On vegan activism
A first-draft essay circulated within the effective-altruism community in late 2015. The animal-welfare wing of EA had been pressing other EAs to go vegan, with some advocates pushing for all-vegan menus at conferences like EA Global. The piece below is a long, multi-pronged critique — not of the moral premise that farm animals matter, but of the dominant strategy of personal moral persuasion. Some sections are explicitly placeholders (“The Xth problem”, “The Ath problem”) that the author had not yet renumbered. Footnote references appear as bracketed numbers; the corresponding URL list runs at the end.
Pro-vegan activism, as it currently stands, needs serious reform. It’s likely that farm animals have moral value, and almost everyone agrees that conditions in factory farms are horrible; the problem is not the goal of making animals happy. Instead, the problem is the most common strategy used to achieve that goal — namely, emotion-laden rhetoric to convince people, either in person or on the Internet, that they should personally become vegan.[1] This category of solution to animal rights problems is likely ineffective at best, and downright harmful at worst. As GiveWell says, non-profits shouldn’t “point to a problem so large and severe (and the world has many such problems) that donors immediately focus on that problem – feeling compelled to give to the organization working on addressing it – without giving equal attention to the proposed solution , how much it costs, and how likely it is to work.”[2] Hence, this essay doesn’t address whether animals have nonzero moral value, which has been thoroughly discussed elsewhere.[3] Nor does it look at other solutions to factory farming, like government legislation, or scientific research to develop meat substitutes. It simply tries to show that a lot of pro-vegan activism, as it’s currently practiced, is ineffective or outright counterproductive. It’s surprisingly hard to find serious criticism of vegan activism — eg. Googling search terms like “anti vegan arguments” produces mostly pro -vegan pages (of which more later) — so it’s hoped that some ideas here will be genuinely new, not just re-wordings of age-old talking points (of which also more later).
To start off with, the first (and probably simplest) problem with pro-vegan activism is that campaigns for large-scale moral persuasion through rhetoric, advertising, peer pressure, graphic images, and so on usually get negligible or marginal results, compared with the effort invested. Consider smoking as a test case. There’s near-universal agreement that smoking is very, very bad for health, in both the short term and long term, and there’s been enormous efforts to convince smokers to quit. On one side, most smokers themselves know darn well how bad smoking is, and many make heroic efforts to stop. On the other side, governments, nonprofits, and smoking-cessation-aids firms spend billions researching how to help people stop smoking. Thousands of studies have been done on the effectiveness of anti-smoking programs, so we’ve put a lot of effort into finding the very best strategies.
The results of this enormous, expensive, fifty-year effort have been modest at best. The US smoking rate has fallen from ~40% to ~20%,[4] a decline of ~50%, or a bit over 1% per year. Of that decline, much of it was caused by fewer people taking up smoking in the first place. Much of the remainder was caused by laws that make cigarettes more expensive and difficult to use, such as taxes, restrictions on sales, public smoking bans, restaurant smoking bans, and so on. Hence, all anti-smoking programs, cessation aids, addiction research, etc. combined have given us a few tenths of a percent decline per year.[5] More generally, Scott has a long essay on how these types of programs are ineffective[6]: “We figured drug use was ‘just’ a social problem, and it’s obvious how to solve social problems, so we gave kids nice little lessons in school about how you should Just Say No. There were advertisements in sports and video games about how Winners Don’t Do Drugs. And just in case that didn’t work, the cherry on the social engineering sundae was putting all the drug users in jail, where they would have a lot of time to think about what they’d done and be so moved by the prospect of further punishment that they would come clean.
And that is why, even to this day, nobody uses drugs. (…) Saying ‘Tendency toward drug abuse is primarily determined by fixed brain structure’ sounds callous, like you’re abandoning drug abusers to die. But maybe it means you can fight the problem head-on instead of forcing kids to attend more and more useless classes where cartoon animals sing about how happy they are not using cocaine.
What about obesity? We put a lot of social effort into fighting obesity: labeling foods, banning soda machines from school, banning large sodas from New York, programs in schools to promote healthy eating, doctors chewing people out when they gain weight, the profusion of gyms and Weight Watchers programs, and let’s not forget a level of stigma against obese people so strong that I am constantly having to deal with their weight-related suicide attempts. As a result, everyone… keeps gaining weight at exactly the same rate they have been for the past couple decades.”
To create a quantiative model, we can look at the test case of online ads, which Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE) have done substantial research on.[7] ACE says that “online vegetarianism and veganism ads are currently our most cost-effective intervention recommendation”.[8] In economic terms, one should naively expect that one dollar of ad purchases causes about one dollar of money moved, where “money moved” equals the change in (retail price of goods purchased − marginal cost of goods sold), summed over all relevant goods. If each dollar of ads caused more than one marginal dollar of money moved, companies would just buy more ads to make more money, until decreasing marginal returns brought gains back down to $1.
Of course, that’s only a rough approximation. Any given ad campaign might be more or less effective, for any number of reasons. However, in this case, the sheer magnitude of the gap is cause for great concern. ACE estimates that the cost-per-click (CPC) of pro-vegan ads is about two to twenty cents, and that based on survey data, around 2% of ad clickers become vegetarian or vegan.[7] American adults spend around $5,000 to $10,000 on food per year,[9] so total money moved through becoming vegetarian is in the range of $100,000. Hence, under the naive economic model, the chance of people becoming vegan because of an ad click is roughly 0.00002% – 0.0002%, a massive four to five orders of magnitude smaller than ACE’s estimate. A likely explanation for this, as ACE themselves note, is that people only click on the ads if they were thinking about becoming vegan anyway.[7] About two thousand people typically see an online ad for each person who clicks,[10] so even a very small number of existing proto-vegans in the ad audience fully account for the survey data.
What empirical data we have backs this up. After decades of animal activist, PETA says that “society is at a turning point” for veganism.[56] But polling data suggests that only 5% of Americans are vegetarian, and that this percentage has gone down since the 90s.[57] Only 2% consider themselves vegan. Further, these numbers are likely overestimates. Polls often show a few percent support for any idea, no matter how crazy, like “all politicians are secretly lizards” (seriously);[58] most people who said “yes” to the vegan question said “no” to the vegetarian question, which suggests high confusion;[57] and more detailed surveys show that most self-described vegetarians still eat meat, an average of one serving per day.[59] This leads into the second problem, which is that this kind of vegan advocacy has extremely high negative externalities. “Negative externality” is an economic term for side effects that hurt third parties. Eg., a coal plant in East City might sell power to customers in East City, but also produce black smoke that chokes West City. The coal plant has an economic incentive to be productive and efficient. However, it has no incentive to stop producing smoke, since the residents of West City aren’t customers, and have no choice in the matter. That’s why Western governments legally limit pollution — on their own, free markets won’t fix damage from externalities.
Similarly, externalities are why cities ban annoyances like begging in subway cars. Activists sometimes moralize the issue,[12] and say that since homelessness is so terrible, it must always outweigh the short annoyance of rejecting a beggar.[13] However, subway begging is an extremely costly way of helping the homeless. At a rough guess, a panhandler might ask around five hundred people for help over an hour, and get paid about $15. Each person’s annoyance at being asked is fairly small; making up a number, let’s say average subway riders would pay fifty cents to avoid each panhandler. However, multiplied over five hundred people, that’s a total of $250 in damage. To transfer each dollar of value from the public to themselves, each panhandler has to destroy $17 in value, like an ancient army that sacks a city to carry off some gold trinkets. It’s way more efficient to just tax each person three cents, and use the tax money for homeless shelters.
From the earlier models of advertising, for every person who’s convinced to go vegan by an ad, somewhere around one to ten billion people have to waste time viewing the ad, even though they won’t respond to it.[14] One must trade off one person changing their diet, against the large negative externality of vast numbers of people being pointlessly annoyed.[19] Conveniently, this situation is a pretty exact analogy to Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Torture vs. Dust Specks scenario.[15] Eliezer asked which was worse: for one person to be tortured horribly, or for many, many people to get a small speck in their eye. Many commenters said the torture was worse, even when the number of hypothetical specks became unimaginably large. People reach this conclusion because of a well-known cognitive bias called scope insensitivity or scope neglect .[16] Humans evolved in an environment (the African savanna) where they mostly didn’t encounter very big numbers; we can imagine torture all too easily, but it’s very difficult to really imagine the size of a billion[17] (never mind the mathematical constructs Eliezer used). Hence, people say they prefer the dust specks, even though the torture causes much less net harm. The same argument applies equally well to vegan advertising; for further details, see Eliezer’s discussion at [18].
The third problem is that going vegan doesn’t improve the lives of farm animals. Since farm animals are bred specifically for their meat (or milk or eggs), if the demand for meat drops, the animals don’t live better lives or get released into the wild. They simply never exist in the first place. Hence, for veganism to be a moral positive, life in a factory farm would have to be so horrible that it’s better for an animal to never exist. To be fair, life in factory farms is pretty darn bad. From ASPCA: “Industrial-scale pig farms are known for their intensive, inhospitable conditions. At just two to three weeks old, piglets are removed from their mothers and placed in large, windowless sheds without fresh air, sunlight or outdoor access. Their pens are too small and crowded for adequate movement and exercise. Ammonia fumes rise to dangerous, uncomfortable levels due to the pigs’ waste.
Pigs tend to be extremely curious and intelligent, so their barren surroundings cause them extreme frustration. The tail-biting that sometimes results leads farms to cut off pigs’ tails without painkillers. Farms also castrate baby male pigs — without painkillers — because consumers don’t like the smell and taste of uncastrated males.
Most female breeding pigs (called sows) in the U.S. spend their reproductive lives confined to a gestation crate. These crates are barely bigger than the sow’s body and prohibit her from turning around. Sows are artificially inseminated and kept in their gestation stalls until a few days before birth, at which time they are moved to equally restrictive farrowing crates to give birth. They remain there for several weeks, nursing their young, and then are placed back in their gestation crates and re-inseminated. This cycle continues for several years, until the sows are no longer as productive and are sent to slaughter.”[11] However, as bad as that is, the data we have from humans suggests that most people prefer to keep living, even when conditions are almost unimaginably horrible. There are all too many examples, but eg., here is one from Vietnam War prisoners: “The torture was constant. The Americans were thrown in tiny cells, slabs of concrete for beds, single, bare lightbulbs making sleep impossible. They were in a constant state of starvation, and when they were fed, their watery soup was laced with pebbles or feces. They were made to stand on stacked stools for days on end. They were often strapped down by 15-pound leg irons, which caused lacerations and infection, or by stocks at the ends of their beds, which kept them on their backs for days. The walls and floors were overrun with roaches and rats. When they were strapped down, they were forced to lie in their own excrement. (…)
While transported to Hanoi after being shot down, Jim Mulligan’s captors poured gasoline over his bound arms, fusing threads of rope into his wounds. Howie Rutledge was beaten mercilessly during his first day in captivity; refusing to give up his ship and squadron, he was told to get on the floor, and a guard thrashed his injured and dislocated leg until it pressed flat on the ground. He and Sam Johnson had both suffered over 60 boils each during one summer, and Johnson had been held in solitary multiple times, often going six days in a row without sunlight. Ron Storz had been made to stand on a stool for seven days straight, beaten nearly to death by a bamboo stick. Hands tied behind his back, George McKnight was held for 34 nights in an air-raid trench 4 feet long; he was 6-foot-2. (…)
By spring 1968, the men had spent five months at Alactraz, and the cells were becoming sweatboxes, reaching up to 110 degrees each day. The combined stench of human waste and sweat made it nearly impossible to breathe. (…) They beat George McKnight for 36 hours straight; they beat and tortured Denton so brutally his arms turned black; Jim Mulligan was strung up and beaten for six days, Nels Tanner for 17.”[20][22] It does seem possible for lives to have negative moral weight — eg. trigeminal neuralgia, possibly the most painful condition known, is nicknamed “the suicide disease” — and, as the article notes, one prisoner did attempt suicide. But my guess is that this is fairly rare. In particular, one might naively expect that lives under ancestral/wild animal conditions must have positive value; evolution wouldn’t select for organisms that preferred not existing to life in the wild, even with omnipresent hunger, disease, and so on. Despite the near-infinite mass of human problems, it’s known that almost all suicide attempts are impulsive, with people regretting them shortly afterwards (sometimes immediately regretting eg. jumping off a bridge).[21] This lends credence to the theory that negative moral weight is rare.
The fourth problem is that the benefits from one person going vegan are not very large, compared to their cost. Statistics from vegan advocacy groups usually cite the large numbers of animals killed . However, each individual life is very short, as meat becomes cheaper when farmers breed animals for rapid growth. Consider chickens as an example. The average American eats 27.5 chickens per year;[23] since a broiler chick takes about five weeks to grow,[24] this gives us 2.64 chicken-years of life prevented by going vegan. To evaluate the cost of not eating chicken, we must look at not the price of the chicken, but the “consumer surplus” — how much benefit the customer derives from the product. With some rough math, I estimate this as $18.84 per chicken; this is averaged over both people who like chicken a lot, and people who only like it barely enough to buy it. That gives us a total value-from-chicken (after the cost of the chicken) of $518 per person per year, which can be given up to save 2.64 years of chicken suffering.
Comparing this to human charity, GiveWell estimates a cost-per-child-saved from malaria nets of $2,838.[26] Since GiveWell’s numbers only count children, given developing-world life expectancy, each life saved gives us about 60 extra person-years. That equals a cost of $47 per person-year, compared to the average cost of $196 per chicken-year from not eating chicken. Therefore, the person-years are a much cheaper buy, even if we assume (highly questionably, as discussed above) that chicken lives are so incredibly bad that preventing one chicken-year is as good as saving one person-year.
In fact, this estimate is still biased in favor of chickens, for two main reasons. The first is that GiveWell’s estimate doesn’t include the benefits of mosquito nets beyond saving children; these include saving adults from death by malaria (though adults have a much lower fatality rate), preventing many more non-fatal cases of malaria, preventing mosquito-borne disease in general, and of course preventing mosquito bites, which (ignoring everything else) can be done for hundredths of a penny per bite. The second reason is that Against Malaria Foundation is selected for being extremely low-risk; given a donation to AMF of $X, one can be extremely confident in at least Y lives being saved. GiveWell thinks it’s likely[27] that if we accept riskier projects, like scientific research and policy reform, the expected cost per life saved will be even lower. Indeed, one of these riskier projects is actually US policy reform to improve farm animal welfare.[28] The fifth problem is that pushing veganism with emotionally-charged rhetoric creates a climate that favors passion over rational discussion, confrontation over collaboration, deontology over consequentialism, and gut feelings over doing the math. The most common arguments for veganism tend to be like: “To see the convulsions, agonies and tortures of a poor fellow-creature, whom they cannot restore nor recompense, dying to gratify luxury and tickle callous and rank organs, must require a rocky heart, and a great degree of cruelty and ferocity. I cannot find any great difference between feeding on human flesh and feeding on [other] animal flesh, except custom and practice.”
“It is frightful wrong that other species are tortured, worried, flayed, and devored by us, in spite of the fact that we are not obliged to this by necessity; while in sinning against the defenceless and helpless, just claimants as they are upon our reasonable conscience and upon our compassion, we succeed only in brutalising ourselves.”
“Cruelty stares at me from the butcher’s face. I tread amidst carcasses. I am in the presence of the slain. The death-set eyes of beasts peer at me and accuse me of belonging to the race of murderers.”[29] These are arguments from emotion; they try to convince us to change our behavior because of deeply-held, gut feelings. But the whole point of effective altruism is that gut feelings aren’t always accurate. Humans feel much worse about one starving child in front of them, than a thousand starving children many miles away. If we let our actions be driven by gut instincts, we’ll wind up saving the one child in front of us, and leaving the thousand children in a different country to die. That’s why so many charities are ineffective; they urge people to donate because of how emotionally horrible the problem is, not because they have a rational, fact-based plan for stopping it at reasonable cost. If we build a culture where people are urged to take action because of strong, graphic, well-marketed emotional appeals, they’ll donate lots of money to charities like [30], even when research proves the money will be wasted.
These angry, emotional techniques also create an atmosphere of cultishness and ingroup superiority. The introduction mentioned how hard is was to find reasonable critiques of vegan activism. That’s partly because activists write deceptive pieces that do things like pretend to consider anti-vegan arguments, only to mock dissenters as idiots, say “there are no good anti-vegan arguments!”, and compare arguing against veganism to arguing for child rape.[44] Or pretend to talk about the health effects of vegan diets, to lure their audience in, and then dismiss readers in a heat of angry rhetoric and mockery.[45] Many people have accused MIRI, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, of being a “cult”, but (to my knowledge) no one has ever said there were no reasonable arguments against MIRI’s positions; never mind pretending to address criticism while mocking all critics as unfeeling idiots. And for good reason; policy debates shouldn’t appear one-sided.[46] Slightly paraphrasing Scott: “I feel like we’ve got a good thing going, we’ve ratified our Platonic contract to be intellectually honest and charitable to each other, we are going about perma-cooperating in the Prisoner’s Dilemma and reaping gains from trade. And then someone says ‘Except that of course regardless of all that I reserve the right to still use lies and insults and harassment and dark epistemology[47] to spread veganism’. (…)
But then someone else says ‘Well, if they get their exception, I deserve my exception,’ and then someone else says ‘Well, if those two get exceptions, I’m out’, and you have no idea how difficult it is to successfully renegotiate the terms of a timeless Platonic contract that doesn’t literally exist. No! I am Exception Nazi! NO EXCEPTION FOR YOU! Civilization didn’t conquer the world by forbidding you to murder your enemies unless they are actually unrighteous in which case go ahead and kill them all. Liberals didn’t give their lives in the battle against tyranny to end discrimination against all religions except Jansenism because seriously fuck Jansenists. Here we have built our Schelling fence and here we are defending it to the bitter end.”[48] Fortunately, most of EA has stayed well away from the worst vegan activists. But a group that runs on emotionally-charged rhetoric is playing with fire, and must be very careful not to burn itself. This gets somewhat personal, and I’ve never talked about it publicly before, but when I was a college freshman campus security came to my dorm one day. An FBI agent was at the security office, and he started asking what my thoughts on animal rights were, what I was doing on my computer, and so on. It turned out that a few months before, I’d looked up some professors’ phone numbers, and those professors were animal researchers who got death threats from pro-animal terrorist groups. Animal rights extremists are considered terrorists by the FBI, and their tactics have included bombs, arson, and intimidation through violence.[49] The problem isn’t the goal of animal rights, any more than the problem with communism was the goal of helping the poor. The problem is the methods used — when a movement is based around anger and passion in place of math and reason, good intentions can create very bad results.
The vegan activist arguments from deontology are equally troubling. Deontology is a system where actions are ethical or unethical according to a set of rules — eg., one rule might be “never kill a human being”. Consequentialism judges actions by their results, so one might consider actions A, B, and C, and choose the one which results in the fewest deaths. Arguments for veganism are often deontological, eg. this common argument from philosopher Dave Pearce: “Paying others to harm sentient beings isn’t altruism. Factory-farming and slaughterhouses cause some of the worst forms of severe and readily avoidable suffering in the world today. Turning whether EAs should actively pay to harm sentient beings into a challenging moral issue takes intellectual ingenuity worthy of a better cause.”[31] The argument here is that EAs should never buy products that cause suffering, or at least not really bad suffering. On an individual level, deontology is often useful. It might be good to have a rule saying “never kill anyone”, even if killing seemed like a good idea at the time. But on a large scale, deontology stops working, because any big enough action will have some negative consequences. Eg., almost any major change in FDA policy will kill someone, even if it saves hundreds of lives on net. If an effective altruist is ever President, we wouldn’t want them to disband the army and the police, because the soldiers and policemen might hurt somebody.
Furthermore, with this type of deontological argument, it’s never clear where to stop . A donation to AMF saves lives for about $3,000 each; yet, if we felt guilty whenever we spent money on ourselves instead of saving lives, we’d all go mad. That’s why Giving What We Can has a pledge to donate 10% of your income, and not 90% or 100%; if you give 10%, you can be satisfied, and continue living a normal life without feeling guilty, which has all kinds of other benefits.[32] But with a rule like “never pay others to harm sentient beings”, when could anyone be satisfied? Oil money props up Saudi Arabia, a brutally repressive dictatorship which stones women to death for “crimes” like adultery and blasphemy; should EAs never buy oil-based products? Some Chinese factories (though thankfully not most) enslave and torture their workers; should EAs never buy Chinese products? Coal mining kills thousands in industrial accidents, and coal fumes then choke countless people to death through respiratory disease; should EAs never use electricity from coal? One could go on and on and on. I’ll celebrate the day when the world abolishes radical Islamist governments, slave labor in factories, and coal-burning power plants. But it isn’t practical to live life without buying anything harmful, at least if you ever want to do anything else.
The sixth problem is health. Vegan activists say that it’s entirely possible to have a healthy vegan diet, and that’s probably true. And, of course, good health gets even easier with vegetarianism or other, looser diets. However, the relevant factor isn’t what people could eat, but what people really will eat. To model this problem, we can borrow another idea from economics called the “production possibility frontier”, or PPF.[35] Consider, eg., a person choosing which car to buy. Cars vary in price from “cheap” to “expensive”, and they also vary in quality from “luxury” to “crap”. One can plot all cars on a two-dimensional sheet, with “price” on the X-axis and “quality” on the Y-axis. When comparing car A and car B, if car A is cheaper, but of equal or better quality, almost everyone will choose A over car B. Likewise, if car B is better made, but has an equal or lower price, almost everyone will choose B. Choosing a car that’s better in at least one way, without being worse in any other way, is called a “Pareto improvement”. A style of car that has no Pareto improvements is called “Pareto optimal”, because one can’t make any aspect of the car better without making at least one other aspect worse. Under normal circumstances, consumers will buy Pareto-optimal goods; no one is going to buy a junky death trap that costs $100,000. If we pick out all the Pareto-optimal cars on the grid, we can draw a line connecting them; that line is the production possibility frontier. The PPF tells us, for any given price, the best quality of car we can get. Likewise, for any given quality, it gives us the lowest possible price.
Why is there a PPF — why can’t everyone just buy $500 Ferraris? The reason is that cars are built from atoms, and the properties of those atoms were determined randomly by nature,[37] without human input. Ideally, Toyota would build its cars from metal that’s super durable, rustproof, dirt cheap, easy to machine, totally non-toxic, and so on. But the properties of the metals which physically exist were determined by luck. Sometimes, by coincidence, a metal will happen to be really cheap, or really tough, or rustproof, and so on. But since these properties are random, for one metal to be all of those things at once would be too much coincidence — like rolling thirty dice, and having them all come up sixes. That’s why real auto engineers have to trade off iron vs. aluminium, chromium vs. titanium, cost vs. durability, tensile strength vs. shear strength, and so on. And likewise for everything else we make — there’s no perfect fabric for clothing, no perfect wood for construction, no perfect conductor for electronics, etc. In all of these areas, there are PPFs that describe how to trade off different constraints.
Similarly, for food, every eater has to trade off constraints; the biggest ones are things like “cost”, “availability”, “taste”, “health”, and “ease of preparation”. Different people have different preferences along these axes, and so each person chooses their own point on the PPF. One person might eat junk food, because it’s cheap and available everywhere; another person might eat in fancy restaurants, which are tasty and healthy, but expensive; and so on. Some diets will have more meat than others, but few would be vegetarian and almost none would be vegan; if a diet were optimized for other things, that diet just happening to also be optimized for animal ethics would be a crazy coincidence, like building a car and then just happening to have used a metal so light that it’s also a boat. Realistically, if we push people towards parts of the PPF that rank highly on the “animal ethics” axis, we should expect those parts to be worse on all the other axes, one of which is health. There are points on the PPF that are both vegan and healthy, but one should expect those points to rank poorly on axes like cost, availability, and taste, for the same reason one should expect a racecar that can also fly to be hard to find, expensive, and high maintenance. Therefore, people won’t realistically choose these points unless they care very little about things besides veganism and health, which is almost nobody.
Of course, all of that’s a theoretical argument, and blackboard models don’t always apply. But it seems likely that diets really do work this way. To quote Paul Graham: “How bad could it be? Well, food shows that pretty clearly. If you were dropped at a random point in America today, nearly all the food around you would be bad for you. Humans were not designed to eat white flour, refined sugar, high fructose corn syrup, and hydrogenated vegetable oil. And yet if you analyzed the contents of the average grocery store you’d probably find these four ingredients accounted for most of the calories. ‘Normal’ food is terribly bad for you.”[38] These four ingredients — white flour, refined sugar, high fructose corn syrup, and hydrogenated vegetable oil — rank highly on the “cost”, “taste”, and “availability” axes, but many people still avoid them because of the “health” axis. But all four of these ingredients are also 100% vegan. If we push people to select for vegetarianism in diets, it seems extremely likely that consumption of these four foods would go up, even though them being bad for you is might be the only thing all nutritionists agree on.
People have also done studies showing that vegetarians (not sure about vegans) tend to be healthier. However, it’s extremely likely that these studies suffer from confounders. Scientists can control for some confounders — eg., vegetarians are more likely to be rich/white/highly-educated, and rich/white/highly-educated people are healthier in general, so one might control for that by adjusting for income, race, and education. But other confounders seem almost impossible to account for. Eg., it’s likely that there’s a general “interest in diet” variable — some people are very careful about what they eat, while others just eat whatever they see first at the store. Since most modern food is bad for you, as discussed earlier, people in the second group will be a lot less healthy. However, people in the second group are also less likely to become vegan — it’s more (subjective) work for them to keep track of which foods have meat ingredients, and maintain a healthy balance of nutrients without meat proteins. This (or any number of other confounders) could fully explain the survey results, even in the (very likely) event that meat is healthier than high fructose corn syrup.[39] The seventh problem is the disruptiveness that insistence on vegan food creates in a movement. At the Effective Altruism Global conference, many people argued that the cafeteria should serve vegan food to everyone — even people who said they didn’t want it. Hundreds of hours were spent in debates about conference food. The organizers of EAG were a fairly small group, but consider the impact such a debate would have on, eg., GiveWell, if they held an EA conference. A conservative guess is that similar disruptions to GiveWell would cause around 22,000 people to die and millions more to get very sick; not in the distant far future, but in the next five or ten years.[50] Numbers like that are normally confined to books about World War Two. There were many arguments for all-vegan conference food — policy debates shouldn’t appear one-sided — but there are none which justify such extraordinarily large damages.[51] Banning chicken, for example, would save at most ten years of chicken suffering, in exchange for ~1.3 million years of human life and another ~2.6 million years of serious human suffering.[52] This does not include the harm done to animals — this disruption would, in addition to everything else, slow GiveWell’s work on US policy reform for farm ethics.[53] Before launching into the other problems, it’s convenient to define some terms; these are “under-inclusive” and “over-inclusive”. These terms come from the legal world, and Judge Richard Posner include great definitions in his opinion on gay marriage.[33] A law is “under-inclusive” when the government wants to target some group, but the law doesn’t apply to large parts of the group. Likewise, an “over-inclusive” law also applies to lots of people who aren’t in the group. Suppose, for example, that black people were more likely to get some disease, so the government passed a law quarantining all black people. This law would be under-inclusive, because the government is forgetting sick people who aren’t black; it’d also be over-inclusive, since it’s quarantining black people who aren’t sick. In cases like this one (though not in some others), the law would be struck down as unconstitutional, because it isn’t “tailored” for the government’s purpose in passing it. Similarly, policies in general can be over- or under-inclusive. If Bob eats chocolate cake to help the sugar industry, Bob’s policy is under-inclusive, because it doesn’t include other, more effective actions (like buying pure sugar, lobbying Congress, or writing checks to sugar growers).
A lot of people aren’t very skilled at analyzing scientific papers, or doing complex math. However, most people are very skilled at picking up on over- and under-inclusiveness, even if they don’t consciously realize it. Much of the hostility to pro-vegan rhetoric might come from these types of issues; people will sometimes pick up on these problems and get a negative feeling, without being able to explain exactly why.
So, let’s dive back in. The Xth problem, and the most obvious under-inclusive one, is that if animals in pain have negative moral value, animals in pleasure should have positive value. One could do huge amounts of good in the world by breeding large numbers of animals — preferably small ones that are easy to feed — and dosing their food with opiates or other pleasure drugs. That wouldn’t be an ideal animal life, but it’s almost certainly better than not existing. Even if one didn’t accept that argument, though, the cost of a very happy pet mouse life is only about $100 per mouse-year,[34] and that would almost certainly go way down if done in industrial bulk. Happy human cities are many orders of magnitude more expensive, per inhabitant, than happy mice cities; clearly, the mice cities are a better buy, at least on the current margin.
The obvious objection is that animal lives aren’t fully equivalent to human lives; a happy animal isn’t as good as a happy human. Indeed, one should expect that to be true on theoretical grounds. Because all animals evolved from bacteria, we know that one can take a bacterium, make a series of very very small changes (on the scale of individual atoms), and eventually get a cow or pig or horse. Likewise, one can take any animal, and make a series of extremely small changes to get Homo sapiens. Everyone agrees that bacteria have no moral value, while humans do. But that implies that, over a very large number of very tiny changes, we must be able to go from moral value = 0 to moral value = 1. Either the change is continuous, and each very small change produces a very small difference in moral value; or it’s discrete, and there are one or more points where moral value suddenly drops off a cliff. However, it’s highly implausible that one could make an arbitrarily tiny change (moving one atom one nanometer) and cause a significant jump in moral worth. Therefore, we should assume the continuous theory, which tells us that animals have moral worth intermediate between bacteria and humans (though not whether it’s 10% or 90%).[40] The problem is that vegan activists seem to ignore this issue, and use slogans like “all suffering is equally bad”; however, in physics, there’s no binary division between “things that suffer” and “things that don’t suffer”. Atoms are so small that, on a macro scale, physics is continuous; it doesn’t make physical sense to have sharply-defined “suffering” and “non-suffering” categories.
The Ath problem is one of over-inclusion. Even if one believes that factory-farmed life has negative value, it’s obviously possible to treat animals well enough that their lives become net positive. Eating meat from such animals would then also have positive moral value, since (as discussed above) the animals wouldn’t otherwise exist. However, many vegan activists reject this argument on highly questionable grounds. A few example quotes: “Castration (males except breeders), dehorning (male and female cows and goats), nose rings (free-range pigs), and ear tags or flesh ‘notches’ (sheep, pigs, cows, and goats) are all painful mutilations commonly practiced without anesthetic on even the most ‘humane’ farms. Most eggs sold in stores under free-range or cage-free labels come from hens who are painfully debeaked.”[42] Obviously, these procedures are nasty, and it’d be good to find practical alternatives. However, it’s (quite frankly) a ridiculous leap to conclude that these animals would be better off not existing. Almost every human has to undergo painful medical procedures sometime in their life, often gruesomely so: “Wait, am I calling hospitals hellish? Sure am. (…) It’s mostly the screams. The screams are coming about 33% from the confused demented old people I mentioned, 33% from people having minor procedures performed without anaesthetics for one or another good reason, and 33% from people who just have very painful diseases (plus 1% from me sitting in the break room looking up examples of hospital poetry for this post). They run the gamut of human screams. There are wordless shrieks. There are some angry screams, like ‘$#%! YOU GET ME OUT OF HERE!’. There are a lot of people screaming ‘SOMEBODY HELP ME!’ And there are some religious screams, like ‘OH GOD!’ or ‘JESUS HELP ME!’ or ‘CHRIST NO!’.
When I first started working in hospitals, I would not only inevitably run over to these screams, but I would feel contempt and anger at the rest of the hospital staff who would just continue their daily routine. I soon learned better. Not only would I be unable to do anything – I can’t single-handedly cure their painful illness, or make their procedure go any faster, or explain to them that the year is 2013 and they’re no longer on their childhood farm in Oklahoma – but as soon as they saw me I would be the one they started screaming at and expecting to save them. The bystander effect, my last defense, disappeared. Sometimes I would make a stand by asking the nurse to increase their pain medication or something, and be politely told all the reasons why that was a bad idea from a medical perspective (pain medication has lots of side effects which doctors monitor carefully). In the end I would just slink out of the room, wishing I had never come in.”[41] Yet, no one’s ever argued that humans should never have babies, because most babies eventually undergo painful surgery. Combined with the previous problem, the ethical positions of vegan activists seem to come from a philosophy called “strong negative utilitarianism”[42]. In this system, farmers are responsible for any suffering that animals endure, even if the suffering isn’t realistically avoidable (other than by not creating the animal). Yet at the same time, farmers aren’t given credit for pleasure in animals’ lives. Under negative utilitarianism, pleasure does not count — avoidance of suffering is the only good. But by that reasoning, ultimately the best way to end suffering is to aim a large enough asteroid at Earth to destroy all complex life. A few people do actually argue for that, but it seems like a fairly strong reducto ad absurdum.
Another argument goes as follows: “Humans decide where they will live; if they will ever know their mothers; if, and how long, they will nurse their babies; when, and if, they will be permitted to see or be with their families and friends; when, where, or if they will be allowed to socialize with members of their own species; when, how, and if, they are going to reproduce; what, when, and how much they will eat; how much space they will have, if any; if, and how far, they will be allowed to roam; what mutilations they will be subjected to; what, if any, veterinary care they will receive; and when, where, and how they are going to die.”[42] Every agent — adult, child, robot, and animal — should have as much freedom as is practical. But for farm animals, and for that matter human two-year-olds, a very wide range of freedom isn’t practical in the modern world. In many ways, cows (and two-year-olds) simply can’t understand enough to make meaningful choices, and if left unsupervised will just get run over by cars. The state of California has decided that seventeen-year-old humans (!) can’t meaningfully consent to sex, because they lack the knowledge and skills to make those kinds of decisions. If a seventeen-year-old doesn’t have the judgement to give consent, how could a cow, even when having sex with another cow? And yet, it isn’t wrong for every species besides humans to ever have sex. Of course, all that doesn’t mean that cows (or two-year-olds) should be starved, tortured, or locked up in dark pens without any room to move; but “full freedom” is simply not a realistic option.
The Yth problem is also an under-inclusive one, and it’s that one common argument for vegan advocacy, and often the primary argument, is environmentalism. Animal agriculture uses a lot of land and other resources, so it’s damaging to the environment. Therefore, people can protect the environment by eating less meat, even if they personally are less happy because of a less tasty diet. (This issue is something of a pet hobbyhorse, so the following is somewhat long, but bear with me for a minute.)
But, suppose for a minute there was another country, outside the US, where vegetarianism was extremely popular. Not everyone would like it, of course, but a lot of people in this country would actively prefer vegetarian diets. But in order to subsidize the politically powerful meat industry, the government there has heavily restricted the amount of food that can be sold without meat-based ingredients. As a result, vegetarian and especially vegan foods are extremely expensive — there’s way too much demand, and not enough supply. Any one person can still be vegetarian, but in aggregate, the population is de facto legally required to eat lots of meat. Since vegetarian food is limited, the only way for one person in this country to become vegetarian is for someone else to start eating meat again — if one person gets more, someone else has to get less. So all activists would have to do is get the laws in this country changed, and they wouldn’t have to advocate or convince consumers of anything. The environmental problem from meat production would magically fix itself, which sounds much easier.
Unfortunately, there isn’t any such country. However, for almost every kind of pollution except meat consumption (!), the United States is exactly like the country described above. A lot of people would like to not live in big, polluting houses, next to acres of pavement that used to be forests, but they’re forced to. They’d like to not drive long distances in big, polluting cars, but they’re forced to. They’d like to not have large, high-maintenance lawns that soak up tons of water and fertilizer, but they’re forced to. They’d like to use less electricity, less water, and less natural gas, but they’re forced to use more, and so on. Any one person can choose to pay lots of money to not pollute, but they’re bidding on a limited number of slots — if one person stops, another person has to start. So, in aggregate, the population is forced to pollute. If 20% of CO2 emissions are from meat, legally mandated pollution is probably the majority of the remaining 80%.
Stories on the environment and global warming practically never mention this, so most people haven’t heard of it. But as proof, when some spare time crops up, take a minute or two and Google “<name of home city> zoning map”. Unless they’re rich enough to afford Manhattan or downtown San Francisco, a reader will almost certainly find that: It’s illegal to build housing within walking distance of stores, offices, or other employment centers. Therefore, people are forced to drive long distances to work — they have no choice, unless they want to lose their job.
It’s illegal to build housing densely enough to make public transportation practical. The usual euphemism cities use is “FAR”, or floor-to-area ratio. Nobody can build more than X amount of living space per Y amount of land. So people are forced to live far apart, which means they also have to drive long distances to do anything else — see a friend, watch a movie, even just buy a gallon of milk. This also forces housing developments to take up lots of space, which means fewer forests, more concrete, more urban heat island effect, etc.
Building smaller, less-polluting houses is illegal, or strongly discouraged. Sometimes one can technically do it, but there’s always a legal requirement to have a minimum “lot size”, ie. one can’t buy or sell land in chunks smaller than X acres. So if a developer has one acre of land, they can’t split it in half, and build two smaller houses on it. They can only build one house, whether larger or smaller. And since larger houses sell for more, of course they build the larger (and more polluting) one. Larger houses use more of everything — more electricity, more water, more heat, more wood to build the house, more maintenance, more furniture, and so on.
In over 80% of the city, and often 100%, apartments will be illegal. Most of the city will be reserved for detached, single-family housing, which is the least environmentally friendly type. Of course, it’s illegal to build high-rise apartment towers, but nobody can build anything else either. Townhouses are illegal. Combined live/work spaces are illegal. Duplexes are illegal. People might try to get one house and share it with roommates, but in many places, even that’s illegal — each house must have one family only, where “family” is defined as a group of blood relatives.
Lawns under a certain size are illegal. The technical term is “setback”, which means the house’s distance from the property line. The law might require (eg.) at least 20 feet for a front lawn, plus 50 feet for a back lawn, plus 30 feet on each side for side lawns. Those lawns require maintenance, of course, and not maintaining them is illegal. Some people try to grow food on their lawns, but in a lot of places that’s illegal too — last year California tried to pass a bill letting everyone in the state grow food on their own land, but the provision was stripped by a last-minute amendment.
It’s illegal to not surround a building with lots and lots of free parking. So even if, in spite of all the above, a person is doggedly determined not to drive everywhere, it’s often very dangerous to do so. The only way to get to any building is to dodge through a maze of speeding cars. Over a person’s lifetime, you’d have a roughly 1% chance of being killed this way. And if they are killed, no one will be punished, and their death will not be investigated. Of course, subsidizing driving with mandatory free parking creates a higher risk of death for everyone else too. My friend (and former MIRI visiting fellow) Shaneal Manek was murdered by cars. My other friend Morgan Wang, a core member of the New York meetup group, was seriously injured and is now permanently disabled.
If things were like this because 98% of Americans wanted to pollute, then environmental activism and vegan activism would be roughly equivalent. Both types of activists would have to convince people to change, to make sacrifices for the greater good, one person at a time. However, a large fraction of Americans already don’t like living this way. We know that because the US has a few cities built before the 1950s and 60s, when these laws were enacted, and these cities are extremely expensive because of the huge unmet demand. The densest metro area in the US is New York City, and it’s also the most expensive. The second densest is San Francisco, and it’s the second most expensive. Third densest is Boston, the third most expensive, and so on. A ton of people would be more environmentally friendly if they could, but they can’t, they aren’t allowed to. This is a golden opportunity for environmentalists — just change the laws, and the problem magically gets better — but vegan activists have almost entirely ignored it. (GiveWell has not; in addition to farm ethics, one of their focus areas for US policy change is land use reform.)
Other environmental issues seem similar. Arguably the most critical part of green electricity is building cheap energy storage, since wind and solar are intermittent.[54] VC funding for green energy technology is so small (and shrinking) that even a modest new firm could dominate the market.[55] A simple carbon tax could price in the externality of global warming, and make all polluters (including livestock farms) pay fairly for the damage they do. Progress could be made on any of these fronts, or countless others (geoengineering, new nuclear power, carbon capture, civil engineering…) with strong efforts by mid-sized teams. Yet, most vegan activists ignore all of these strategies. Their only solution is more of the same — more and more rhetoric for people to not eat meat.
The Zth problem is also one of under-inclusiveness. Despite the arguments about moral value from earlier, there is one class of lives we can be fairly sure are of negative value; one group of people who, rationally and deliberately, express a strong desire to die. That group is many elderly patients in nursing homes. Scott Alexander, a psychiatrist, describes exactly why: “You will become bedridden, unable to walk or even to turn yourself over. You will become completely dependent on nurse assistants to intermittently shift your position to avoid pressure ulcers. When they inevitably slip up, your skin develops huge incurable sores that can sometimes erode all the way to the bone, and which are perpetually infected with foul-smelling bacteria. Your limbs will become practically vestigial organs, like the appendix, and when your vascular disease gets too bad, one or more will be amputated, sacrifices to save the host. Urinary and fecal continence disappear somewhere in the process, so you’re either connected to catheters or else spend a while every day lying in a puddle of your own wastes until the nurses can help you out. The digestive system isn’t too happy either by this point, so you can either have a tube plugged directly into your stomach or just skip the middleman and have an IV line feeding nutrients into your bloodstream.
Somewhere in the process your mind very quietly and without fanfare gives up the ghost. It starts with forgetting a couple of little things, and progresses until you have no idea what’s going on ever. In medical jargon, healthy people are ‘alert and oriented x 3’, which means oriented to person (you know your name), oriented to time (you know what day/month/year it is), and oriented to place (you know you’re in a hospital). My patients who have the sorts of issues I mentioned in the last paragraph are generally alert and oriented x0. They don’t remember their own names, they don’t know where they are or what they’re doing there, and they think it’s the 1930s or the 1950s or don’t even have a concept of years at all. When you’re alert and oriented x0, the world becomes this terrifying place where you are stuck in some kind of bed and can’t move and people are sticking you with very large needles and forcing tubes down your throat and you have no idea why or what’s going on.
So of course you start screaming and trying to attack people and trying to pull the tubes and IV lines out. Every morning when I come in to work I have to check the nurses’ notes for what happened the previous night, and every morning a couple of my patients have tried to pull all of their tubes and lines out. If it’s especially bad they try to attack the staff, and although the extremely elderly are really bad at attacking people this is nevertheless Unacceptable Behavior and they have to be restrained ie tied down to the bed. A presumably more humane alternative sometimes used instead or in addition is to just drug you up on all of those old-timey psychiatric medications that actual psychiatrists don’t use anymore because of their bad reputation.”[41] In most cases, these patients are not allowed to choose to die. They’re forced by the government to continue living, until their bodies physically can’t take any more. And this is done at enormous cost. Stealing the rough numbers from earlier, the cost of saving one person-year from malaria is about $47; the cost of saving one chicken-year from factory farming, $196 (benefit of eating to the consumer, minus cost of the chicken); the cost of saving one end-of-life year from American medical torture might be negative $500,000. Right-to-die legislation has already passed in several states, and getting more states would be orders of magnitude easier than talking billions of people into going vegan, yet vegan activists (and, to my knowledge, everyone else in EA) ignore this opportunity.
References Of course, in many cases, the diet being advocated isn’t really vegan. Other types of ethics-based dietary restrictions include “vegetarian”, “lacto-ovo vegetarian”, “pescatarian”, “flexitarian”, “reducetarian”, and so on. Since keeping track of all the different labels is unwieldy, for the most part I’ll simply say “vegan”, even though the main arguments also apply to many other ethics-based diets. I’ve seen people use “veg*n”, but that’s unpronounceable and not that widely understood.
GiveWell: The most important problem may not be the best charitable cause A debate on animal consciousness Gallup: One in five US adults smoke One possible complication is that nicotine is chemically addictive. However, treatments to fight the chemical part of addiction have been available for decades, which I’d expect to largely cancel out this effect.
Slate Star Codex: Society is fixed, biology is mutable Animal Charity Evaluators: Online ads Although I disagree with them, ACE should be commended for trying to be quantitative; most vegan activists don’t.
Data from Gallup . Note that this data is based on self-reports, and is per-household rather than per-adult, so it is only approximate.
Smart Insights: display advertising clickthrough rates ASPCA: Animals on factory farms Appeal to emotion Scientific American: Psychology of the taboo tradeoff If this sounds implausibly high, compare eg.
the list of websites with huge numbers of pageviews but very few employees . Also consider how often you yourself click on ads, especially for things you weren’t previously interested in, compared to how many ads you see in a typical day.
Torture vs. Dust Specks Scope neglect Minding Our Way: Respect for large numbers Circular Altruism Yes, this implies many other forms of advertising are horrible too. But, hey, one thing at a time. :)
NY Post: Tortured in Vietnam’s worst prison Slate Star Codex: In defense of psych treatment for attempted suicide Of course, we now know that the prisoners would be released in seven years, but they had no way of knowing that at the time.
National Chicken Council statistics , divided by US population of 318.9 million Penn State Extension: The modern meat chicken industry The cost of a whole chicken is roughly $1.50 per pound ( Reuters ), or $9 for a six-pound chicken. Per USDA ERS , the price elasticity of demand of chicken is around −0.8, so we can naively model the demand-price curve with the ODE dy/dx = −0.8*y/x, y(9) = 1, which has the solution y(x) = 5.8/x^0.8. Integrating from x = 9 to, say, 100, we get 27.84, which subtracting the $9 for the chicken’s price gives us a consumer surplus of $18.84. This is, of course, just a rough guess.
GiveWell: Cost per life saved (AMF) GiveWell: Should Open Philanthropy be recommending more/larger grants?
Open Philanthropy: US policy Wikiquote: Vegetarianism Children’s Village ad Nothing Is Mere: Revenge of the meat people Slate Star Codex: Nobody is perfect, everything is commensurable Slate: Judge Posner’s gay marriage opinion Humane Society: Mice as pets Production-possibility frontier Further discussion: Aiming at the target Of course, it isn’t really “random” — the properties of materials follow from atomic physics, which follows from quantum mechanics. But it’s “random” in the sense that there was no human input to make chemical properties suited to human goals.
Paul Graham: You weren’t meant to have a boss As an aside, it seems plausible that meat from well-treated animals is healthier than meat from factory farmed animals (though also more expensive). I haven’t investigated this, though.
Technically, it could also imply that animals have more moral worth than humans. However, I’m not aware of anyone who takes that position.
Slate Star Codex: Who by very slow decay Free From Harm: Humane farming myth Negative utilitarianism YouTube example Eat Plants Drink Beer: Our vegan diet almost killed us Policy debates should not appear one-sided Dark side epistemology Slate Star Codex: In favor of niceness, community, and civilization FBI: Animal rights extremism and ecoterrorism In the last five years, GiveWell has attracted one billionaire (Dustin Moskovitz) who will donate the majority of his wealth. Per CNN Money , there are several hundred other such billionaires whom GiveWell might recruit. Hence, one might naively expect that GiveWell will continue finding about one new billionaire every five years, or a base rate of 1/60 expected billionaires per month. Since the mean net worth of a billionaire is $4.2 billion , this implies an expected gain of $840 million per year. If GiveWell’s staff works 50-hour weeks, and a future veganism dispute took 200 hours, the amount of time consumed would be 200 / 2500 = 0.08 years, or $67 million worth of billionaire recruitment. At a cost per child saved of $3,000 from AMF, this implies 22,400 children not saved from malaria, and millions of extra non-fatal malaria cases (there are roughly 400 non-fatal cases per fatal case, WHO ). This estimate is conservative for two reasons; first, it ignores everything else GiveWell does, such as doing research to find even better giving opportunities. Second, GiveWell thinks it’s likely that marginal money can be spent even more effectively than on AMF ( link ), in which case not raising money would do even more damage.
One could, of course, argue that a fight would be avoided if everyone on the anti-vegan-activism side gave in. However, giving in is a terrible general policy; it creates an incentive for groups to demand large donations (or similar favors) as a payoff for not causing disruption. For more on this, see Scott’s Setting the default .
400 conference goers * 3 days * 27.5 chickens/year average / 365 days per year * 5 week chicken lifespan / 52 weeks per year = 8.69 chicken years. This assumes that everyone would eat chicken if chicken were served, which is unlikely.
One argument against this is that, eg., most people would agree it was wrong to murder in order to help GiveWell. However, in that case, using violence makes it vastly more likely that violence will be used against you , either by the state or by private actors, and worrying about the threat of such violence would sap a ridiculous amount of resources. Similar arguments apply to fraud, kidnapping, etc., while no such argument applies to chicken meat.
MIT Technology Review: The energy startup conundrum Greentech Media: Cleantech venture capital 2014 PETA: Position on sustainable meat Gallup: Consider themselves vegetarians Slate Star Codex: Noisy poll results and reptilian Muslim climatologists from Mars The Daily Beast: Why drunk vegetarians eat meat