Vegetarianism feels to me kind of like an issue where bike shed arguments are rampant because everyone eats and everyone wants to be moral and "how hard can it be to decide what to have for dinner"? So everyone has an opinion... and feels entitled to speechify about it :-)

In the meantime I suspect that if there is a correct answer here (like there is some kind of diet that simultaneously optimizes moral, health, economic, social, and deliciousness issues) it probably doesn't exist yet and could take decades of research to properly nail down. Maybe some sort of vegan school would actually make sense, rather than just being a fun joke? But if a vegan school makes sense then non-experts who talk about the subject are likely to be spreading BS...

And in the meantime there's this huge number of moral prerequisites to being right about moral vegetarianism that I'm just not sure about. Despite being opportunistic omnivores rather than obligate carnivores, humans are the apex predator of the planet. (This isn't quite as weird as it seems, because for a while grizzly bears occupied much the same niche in north america.) As far as I can tell, this makes humans (not otters or s... (read more)

This is a pretty good post -- check out Politics is the Mindkiller to see if you think it's appropriate for the main page. My guess is that people have avoided vegetarian posts in the past in order to avoid the controversy...we tend not to advocate for specific lifestyles on LW unless it's necessary to teach some more general, underlying point about rationality.

I eat meat only occasionally, giving weight to your reasons (2) and (3), but not (1). I think it takes quite a few farm animal deaths to add up to a papercut to a human, morality-wise.

I do find it quite interesting to see how people react when you say you don't eat meat. I'm from the midwest, and often get reactions like:

• "Wuss."

• "I am going to make you eat meat."

• "What about protein, huh?"

I don't quite understand why people are offended by my dietary choices that don't affect them at all, but I've come to think it's something like "You don't eat meat, so you must think it's better not to eat meat. I eat meat, so therefore you think you're better than me."

I get similar reactions when I say I don't drink.

"It's bad for humans." The scale on which we eat meat is demonstrably unhealthy, wasteful and recent (arising in Western culture in the last hundred years). The way Westerners eat in general is unhealthy and meat is just a part of that, but it's a significant factor.

There was a lot of discussion of nutrition a while ago. The general conclusion is that the literature is too confused to assign any one hypothesis high probability, but was leaning toward Atkins-style low-carb high-protein diets.

I have varying levels of empathy for different classes of beings (for example: my family and neighbours > people that live in a faraway and different country > my mother's cat > murderers and rapists > cows > insects > telemarketers who call during dinner to sell insurance > plants > rocks). The ordering seems to roughly correspond both to "things who are likely to be nicer towards me if I'm nicer towards them" and "genetic relatedness", both of which probably account for the evolution of our current morals in the first place.

Of course, "our morals evolved in order to fulfill goal X" doesn't mean that we should try to fulfill goal X instead of following our morals. But it explains why our moral intuitions generally have weird patterns. It' not clear to me whether that means our intuitions are something wrong, or that we should be cautious about coming up with simple rules to explain our morality.

My current position is to acknowledge that I care less about some entities than others, and that while some moral systems say that I shouldn't, those systems go against my intuitions, so it's not clear which of my intuitions or the moral systems are wrong - the fact that ultimately, moral systems aren't justified by anything much stronger than intuitions (and possibly something like game theory) is enough for me to stick to my badly-formalized intuitions for now.

Among people who are aware of some of these issues, I frequently hear the most amazingly complex discussions concerning which kinds of meat consumption are ethically OK and which aren't. The ethical systems constructed in this way can become quite baroque. Needless to say, a large degree of assuming-the-consequent is involved in creating these ethical "systems."

That is, it reminds me of nothing so much as the sort of handwaving that well-meaning people sometimes do concerning the necessity of death (recently discussed, e.g., here and here). In both situations, there's one possibility that seems too fantastic to most people to be worth discussing: in one case, that death is unnecessary and worth fighting against; in the other; that it's wrong to kill and eat creatures that can feel and suffer.

Unfortunately, the suggestion that there might be ethical considerations to one's diet is usually considered extremely impolite to discuss. Obviously, various community consensuses do arise about these things in certain circles, but in society at large there's this sense that "nobody has the right to pass judgment on someone else's diet."

Anyway, whenever I hear these kinds of contortions I'm tempted to chime in: embrace the consequences of your beliefs. On some level you know you shouldn't be killing animals and eating them. Stop it.

The same moral arguments keep cropping up in multiple threads, and responding to them all separately seems inefficient. Here's an attempt to summarize my views and head off a lot of identical conversations:

As I said before, I'm operating off of Preference Utilitarianism. I am still in the process of working through that (it's only recently that I tacked on the word "preference," I'm not 100% sure it solves the problems I wanted it to solve). But I strongly believe that the happiness and suffering of others IS important.

That is not a fact I will ... (read more)

I was particularly taken aback by the Newtonmas invitation not even mentioning a vegetarian option.

God forbid someone should offer to make free food at their expense that isn't to your taste.

Am I the only one that this presumption strikes as breathtakingly rude?

What is the most convincing argument that a factory animal is suffering on a day to day basis?

I would note that the very act of eating is a pleasure for all creatures, and so is the process of going to sleep. I suspect the life of a factory cow is pretty routinized, such that it can learn the basic daily patterns and anticipate that it will be fed and that it will be able to rest and sleep on a regular basis. My dog is all about routine.

I wonder if there is a physiological correlate of suffering that is measurable. High cortisol? Beta-endorphins? Some change in brain structure?

If this thread can bear anything so prosaic:

On the off-chance that anyone is interested in eating more vegetarian food but doesn't know where to begin, I've found Mark Bittman's vegetarian cookbook to be pretty good. It contains hundreds of dishes, most of which have several variations. The effect of this is that you learn not just rigid recipes, but highly extensible techniques and templates. I've used this book for a couple of years and by now I improvise most of my cooking based on things I've learned from it.

A lot of us probably just call it akrasia and shrug (me included). I don't know any convincing reason for eating meat that doesn't make one immoral by usual modern standards.

Massive amounts of cows require massive amounts of grain

If that was the limiting factor I'd expect it to show up in the price of meat.

On New Year's Eve this year, I made a spontaneous resolution to go vegetarian. It wasn't exactly a well-thought out rational decision; I mainly just wanted to see what it was like and if I could do it. I never really liked the cruelty argument, probably because that would entail coming to face with the fact that I was responsible for quite a bit of that cruelty. Mainly, I was interested in health benefits, and figured a good way to test those would be to become my own guinea pig. Ten days into the new year, I've only eaten meat twice (I had sushi with ... (read more)

About a year ago I stopped eating mammals; for some time before that, eating them had started to make me queasy.

I do not feel that killing animals amounts in any way to murder, but I would on an emotional level feel moral discomfort if asked to kill an animal, or at least most mammals. To prevent myself from encouraging acts I otherwise don't like, I try not to take actions that ask or force people to do things I'm morally repelled by, even if that moral revulsion isn't one I have a strong argument for.

Edit: I originally wrote some defense of responsibly raised food with respect to point 3, which you actually seem to have addressed in the original post.

I believe the other issues are much more complicated than you make them seem, which is to be expected but makes convincing someone more difficult (and makes it way harder to compete against justifications of the status quo). A lot of the meat I eat I can justify from the perspective of animal cruelty (I am fine, for example,being cruel to most of the life on earth, and I am completely fine killing almost a... (read more)

If eating meat is wrong because animals suffer, is it bad to eat animals that don't suffer? Most farm animals are man-made, genetically modified by breeding, to provide food for man. I have been told that some humans cannot experience pain. I suppose that condition may occur from time to time in domestic animals. Suppose pain was bred out of animals raised for food or labs genetically modified animals to eliminate pain. Would meat eating then be less immoral? Because domestic animals are bred for food, they are highly specialized. Dairy cattle and chicken ... (read more)

Personally I would prefer growing up in prison and being slaughtered when done growing to never having existed in the first place.

The consequence of eating less meat would seem to be fewer farm animals existing. It seems possible, even likely, that many farm animals suffer so much that their existence is net negative, though I find that hard to judge. But arguing that this has to be the case for any and all kinds of farming seems to be a stretch to me. If you are concerned about the wellbeing of animals buying low suffering high happiness meat and encoura... (read more)