I think you shouldn’t eat factory farmed animal products (modulo some caveats).
I’ve been meaning to write a long “open letter to my non-vegan friends making more than $x,000 a year” (where $x,000 is the amount of income where the cost making choices as to not personally subsidize factory farming is less than 1% of your income), for years. I still plan to do that. But in the meantime, this post outlines one of several relevant considerations in my thinking about it. I don’t intend this to be a compelling knock-down argument, so much as a pointer to my view.
It’s almost always a bad idea to have carve-outs for your epistemic integrity—”I’m usually committed to truth-seeking, but in [exceptional case] [other consideration] takes priority.” This is a bad habit, and very often it seems that the places where you allow lax epistemic standards leak into really important issues.
Claims that a particular area doesn’t matter to anything important, and so that’s a fine place to have lax epistemic standards are super-duper suspect. Claims that in this one case, the consequences of believing the truth are so bad that you should make an exception to the general rule of believing only things to the extent that you have reason to think they’re true, are even more suspect.
Such claims often seem wrong in practice, because true facts are entangled with other facts in sometimes surprising ways. Further “deciding on a case by case basis where you should have epistemic integrity” is not how epistemic integrity works.
Similarly, I think you should have a strict policy of “do no harm” (for an importantly carefully-considered somewhat technical notion of “do no harm”).
I think you should be very suspicious of any place where you have carve-outs where you’re making an exception to that general policy, even if it seems like the consequentialist benefits outweigh the costs.
eg
- You shouldn’t commit crimes to fund your altruism.
- You shouldn’t start companies to build AGI to steer development of the technology (and fund your altruism on the side), at least without a bunch of specifics that are downstream of the technical notion of “do no harm”.
- And you shouldn’t subsidize torture of non-humans, even though if its not that big a deal next to x-risk, and you have more important things to worry about.
A lot of people I know admit that factory farming is obviously super bad, and that supporting it entails harming beings in their power (though they rarely think in specific terms about the fact that those chickens and pigs are are “in their power”), but give themselves a carve-out for eating meat, giving some reason why this case of doing harm doesn’t matter or isn’t worth thinking about. Often it’s something to the effect of “yeah, this is obviously bad, but there are too many bad things for me to worry about and this one seems less important than [other thing that I’m focusing on].”
It makes sense, and is often necessary to prioritize between various moral catastrophes, including to take the stance “I’m just not going to worry about this” towards many of them, in your ambitious scope-sensitive heroism.
But, I claim it is rarely legitimate to do that kind of prioritization in your deontology, where (most of) the point is capping downside—avoiding causing egregious harm or taking unknown tail risks.
Your deontology should observe the act-omission distinction, and adhere to the general rule of “do no harm” across all the harms you might be causing. You don’t get to say “ah, yes I’m really screwing over these people over there, but they can’t really do anything about it, and anyway I’m focusing on bigger moral problems, so I’m not gonna worry about it”. If that’s your stance, I claim that you either 1) don’t actually have a deontology or 2) are adopting a notion of deontology that I think is wrong, and want to argue against (but won’t, here).
To me, giving yourself a carveout for the general principle of “do no harm” seems about as sus as giving yourself a carveout for the general principle of “believe true things”.
Just as you shouldn’t have that one place you’re going to consciously/ unconsciously allow yourself to be lax in evaluating what’s true (you’re only allowing yourself to rationalize a little bit, on this one issue), you also shouldn’t have that one place where you know what you’re doing is causing harm, but no one is punishing you about it, so you’ll let it slide.
musings and rough drafts 