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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.
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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