I second #12. Some of the benefits (e.g. providing social support for philanthropists) seem hard to measure.
Xodarap
I think your points about the limits of quantitative analysis are a good reality check, but I’m not sure I understand the argument for the types of assessment you suggest here.
Why should I (someone who’s not remarkably experienced in charity evaluation) expect my intuition about e.g. “historical precedent” to be more valid than the data GiveWell collects?
It doesn’t seem like you’re really criticizing “pro-animal people”—you’re just critiquing utilitarianism. (e.g. “Is it arbitrary to state that suffering is bad?” “What if you could help others only at great expense to yourself?”)
Supposing one does accept utilitarian principles, is there any reason why we shouldn’t care about the suffering of non-humans?
Which I value a lot more
Why?
(Keeping in mind that we have agreed the basic tenets of utilitarianism are correct: pain is bad etc.)
You probably don’t want to draw the line at fish.
I may be misunderstanding you, but I thought you were suggesting that there is a non-arbitrary set of physiological features that vertebrates share but fish don’t. I was pointing out that this doesn’t seem to be the case.
How is the statement “fish and humans feel pain approximately equally” different from the statement “we should care about fish and human pain approximately equally?”
Fair enough. To restate but with different emphasis: “we should care about fish and human pain approximately equally?”
No, I have a lot of biases like this: the halo effect makes me think that humans’ ability to do math makes our suffering more important, “what you see is all there is” allows me to believe that slaughterhouses which operate far away must be morally acceptable, and so forth.
Anyway, fish suffering isn’t a make-or-break decision. People very frequently have the opportunity to choose a bean burrito over a chicken one (or even a beef burrito over a chicken one), and from what Peter has presented here it seems like this is an extremely effective way to reduce suffering.
I think this is a clever argument Peter. But does it increase the beta without changing the expected outcome?
E.g. if I choose the right org to donate to, then my impact is doubled by getting others to join. But if I choose the wrong org, that error is compounded doubly because not only will I have mistakenly given to a bad org, but others’ donations will be put there as well.
Anyone have tips to measure the effectiveness of interventions like this?
This is a great point, and was advanced by Steven Davis, who claimed that eating grass-fed cows would cause fewer deaths than being vegetarian. Matheny however found an error in his calculation—you can see the paper for full details, but the short version is that veg diets cause much less harm.
This is a great argument, and is known as the “Logic of the Larder” (for reasons I have never comprehended). This paper goes into more detail than you probably care about; the main point is that your guess:
the animal population would likely be greatly diminished
Isn’t generally true, because wild animals have a much greater density than farm animals.
- 24 Jul 2013 0:06 UTC; 0 points) 's comment on Why Eat Less Meat? by (
Thanks for posting this Peter. I’ve found it hard to find an action with a higher benefit/cost ratio than ordering a bean burrito instead of a chicken one, and I’m interested to see what others have to say on the subject.
Niman Ranch claims to raise their animals humanely. Do they really?
The shareholders of Niman Ranch voted to reduce their standards to increase profits. As a result, Bill Niman (who originally founded the company) now refuses to eat their products, Wikipedia has more
This is a good point, and was raised below. Note that the argument doesn’t seem to be factually true, independent of moral considerations. (You don’t actually create more lives by eating meat.)
I would be willing to become vegetarian were it not for my belief that the only way to keep cows alive is to eat them.
I think this is a great point, but it has the opposite conclusion. Agriculture is the leading cause of habitat loss and meat consumption causes more greenhouse gas emissions than the entire transportation sector.
If we want to keep animals from going extinct, we have to eat less meat.
Regarding (4) (and to a certain extent 3 and 5): I assume you agree that a species feels phenomenal pain just in case it proves evolutionarily beneficial. So why would it improve fitness to feel pain only if you have “abstract thought”?
The major reason I have heard for phenomenal pain is learning, and all vertebrates show long-term behavior modification as the result of painful stimuli, as anyone who has taken a pet to the vet can verify. (Notably, many invertebrates do not show long-term modification, suggesting that vertebrate vs. invertebrate may be a non-trivial distinction.)
Richard Dawkins has even suggested that phenomenal pain is inversely related to things like “abstract thought”, although I’m not sure I would go that far.
I’m not certain I understand. Are you saying that fewer species will go extinct if people eat meat? Or are you agreeing that being veg is the best way to preserve biodiversity, but that you don’t care about biodiversity?
This is exactly it, and it’s something that people seem to misunderstand about Singer. He is merely stating that if donating more money will help, then it’s obligatory.
In the event that spending your money in other ways will help more, or that working so hard will burn you out, then the antecedent doesn’t hold.