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Morendil comments on Essay-Question Poll: Dietary Choices - Less Wrong
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Since you said you welcomed discussion, I have a few questions. I've been thinking about this topic occasionally, with some curiosity and some (mild) moral concern.
It's not clear to me that my deciding to switch to a purely vegetarian diet would have the consequence of preventing the suffering or delaying the death of even one animal. (I can even think of relatively likely scenarios where it would make matters worse.)
How did you arrive at your decision? (To put it somewhat bluntly, did you first decide for emotional reasons to stop eating meat, and later rationalized it on grounds of alleviating the suffering of animals, or did you first work out that the decision would have effects of this kind and then implement it?)
I am horrified, when I think about it (which is not too often), by the conditions in which some "factory farm" animals are bred, raised and slaughtered. The suffering inflicted on e.g. pigs seems uncalled for, and other things equal I would prefer that they not suffer as much. I do try to buy free range when that choice is available, so to some extent that knowledge does affect my behaviour.
On the other hand, I suspect that "bringing my behaviour in line with my values" would call, if I really cared, for something more than only a change in my own dietary preferences. If I carefully worked out all the actions available to me that might have an effect on the situation, and ranked them by effectiveness, I'd be surprised if a change of diet came first.
Do you see that as the only option, or are there other things you do, besides not eating meat, directed at alleviating the suffering of animals?
This action would do good. But maybe there's an action that would do even more good! Therefore I'll do nothing.
Even granting that it has some positive effect on the suffering of animals (which I've said I'm skeptical of), eliminating meat from my diet is not an unalloyed benefit to the world: it has a cost to me (inconvenience, social stigma, and so on).
So, it's possible that the net benefit of that change in my diet is negative (very small positive effect on the rest of the world, noticeable negative effect on me).
It's more like, "this action does not obviously do good, but I won't rule out that there is a bundle of actions including it that does good in aggregate".
I'm not too surprised the parent got (at least) one upvote, and I will refrain from downvoting it as I'm involved in the discussion; but I think setting up a straw-man from a bad paraphrase of your interlocutor's argument should be frowned upon.
You will save an expected number of animals equal to the number of animals you don't eat that you would otherwise have eaten. You might not personally tip any balances, because factory farms operate on large scales; but you might be the Nth vegetarian whose decision justifies shutting down a factory farm full of suffering animals. The utility of the latter counterbalances its small likelihood.
Also, stigma? Where do you live? If anything, being a vegetarian lets me be smug and self-righteous in social situations.
Perhaps my social circles are unusual, but in my experience smug self-righteousness tends to have some stigma associated with it.
"Lets me" was shorthand for "gives me social leeway to be". This leeway must of course be exercised judiciously.
Is that "expected" in the mathematical sense? As in, probability of my actions having the consequence that N animals are saved, times N? How do you work out that the numbers work out in such a way that N equals the number of animals I would have eaten? That strikes me as an unlikely coincidence.
As a rough basis for back-of-the-envelope calculation, assume I eat 200g of meat per day. I estimate one cow provides about 250Kg of the type of cuts I eat. That means I have so far in my life eaten about 4 cows. (Simplifying assumptions: I eat only cow meat, have eaten the same amount constantly for 40 years. We could work this out in more detail but I'm interested in orders of magniture here.) Perhaps five to ten times as many hogs.
Cows don't seem to lead a particularly horrible life. True, this life is cut short at a fraction of their natural lifespan, but on the other hand cows don't seem to form explicit life plans or intense emotional attachments to other members of their species beyond rearing. I worry about the hogs a little more, but it's also the more affordable meat (the disutility of not eating them is larger).
So, we're talking about a major lifestyle change, traded for a reduction in animal suffering which is only probable, not certain, and which tops out at a small number of individual animals.
It's not a coincidence. People farming meat animals do so because they expect to be able to sell the meat. If they consistently find that they can't sell it all, or have enough surplus floating around that the price drops and underperforming farms can no longer economically stay in the business, then some farms will shut down. If you've eaten 40 hogs in your life, then you have generated demand for 40 hogs. If there's a farm that had produced 40,000 hogs' worth of meat in your lifetime, then it takes 1,000 people like you to support that farm. It's a problem of collective action to get the necessary number of people to quit patronizing it, but that sort of thing is relatively elementary for LW.
You seem to be assuming that meat farming scales linearly in most respects with the number of people consuming the meat. I'd question that assumption, and assume instead that there are marked threshold effects.
Possibly 1000 people swearing off pork would instead have the effect of driving that same farm to a ruthless cost-cutting program, so that it could keep up its volume by selling at lower prices; this would likely be to the hogs' detriment, since they are the "stakeholders" least likely to raise a politically effective complaint about such changes. And frankly, given what I know of the industry, this is a scarily plausible scenario.
Quite frankly, I don't think this argument makes sense. Meat factories are already ruthless cost-cutting programs, and hogs "complaints" are already not taken into account.
What you seem to be implying here is that if meat farming is bad, we should better give them money so they don't make it even worse.
Not so far off the mark, I guess. You might call that a "fair trade meat" argument.
I prefer to buy my meat at a local butcher's, where it's slightly more expensive but is sourced from a smallish factory 125km away; when I buy it at supermarket chain, my assumption is that the meat has traveled more miles and comes from a larger factory which treats animals worse. (The butcher advertises where the meat comes from, the supermarket doesn't.)
So your argument, if I understand it correctly, is this:
Your conclusion is then that we shouldn't force farms into financial trouble, because then the second type turns into the first type due to needing to cut costs.
Here is my view of things:
For your view, the causal relation is from the meatprice to the animal welfare.
For me it's the other way around: the animal welfare causes the meatprice.
Current fairtrade farms aren't fairtrade because they want to sell expensive meat. Instead, they want to treat their animals well, which means they're fairtrade and which results in higher meat prices.
Now, to tie this worldview back into the argument we were having:
If 1000 people who previously bought from the supermarket stop buying, megafarms won't start treating their animals worse. After a while, they would reduce their chicken output over time in order to minimize leftover chickens.
If 1000 people who previously bought locally decide to stop doing that, it might increase cost for the rest of the fairtrade buyers, reducing their motivation for buying fairtrade. However, it wouldn't make the fairtrade farmers promptly drop their fairtrade motivations. It also wouldn't suddenly turn them into megafarms, since they don't have the volume for that.
Does this argument imply a preference for eating larger animals?
Yes, though depending on your (definitive or provisional) conclusions about how much sapience matters, there may be an inflection point.
At the bottom of that scale, I wouldn't worry about eating very small animals because very small brains seem to make for negligible amounts of moral concern. At the higher end, and as this link from elsewhere in this thread suggests, larger animals are more "suffering efficient" to coin a phrase both horrible and awkard, but also suggestive.
I don't think an oyster suffers in any meaningful sense, and I don't worry a whole lot about fish. I worry more about chickens and hogs than about cows because it takes a larger number of them to yield an equivalent mass of meat.
Oh nice, I had never considered that! Thanks for this new conclusion that flows naturally from two of my beliefs: Brain size differences between species don't correlate strongly with intelligence differences*, and suffering is bad.
*It's mostly brain-to-body mass ratio that seems to correlate.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain-to-body_mass_ratio
Within 1 species, there seems to be correlation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_size#Intelligence
If going veg indeed has negative expected utility for you, my paraphrase indeed was a wrong strawman.
I guess I found this
hard to accept. Here's the argument against it.