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Notes -
Surveying my vegan friends, what's been most interesting to discover is that they're mostly not utilitarians. I routinely pose the question of, "how many weeks of veganism would I have to endure to convince you to eat a single burger." One dude was provisionally willing to eat a burger if it turned me vegan permanently (and agreed in general that there was some finite number of weeks he would trade for a burger) but the rest turned out to be avowed kantians on the subject. Apparently they didn't care about saving animal lives on net as much as they cared about not violating their personal morality about not contributing to the suffering of animals. That was a particularly interesting result for me because these same vegans are also involved in the local EA movement (which is how I met them.) Going in, I was under the impression that EA was a pretty explicitly utilitarian movement, in the sense that it prioritized QALYs and net pleasure-minus suffering, but that wasn't the angle they approached it from.
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