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peter_hurford comments on Group Rationality Diary, August 1-15 - Less Wrong
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Updating towards many animals I eat being more similar to humans than I had previously thought, based mostly on this link from Why Eat Less Meat?. Still unsure what to do about it. Feeling guilty seems unproductive and so does rabid vegetarian advocacy.
Also, I conducted an informal poll on Facebook among my friends about how much they would have to be compensated for going vegetarian for a year, and I got answers generally hovering around $3,000 (I included instructions not to look at other people's answers first, although I don't know how well they were followed), although one respondent seriously answered $20,000. At the very least this reflects a general impression that vegetarianism is very inconvenient / unpleasant which could be the target of effective animal altruists. Although...
Another interesting question is to ask current vegetarians how much they would pay to stay vegetarian.
This is a difficult question. By analogy, should rich cannibals or human child abusers be legally permitted to indulge their pleasures if they offset the harm they cause with sufficiently large charitable donations to orphanages or children's charities elsewhere? On (indirect) utilitarian grounds if nothing else, we would all(?) favour an absolute legal prohibition on cannibalism and human child abuse. This analogy breaks down if the neuroscientfic evidence suggesting that pigs, for example, are at least as sentient as prelinguistic human toddlers turns out to be mistaken. I'm deeply pessimistic this is the case.
I wasn't speaking at all about "moral offsets". I was attempting to counter Qiaochu_Yuan's point that a high value put on eating meat by meat eaters indicates that being vegetarian is difficult.
I can't answer this question without knowing what the scenario where I don't cough up the requisite amount looks like. (I have this problem with a lot of "how much would you pay" questions.) Even I assume for the sake of argument that I am in a position where I have to part with money to continue not eating meat, that doesn't tell me who has me in this situation or what they're going to do about it. Force-feeding, legal consequences, health consequences, social consequences, if I don't eat some minimum amount of meat? Meat will be teleported into my stomach on a routine basis without my intervention should I fail to make quota? How much is that minimum?
I want to answer about $3000, but I am pretty sure that's almost entirely because of priming. I think the honest answer is that I'm not sure I'm capable of eating meat anymore. Emotionally, I find it disgusting and repulsive. I almost certainly don't have the enzymes to digest meat anymore, as I've been a vegetarian for over two years. The resulting combination is... gastrically unpleasant.