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Just because they're annoying doesn't mean they're wrong - a meta-discussion
A few months ago a wild vegan appeared. He was almost self-parodically stereotypical: short, mid thirties, college-educated, and into endurance sports. He posted a reasonably well-argued case that veganism was not harmful to sporting performance, with the usual smug boasting of his numbers in endurance sports. At the end of his post, he finished with "what's your excuse?"
The entirety of his well-reasoned post was ignored, and he was dogpiled for that one final sentence.
Mottizens could immediately detect what was going on - he actually found the killing and eating of animals to be immoral, but didn't think that would be a convincing argument, so he tried to achieve his goal with another argument.
Both positions are actually worth considering. I'm open to the possibility that killing animals for food is wrong, and I'm open to the possibility that a vegan diet is not harmful to athletic performance. Hiding behind one to advance another, however, is deceitful.
I've actually tried to engage seriously with these ideas, and in my desire to see their own steelmen, I have tried to read some vegan sites. Usually I give up quickly, as they are full of the above argumentation - shifting goalposts, emotional appeals, hiding behind one argument to advance another, etc.
I wish I could say I have rejected vegetarianism because I engaged with their best arguments and found them wanting. Instead, I found their argumentation so annoying I ceased to engage with them.
I've had similar experiences with people who hate cars. Like anyone else who can do math, I have often found it absurd to use two tons of car and two liters of fuel to get two bags of groceries. I've also tried to mitigate some of these by moving to a New Urbanist development (with an unpleasant HOA, sadly), and I've got an electric car and solar panels on my roof. Sadly, this doesn't lead to any productive discussion, as I've discussed before.
Years ago, I remember a similar circular argumentative style among supporters of the ACA. They would say that people are afraid to start companies because they won't have health care, to which I'd reply "sure, how about two years of subsidized COBRA?". Then they'd point to catastrophic expenses, to which I'd say "sure, how about a subsidized backstop for all 1MM+ expenses for anyone who has a 1MM plan?", to which they'd change the argument again.
Of course, there's a pattern here. From what I can tell, many vegetarians have an (understandable) response to the raising, killing, and eating of animals. Some people seem to be terrified of owning and operating large machines, and they find private cars and single family housing to be socially alienating. Some people are emotionally disturbed by other people suffering from the health consequences of a lifetime of bad choices.
What these groups all have in common is a strong ability to signal these things emotionally to people similar to them and form a consensus, but also a generally terrible ability to discuss these things reasonably.
We don't have many vegans, anti-car people, or socialists here at The Motte - but that's not because their arguments are invalid, it's because the people attracted to those ideologies don't fit well with our particular discursive style. On the flip side, we have plenty of white nationalists, who seem to be able to adapt.
I'm confident that white nationalists are wrong. I have engaged with their best arguments, and found them wanting.
I'm only confident that vegans are annoying, because they are so annoying that I find it hard to engage with their arguments.
I think that's a blind spot for The Motte.
One question for vegans is that pretty much any industrial sized farming (needed to support our population) will involve killing a lot of animals in collecting farm products. That is, killing a cow and eating it may involve less animal death compared to eating bread.
This can be solved via two ways: (1) is that animals killed during farm are less advanced and therefore their death is less morally wrong or (2) intent matters.
The problem with (1) is it undermines the entire vegan argument. The problem with (2) is that at a certain level of recklessness the moral consequences are similar.
Therefore, to live means other animals will die. I am on board with not torturing other animals (eg I wont eat veal, I buy pasture raised eggs) as that seems just unnecessary. But at the same time I don’t have qualms with eating meat.
Cows eat industrially farmed food. Every calorie of meat you eat requires far calories of plants to create than if you had just eaten plants.
This depends massively on where in the world you are. In the UK, most of our beef is domestic, and most of our domestic production is fed via grass forage. Now, I suppose you could consider pastures to be industrially farmed grass, but I don't think that's what most people would think of it as. Humans cannot extract meaningful nutrition from eating the grass instead.
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There are lots of questions for vegans. They just won't answer them.
They say that meat-eating is bad for animals. That's worth considering, so I put out some counterarguments.
They respond by saying it will clog your arteries. That's worth considering, so I put out some counterarguments.
They respond by saying it's bad for the planet. That's worth considering, so I put out some counterarguments.
They respond by saying it's bad for animals, and I disengage.
The unfortunate thing is that their arguments all seem to be worth considering. Perhaps it is bad to kill and eat animals. Perhaps animal fat is bad for cardiovascular health. Perhaps it does have an abnormally large carbon footprint. I'd love to know, but all my discussions with vegans have resulted in changing the argument, emotional appeal, and social pressure - in other words, bullshit.
I think the views of the white supremacists here are repugnant, but at least they respect me enough to engage with my arguments, and I feel obligated to show them the same.
The main argument about the cruelty involved in agri-business intensive factory farming and the suffering caused is the best of their case. That does raise legitimate points to be answered, and to see and understand what is really going on for the production of cheap, plentiful animal protein for us to consume.
It's when they get into "of course you're an immoral heartless monster if you don't immediately this second give up all meat and animal products", and when some of them get into the sentimental theatrics around weeping cows etc. that turns me off.
Especially the double standard when it comes to keeping pets; they don't let their cats outside, which seems to me very cruel to animals that are not meant to be indoors all the time. That's because they don't want the cats killing birds and other small animals, which okay maybe, but that's nature. But they want to go against nature when it suits them when it comes to being able to exploit animals, such as pets, as unconditional-love-production machines. Then we get posts about having to put the cat on a diet because it put on too much weight. Well, yeah, of course it did! It's inside literally 24/7 with nothing to do but eat, instead of being put out at night at least, or let out during the day, to run around and be an animal. Though part of that is as much that the people are living in places where they don't have a back garden or any way to let their cat out. But the human at least can get out of the house.
Okay, that's a side track, but the point I think still stands: they're willing to be cruel in a small way to animals for companionship, so their morality isn't 100% perfect. Nobody's is, of course, but they don't get to call other people immoral for not living up to their standards then.
There's also the route of "how dare you take medication when you're sick, that virus needs to replicate inside you to survive, by taking medicine you're essentially conducting a genocide".
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Is your main point of contention that vegans bundle together a lot of beliefs that should be independent, likely motivated by a core moral dislike of killing animals? Sure. But the vast majority of people do that; beliefs are tribal, and that's far from unique to vegans.
I'd be curious to see a link to the vegan post you mentioned; did he jump from point to point as you describe here, or did he focus on the (likely wrong) "veganism is good for high performance in sports" argument only to have a bunch of posters bring up unrelated points?
Vegans seem especially bad at this.
The other end of my social circle is rather MAGA. I can sit with them and discuss my many reservations about Donald Trump. For example, I usually say that I think he is hopelessly underinformed about foreign policy. In response, they sometimes disagree with me, citing things like the Abraham Accords. Usually they'll agree with me that he's terrible on foreign polic, but on balance, they prefer him to the alternatives.
I can have a productive discussion with them. They'll discuss the point at hand, and treat me with respect. With vegans, I get Gish Gallops, emotional appeals, shaming, and social desirability arguments.
My moral intuitions are closer to vegans than MAGA, but I find vegans so annoying I don't engage with them.
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This appears to be the original link that I painstakingly spent several minutes of my valuable time looking up. (just kidding, my time isn't very valuable) https://www.themotte.org/post/476/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/93520?context=8#context
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Response 1 isn't self-undermining, just saying that some utils should be weighted more or less than others. Most vegans, for instance, would say that given a choice between killing a roach and killing a human, it's better to kill the roach. The point of dispute is what that weighting scheme should be (particularly, whether non-human animals have zero, or near enough, moral weight). Vegans have to justify granting moral weight to animals, of course, but saying they do have moral weight doesn't commit them to granting all animals equal weight.
But it is hard to say on the way hand why a mouse dying is worse than say eating an egg or for that matter a chicken.
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This is a big ‘may’, I’m not sure how you can get to a confident ‘therefore’ without settling it.
I also think (2) is an easy bullet for a vegan to bite if you aren’t a utilitarian (though the utilitarian question remains unsettled). If you think killing animals is wrong full stop then arguments about how trying to avoid killing animals can backfire will sound the same as a pro-lifer hearing about how legalising abortion will lead to fewer murdered babies (this was an argument I heard a lot of during the build up to the Irish abortion referendum).
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Industrial farming of animals requires feeding them, and thanks to thermodynamics this is dramatically less efficient than growing food for humans directly. (Theoretically you can raise some grass-fed cattle on grassland that already exists without clearing new land but this does not scale and still kills the cattle themselves. Note that labeling beef as "grass-fed" does not mean they get their food exclusively from pasture, it includes feeding them hay which itself has to be harvested.) You don't need to throw up your hands and act like there's no way to know if there's more animal death/suffering required for beef or bread, various rough estimates like this are enough to show the intuitively obvious answer is correct.
A life lived only doing the optimal bare minimum to survive is not a life I want to live at all.
It might be more efficient for humanity to subsist on a bland grey nutrient paste, but that's not in any way an argument to say that we SHOULD do that.
Is somebody asking you to consider doing that?
If you're using efficiency as an argument for doing something with no other considerations bounding it (such as enjoyment) then, yes, you are asking exactly that.
Veganism is one point on the spectrum, with people both before it and after it. You cannot dismiss it by appealing to the limit (you’ll note that vegans don’t eat flavorless paste).
Unless you’re arguing that anyone advocating for efficiency in consumption has to eat flavorless paste, otherwise they’re a hypocrite.
The key is not that they're advocating efficiency, it's that they're excluding other things. If they exclude enjoyment, yet they don't eat flavorless paste, indicating that enjoyment actually matters to them, yes, they're a hypocrite.
Responding to "one benefit of X is Y" with "I think you're forgetting about Z" is completely fine.
When somebody (zeke5123) incorrectly says "actually Y isn't a benefit of X" and somebody (sodiummuffin) responds with "actually, you're wrong because etc.", it is completely inappropriate to accuse them of forgetting about Z (assuming that was what astranagant was actually doing).
sodiummuffin never claimed to be doing a fully-fledged accounting of all the pros and cons of veganism.
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I've seen vegan bacon. It looks like a plastic dog toy.
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Many years ago vegans on the internet liked to throw out estimates of how many gallons of water it takes to make pound of beef. But they had various estimates varying by orders of magnitude. It seemed that their "calculations" were actually bullshit. I tried pressing them when they put forth one of the various contradictory claims, but they don't care to explain why the number they stated is orders of magnitude off of other seemingly as valid predictions.
So, maybe your link with bar graphs legit. Maybe it is yet more vegan fantasy math.
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Okay, let's turn all pasturage over to tillage (and forget marginal lands such as raising sheep on mountainsides). No more commercial cow, sheep, pig or chicken rearing, all those animals slaughtered and consumed and no replacements.
When talking about mass crop production, we have to consider what crops are (1) commercially desirable (e.g. what wheat for flour for baking) (2) what crops can be grown on particular land (not everywhere is suitable; that's why the American and Canadian plains of wheat for producing 'strong' flour) (3) the evolution of monoculture and loss of traditional varieties of crops, because we're now on mass production scales to feed the world (4) necessity for pesticides, herbicides, and other means of keeping crop loss down (you don't want birds eating the seed once planted, for instance, so how do you cope with that?) (5) downstream damage to environment from mass scale monoculture (rice, for example, is supposedly problematic and involved in contributing to global warming due to greenhouse gases emissions from necessary growth conditions). There's a lot of wild animals, from birds on down to insects, which are considered pests and which need to be controlled (including killing) in order to produce food crops. And that's without touching the GMO question, which may produce hardier crops but which inevitably lead to the same necessity for large scale agri-business production because the economies of scale don't exist for small peasant farmers/small scale farming. Think of those same American plains with no trees, hedges, fences, in sight, just acres upon acres of croppage replacing native prairie and grassland (and think of the Dustbowl era from over-exploitation of same).
I have a notion that there's a vegan ideal of cosy cottage food production which has no basis in the reality of large-scale food production from grains, pulses, vegetables and non-animal foodstuffs, anymore than the majority of meat-consumers know the full details of how meat is produced.
除四害! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Eradicate_pests_and_diseases_and_build_happiness_for_ten_thousand_generations.jpg
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None of that addresses that raising meat for slaughter involves growing more crops, not less. For instance, the U.S. produces 51.5 million acres of hay and 37.3 million acres of wheat per year. Even before trying to account for other sources of animal feed, or that people eat more wheat than beef, or that some of that wheat is itself feeding animals, hay alone is using more land that wheat production.
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Most of the 'food' that we feed cattle is agricultural waste that cannot be eaten by people and would otherwise simply be left to rot, and most cattle are raised on marginal land that cannot be used to grow crops. Farmers have a direct financial incentive to reduce inefficiency as much as possible, as inefficiency eats into their profit margins.
However, I think that Zeke was referring to small mammals getting killed during harvesting, which my googling suggests is more due to increased predation from loss of cover than getting chewed up by machinery. Depending on how you balance the utils of cows versus mice versus birds that prey on mice, it's certainly plausible that harvesting a field of wheat could produce more animal suffering than grazing cows on that same field.
The U.S. produces 51.5 million acres of hay and 37.3 million acres of wheat per year. So setting aside all other forms of animal feed, more land goes to producing hay alone than to wheat.
Which is why I'm pointing out that raising cattle at scale involves harvesting even more land. Estimating the effects on animals from cropland is difficult, but it's not a comparison that favors beef to begin with.
A lot of hay production is a tax write off- it’s cheaper to have a guy come bail up your hay on land you aren’t using for agriculture than it is to pay taxes on it. Some of that land is also fallowed, or hay is otherwise a secondary product(certain kinds of hunting leases, for example).
The Saw Doctors - Hay Wrap
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You can grow hay/alphalpha on extremely marginal land, which is largely unusable for other crops. I’m not arguing that these crops never displace food commodities, but in general I would expect that farmers favor food crops which are typically more valuable.
But zeke5123 is talking about accidentally killing animals as part of growing and harvesting crops, not optimal land use. That seems like it would be similar per-acre whether you're growing alfalfa or wheat.
It's a completely different subject but I'm reminded of Scott's 2015 post about California's water crisis:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/05/11/california-water-you-doing/
Which leads to interesting calculations like this:
But in any case the question of whether alfalfa is worth the resource usage has little to do with zeke5123's objection.
Alfalfa maybe, but generic hay production probably kills fewer animals because of less pest control, tilling, etc.- even though being a mouse caught in a mower is pretty bad, just like being a mouse caught in a combine harvester.
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California agriculture is feckin' crazy, because they're growing water-heavy crops in places never meant to grow anything, in order to exploit the good climate and growing seasons. And because they don't have sufficient water resources, they have to drag it out of rivers originating in other states.
But hey, that's their economy and their problem to sort out.
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You never gain-feed cattle for years, you finish them on grain in a lot for a few months to put some marbling on them. Have you seen grain prices? Even before 2020 you'd quickly go broke trying to raise beef on grain.
And clearing jungle for pasture is a net improvement for animal welfare, because jungles are obscene murder temples of pure agony, while well-tended pastures are grass and flowers and a few voles (if you don't care about insects).
This whole thing gets very silly when you start quantifying it, which is why the people doing the quantifying only ever do it in ways that give the impression of making their moral arguments "sciency"
Sorry, I was going off half-remembered information about how "grass-fed" labeling is meaningless in some countries. A more relevant point is that grass-fed labeling includes food sources like hay, which still have to be harvested, which brings us back to the inherent thermodynamic inefficiency of feeding another animal so you can later eat its meat.
I was responding based on his assumptions that areas like cropland are bad for animals, rather than being good because they involve creating areas where fewer animals are born into lives of suffering. Yes, with the right set of moral assumptions you can view every animal born into the wild as a bad thing, which would be a point in favor of anything that involves using lots of land in a way that leads to a low density of animal life. But once you're considering things at that level of indirect effects, you should also consider that using resources and land to raise cattle trades off against using it in other ways. Strip-mines and suburbs don't have a high density of animals either, even tree farms aren't that high, it's difficult to predict the effects on land use if people redirected money from meat to something like housing.
In the sufficiently long term the biggest effect might be on social attitudes, as humans gain more and more power over the environment a society in which ethical vegetarianism is the norm also seems more likely to care about wild animal suffering and act accordingly. (Like those ideas regarding genetically-engineering wild animals to reduce their suffering.) If nothing else wild animals with brains capable of suffering are already becoming a smaller percentage of Earth's population, so the average welfare of animals (including humans in the average) is increasingly driven by whether humanity continues to scale up the population of animals we raise for slaughter alongside our own population. For instance look at Earth's distribution of mammal and bird biomass - obviously neither mammals or biomass are the metrics we care about, but it gives a sense of the trend.
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There's a third solution. A field mouse living in a wheat field lives a normal field mouse life until one day it's instantly shredded by a thresher. That doesn't resemble the life of the vast majority of farm animals in the US, who are typically raised in very poor conditions and then are slaughtered in more or less stressful environments.
inb4 "I only buy meat from my uncle's farm": good for you, but again, that's not reflective of the reality of factory farming which produces most meat.
Okay, that's at least a compromise solution where you're willing to trade off some animal suffering and death in exchange for giving up a lot more animal suffering and death. Presumably, you'd be okay with farmed fish and the likes, since fish aren't that high on the "they gots qualia just like us!" scale?
This is a position that can be debated, with room to give on both sides. It's the vegans who, like one online lassie, can't even look at people fishing because of the persons (she meant fish, not humans) dying, or those who seem to think you can switch to all-plant diet with no animals at all harmed, that are the unreasonable ones. And being online, they're the vocal majority who are seen as representative, not types like "Well, Hindu diet is vegetarian" but acknowledging that it uses milk, butter, ghee, cheese, yoghurt etc. and depends on dairy farming and isn't 100% vegan.
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It is very easy to source ethical meat and not very expensive either. Treating it as some kind of unfeasible or cumbersome solution is so strange to me. If we want to reduce suffering then surely that must be an easier ask than asking people to eschew meat entirely.
But that's kind of the point isn't it? The vegans don't really want to reduce animal suffering, they want to be on a moral crusade. Veganism isn't an intellectually principled moral stance, it's a religious one.
Some of 'em. It's the zeal of the convert problem, where for some people it is an all-or-nothing crusade. And if you're basing your veganism on the suffering of sentient others, of course it's appalling to them.
It really is the equivalent of the abortion debate, though vegans may not wish to see it in those terms, but they can both consider abortion to be a human right and Constitutional right and healthcare because of bodily autonomy and the foetus is not a person, and object to meat-eating because even if animals are not persons, they're sentient or sapient or both. One question is a matter of private personal morality and the other is plain observable fact and nothing to do with personal morals other than "you should be horrified by this scale of torture and murder".
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A normal field mouse lives in constant fear of being eaten alive by a dozen different types of predators, and their population is kept in check either by being relentlessly hunted by perpetually hungry overpopulated predators or hideous, agonizing plagues if their population density gets high enough.
The un-hunted deer where I live all caught a wasting disease that rots their brains as they grind their teeth out and and wander in circles. I watched a baby fawn starve to death next to the already-skeletal body of her mother.
Nature is horrifying. Man is kind.
And how long did the death from starvation take? A few weeks, maybe a month at most? Meanwhile human will force human into a prison to suffer for decades. I would much, MUCH rather starve in a month or two.
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To me this gives away the whole game. When someone says “This is cruel and inhumane!” The natural follow up question for someone interested in actually understanding the truth of the matter is “Compared to what?”
For actions between humans it’s incredibly easy to find alternative contexts and thus possible to make judgements about what’s moral and what is not.
But the life of animals, with or without human intervention, is just one rolling atrocity after another, forever and ever, without end.
I think it’s no accident this ideology only came into being after it became possible for people to live lives so alienated from wild nature that their only real experience of it is through a Disney-fied, highly sanitized lens.
And the natural follow up answer is "compared to not raising those pigs at all".
Then you’d be effectively saying that it would be better for domesticated pigs to have never existed at all, which is a whole other can of worms. Comparing not existing in the first place to existing is largely a fool’s game.
But it also belies almost a closed system of philosophical belief. Barring extreme and probably impossible human action, animals will exist. Their existence will consist of some amount of suffering. So the question isn’t “will animals suffer?” it’s “how much, and for what purpose?”
I understand if you, personally, don’t wish to participate in any action that causes animals to suffer. That has been a relatively common personal and religious choice throughout history. But the idea of systematically lessening animal suffering through collective human action is more than a little farcical.
As compared to human suffering, which while it waxes and wanes throughout the ages and will likely never be eliminated, we are able and have been able to really dull the edge of the lovecraftian horror that is the state of nature.
Veganism always reminds me of anarchism for this reason, an utopian vision of erasing a somewhat tragic aspect of the universe by radically decontextualizing it, then arguing it can be eliminated by ignoring all context.
We don't need to solve every problem in existence, but if we find ourselves in a hole we should stop digging.
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Nature is horrifying, Man is part of Nature. Life itself might be described as self-organizing horror.
Yes, the conversation had me trying to remember Land's "Hell-Baked," from one of his lighter meth binges.
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Certainly. Of course, if that field mouse has baby mice they will die as they cry out for their mom. That’s pretty awful.
If the vegan argument is “make factory farming more humane” I’m here for it. If the argument is eating animals is wrong because it requires killing, then nah fam I’m out.
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