The main points for ethical veganism as I understand it are:
1. Killing other animals is unjust aggression; you wouldn't like to be killed and eaten, so don't kill and eat them.
2. Factory farming causes animals to have bad lives.
My answer to these arguments:
1a. In a modern market economy, buying farmed meat causes more deaths by causing more animal lives. The ethical vegan must therefore decide whether their objection is to animals dying or to animals living. The question reduces to whether they'd be more glad to have been born than sad to die. Buying wild-caught game does cause a death, but if the animals in question aren't being overhunted / overfished, the counterfactual is that some other equilibrating force acts on the population instead. If you're really worried about reducing the number of animal life years, focus on habitat destruction - it obviously kills wildlife on net, while farming is about increasing lives. The remedy is to promote and participate in more efficient, less aggressive patterns of land usage, which would thereby also be less hostile towards other humans. I'm on the record as interested in coordinating on that. It's a harder problem because it requires prosocial coordination in a confusingly low-trust society pretending to be a high-trust society, but just because a problem is hard to solve doesn't mean we should substitute an easier task that is superficially similar but unhelpful.
1b. Another way of interpreting argument 1 for ethical veganism invokes rights: we shouldn't kill other agents because this violates decision-theoretic principles about respecting agency. But this assumes the other party can engage in the kind of reciprocal decision-making that grounds such rights. Most animals' decision processes don't mirror ours in the way needed for this kind of relationship - they can't make or honor agreements, or intentionally retaliate based on understanding our choices. The question returns to welfare considerations: whether their lives are net positive.
1c There's a third argument sometimes offered, which I think muddles together a rights-based and utilitarian perspective: the instrumentalization of animals as things to eat is morally repugnant, so we should make sure it's not perpetuated. This seems to reflect a profound lack of empathy with the perspective of a domesticate that might want to go on existing. Declaring a group's existence repugnant and acting to end it is unambiguously a form of intergroup aggression. I'm not arguing here that domesticates' preference to exist outweighs your aesthetic revulsion - I'm just arguing that under basic symmetry considerations, the argument from "moral" revulsion is an argument for, not against, aggression.
2. If factory farming seems like a bad thing, you should do something about the version happening to you first. The domestication of humans is particularly urgent precisely because, unlike selectively bred farm animals, humans are increasingly expressing their discontent with these conditions, and - more like wild animals in captivity than like proper domesticates - increasingly failing even to reproduce at replacement rates. This suggests our priorities have become oddly inverted - we focus intense moral concern on animals successfully bred to tolerate their conditions, while ignoring similar dynamics affecting creatures capable of articulating their objections, who are moreover the only ones known to have the capacity and willingness to try to solve problems faced by other species.
What do you mean?
I don't think factory farmed animals tolerate their conditions well at all, because they suffer a lot. I'd recommend Welfare Footprint Project's research on egg-laying hens and meat chickens, and RP's similar research on shrimp to get an idea of what factory farmed animals' lives are often like. In particular, egg-laying hens live with chronic frustration and meat chickens often with disabling chronic pain. And they don't have ways to effectively relieve these.
Why do you believe discontent (or its expression) is increasing? On what time scale? And do you expect this trend to continue for long?
Plus, factory farming is also increasing, especially in developing countries and for farmed insects.
Your response to 2 in general seems totally insensitive to the relative numbers involved wrt farmed animals and humans, and our potential impacts on each group. Shouldn't there be a point where you'd prioritize farmed animals?
The clearest evidence of discontent is the unprecedented fertility decline across developed nations. Humans are increasingly choosing not to reproduce at replacement rate when given modern conditions. This isn't just about discomfort - it suggests our large-scale coordination systems (markets, governments, corporations, media) are actively hostile to the welfare of the governed in a way that factory farming isn't.
Nearly no one wants to torture broiler chickens at massive and increasing scale. If we're doing that, this suggests our interlocking coordination systems are already producing outcomes severely misaligned from individual human values and preferences.
Either we restore human agency enough to avoid relying on distasteful and repugnant systems like the worst aspects of factory farming, or we lose the capacity for meaningful ethical action entirely as our systems drift toward whatever our failing coordination mechanisms were optimizing for, or civilization collapses and takes factory farming with it (along with most humans and domesticated animals). Only the first path offers hope of addressing animal welfare systematically.
The decision calculus would be substantially different if we were near the end rather than the beginning of expansion through the universe, just as one should usually focus more on improving one's own capacities earlier in life and on contributing to others' development later on.
Why is this clear evidence of discontent? Aren't there many other plausible explanations for the decline in fertility rates, like changes in values and life goals, like ideal family size, prioritization of careers and other interests?
I agree with the first sentence, but I'm not sure about the second. I think a primary reason is that it's not usually a political priority, because it's not actually important to the average voter. If it's not that important, the outcomes are not severely misaligned from individual human values and preferences.
But it can be made a priority through political advocacy. The outcomes of ballot measures seem like pretty good evidence of what people prefer.
I doubt we have ever really had more human agency in the past than now.
This seems wrong to me. While factory farming is increasing, it's primarily because of increasing populations and incomes, and there are effective targeted ways to systematically reduce and mitigate factory farming that don't require increasing human agency as a whole. Basically what the animal welfare side of EA does.
Possibly! But I'd like to see actual intervention proposals and estimates of their effects and cost-effectiveness. If the decision calculus is so obvious, you should be able to easily give a lower bound on the cost-effectiveness that drastically beats targeted animal welfare work (and being fair, should consider long-term effects of animal welfare work).
You say:
"But this assumes the other party can engage in the kind of reciprocal decision-making that grounds such rights. Most animals' decision processes don't mirror ours in the way needed for this kind of relationship - they can't make or honor agreements, or intentionally retaliate based on understanding our choices. The question returns to welfare considerations: whether their lives are net positive."
I'm generally confused about this argument. If someone says "you can break your promises and violate trust if your counterparty is never able to find out or retaliate" they will get the retort "no no no decision theory doesn't work that way". If that person says "don't worry, I really picked out those that really are unable to retaliate. I will be super careful with folks who are able to retaliate.", they will get the response "nope, that doesn't work".
When you hurt those who might have interests but are in no position to exercise agency, don't you send a similar signal that "if you're unable to understand what I'm doing, then I might hurt you". You might say "don't worry, I really picked out those that lack agency from birth, it will be fine" but I'm struggling to see a principled distinction.
I also think many animals have some capacity to communicate, understand promises, feel anger and spite over betrayal and hold grudges. It's possible to lie to many mammals and it's also possible to trade with them.
The decision theory argument isn't just about ability to retaliate - it's about ability to engage in reciprocal decision-making and honor agreements. Most animals can't make or understand explicit agreements or intentionally coordinate based on understanding others' choices. Maybe some corvids and a very few other nonhuman animals can try to imagine our perspectives and take actions based on predictions of what we're likely to decide, on levels of abstraction that might give us some basis for ongoing noninstrumentalizing cooperation.
This matters more in our current context because:
Given those facts, our priority ought to be preserving and improving our ability to make good individual and collective decisions. While animal welfare matters, compromising human coordination capacity to address it would be counterproductive - we need better coordination to address any large-scale welfare concerns effectively.
Humans are fundamentally an instrumentalizing species - that's how we solve problems. Animals suffer in factory farms not because we instrumentalize them, but because our capacity for instrumental reasoning is being turned against itself through broken coordination systems. Trying to fix animal suffering without addressing this underlying coordination failure seems like palliative care for a dying civilization.
If you are interested in cooperating with nonhuman animals - say, on the theory that cognitive diversity enables more gains from trade - it would make more sense trying to figure out how to trade more equitably and profitably with whales or corvids, than treating chickens as counterparties in a negotiation.
There are some forms of agreements you can make with animals and there are some forms you cannot. I don't see why they can't intentionally coordinate based on understanding of our choices. A cow or a crow might move closer to someone giving them food and act kindly towards them later on, but they will refuse to move closer and cooperate if they realise that person has a history of deception.
There are also possible worlds in which animals' intelligence can be enhanced even further. It could even happen during our lifetimes given a technology explosion. In those possible worlds animals will be able to meet any threshold you want them to pass.
I really struggle to see a consistent way to be respectful towards people in coma or babies without also respecting the animals. You need a very specific argument on why both of these are true:
I believe the only consistent way to disregard animal interests is to deny that animals have interests at all as Yudkowsky does. As long as animals have interests it's very difficult to explain why screwing them over won't send a signal of "I might screw over others if I can get away with it".
Question for you: would it be morally good to factory farm permanently and severely cognitively impaired human orphans, assuming a) the conditions that matter to you are met (e.g. their lives are net positive, they've been "successfully bred to tolerate their conditions") and b) there are no negative externalities (e.g. the rest of society isn't upset or scared by this factory farming)?
Veganism (and, relatedly, taking animal ethics seriously) isn't about not killing or eating animals; it's about not exploiting (non-consensually using) and inflicting suffering on them if you can avoid it. The golden rule is probably why.
Veganism (and taking animal ethics seriously) is about all forms of animal exploitation, not just factory farming.
This isn't what vegans and animal ethicists are worried about. We're worried about harm (maybe suffering, maybe exploitation, maybe rights violations) being done to sentient beings, unnecessarily.
Neither can many humans, including infants and adults with severe dementia.
I don't this is a helpful framing. Where does it leave enslaved humans?
Is the revulsion moral, or aesthetic, or both?
This is what factory farming looks like: www.watchdominion.com
If this is a measure of badness, you should explain why.
www.watchdominion.com
Your hypothetical seems to be anticipating an argument that farming mentally disabled humans would be repugnant even with slightly net-positive lives, so that therefore something similar must apply to animals. Let's consider a concrete case: Someone hires a mentally disabled person to provide warmth to their blanket-averse toddler at night, instead of the 'vegetarian' solution of turning up the heat (or 'vegan' if fossil fuels aren't involved). If they don't worry much about their employee's other living conditions as long as they seem willing to perform the service, we might say there's room for improvement but not that they're doing anything particularly wrong.
Consider another concrete case, closer to home for me. My aunt had Down syndrome. From the way my father talked about it, I didn't realize until my teenage years that Down syndrome isn't usually fatal in early childhood. The state advised my grandparents that it would be better for the family if they sent her to an institution, where she died of pneumonia (i.e. neglect) a couple years later. It seems like it would've been better for everyone involved if she'd been allowed to live until 20, and then some rich person had bought her organs.
You might object that efficient farming is different from neglectful institutionalization. But my landlord works in an Amazon warehouse, spending much of his waking time having value extracted from his labor at maximum efficiency, which can be seriously physically depleting work, and he seems to be pretty cheerful and happy with his life. Or consider Foxconn, where they installed nets to prevent worker suicides - arguably worse conditions than many factory farms - yet we all use smartphones.
This isn't about catching ethical vegans in hypocrisy - it demonstrates that we can't solve these problems by drawing bright moral lines around 'exploitation' or 'farming.' We have to consciously engage with complex trade-offs to get the goods we need while improving conditions where we can. The horror at 'farming humans' seems more about aesthetic revulsion at the framing than actual welfare - when we call similar value extraction 'employment' it becomes acceptable.
There are principal-agent problems here - if the person is mistreated enough in their off hours, they might not be a safe cuddle buddy for a toddler. These are real decision-theoretic concerns. But these problems are much less applicable to factory farming.
Again, my question: do you think that non-consensually farming cognitively impaired humans for their flesh/secretions, given net-positive lives and no negative externalities, would be morally justifiable (or good)?
I think we shouldn't exploit any sentient beings (i.e. use them as a means to an end without their consent), regardless of their species or substrate. I'm not sure whether this is because I believe exploitation is intrinsically morally wrong, or whether it's because I think it's a helpful proxy for suffering (something I do think is intrinsically morally bad, at least suffering beyond a certain threshold).
Do you disagree - either with my definition of exploitation, or with my normative claim that we shouldn't exploit sentient beings?
I'm a bit disappointed, if not surprised, with the community response here. I understand veganism is something of a sacred cow (apologies) in these parts, but that's precisely why Ben's post deserves a careful treatment -- it's the arguments you least agree with that you should extend the most charity to. While this post didn't cause me to reconsider my vegetarianism, historically Ben's posts have had an outsized impact on the way I see things, and I'm grateful for his thoughts here.
Ben's response to point 2 was especially interesting:
And I agree about the significance of human fertility decline. I expect that this comparison, of factory farming to modern human lives, will be a useful metaphor when thinking about how to improve the structures around us.
<I'm a bit disappointed, if not surprised, with the community response here.>
I can't speak for other voters, but I downvoted due to my judgment that there were multiple critical assumption that were both unsupported / very thinly supported and pretty dubious -- not because any sacred cows were engaged. While I don't think main post authors are obliged to be exhaustive, the following are examples of significant misses in my book:
It's important to not reflexively defend sacred cows or downvote those who criticize them . . . but one can believe that while also believing this post seriously missed the mark and warrants downvotes.
I agree that the post is not well defended (partly due to brevity & assuming context); and also that some of the claims seem wrong. But I think the things that are valuable in this post are still worth learning from.
(I'm reminded of a Tyler Cowen quote I can't find atm, something like "When I read the typical economics paper, I think "that seems right" and immediately forget about it. When I read a paper by Hanson, I think "What? No way!" and then think about it for the rest of my life". Ben strikes me as the latter kind of writer.)
Similar to the way Big Ag farms chickens for their meat, you could view governments and corporations as farming humans for their productivity. I think this has been true throughout history, but accelerated recently by more financialization/consumerism and software/smartphones. Both are entities that care about a particular kind of output from the animals they manage, with some reasons to care about their welfare but also some reasons to operate in an extractive way. And when these entities can find a substitute (eg plant-based meat, or AI for intellectual labor) the outcomes may not be ideal for for the animals.
I didn't catch this post until I saw this comment, and it prompted a response. I'm not well calibrated on how much upvotes different posts should get,[1] but personally I didn't feel disappointed that this post wasn't on the front page of the EA Forum, and I don't expect this is a post I'd share with e.g., non-vegans who I'd discuss the meat eater problem with.[2]
I'm assuming you're talking about the downvotes, rather than the comments? I may be mistaken though.
This isn't something I'd usually comment because I do think the EA Forum should be more welcoming on the margin and I think there are a lot of barriers to people posting. But just providing one data point given your disappointment/surprise.
I strongly disagree with flat earthers, but I don't think that I should extend a lot of charity to arguments for a flat earth.
Also, on a quick skim, I could not find where this is argued for in the linked "I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup"
One might object to animal suffering, rather than living/dying. So a utilitarian might say factory farming is bad because of the significantly net-negative states that animals endure while alive, while being OK with eating meat from a cow that is raised in a way such that it is living a robustly net positive life, for example.[1]
This isn't an obvious comparison to me, there are clear potential downsides of habitat destruction (loss of ecosystem services) that don't apply to reducing factory farming. There are also a lot of uncertainties around impacts of destroying habitats - it is much harder to recreate the ecosystem and its benefits than to re-introduce factory farming if we are wrong in either case. One might also argue that we might have a special obligation to reduce the harms we cause (via factory farming) than attempt habitat destruction, which is reducing suffering that exists ~independently of humans.
I'm not sure I'm understanding this correctly. Are you saying animals in factory farms have to be able to indicate to you that they don't want to go on existing in order for you to consider taking action on factory farming? What bar do you think is appropriate here?
If there were 100 billion humans being killed for meat / other products every year and living in the conditions of modern factory farms, I would most definitely prioritise and advocate for that as a priority over factory farming.
Can you say more about what you mean by "the domestication of humans"? It seems like you're trying to draw a parallel between domesticated animals and domesticated humans, or modern humans and wild animals in captivity, but I'm not sure what the parallel you are trying to draw is. Could you make this more explicit?
This seems like a confusing argument. Most vegans I know aren't against factory farming because it affects animal replacement rates. It's also seems unlikely to me that reduced fertility rates in humans is a good proxy/correlate for the amount of suffering that exists (it's possible that the relationship isn't entirely linear, but if anything, historically the opposite is more true - countries have reduced fertility rates as they develop and standards of living improve). It's weird that you use fertility rates as evidence for human suffering but seem to have a extremely high bar for animal suffering! Most of the evidence I'm aware of would strongly point to factory farmed animals in fact not tolerating their conditions well.
This is a good argument to work on things that might end humanity or severely diminish it's ability to meaningfully + positively affect the world. Of all the options that might do this, where would you rank reduced fertility rates?
Though (as you note) one might also object to farming animals for food for rights-based rather than welfare-based reasons.