threewestwinds comments on Arguments Against Speciesism - LessWrong

28 Post author: Lukas_Gloor 28 July 2013 06:24PM

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Comment author: Jiro 30 July 2013 03:17:36AM *  1 point [-]

You can come up with costs - social, personal, etc. to being vegetarian - but remember to weigh those costs on the right scale.

By saying this, yoiu're trying to gloss over the very reason why becoming vegetarian is not a cheap change. Human beings are wired so as not to be able to ignore having to make many minor decisions or face many minor changes, and the fact that such things cannot be ignored means that being vegetarian actually has a high cost which involves being mentally nickel-and-dimed over and over again. It's a cheap change in the sense that you can do it without paying lots of money or spending lots of time, but that isn't sufficient to make the choice cheap in all meaningful senses.

Or to put it another way, being a vegetarian "just to try it" is like running a shareware program that pops up a nag screen every five minutes and occasionally forces you to type a random phrase in order to continue to run. Sure, it's light on your pocketbook, doesn't take much time, and reasding the nag screens and typing the phrases isn't difficult, but that's beside the point.

Comment author: threewestwinds 31 July 2013 07:05:03PM 0 points [-]

As has been mentioned elsewhere in this conversation, that's a fully general argument - it can be applied to every change one might possibly make in one's behavior.

Let's enumerate the costs, rather than just saying "there are costs."

  • Money wise, you save or break even.
  • It has no time cost in much of the US (most restaurants have vegetarian options).
  • The social cost depends on your situation - if you have people who cook for you, then you have to explain the change to them (in Washington state, this cost is tiny - people are understanding. In Texas, it is expensive).
  • The mental cost is difficult to discuss in a universal way. I found them to be rather small in my own case. Other people claim them to be quite large. But "I don't want to change my behavior because changing behavior is hard" is not terribly convincing.

Your discounting of non-human life has to be rather extreme for "I will have to remind myself to change my behavior" to out weigh an immediate, direct and calculable reduction in world suffering.

Comment author: SaidAchmiz 31 July 2013 11:44:01PM 2 points [-]

Money wise, you save or break even.

This is false. Unless you eat steak or other expensive meats on a regular basis, meat is quite cheap. For example, my meat consumption is mostly chicken, assorted processed meats (salamis, frankfurters, and other sorts of sausages, mainly, but also things like pelmeni), fish (not the expensive kind), and the occasional pork (canned) and beef (cheap cuts). None of these things are pricy; I am getting a lot of protein (and fat and other good/necessary stuff) for my money.

It has no time cost in much of the US (most restaurants have vegetarian options).

Do you eat at restaurants all the time? Learning how to cook the new things you're now eating instead of meat is a time cost.

Also, there are costs you don't mention: for instance, a sudden, radical change in diet may have unforeseen health consequences. If the transition causes me to feel hungry all the time, that would be disastrous; hunger has an extreme negative effect on my mental performance, and as a software engineer, that is not the slightest bit acceptable. Furthermore, for someone with food allergies, like me, trying new foods is not without risk.

Comment author: Jiro 31 July 2013 10:00:06PM *  2 points [-]

it can be applied to every change one might possibly make in one's behavior.

And it would be correct to deny that a change that would possibly be made to one's behavior is "such a cheap change" that we don't need to weigh the cost of the change very much.

Your discounting of non-human life has to be rather extreme for "I will have to remind myself to change my behavior" to out weigh an immediate, direct and calculable reduction in world suffering.

That only applies to someone who already agrees with you about animal suffering to a sufficient degree that he should just become a vegetarian immediately anyway. Otherwise it's not all that calculable.

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