My Problem with Veganism and Deontology

My reasons for being vegan have little to do with the direct negative effects of factory farming. They are in roughly descending order of importance.

1. A constant reminder to myself that non-human animals matter. My current day-to-day activities give nearly no reason to think about the fact that non-human animals have moral worth. This is my 2-5 times per day reminder of this fact.
2. Reduction of cognitive dissonance. It took about a year of being vegan to begin to appreciate, viscerally, that animals had moral worth. It's hard to quantify this but it is tough to think that animals have moral worth when you eat them a few times a day. This has flow-through effects on donations, cause prioritization, etc.
3. The effect it has on others. I'm not a pushy vegan at all. I hardly tell people but every now and then people notice and ask questions about it.
4. Solidarity with non-EAA animal welfare people. For better or worse, outside of EA, this seems to be a ticket to entry to be considered taking the issue seriously. I want to be able to convince them to donate to THL over a pet shelter and to SWP over dog rescue charities and the the EA AWF over Pets for Vets. They are more likely to listen to me when they see me as one of them who just happens to be doing the math.
5. Reducing the daily suffering that I cause. It's still something even though it pales in comparison to my yearly donations but it is me living in accordance with my values and is causing less suffering than I would otherwise.

Therefore, veganism does not make sense for someone aiming to maximize their EU. ... The only other factor stopping me from eating meat was a deontological side-constraint.

It looks to me like you're not including some other pretty important ways veganism can increase expected utility beyond the direct impact of reducing the suffering caused by your diet. For example, it's a clear signal to other people that you think animals matter morally and are willing to make sacrifices for their benefit. And it helps build a norm of not harming animals for human benefit, reducing the risk of locking in speciesist values. I think there are many EAs who wouldn't make the sacrifice to be vegan in a hypothetical world where no one would ever know their dietary choices, but who think it's a very important thing to do in the world we do live in.

I am very happy to see this post.

As a practical matter, agents can only burden themselves so much in so many ways. Even if an agent is committed to impartial utility maximization, increasing his/her burden will decrease productivity and/or risk value drift via burnout.

If the burden of restricting one's diet to veganism burdens an agent more than the utility derived from this restriction (which can be calculated and paid for in offsets), it does not make sense for an agent to do so. Of course, it may be difficult to calculate the value of this dietary restriction, which may include avoidance of negative utility, by contributing to demand for animal products and thus harming animals, but also the preemption of positive utility from contributing to demand for vegan products and sending a broader social signal as to the value of animal rights and the normality of veganism. Thus, the value of being vegan vs. omnivore has quite a bit to it to calculate the total value attributable to it.

However, if you are not a significant public figure and you would be significantly burdened by switching to veganism (due to your cultural or family situation, health issues, or you just really enjoy consuming animal products), it may very well make more sense to spend your altruistic sacrifice points on increasing utility in other ways, such as by donating to charities that effectively address farmed animal welfare.

A useful test when moral theorizing about animals is to swap "animals" with "humans" and see if your answer changes substantially. In this example, if the answer changes, the relevant difference for you isn't about pure expected value consequentialism, it's about some salient difference between the rights or moral status of animals vs. humans. Vegans tend to give significant, even equivalent, moral status to some animals used for food. If you give near-equal moral status to animals, "offsetting meat eating by donating to animal welfare orgs" is similar to "donating to global health charities to offset hiring a hitman to target a group of humans". There are a series of rebuttals, counter-rebuttals, etc. to this line of reasoning. Not going to get into all of them. But suffice to say that in the animal welfare space, an animal welfarist carnivore is hesitantly trusted - it signals either a lack of commitment or discipline, a diet/health struggle, a discordant belief that animals deserve far less rights and moral status as humans, or (much rarer) a fanatic consequentialist ideology that thinks offsetting human killing is morally coherent and acceptable. A earnest carnivore that cares a lot about animal welfare is incredibly rare.

I basically agree with the core case for "animal welfare offsetting", and discuss some related ideas in Confessions of a Cheeseburger Ethicist. The main points of resistance I'd flag are just:

• For some people, there may not be any "tradeoff" between going vegan and donating. If you can easily do both, all the better!  So it's worth being clear that the argument isn't really against veganism so much as against investing too much moral effort into becoming vegan (if it would require significant willpower).
• As Jeff notes, there may be better second-order effects from going vegan. Presumably a sufficiently large extra donation could balance those out, but it's very hard to guess what would be sufficient. (I do think there's also value to omnivores like us being public about valuing animal welfare and donating accordingly. That might help reach some different audiences, for example. But I still think it's worth esteeming veganism as a laudatory practice, even if it shouldn't be everyone's top priority.)

Eating meat seems indirect enough that offsetting feels acceptable. When you purchase meat, the harm unfolds as follows: A farm reviews the previous year's demand and decides to expand operations to supply another 1,000 chickens. Of course, this decision typically occurs for every 1,000th chicken sold. This level of indirectness feels similar to the harm caused by emitting CO₂ during a commute. For instance, my emissions might exacerbate a flood by 0.1% twenty years later, leading to one extra death for every 1,000 commutes on average.

One could classify a whole lot of harms as "indirect enough" under this logic. I'm hesitant to trot out examples involving serious mistreatment of human beings on the Forum. However, I submit that consideration of some examples along those lines would suggest that while "indirect enough" (as described in your post) may be a necessary precondition to offsetting being morally acceptable, it is not a sufficient precondition.

The CO2 hypothetical strikes me as meaningfully different. There's a sustainable amount of CO2 emission, and certain forms of offsetting can ensure that your net contribution to CO2 emission does not exceed your fair share of the sustainable amount. In that scenario, you're not violating the side constraint of taking more than your net fair share from the commons at all.

I continue to think many (but not all) offset calculations are too low in ways that may be problematic from a deontological perspective. For instance, some end up shifting much of the cost of one's own morally problematic conduct onto third parties, which doesn't seem to fit within a deontological framework. And standards for crediting impact need to be stricter here because multiple counting is a much more meaningful problem than when an altruistic donor is deciding where to donate. But that is somewhat of a different issue.

You seem to be generally conflating EA and utilitarianism. If nothing else, there are plenty of deontologist EAs. (Especially if we're being accurate with terminology!)

As an omnivore who wants to eat lots of protein for fitness, I would love to agree with this and just keep on piling up chicken breasts on my plate. However, I think there are some factors ignored here. Most of them have already been addressed, but I'd like to add another that I did not find so far:

Not eating meat has not only an effect in terms of less demand for meat, it also increases demand for alternatives. This should, in my opinion, not be underestimated, as it also makes the diet change much easier.

For example: In Germany, we have a company called Rügenwalder Mühle. The origins of this company go back to a butcher shop back in 1834 and consequently, they always sold meat-based products. However, in 2014 they introduced vegetarian and vegan alternatives that were so great in terms of taste, quality and nutritional value that the demand was incredibly high. By now, these products bring in more revenue for them than the meat products. Obviously, this company will now focus more and more on the alternatives and they keep expanding their catalogue, often times with very high protein. This makes it much easier for a person like me to consider alternatives, and leads people to consume less meat even if they don't have any moral motivation to go vegan.

I doubt that any realistic amount of donations can top this. Sure, e.g. The Good Food Institute is basically trying to go into this direction, but at the end the demand needs to be there for it to work out long-term. Similar to voting in democracies, I think the "small effect" of our decisions can have quite an impact here that is hard to replace with donations.

I think offsetting your emissions and offsetting your meat consumption are treated differently by EAs because they really are different.

I liked the two examples presented by William MacAskill in 'Doing good better':

1. Offsetting your contribution to climate change by donating to CoolEarth, so that all the CO2 you produce gets offset before it gets to harm anyone - the 'undoing harm' kind
2. Donating to an org that advocates for not cheating on your spouse to offset your cheating on your spouse - the 'apology' kind

In the second case the damage is already done; by offsetting, you just prevent further harm. Eating meat while donating to animal welfare organizations is more like the second example. You harm some animals and then pay for some other animals to be saved. You can't undo the harm done to the animals harmed.

Interesting post! Would you keep a human slave if there was an effective anti slavery charity? Or is this speciesism?

Maybe I am naive but what is the cost that’s associated with not eating meat? Not having the taste of it? What motivates you to donate money to reduce animal suffering if you believe that your taste is more valuable than the life of the animal in the first place? Or are you at a point where you believe that animals matter enough to warrant some small amounts of donations but not to deprive you of their taste?

I mean, of course it’s good to donate but I don’t see why this means that you should continue the practice that you want to offset if you can help it or am I missing something?

Similarly, if I offset pollution, I do not turn around and pollute more because that would defeat the purpose?!

For the issues you raised in the last section, you may find this paper by Mogensen & Macaskill valuable. From the abstract: "Given plausible assumptions about the long-run impact of our everyday actions, we show that standard non-consequentialist constraints on doing harm entail that we should try to do as little as possible in our lives."

I think offsetting emissions and offsetting meat consumption are comparable under utilitarianism, but much less comparable under most deontological moral theories, if you think animals have rights. For instance, if you killed someone and donated $5,000 to the Malaria Consortium, that seems worse – from a deontological perspective – than if you just did nothing at all, because the life you kill and the life you save are different people, and many deontological theories are built on the “separateness of persons.” In contrast, if you offset your CO2 emissions, you’re offsetting your effect on warming, so you don’t kill anyone to begin with (because it’s not like your CO2 emissions cause warming that hurts agent A, and then your offset reduces temperatures to benefit agent B). It might be similarly problematic to offset your contribution to air pollution, though, because the effects of air pollution happen near the place where the pollution actually happened. 

As a vegan I agree with Marcus and Jeff's takes but also think at least carnitarianism (not eating fish) is justifiable on pure utilitarian grounds. The 5 cent offset estimate is miles off (by a factor of 50-100) for fish and shrimp here, and this is how your argument falls. 

I made a rough model that suggests a 100g cooked serving for farmed carp is ~1.1 years in a factory farm, and that of farmed shrimp is ~6 years in a factory farm. I modelled salmon and it came out much lower than this, but I expect this to grow when I factor in the fact salmon are carnivorous and farmed fish are used in salmon fish feed.

This is a lot of time, and it's more expensive to pay for offsets that cover a longer time period. We have two main EA-aligned options for aquaculture 'offsets', one is the Fish Welfare Initiative, which (iirc) improves the life of a single fish across its lifetime for a marginal dollar, and the other is the Shrimp Welfare Project, which improves the death (a process lasting 3-5 minutes) of 1000 shrimp per year for a marginal dollar (we don't know how good their corporate campaigns will be yet). 

I'm really not sure how good it is for a carp to have a lower stocking density and higher water quality, which is FWI's intervention in India, and essentially the best case for FWI's effectiveness. If we assume it's a 30% reduction in lifetime pain we can offset a fish meal for roughly $3.33.

I don't think it's good to prevent 1 year of shrimp suffocation and then go off and cause shrimp to spend 100 years in farmed conditions (which are really bad, to be clear). Biting the bullet on that and assuming a stunner lasts 20 years and no discount rate, to offset a single shrimp meal you'd have to pay $4.6 (nearly 100 times more than the estimate you used). 

Maybe you could offset using a different species (chicken, through corporate commitments). Vasco Grilo thinks a marginal dollar gets you 2 years of chicken life in factory farms averted. Naively I'd think that chicken lives are better than shrimp lives, but shrimp matter slightly less morally. This time you probably have to pay $3 to offset a shrimp meal using the easiest species to influence.

Additionally, the lead time on offsets is long (I would think at least five years from a donation to a corporate commitment being implemented). It's not good to have an offset that realises most of its value 20 years from now when, by then, there is a much higher chance of lab grown meat being cheaper or animal welfare regulations being better.

I think that you should at least be carnitarian because this is incredibly easy and based on my modelling (second sheet) it's the vast majority (90-95%) of the (morally adjusted) time saved in factory farms associated with vegetarianism. I doubt that any person gets $4 of utility from eating a different kind of meat, and this just adds up over time.

Related thread here.

It looks like this posted twice? It seems to be a duplicate of My Problem with Veganism and Deontology

Here's another reason to be vegan that donations alone can't replicate: individual vegans create crucial demand-side pressure that drives market transformation. Even one vegan in a social group often forces restaurants to add plant-based options (the "veto voter" effect). This creates positive feedback loops by:

1. Making veganism more accessible for others by increasing availability
2. Providing the initial market that makes alternative protein R&D viable
3. Normalizing plant-based options in mainstream establishments

This market development mechanism is distinct from direct animal welfare impact. Without a base of committed vegan consumers, it may be harder to develop the scalable alternative proteins needed for widespread adoption - something that donations to animal welfare charities don't directly address. This is one way to signal to the market that there's a segment of customers willing to buy (and potentially pay more for) cultivated meat in the future.

Executive summary: The post argues against veganism and deontological ethics, claiming that offsetting harm through effective donations is more impactful than avoiding meat consumption, and that deontological side-constraints are inconsistently applied and may prevent greater good through utility maximization.

Key points:

1. According to EA calculations, a $1,000 donation to animal welfare organizations can offset a lifetime of meat consumption, making veganism less efficient than earning-to-give strategies.
2. The indirect nature of harm from meat consumption is comparable to carbon emissions, yet EAs are more willing to offset the latter - suggesting inconsistent application of moral principles.
3. Deontological side-constraints (refusing to cause direct harm) may be selfish if they prevent greater positive impact through utility maximization.
4. The post identifies a key contradiction: deontologists inconsistently apply their principles to actions with butterfly effects, which all ultimately cause some form of harm.

5. The author questions whether personal moral purity (avoiding direct harm) should be sacrificed for greater overall positive impact.

    

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