Pay other people to go vegetarian for you?

jefftk

I notice that a large fraction of Effective Altruism people are vegetarian. This makes sense: in general Effective Altruists take moral issues seriously, even when that means changing your lifestyle. I'm not sure it's a good balance, though.

One way to think about this is to convert it into money. How much would I need to be paid to give up eating meat? All animal products? How much money would I need to spend on myself to be about as happy as I would be with less money but continuing to eat animals? I'd probably be willing to go vegetarian for about $500/year, vegan for maybe $2000/year.

It turns out you can probably pay to convince other people to be vegetarian much more cheaply than that. I estimate the cost of a vegetarian-year at $4.29 to $536 while Brian Tomasik estimates $11 with better methodology (which I looked at). This is by placing ads on facebook for a site where people can watch an animial cruelty video and ideally become vegetarian or vegan.

If you would get more than $11/year worth of enjoyment out of continuing to eat meat, why not give $11/year to convince someone else to not eat meat for you? Or give $50/year and be on the safe side?

(While you're giving money, you should probably give it to the organization that you think will do the most good with it, which I think is probably one of GiveWell's top charities. The nice thing about money as opposed to actions is that it's easy to redirect.)

I also posted this on my blog.

If you would get more than $11/year worth of enjoyment out of continuing to eat meat, why not give $11/year to convince someone else to not eat meat for you? Or give $50/year and be on the safe side?

I also posted this on my blog.

But the effect would not be the same if the information was merely listed, rather than accompanied by shocking videos

The effect would not be the same if there was less information, rather than more. The extra imagery adds additional information.

Assuming that the technology and videos had been available, would you have considered it immoral to show the citizens of Nazi Germany videos from concentration camps? People who might have decided to not look further into the issue of Jewish treatment within their country?

Ok, that is a very good point. I think I was being biased by not caring about animals for other reasons, and thus searching for more arguments to agree with my position, rather than independently evaluating them. Mea culpa.

The obvious other care is with abortion. It might be that showing them gruesome pictures is the only way to make people care about infant beheadings and the murder to screaming children (note that this link does not contain images)

1Jiro13y

Something else to consider: Person X believes that gay sex, or maybe abortions, are immoral. Is it okay for him to show people pictures of those activities in order to shock them? As in the vegetarian example, the imagery adds "information". But I would certainly classify trying to get someone to oppose gay sex by forcing them to confront how disgusting it looks (to non-gay people) as "immoral mind-hijacking". It doesn't add meaningful information. Technically, you could claim that someone wasn't aware of how disgusting it is and now that they know, that's new information, but that's not the type of information that's normally relevant to rational arguments. You could also say "well, some disgust isn't rational, but the disgusting aspect of animal slaughter is a different kind of disgust which is rational", but you'd be hard pressed to come up with an argument for why the two kinds of disgust are different that doesn't amount to a direct argument for vegetarianism that could be expressed without involving disgust at all.

3Jiro13y

I think that if I were in Nazi Germany, it would be acceptable to forcibly show people videos of concentration camps to save Jews. However, if I were in Nazi Germany, it would also be acceptable to cheat, to destroy property, or even to shoot people in order to save Jews. To a rational vegetarian who thinks that eating animals is as bad as killing Jews, it would be moral to do anything in order to prevent the eating of animals. However, such a variety of vegetarian is a menace to society from the point of view of other people who don't share in his ideology, and would (according to those other people) need to be stopped--and rationality doesn't really matter at this point; whether he is stopped would only be a question of who is more powerful. Now, suppose that a vegetarian thinks that eating animals is only 1/1000 as bad as killing Jews. If it's okay to do otherwise evil things to save a Jew in Nazi Germany, then this vegetarian ought to be willing to do them to create 1001 vegetarians. So vegetarians should be shooting people right and left (or doing other inherently immoral things) if they think it advances vegetarianism enough. Of course, it's not possible for a vegetarian to be absolutely certain about vegetarianism, and once he accounts for his own uncertainty about vegetarianism in the calculation, the possibility that he is wrong and will have committed murder makes it no longer palatable to kill people to create vegetarians even if you're creating lots and lots of vegetarians. (And if he then reasons "okay, I shouldn't kill to create 1001 vegetarians, but my uncertainty about vegetarianism is so low that it's okay to kill to create a million vegetarians, that still doesn't work because he is also uncertain about what his uncertainty is.) Doing an (otherwise) mildly immoral thing to create many vegetarians is similar, except that of course the acceptable bound on his uncertainty about vegetarianism is higher--maybe high enough that he actually could jus

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Pay other people to go vegetarian for you?

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Pay other people to go vegetarian for you?

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