Veganism is on the face of it an extremely simple moral philosophy. If Animals have feelings, then eating animals is bad. Duh.
Effective Altruists tend to be people who actually take moral arguments at face value rather than ignoring them, and unsurprisingly many effective altruists are vegan.
But effective altruists also tend to be utilitarians, and as such are likely to want to minimise total animal suffering in aggregate, rather than taking the more deontologist view that you personally shouldn't cause suffering by eating animals.
So presumably vegan EAs assume that most farmed animals lives aren't worth living and so better not to eat farmed animals, even though this will cause them never to be raised in the first place.
It seems to me that most wild animals lives are just as terrible as those of farmed animals, especially for the vast majority of animals who give birth to thousands of young of which on average only 2 will ever reach adulthood. Their lives are presumably also not worth living.
As a utilitarian then, it should be far more important to wipe out as many animal habitats as possible rather than avoiding eating a relatively small number of animals by being a vegan.
I'm interested if anyone espouses such negative animal utilitarianism, or if anyone has any responses to it?
Hey Yair, I would highly suggest reading the Brian Tomasik articles under Lukas Gloor's comment on this. But you may also be interested in articles discussing '[Logic of the Larder](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/logic-of-the-larder)'. Initially when used would suggest cases of farmed animal welfare being directly positive, the farmed animals have a life better than not worth living. However, with time it has also been used to discuss that farmed animal land-use is counter-factually positive for animals on-net.
Veganism is on the face of it an extremely simple moral philosophy. If Animals have feelings, then eating animals is bad. Duh.
Effective Altruists tend to be people who actually take moral arguments at face value rather than ignoring them, and unsurprisingly many effective altruists are vegan.
But effective altruists also tend to be utilitarians, and as such are likely to want to minimise total animal suffering in aggregate, rather than taking the more deontologist view that you personally shouldn't cause suffering by eating animals.
So presumably vegan EAs assume that most farmed animals lives aren't worth living and so better not to eat farmed animals, even though this will cause them never to be raised in the first place.
It seems to me that most wild animals lives are just as terrible as those of farmed animals, especially for the vast majority of animals who give birth to thousands of young of which on average only 2 will ever reach adulthood. Their lives are presumably also not worth living.
As a utilitarian then, it should be far more important to wipe out as many animal habitats as possible rather than avoiding eating a relatively small number of animals by being a vegan.
I'm interested if anyone espouses such negative animal utilitarianism, or if anyone has any responses to it?