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yli comments on When should an Effective Altruist be vegetarian? - Less Wrong
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Agreed. Of course the thing about means and ends is that you can always frame the situation in two opposing ways:
Way 1: Eating factory farmed meat and not worrying about it in order to better focus on third world donations is the same as making the following means-end tradeoff:
Way 2: Avoiding meat in order to not support factory farming despite the fact that such avoiding causes costs* that lessen the effectiveness of your EA activities is the same as making the following means-end tradeoff:
So which ends don't justify which means?
... Of course for the majority of people it's more like:
And
* It's not clear that it does but that's what the original post assumes so for the sake of example I'm going with it.
I think that the point of the original post was to basically say "humans can justify doing things that our systems 1 want to do, by saying that they're for the good of everyone". With this in mind, you would expect people to be more OK with eating meat and animal products than they should be, because our systems 1 don't really care about people far away from us who we have never met, meaning that way 2 doesn't apply. I do think that there's a logical equivalence between your way 1 and way 2, which is why I think that utilitarianism is the correct theory of morality, but I don't think that they're psychologically equivalent at all.