Reasons to eat meat

I'm not sure I've ever seen someone in EA who both:

a) Wanted everyone to be vegan and was actively pushy/bothersome toward people who didn't do this

b) Took a fairly permissive stance on luxury/ineffective charity spending

Mostly, this is because I haven't seen a lot of people who fit (a) at all. I have friends who are vegan, donate to animal causes, and are pretty certain that veganism is the "right" thing to do, but they don't judge me too harshly for eating cheese.

The most common position I'm aware of among the most involved people in EA is "try to avoid judging people harshly if they're doing some good things and moving in the right direction, even if they could do better", which they apply to both donations and veganism (if they care about animal causes).

This post tickled my brain in a funny/good way, so thanks for that. I'm still left a little dumbfounded. My thought is if you think of taking EA actions from a units-of-good-accomplished-per-unit-of-personal-sacrifice perspective, donating 10% of my income and giving up meat feel about equally hard to me (and I do both), though I imagine this feels very different for other people and I don't know what norms are appropriate to make/enforce around how much and what kinds of sacrifices people should make.

I know the post is satirical, but I think it's worth pointing out that ego depletion, the idea that self-control or willpower draws upon a limited pool of mental resources that can be used up, is on shaky ground, i.e. the effect was not replicated in a few meta-analyses, although an older meta-analysis did replicate it.

I think reducetarianism is really important and not satireworthy. I am vegan because I don't want to consume slaughtered animals period. Although I think changing norms is the most important effect of veganism, my (small) donations arguably do more to directly combat factory farming. I couldn't eat meat knowing what it is, and it would require me to numb my morality to try, but if someone can and has to try really hard to reduce meat consumption, I think they should do as much as they can and not feel too bad.

Ultimately, as much as this goes against my instincts, eating meat is a sin that's comparable to all the other sins that a person can't fully eliminate from their life. It's a priority issue for me, but I believe that a person could do as much or more good than me by working on different issues and still eating meat.

On a less satirical note, I think one strong argument in favor of eating meat is that beef cattle (esp. grass-fed) might have net positive lives. If this is true, then the utilitarian line is to 1) eat more beef to increase demand, 2) continue advocating for welfare reforms that will make cows' lives even more positive.

Beef cattle are different than e.g. factory farmed chicken in that they live a long time (around 3 years on average vs 6-7 weeks for broilers), and spend much of their lives grazing on stockers where they might have natural-ish lives.

Another argument in favor of eating beef is that it tends to lead to deforestation, which decreases total wild animal habitat, which one might think are worse than beef farms.

The willpower argument is actually quite good. There are ways to reduce the amount of willpower required, but the kernel of the argument applies.

My prediction for people who constantly feel bad for not living up to an exacting standard is that a majority will fall off the boat entirely.

I'm not sure that many people who push for moral obligations hold inconsistent views. These seem like two mainly distinct sets of people.

Most people I speak to either think people are morally obligated to do actions that might improve the world, whether that's veganism, frugality etc or they take the more laid back approach.

I'd also say there are some differences between eating factory farmed meat and spending on ineffective charities, mainly that a world that still has factory farmed meat is hard to imagine as one of the best worlds compared to one where people still give money to ineffective charities.

The openness of the EA movement to omnivores is a good point I had not considered before. Although this could probably be accomplished by not being in peoples face about it. I understand the reasoning that concludes that the strength of obligations to give to charity and for veganism are the same. However, I think there is one important distinction, we are causing harm. If we use the classic example of the child drowning in the pool. Not giving to charity is analogous to allowing the child to drown. Eating meat is analogous to drowning the child (or at least a chicken every couple of days). I think we should examine our actions through many ethical theory's due to moral uncertainty. If we do so we can see that there tends to be an extra obligation not to do harm in many ethical theory's. This means there is a distinction between not allowing someone to drown and drowning them. Thus I think there should be extra moral importance placed on first not doing the world any harm.

I think you should warn your reader, in the first or second paragraph, that your intent is not so straightforward. Do not assume everyone will read it up to the end otherwise.

I think the arguments about moral realism/utility and ethics being demanding are very interesting.

I am new to EA, and I am an environmental vegetarian for over 10 years. I believe it was in one of the video introductions to EA that they talk about how many chickens equal a human life, and the answer varies for different individuals and for some may be quite large. Does EA allow for people having differing valuations of level of suffering?

For people whose animal-to-human suffering equivalence ratio is very high, could the choice to eat meat be presented as a cause of human suffering (of future generations, due to carbon emissions/equivalence) instead of animals? Then again, nearly every choice we make could be. (Do I take the bus vs. drive my car, do I feed myself this fancy meal or feed 100 starving children.)

From an ethics standpoint, eating meat is inconsistent with our common assumptions and behaviors. The reason why it is so strongly considered in the EA movement, and why it is perhaps our gravest moral emergency, is because people aren't convinced of the moral argument. 

What would you think of me if I said I bought dogs and beat them to death in a slow and painful manner? For the sake of being socially included? No serious person, especially in this forum, would condone such a thing. Clearly we have sympathy for those beings that experience pain and do not wish to see them unnecessarily suffer. And it is not morally commendable to 'sometimes' be against this. The person beating dogs might not like doing it on Sundays, but would our moral judgement of that person change because of that? The same can be said of the Auld's, who infamously refused to beat Frederick Douglas on Sundays because they were good Christians. 

The question one needs to consider is this: does the pain experienced by these animals justify the pleasure you feel on your taste buds? I don't think you could seriously say it would, unless you are in a situation where you are required to eat meat and there aren't alternatives. It is also seems inconsistent to be a patron of the EA movement, and simultaneously neglect the single gravest moral emergency, the greatest contributor to green house gas emissions and climate change, the greatest threat to a pandemic, and the greatest human health emergency. Why not start from an honest and unbiased perspective and ask 'why am I doing this in the first place'?

This post is satire. Some of these reasons are good and some of them are bad...

Ahh, you might want to lead with that.

Since I don't have EA friends or an EA spouse, avoiding meat can be difficult and I've settled for "reducetarian".

It feels like there really is a sense in which someone who mugs a person vs someone who could have prevented it but walks away deserve different amounts of punishment. In which case, this is not at all an inconsistency.

Increasing the demand for meat does feel like I'm taking an action to cause the murder of animals, moreso than continuing with my life is causing poor people to remain poor and sick.

In the other direction, there really is a sense in which you "earned" your money (despite your privileges), and it really is a huge ask to give it up.

I'm not sure how to formalize the spectrum from merely complicit to primary cause, or even whether it's just a legacy of thinking in terms of property rights and should be done away with, but I'm not as sure as I used to be.

Either way, I don't think people should shy away from simultaneously holding strong views on veganism and moderate views on donating on these grounds.

ACE charities are also super cost-effective (15 chickens spared per dollar or so) so if you can hold yourself to a deal like "I'm gonna eat steak tonight but promise to donate $1 to The Humane League after", you just did a lot more good than bad, at least in expected value.