This is a special post for quick takes by Isaac King. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
I'm switching to a password manager and wanted a master password that's short enough it's not annoying to type, so I came up with a scheme that can potentially improve on passphrases, keeping the memorability while becoming shorter.
Meat-eating (without offsetting) seems to me like an obvious rationality failure. Extremely few people actually take the position that torturing animals is fine; that it would be acceptable to do to a pet or even a stray. Yet people are happy to pay others to do it for them, as long as it occurs where they can't see it happening.
Attempts to point this out to them are usually met with deflection or anger, or among more level-headed people, with elaborate rationalizations that collapse under minimal scrutiny. ("Farming creates more animals, so as long as their lives are net positive, farming is net positive" relies on the extremely questionable assumption that their lives are net positive, and these people would never accept the same argument in favor of forcible breeding of humans. "Animals aren't sentient" relies on untested and very speculative ideas about consciousness, akin to the just-so stories that have plagued psychology. There's no way someone could justifiably be >95% confident of such a thing, and I highly doubt these people would accept a 5% chance of torturing a human in return for tastier food.)
So with the exception of hardcore moral relativists who reject any need to care about any other beings at all, I find it hard to take seriously any "rationalist" who continues to eat meat. It seems to me that they've adopted "rationalism" in the "beliefs as attire" sense, as they fail to follow through on even the most straightforward implications of their purported belief system as soon as those implications do not personally benefit them.
Change my mind?
I eat most meats (all except octopus and chicken) and have done this my entire life, except once when I went vegan for Lent. This state seems basically fine because it is acceptable from scope-sensitive consequentialist, deontic, and common-sense points of view, and it improves my diet enough that it's not worth giving up meat "just because".
I do have some doubts; sometimes eating meat feels like being a slaveholder in 1800, which feels pretty bad. I hope history will not judge me harshly for what seem like reasonable decisions now, and plan to go vegan or move to a high-welfare-only diet when it's easier.
I agree with the first bullet point in theory, but see the Corrupted Hardware sequence of posts. It's hard to know the true impact of most interventions, and easy for people to come up with reasons why whatever they want to do happens to have large positive externalities. "Don't directly inflict pain" is something we can be very confident is actually a good thing, without worrying about second-order effects.
Additionally, there's no reason why doing bad things should be acceptable just due to also doing unrelated good things. Sure it's net positive from a consequentialist frame, but ceasing the bad things while continuing to do the good things is even more positive! Giving up meat is not some ultimate hardship like martyrdom, nor is there any strong argument that meat-eating is necessary in order to keep doing the other good things. It's more akin to quitting a minor drug addition; hard and requires a lot of self-control at first, but after the craving goes away your life is pretty much the same as it was before.
As for the rest of your comment, any line of reasoning that would equally excuse slavery and the holocaust is, I think, pretty suspect.
I don't much care about animal suffering.
Really. I am not pretending not to care for self-serving reasons. I. Actually. Do. Not. Care.
Life has not brought me any occasion to slaughter and butcher a carcase myself, but if it did, I'd be willing to do it. I am not drawn to fishing as a recreation, but I have no moral objection to it, if the catch is to be eaten. On the other hand, I would be disinclined to the sort of sport fishing where the catch is released back into the water.
I wouldn't eat primates, and certainly not humans. I wouldn't go game hunting — large fierce animals are rare enough already. People shouldn't mistreat their pets. I have no desire to keep a pet myself. I have eaten horse and ostrich. Intensive livestock farming is unaesthetic, and if people want to campaign for better conditions for the animals, I've neither a problem with that, nor any urge to pitch in.
These choices about my actions outline the extent of my caring.
I agree that this is technically a sound philosophy; the is-ought problem makes it impossible to say as a factual matter that any set of values is wrong. That said, I think you should ask yourself why you oppose the mistreatment of pets and not other animals. If you truly do not care about animal suffering, shouldn't the mistreatment of a pet be morally equivalent to someone damaging their own furniture? It may not have been a conscious decision on your part, but I expect that your oddly specific value system is at least partially downstream of the fact that you grew up eating meat and enjoy it.
I got the strong impression that you were presenting your values regarding animals as right, calling meat-eating an “obvious rationality failure”. Now you switch to the relativism that you explicitly rejected previously?
Regarding pets, people cultivate close emotional relationships with their pets. That is what pets are for. For someone to cultivate an abusive relationship with a pet strikes me as symptomatic of a sickness in their soul. That is the wrongness of it. (BTW, some vegans reject the use of animals for any purpose, hence oppose the keeping of pets.)
I don’t see anything “oddly specific” about my values around animals. They seem to me boringly unremarkable. And of course my values are downstream of my upbringing, as yours are of yours.
Why is it a sickness of soul to abuse an animal that's been legally defined as a "pet", but not to define an identical animal that has not been given this arbitrary label?
Intent.
I don’t know what’s with this “legally defined” and “arbitrary label”. If someone adopts a stray cat as a companion, legal definitions are not involved. The law is not involved. “Pet” is not an arbitrary label, it is a word with an ordinary meaning that everyone knows. You may disagree with my acceptance of livestock and rejection of maltreating pets, but your faux-naïf framing is not an argument.
You use the word “torture” a lot, but torture has a specific meaning: suffering deliberately inflicted in order to coerce or punish someone, or as an end in itself. (“The purpose of torture is torture.” — O’Brien, in “1984”.) This is not the reason for the suffering of livestock, which is a side-effect of the intention of making food. No farmer, on discovering that the conditions of his animals are more humane than he thought they were, will deliberately go out with a cattle prod to make up the loss of the suffering he thought he was inflicting. If market conditions change to make crops a more profitable use of his land, he will switch without a thought of all the animal suffering he is missing out on.
They'd not identical. First, they have a different status, much the same as citizens and aliens have different rights. Second, different species of animals have different relationships with humanity: Dogs are bred to be symbiotic companions Cats are parasites if allowed, pest control if tolerated Rats are disease vector scavengers Chickens are livestock - they lay infertile eggs for human consumption!
Are you in favor of destroying the habits of all wild animals who live in conditions with a lot of suffering?
Or to be more concrete, if I buy meat produced by destroying the habits of enough suffering wild animals so that cows can graze in the area, do you think I have done adequate offsetting for my meat consumption?
It seems unlikely to me that the amount of animal-suffering-per-area goes down when a factory farm replaces a natural habitat; natural selection is a much worse optimizer than human intelligence.
And that's a false dichotomy anyway; even if factory farms did reduce suffering per area, you could instead pay for something else to be there that has even less suffering.
You claimed that you are interested in changing your mind. If that would be true you would be willing to find cruxes.
It's different if your crux is that you don't believe that factory farms destroy enough natural habitat than if your crux is that even if factory farms would destroy enough habitat they wouldn't meaningfully offset the harm that you think they cause.
There are EA people who argue that everyone should use donate most of their resources to EA causes. It's unclear to me why you shift to it when we discuss the issue of veganism.
Meat-eating (without offsetting) seems to me like an obvious rationality failure.
This poses an interesting question: Where is the difference between failures of rationality and failures of morality? No doubt there is some sort of contradiction (loosely speaking) in holding these two mental states simultaneously:
This would ordinarily be called a failure of morality. But now compare this pair:
Now this seems more like a failure of rationality.
Perhaps the difference is that in the first pair, "bad" means "bad overall", while in the second pair, "bad" means "bad for me". That's the difference between altruism and egoism.
Now thinking about this a bit more, the first pair might be really a triple:
This does seem like some form of contradiction (cognitive dissonance?), and some/many people will remove the tension by giving up 1) and keeping the other two. This is called motivated thought, or rationalization: Which is indeed irrational, not just immoral.
The right response would arguably be to give up 2), which would remove the moral problem while not being irrational.
Giving up just 3) (to some degree) would still be immoral, but it's unclear whether doing so would be irrational.
Different meanings of "bad". The former is making a moral claim, the second presumably a practical one about the person's health goals. "Bad as in evil" vs. "bad as in ineffective".
Hitler was an evil leader, but not an ineffective one. He was a bad person, but he was not bad at gaining political power.
While most people have super flimsy defenses of meat-eating, that doesn't mean everyone does. Some people simply think it's quite unlikely that non-human animals are sentient (besides primates, maybe). For example, IIRC Eliezer Yudkowsky and Rob Bensinger's guess is that consciousness is highly contingent on factors such as general intelligence and sociality, or something like that.
I think the "5% chance is still too much" argument is convincing, but it begs similar questions such as "Are you really so confident that fetuses aren't sentient? How could you be so sure?"
Eliezer's argument is the primary one I'm thinking of as an obvious rationalization.
https://benthams.substack.com/p/against-yudkowskys-implausible-position
I'm not confident about fetuses either, hence why I generally oppose abortion after the fetus has started developing a brain.
I think you present here some false dichotomy, some impartial utilitarian -ish view VS hardcore moral relativism.
Pets are sometimes called companions. It's as if they provide some service and receive some service in return, all of this with trust and positive mutual expectations, and that demands some moral considerations / obligations, just like friendship or family relationship. I think mutualist / contractualist framework accounts for that better. It makes the prediction that such relationships will receive additional moral considerations, and they actually do in practice. And it predicts that wild animals wouldn't, and they don't, in practice. Success?
So, people just have the attitude about animals just like any other person, exacerbated with how little status and power they have. Especially shrimp. Who the fuck cares about shrimp? You can only care about shrimp if you galaxy brain yourself on some weird ethics system.
I agree that they have no consistent moral framework that backs up that attitude, but it's not that fair to force them into your own with trickery or frame control
>Extremely few people actually take the position that torturing animals is fine
Wrong. Most humans would be fine answering that torturing 1 million chickens is an acceptable tradeoff to save 1 human. You just don't torture them for no reason, as it's unvirtuous and icky
Do you also find it acceptable to torture humans you don't personally know, or a pet that someone purchased only for the joy of torturing it and not for any other service? If not, the companionship explanation is invalid and likely a rationalization.
How many randomly sampled humans would I rather condemn to torture to save my mother? Idk, more than one, tbh.
pet that someone purchased only for the joy of torturing it and not for any other service?
Unvirtuous. This human is disgusting as they consider it fun to deal a lot of harm to the persons in their direct relationships.
Also I really don't like how you jump into "it's all rationalization" with respect to values!
Like, the thing about utilitarian -ish value systems is that they deal poorly with preferences of other people (they mostly ignore them). Preference based views deal poorly with creation and not creation of new persons.
I can redteam them and find real murderous decision recommendations.
Maybe like, instead of anchoring to the first proposed value system maybe it's better to understand what are the values of real life people? Maybe there is no simple formulation of them, maybe it's a complex thing.
Also, disclaimer, I'm totally for making animals better off! (Including wild animals) Just I don't think it's an inference from some larger moral principle, it's just my aesthetic preference, and it's not that strong. And I'm kinda annoyed at EAs who by "animal welfare" mean dealing band aids to farm chickens. Like, why? You can just help to make that lab grown meat a thing faster, it's literally the only thing that going change it.
Idea: it should be illegal to keep animals in captivity, so any organization that wants to butcher animals for flesh and blood should make a space that's attractive for animals to hang out so they can hunt them there.
I've been having some related discussions in this comment section: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/nrC5v6ZSaMEgSyxTn/discussion-thread-animal-welfare-vs-global-health-debate?commentId=aBYj4P6JWJyyZmSEa
I think I observe this generally a lot: "as soon as those implications do not personally benefit them", and even more so when this comes with a cost/conflict of interest.
On rationality on decision making (not the seeking truth part on belief forming I guess) - I thought it is more like being consistent with their own preference and values (if we are constraining to the definition on lesswrong/sequence ish)? I have a hot take that: