I've been turning this over in my head for a while now. (Currently eating mostly vegan fwiw, but I am not sure if this is the right decision.)
I think the main argument against veganism is that it actually incurs quite a large cost. Being vegan is a massive lifestyle change with ripple effects that extend into one's social life. This argument falls under your "there are higher-impact uses of your (time/energy/money/etc.)", but what you wrote doesn't capture the reasons why this is important.
most of us do not have good reason to treat this as a zero-sum game in which each attempt to do good in the world must crowd out another. For one thing, we're nowhere near putting all available resources into our efforts to do good, so we can simply choose to expand that budget.
I am reminded of Zvi's Slack post (ctrl+f "afford"). Attention is a very scarce resource. If I am spending all my attention on important things, I cannot also spend attention on creating a whole new diet, finding friends who won't mock me, learning how to cook all new things, etc. On the other hand, animal welfare offsets are probably quite cheap.
For another, our psychology is complicated, and making a moral effort can just as easily increase our capacity to make further such efforts as deplete it.
Indeed, and this is actually why I have become mostly vegan in recent months; but it is not going to be true for everyone. My current decision to eat mostly vegan except when inconvenient feels somehow indulgent.
I wrote more about how I am trying to be vegan: http://www.lincolnquirk.com/2022/02/15/vegan.html
Some thoughts as someone who has been eating plant-based for the past year and who thinks about the ethics constantly for fun:
I'd say that not eating animal products seems like the correct choice if you can pull it off without too much trouble. It probably makes more and more sense the older you get. If you can afford to change your diet but not exclude animal products entirely, consider eating kangaroo if your country doesn't ban its import. Consider eating kangaroo anyway.
It's usually your bullet point 3 ("There are higher-impact uses of your (time/energy/money/etc.") and I think people would argue that you're falling prey to a typical mind fallacy, that you think that what appears easy/effortless to you is that way for everyone.
And also estimates that compared to targeted donations or direct work, personal consumption makes a very small difference. (It's true that these tend to be underestimates because by being a friendly and rational-sounding vegan, you can inspire others to follow your choices.)
[ note: this is outsider thoughts - I am neither EA nor Vegetarian (nor "rationalist", in the community/identity sense). ]
First, are you asking about vegan or just vegetarian (or even semi-vegetarian)? The arguments are different, and especially the "better topics to spend energy on" is scalable in terms of how much thought and effort it actually takes.
Second, I think you missed an important consideration: influence and normalization. Even if your contribution is small, and even if (perhaps especially if) you don't proselytize or demand anything from others, your demonstration that this is a valid and fulfilling way to live makes it much more likely that others will choose it as well.
Additional/complementary argument in favour (and against the “any difference you make is marginal” argument): one’s personal example of viable veganism increases the chances of others becoming vegan (or partially so, which is still a benefit). Under plausible assumptions this effect could be (potentially much) larger the the direct effect of personal consumption decisions.
Could you clarify if you mean claim 3 ("There are higher-impact uses of your (time/energy/money/etc.)") is:
I expected the subbullet to be a refutation of the claim, but right now I think even if you agree with all the clauses it demonstrates only that the claim can be made in error (which I agree with). It doesn't make the case that it's impossible for the claim to hold for a given individual, or even that it's necessarily rare for it to do so.
[edit: reading this back, it's less clear and more tangential than I'd intended. To be more direct: I think claim 3 is sometimes true, but usually either partially or entirely beside the point. 'There are higher-impact uses of resource X available to you than action Y' is only a strong argument against taking action Y if a) the alternative you will actually choose is higher impact than Y, and b) you have insufficient X to do the higher-impact things and Y. I think both a and b are often false in this context, and at least one of them is usually false.
original reply is below.]
I think it's sometimes true, but the implied zero-sum framing of the relevant resources is often false, misleading, or irrelevant, because:
I also think the veganism question is exactly the sort of dilemma that makes self-delusion and rationalisation extremely tempting. If I can convince myself that e.g. my work is so important that I morally ought to do (almost) whatever is necessary to optimise my personal productivity, then I can escape from having to experience any internal conflict or guilt over taking 'selfish' actions.
almost all of us have plenty of room to increase our 'moral budget' by shifting some resources away from self-interest and toward doing good by others.
Except people who are obsessed with having the most impact they can, which describes a lot of people in effective altruism.
I don't understand the relevance of your second bullet point.
I agree with the third bullet point, but this only works in particular situations where you get synergies. (E.g., a lot of people who go vegan also use the opportunity to become healthier, and that can work well. However, if you're already a health nut before veganism, you'd find that veganism limits your options and it would get harder to follow the best health advice.)
If I can convince myself that e.g. my work is so important that I morally ought to do (almost) whatever is necessary to optimise my personal productivity, then I can escape from having to experience any internal conflict or guilt over taking 'selfish' actions.
This sort of argument can be levelled against anything related to doing slightly weird things due to opportunity costs. It isn't always right.
I also feel like the argument goes both ways. If you can convince yourself that you're really moral every time you eat food without animal products, maybe you become more complacent in other ways or rationalize that people who optimize for doing good via workaholicism and cutting down on all non-essential areas of life must all be deluding themselves.
I should add that, of the two points I asked you to take for granted when answering (animal welfare matters a lot; and animal agriculture is overwhelmingly net-negative for animal welfare), only the first is completely pointless to discuss, because it's a question of ground-level values.
The effect of animal agriculture on animal welfare is partly an empirical question, so if you have any surprising facts to offer, I'd like to hear them. What I think would be a waste of time is arguing over how bad some type of life is (e.g. being a pig in an intensive farm) where we both agree on the observable facts.
I can't imagine being convinced that animal agriculture, taken as a whole, is not overwhelmingly negative for animal welfare, but I can imagine being convinced that there are sufficiently numerous and discoverable exceptions that it is okay/good to eat certain kinds of animal product from certain sources.
In fact, I already know there are some small-scale dairy farms that seem genuinely committed to giving their cows a decent life, and I expect that some of them do a pretty good job of if. Specific recommendations, or arguments that humane animal agriculture (or humane commercial hunting of wild animals) is more common than I think, are welcome.
I may be wrong, but I think the following is a mainstream position in rationalist circles: even people who care about animal welfare don't have particularly strong moral reasons to personally switch to a vegan diet.
I haven't seen a fully fleshed-out defence of this position. I can think of a few possible arguments, but none seem convincing:
Then there are arguments over which agricultural-animal lives are worth living. We can differ on that question for pretty deep reasons, so it's harder to usefully argue about. I certainly acknowledge that agricultural-animal lives worth living are possible, but I think they're much rarer than we would like to think.
There's also an argument that some hunted animals, for example wild-caught fish, might not be significantly worse off than those that die a natural death. I could be (and selfishly would like to be) convinced of this; I'm well aware that natural lives often suck and natural deaths usually suck. But my understanding is that the methods of catching and killing fish at scale tend to be pretty horrible even compared to a natural death. (And when I looked for more ethical sources of fish, it seemed like all anyone cared about was things like dolphin safety, not humane treatment of the fish themselves.)
(At the meta level, I also think we should try to apply extra scepticism when evaluating arguments in favour of conclusions that are very convenient to us. Even rational people are prone to rationalisation, and it's very very tempting to suspend disbelief a little bit when evaluating an argument against making a difficult change, and apply an extra-critical eye to arguments in favour of making that change. This is only relevant at the margins, where there is significant uncertainty and judgment calls have to be made, but I think that does apply here. )
So anyway, with all of that in mind, can anyone convince me that personal veganism is unnecessary, even taking for granted the following?
Arguments in the other direction (i.e. in favour of veganism) are of course welcome too.