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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.
Since this thread is has devolved into discussing veganism instead of the meta point, I'll jump into that fray.
I think humans have infinite moral worth compared to animals, and I would save one human child at the expense of, say, 10,000 endangered orcas or whatever. Humans have dominion over animals and have the right to use them how we see fit. Abusing animals is not the same as abusing people, it's morally wrong in the similar way that dumping garbage in a public park is wrong or how dumping perfectly good milk down the drain is wrong. It's a waste of common resources and a poor use of them, it's disrespectful and reflects poorly on humanity.
One mental block I have against listening to vegans is that so many of them seem to have a heavy outgroup bias against their fellow human beings (though in practice this can really be further reduced to "that shithole flyover state I went to school in," it doesn't really include their like-minded friends). I cannot relate at all to people who think we should drastically reduce the population to avoid "harming the planet, "or that having children is selfish/evil, or that "humans suck." I like humans. I think we're pretty great. I think that human suffering is an infinitely greater problem than chickens in cages, and any cent spent on stopping the latter instead of the former is a travesty. So when someone tells me about the evils of cattle farming I want to pull up a list of neglected tropical diseases or statistics on opiate deaths and ask why I should care about chickens when we haven't solved these other (solvable!) problems, and then have them lay their cards on the table and admit that they simply hate people.
Let me poke at this a little.
Why stop at speciesism? It seems obvious to me that fighting tropical diseases and opiate deaths is a waste of effort, indicates miscalibrated priorities or a lack of appropriate newtonian morality. I'd say that if we should not prioritize animals over humans just because they suffer, then we should also not prioritize distant humans over nearby ones just because they suffer. Or would you argue that while there is a vast gulf between the importance of animals and humans, there is none such between the importance of different humans?
By the way I actually think that it is more prudent to care about people close to me as opposed to people far away. And it is mostly due to the fact, that helping means involving oneself into other people lives, which also brings certain level of responsibility. As Scott Adams says: There is nothing more dangerous than resourceful idiot, in my language we also call them "idiot with initiative". You know the type: a good meaning person who decided to water your succulents so they rot, the moron who cleans your cast iron skillet with soap only on larger scale. You can also think about it as skin in the game principle where you are responsible for outcome of your actions however well meant. Only in the case of charity it also goes the other way - that people who disagree with your type of help can actually address you directly and hold you accountable. In Catholic teaching this is reflected in the principle of subsidiarity.
I agree overall, but it seems to me that the obvious counterargument is that by providing mosquito nets or money via charities, there is no potential for damage and thus you're helping with no downside to the beneficiary.
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Kind of. Humans all have some innate level of value simply by virtue of possessing an immortal soul and being made in the image and likeness of God, whereas animals have neither of those qualities. So there is indeed a vast gulf between humans and animals.
But I also agree that we should prioritize which humans to help. I think this has been discussed before on the Motte, but I believe that people have a different levels of responsibility towards others based on family and community ties. So off the top of my head a rough order might look something like this:
Those are overlapping catagories that are kind of malleable depending on the exact situation. But I'll always think it's more valuable to donate money for mosquito nets in the 3rd world than to help chickens.
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When you say 'dominion' is this a strictly religious interpretation, or is it meant to be based on some set of empirical factors?
In either case, if we contacted aliens who had either the same revealed religious/empirical factor-based relationship to us that we have to animals, would you be happy to admit that they also have infinite moral worth compared to us, and walk happily into the thresher for their most minor benefit?
Also, generally speaking: Questions of the form 'why should I care about X when Y exists' are ussually not very meaningful. The people and resources being devoted to X are generally not easily translatable to Y, or at any rate you caring about X does not conflict with you caring about Y unless you are already devoting so much time and effort to personally solving Y that you have no time in the day for X.
No, it's not empirical. Not everything has to be, IMO.
I don't really understand your alien example. If they believed in a god that said humans were cattle to be exploited, I think I would just... disagree? Unless I were somehow converted to their human-hating alien religion? Which I think would be a really hard sell?
Re. caring about X while Y exists, nah, I reject your general point. This always smells like a motte and bailey to me that relies on conflating "nonzero" moral weight with "significant" moral weight.
The motte for this usually imagines a framing like "Why help starving children in famine-stricken Gondwanaland when there are plenty of starving Laurasian war orphans to feed?!" Starving children from any foreign country can be assigned roughly equal moral weight, so it's easy to say "we can care about both without neglecting either." The ratio of caring might be close to 1:1.
A less clear-cut example is "We can care about starving Gondwanan children AND the opiate crisis at home." It's a bit murkier -- who do we have a duty to first? Children overseas? Our own citizens? What about the children of our opiate-addicted citizens? Are they more or less important than starving children overseas? It's debatable, but the ratio her might be 1:2, or 2:3, or 1:4, or something similar. Both are serious problems.
The bailey usually smuggles in some problem of dubious moral weight, e.g. "We can care about both starving Laurasian orphans AND reducing plastic straw usage, you know!" It's impossible to just totally reject doing something about plastic straws, because their impact isn't zero, but it's hard to articulate exactly how much less important reducing plastic straw usage is than feeding starving children (in the opinion of most people outside the Motte, at least). Maybe for most folks the ratio would be something like 1:100, or 1:10,000.
So tl;dr while it's strictly true that you can care about X and Y at the same time, I find that a lot of people who make that argument are trying to steal some of the gravity of (actual) problem X to bolster their pet problem Y.
And so it is with human and animal suffering. Animal suffering is so unimportant to me compared to human suffering that I'd rather round the ratio off to zero rather than have to calculate some absurd number of bovine lives I'd need to save in exchange for the life of a single human.
What I meant was, what if whichever religious figure you respect said they had a revelation from the same God you believe in saying that the aliens had dominion over you?
For the sake of argument, whatever series of factors make you believe that you have dominion over animals on religious grounds, the same factors happened within your own religion, saying the aliens have dominion over you.
Sure, but my point is more about the fungability of efforts to address problems.
There already exists a regulatory body in charge of passing regulations on restaurants, and they have free time. That legislative body can easily pass a plastic straw ban; it is not clear how they would direct that effort instead towards feeding children in foreign nations. They have neither the authority nor the mechanisms nor the expertise to do that.
Perhaps you can imagine firing half the people who work in that regulatory body, re-training them on international diplomacy and supply chains, and assigning them to figure out how to feed those starving foreign children. But there's going to be huge costs to that transition that probably the benefits to those children, those people probably don't want to do that kind of work and wouldn't be good at it anyway (there are reasons people have the jobs/interests they do), and theoretically the regulatory body shouldn't have a lot more staff than it needs anyway to begin with.
So I'm not arguing about the ratio of importance between the two things, I'm challenging the idea that all issues are in competition with each other for resources, and that ignoring one means you are definitely making more progress on another one. Society as a whole isn't perfectly efficient and friction-less like that.
If a straw ban is good and you have a mechanism by which to issue it, but no mechanism by which to transfer the resources for a straw ban into food in the mouths of starving foreign children, you might as well do the straw ban. Saying 'what about the starving children' as a way to oppose the straw ban is disingenuous, if the resources saved by not doing the ban won't actually be used to materially aid teh children instead.
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FWIW, I have a good friend who is a vegan after reading Singer. He is also pro human and pro natalist (more pro life than I am as an example). The only humans he hates are criminals (he is a prosecutor).
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I don't agree at all with your estimation of the value of an Orca, because you’re mixing two concepts – the intrinsic value of a non-human animal and the value of having a flourishing biosphere which have plenty of magnificent things like Orcas. No way I would sacrifice 10,000 Orcas for one human, but that's less about the inherent moral value of an Orca and more about the fact that they are endangered. In a world where Orca are as common as Cattle I wouldn’t think twice, but we don’t live in that world. If we value ocean wildlife - even if the reason is simply to give more utils to humans in the long term - then an Orca is a precious natural resource, not one to be squandered over something so commonplace as a human.
I’m not sure how many humans I would be willing to sacrifice in order to restore the world’s oceans to the state they were in 500 years ago, but it would be many, many thousands.
I think your make "a flourishing biosphere" do a lot of work there. Do you mean "a stable ecosystem that humans can use to feed themselves and keep the planet in good shape," or do you just mean "preserving animal species because they're cool and having lots of different types of cool animals around is a good thing?" Or something else? I don't know how to extract utils from orcas outside of SeaWorld, they're cool to read about but day-to-day they mostly spend time hanging out in the ocean where I have very little chance to interact with them.
If it's the former, I'm on board because I think destabilizing and destroying the environment will probably lead to a lot of human suffering and death, so we should probably prevent that.
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Do orcas' presence in the oceanic ecosystem benefit humans? It seems like they compete with us for seafood resources(probably mostly salmon, but I guess if you eat dolphin it'd be notable) and otherwise have relatively little effect on human interaction with the ecosystem. They're apex predators but I think most of the animals whose populations they keep in check are either things we eat or things with populations that don't need to be kept in check, either because they're sensitive to human activity(eg great white shark) or because they reproduce slowly(sea turtles, right whales).
I mean if an evil genie told me he'd kill either 10,000 water buffaloes or one human child, I'd have to ask if the deaths of those 10,000 water buffaloes would cause a famine in India or something. But orcas just seem like a bad example of that.
Probably.
The textbook example for ecological side effects is the wolf/deer thing. Kill wolves, deer population explodes, mass starvation, much wailing and gnashing of teeth. Or consider the Australian examples of creatures missing their natural predators. It’s not ironclad, but I would expect removing an apex predator to have consequences, and I would be awful skeptical of anyone who claimed to have a foolproof plan for them. Chesterton’s fence should probably apply.
The wolf/deer thing can be resolved by handing out more hunting licenses though, right? The Australian example is better, but more because humans are not those creatures' natural predators since we have nor reason to hunt them. Fish on the other hand--we can hunt a virtually infinite amount of fish. At least, our demand is easily elastic enough to compensate for the disappearance of all orcas.
I would be more concerned that their disappearance leads to an explosion of seals and other [non-apex] predators which would reduce the number of fish.
Humans have hunted seals and whales extensively in the past, though, so in theory we could just do it again to compensate.
Although this obviously isn't exhaustive, the wiki-walk I went through on Orcas showed that great white sharks(which are endangered) and certain larger whale species(which are also endangered) are the main species which don't have non-orca predators, and orca predation isn't a major factor in their populations because it is relatively rare, but that leopard seals and elephant seals are mostly controlled by orca predation even if they're occasionally picked off by larger sharks. So your scenario seems fairly plausible.
That's true, I'm sure sealing is lucrative enough.
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Why do you think humans have infinite moral worth compared to animals?
That's a pretty unusual viewpoint for a modern westerner to espouse (though in a "revealed preferences" sense I guess it's very common). Christian background, Cartesian background, contrarianism, Chinese background.... how come?
I believe that the Great Chain of Being is more or less true. Also this
is part of it. I try to be honest with myself even when it sounds ugly. If someone showed me a video of chickens in cages overlaid with dramatic music and anthropomorphizing narration ("the newborn chicks are kidnapped from their mother mere minutes after hatching...") I might feel sad for a few minutes, but I would also know I was being manipulated, that chickens don't actually experience motherhood or childhood, or really much of anything, probably, and I'd recall my belief that it's part of human nature (in the philosophic sense) to eat other animals, and so it wouldn't sway my behavior.
All of that said, there's room for nuance. While I wouldn't sacrifice a single human infant to save a billion cows, I would definitely be willing to spend a small amount of extra money to buy meat that could somehow be proven to be "more humane" (probably in that the animals' living conditions were more like their natural habitats, although I'm no expert). But I'm also very cynical about greenwashing, "organic" labelling, and other tricks to prey on the wallets of ethical consumers, so I'd need some pretty good proof that it's actually qualitatively different than a cost-minimizing factory farm.
I lol'd, that's a good guess, but no. They don't just value human lives over animals lives, they also think animal lives have roughly zero value and so they can be treated rocks or dirt. The gifs you've seen online aren't uncommon occurances.
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