Link to original article

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Some thoughts on vegetarianism and veganism, published by richard ngo on February 14, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. I feel pretty confused about whether I, as an effective altruist, should be vegetarian/vegan (henceforth abbreviated vegn). I don’t think I’ve seen anyone explicitly talk about the arguments which feel most compelling to me, so I thought I’d do that here, in a low-effort way. I think that factory farming is one of the worst ongoing moral atrocities. But most of the arguments I’ve heard for vegnism, which I found compelling a few years ago, hinge on the effects that my personal consumption would have on decreasing factory farming (and sometimes on climate change). I now don’t find this line of thinking persuasive - my personal consumption decisions just have such a tiny effect compared to my career/donation decisions that it feels like I shouldn’t pay much attention to their direct consequences (beyond possibly donating to offset them). But there are three other arguments which seem more compelling. First is a deontological argument: if you think something is a moral atrocity, you shouldn’t participate in it, even if you offset the effects of your contribution. In general, my utilitarian intuitions are much stronger than my deontological ones, but I do think that following deontological principles is often a very good heuristic for behaving morally. The underlying reason is that humans by default think more naturally in terms of black-and-white categories than shades of grey. As Yudkowsky writes: Any rule that's not labeled "absolute, no exceptions" lacks weight in people's minds. So you have to perform that the "Don't kill" commandment is absolute and exceptionless (even though it totally isn't), because that's what it takes to get people to even hesitate. To stay their hands at least until the weight of duty is crushing them down. A rule that isn't even absolute? People just disregard that whenever. Without strong rules in place it’s easy to reason our way into all sorts of behaviour. In particular, it’s easy to underestimate the actual level of harm that certain actions cause - e.g. thinking of the direct effects of eating meat but ignoring the effects of normalising eating meat, or normalising “not making personal sacrifices on the basis of moral arguments”, or things like that. And so implementing rules like “never participate in moral atrocities” sends a much more compelling signal than “only participate in moral atrocities when you think that’s net-positive”. That signal helps set an example for people around you - which seems particularly important if you spend time with people who are or will become influential. But it also strengthens your own self-identity as someone who prioritises the world going well. Then there’s a community-level argument about what we want EA to look like. Norms about vegnism within the community help build a high-trust environment (since vegnism is a costly signal), and increase internal cohesion, especially between different cause areas. At the very least, these arguments justify not serving animal products at EA conferences. Lastly, there’s an argument about how I (and the EA community) are seen by wider society. Will MacAskill sometimes uses the phrase “moral entrepreneurs”, which I think gestures in the right direction: we want to be ahead of the curve, identifying and building on important trends in advance. I expect that vegnism will become much more mainstream than it currently is; insofar as EA is a disproportionately vegn community, this will likely bolster our moral authority. I think there are a few arguments cutting the other way, though. I think one key concern is that these arguments are kinda post-hoc. It’s not necessarily that they’re wrong, it’s more like: I originally privileged the hypothesis ...