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I recently came across this: https://www.richardhanania.com/p/effective-altruism-thinks-youre-hitler
"Based on what EAs have written, I have replaced much of the shrimp and chicken in my diet with beef and pork, which they say gets rid of most of the harm".
Richard's thought is that you might only eat one cow per decade, but you kill thousands of shrimp. Better to kill one animal than thousands.
He clearly hasn't thought this idea through very well, so I'll help him. Why stop at cows? Larger animals exist. Ideally, we'd just hunt blue whales. A single organism could feed could feed my entire family for life. So effective. So altruistic.
Speaking of blue whales, did you know that a blue whale eats almost nothing but tiny shrimp-like creatures called krill? A blue whale eats about 1000 kg of krill every day. Wikipedia wouldn't tell me how much a krill weights, so I asked ChatGPT which told me "about 1 gram". That seems fair.
This means a blue whale eats 1 million individual krill per day, or nearly 30 billion during its lifetime. By switching to a 100% blue whale diet not only would I eat fewer shrimp and chicken, but I'd save billions of shrimp lives, shrimp that would be literally burned alive in the acid of the blue whale's stomach. In the EA community we call this "not being afraid to multiply". Simpler minds like Scott merely give their kidneys to strangers. My diet saves billions.
I'm being catty here, but my point is that when you really double down on EA thought it takes you to some weird places. I think the moth lady deserves to be mocked and hopefully comes away a little chastened. We're humans and we should live with human morality, which includes killing pest animals.
This doesn't actually seem obviously wrong. (Aside from the practical where we have no good way to raise large amounts of blue whales in captivity.)
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I think you’d have to consider the environment as well. Are billions of krill destructive to the oceans? I know cattle farming produces tones of animal waste which can end up in streams and rivers. There’s also Methane cow farts for global warming. Land used to grow feed and to house the animals would be important factors. In short I think the most ethical way to think about eating animals is the environmental impact of those animals, because that impacts entire ecosystems.
Of course. But Richard is talking about eating beef instead of chicken because EA taught him that killing fewer total organisms is a terminal goal.
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Unlike blue whales, cows are farmed (and for that reason are not endangered). Beyond that, I don't see a principled objection to eating blue whales from a meat eater's perspective.
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