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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.
The first few Quakers who took a stand against slavery were pretty annoying too. In reading about their early forms of activism one can’t help but be struck by how PETA-like some of their tactics were.
Anyway, there really isn’t really a non-annoying way of telling someone a message equivalent to “Hey actually, to all animals you’re more evil than Hitler. Animal lives matter. Have you considered being not animal Uber-Hitler??”
I mean there is a smuggled premise that animals have something like moral equivalence to humans. It's a kind of hack of empathy and personification that we don't like admitting that animals just don't have moral equivalence. It's the same instinct that makes you cringe when a doll's head is ripped off. Hitler was killing people who have moral equivalence to humans, the argument is much simpler.
I don't think you need full moral equivalence for vegan arguments to work. You just need a sufficient ratio. Even of chickens have only 1% of the moral value of humans the suffering we inflict upon them in factory farms is a great evil. On the other hand if chickens have 10^-100 times the moral value of humans its trivial. Unfortunately we are far from the point where we can actually compute such a ratio with any authority (though many have tried) so often the arguments fall back to intuition and emotion.
In practice, it's not even close to this.
Anyone who would direct a trolley problem trolley at one person to save 100 chickens is someone I would consider an aberrant moral monster.
Personally, I would be extremely suspicious of anyone who would save ANY number of chickens over a single human. But anyone who puts the number at anything less than 100,000 is actually mind-boggling to me.
You don’t have to go even that far. Eating a lot of meat is a luxury (I think some small amount is necessary for health) so given that the choice is wants vs morals, there’s no good moral reason to choose to eat large portions of meat.
I don’t think that requires the trolley directed at humans, and I wouldn’t do that.
There is. The moral reason is that I want to, and anything I want to do is more moral than anything I don't. I have an overwhelming moral responsibility to myself to maximise the enjoyment of the single, limited lifespan I have. A life un-lived is the most immoral thing imaginable; it is a waste of the single most precious gift any of us can ever receive.
Maybe I’m not understanding you but I’m not sure how not having meat as the main dish of your meal is that much of a diminished enjoyment. Most of the time, for me, I don’t miss it. I don’t say no entirely to meat, I’m just not making it the star of the meal.
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