Since the discussion on this thread, I've had the view that the meat-eater problem is dwarfed by the cause prioritisation problem, in the sense that if you give money to a global health and development charity, overwhelmingly the biggest harm to animals is that you didn't give that money to animal welfare charities: the actual negative effect of your donation is likely very small by comparison.

(There's obviously an act-omission difference here, but I don't personally find that an important difference.)

It is a pretty uncomfortable problem and not one that I have been able to reconcile very well. One way around it is steering people to support global health/dev orgs that help people while not increasing meat consumption. An example is Female Family Empowerment Media, which improves openness and access to contraceptives in Nigeria. Another examples is the Beans is How Coalition, which aims to double worldwide bean consumption for the purpose of reducing hunger and increasing sustainability.

This doesn't answer the core question, but in many places like UgAnda the lives we are saving (people who live in the village) aren't eating any factory farmed meat. The little meat they do eat is from animals reared locally which I think have net positive lives.

I like this explanation a lot, from an 80000 Hours podcast:

Rob Wiblin: One really important consideration that plays into Open Phil’s decisions about how to allocate its funding — and also it really bears importantly on how the effective altruism community ought to allocate its efforts — is worldview diversification. Yeah, can you explain what that is and how that plays into this debate?

Alexander Berger: Yeah, the central idea of worldview diversification is that the internal logic of a lot of these causes might be really compelling and a little bit totalizing, and you might want to step back and say, “Okay, I’m not ready to go all in on that internal logic.” So one example would be just comparing farm animal welfare to human causes within the remit of global health and wellbeing. One perspective on farm animal welfare would say, “Okay, we’re going to get chickens out of cages. I’m not a speciesist and I think that a chicken-day suffering in the cage is somehow very similar to a human-day suffering in a cage, and I should care similarly about these things.”

Alexander Berger: I think another perspective would say, “I would trade an infinite number of chicken-days for any human experience. I don’t care at all.” If you just try to put probabilities on those views and multiply them together, you end up with this really chaotic process where you’re likely to either be 100% focused on chickens or 0% focused on chickens. Our view is that that seems misguided. It does seem like animals could suffer. It seems like there’s a lot at stake here morally, and that there’s a lot of cost-effective opportunities that we have to improve the world this way. But we don’t think that the correct answer is to either go 100% all in where we only work on farm animal welfare, or to say, “Well, I’m not ready to go all in, so I’m going to go to zero and not do anything on farm animal welfare.”

Alexander Berger: We’re able to work on multiple things, and the effective altruism community is able to work on multiple things. A lot of the idea of worldview diversification is to say, even though the internal logic of some of these causes might be so totalizing, so demanding, ask so much of you, that being able to preserve space to say, “I’m going to make some of that bet, but I’m not ready to make all of that bet,” can be a really important move at the portfolio level for people to make in their individual lives, but also for Open Phil to make as a big institution.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. It feels so intuitively clear that when you’re to some degree picking these numbers out of a hat, you should never go 100% or 0% based on stuff that’s basically just guesswork. I guess, the challenge here seems to have been trying to make that philosophically rigorous, and it does seem like coming up with a truly philosophically grounded justification for that has proved quite hard. But nonetheless, we’ve decided to go with something that’s a bit more cluster thinking, a bit more embracing common sense and refusing to do something that obviously seems mad.

This is also how I think about the meat eater problem. I have a lot of uncertainty about the moral weight of animals, and I see funding/working on both animal welfare and global development as a compromise position that is good across all worldviews. (Your certainty in the meat eater problem can reduce how much you want to fund global development on the margin, but not eliminate it altogether.)

Hi Sammy, I’ve also found the meat eater problem compelling/distressing. One idea that gives me peace is an “offsetting” argument - that the most effective animal welfare charities use resources remarkably well. I’ve seen estimates online that the average American eats 7,000 animals over the course of their life (98.5% of which are fish and chicken). My intuition is that the average recipient of a GiveWell-recommended program eats slightly fewer animals, though I could be wrong.
 

The Humane League claims to be able to be able to spare a hen from the life of extreme confinement for just $2.63, and the Fish Welfare Initiative claims to be able to help a fish live in lower stocking density, higher water quality environments for just $1. Altogether, this suggests that donating ~$11,000 to cost-effective farmed animal welfare organizations mitigates a substantial amount of the harm that a meat-eater might cause (consuming 4500 fish and 2400 chickens). So a portfolio of global health and animal welfare donations seems likely to do good across both worldviews.

A few other scattered thoughts:

• Saving human lives doesn’t just contribute to the problem of animal consumption, I hope it it also accelerates the solutions to factory farming.
• The extent to which averting a death of a child under 5 (which GiveWell programs primarily target) increases total global population is unclear to me. Families that lose a child may be more inclined to have another baby than families that don’t. My guess is that lifesaving GiveWell-style charities do increase population in the short term, but not by one full person per life saved.
• I would recommend this blog on the idea of a “moral parliament”, which I think can be an interesting thought exercise for resolving tensions like this. Rethink Priorities also has a cool tool for this idea.
   

I know this may not be fully satisfying, and this isn’t a strong argument against using your resources to go all in on animal welfare (which I think is a great thing to do), but I hope it might be helpful.

Brian Tomasik has argued that if (a) wild animals have negative welfare on net, and (b) humans reduce wild animal populations, then that may swamp even the horrific scale of factory farming.

I personally think the meat eater problem is very serious, and the best way around it is to just donate to effective animal welfare charities! Those donations would be orders of magnitude more cost-effective than the best human-centered alternatives.

Nice question, Sammy! I worry the meat-eater problem is mostly a distraction. If one values 1 unit of welfare in animals as much as 1 unit of welfare in humans, and does not think Rethink Priorities' welfare ranges are wildly off, the best animal welfare interventions will be much more cost-effective than the best interventions to save human lives. I estimated corporate campaigns for chicken welfare, such as the ones supported by The Humane League (THL), are 1.51 k times as cost-effective as GiveWell's top charities.

My thoughts:

(1) If building human capacity has positive long-term ripple effects (e.g. on economic growth), these could be expected to swamp any temporary negative externalities.

(2) It's also not clear that increasing population increases meat-eating in equilibrium. Presumably at some point in our technological development, the harms of factory-farming will be alleviated (e.g. by the development of affordable clean meat). Adding more people to the current generation moves forward both meat eating and economic & technological development. It doesn't necessarily change the total number of meat-eaters who exist prior to our civ developing beyond factory farming.

But also: people (including those saved via GHD interventions) plausibly still ought to offset the harms caused by their diets. (Investing resources to speed up the development of clean meat, for example, seems very good.)

It's not clear that saving someone's life causes a net increase in the population.

I think if you put some weight on viewpoint pluralism you should mostly not conclude that other peoples' lives aren't valuable because those people will make the wrong moral choices.

This is where we need a broad perspective. 

Long-term, we solve the problem of meat-eating with artificial protein, which also solves many other problems. 

Medium-term, we work to end factory-farming, which needlessly increases the suffering of animals. (I don't want to get into it because there are many experts here and I'm not one of them, but it may be arguable that an animal which is bred for food but gets to live a decent life in a field is better off than if it hadn't been born because people didn't need to eat it. However, in the case of factory-farming, such an argument seems totally untenable). 

Short-term, we accept that we live in an imperfect world and that most people value saving human lives, even at the cost of animal lives. So we work to save human lives and improve health and improve quality of life, and instead of losing sleep over the calculation of the net impact on animals, we support the amazing organisations who are working to end factory-farming (like Farmkind) and to develop alternative protein (like GFI). 

It's valuable to discuss questions like this, and I absolutely do not claim to have a definitive answer - all I say is that when I think about this, that's how I rationalise it. 

This problem^[1] was one I independently noticed before finding EA.

I think in some ways the actions implied under it are similar: focusing on long-term world-change so that the world is eventually organized by morality.

If 'how do you deal with it' means 'how do you make your actions compatible with this view', my answer is that I'm trying to help with {figuring out how we can make powerful AIs also be benevolent}.^[2]

If 'how do you deal with it' means 'how do you convince yourself it is false, or that things some EA orgs are contributing to are still okay given it', I don't think this is a useful attitude to have towards troubling truths.

I agree with this:

It feels like EAs who value animal suffering at all must provide very clear reasons why its okay to support saving the lives of meat-eaters and also developing the third-world given the "meat eater problem."

1. ^{^}

   Many current human lives causing extreme suffering by funding factory farming, enough to outweigh the positive value of their own life

2. ^{^}

   A nice fiction about coming into existence in a world with normalized moral catastrophe, and acting heroically: the sword of good by Yudkowsky

Good question. Does this also work in the opposite direction? ~ Worry less about catastrophic or existential risks because there'd be fewer animals in factory farms?

I have an intuition that any ASI that wipes out humans does the same to non-human animals though.

We need to keep in mind that we are effective altruists (or effective anything) to the extent that we are also respected members of our communities, not only of the EA community. We live in a world in which meat-eaters are much of the population. In this kind of world, the belief that the life of a meat-eater life has a net negative value would turn us into a cult of phanatic monsters. Or at least we would be perceived in this way. We would have no chance whatsoever of contributing to the end of cruelty. We need to stay humans, connected to all kinds of humans. The quantitative approach to morality is powerful, one of the best ideas I can think of. But it's not the only tool we should use. 

I  deal with this problem by donating (almost) exclusively to animal welfare charities. Besides, I think that the suffering of animals reared for human consumption is much more intense than those of humans, in general.

More development may at least indirectly contribute to hastening ubiquitous lab-grown meat becoming economically cheaper than non-lab-grown meat. 

A lot of uncertainty here because I have no idea how much (if at all) more development may cause this, but, if it does, it leads to fewer total moral atrocities.

RCT-informed interventions focused on the poorest will not increase demand for factory farmed meat - only broad based economic growth will do this. So one solution is to focus on micro interventions targeted at the extreme poor.

Another solution is to support the alternative proteins sector in LMICs, which could enable some degree of “leapfrogging” factory farmed meat and reduce carbon emissions.

I read some of the answer and they were really interesting. I like to simplify so i will bring my modest simple answer and my advice : 

I have a amateur answer but i am not an expert although this topic interest me a lot being interested in sustainability, agronomy and ea (here global health and animal farming) : 

Firstly pro donating to animal farming : 

• if you believe in animal having a moral weight similar (1 - 10x) to humans it is probable that saving a human life might be negative compared to saving 100 - 1000 animals.  
• We know that our way of living is not sustainable. We also know that one reason why our lifestyle is not sustainable is animal farming. 

Secondly pro donating to save a life : 

• Saving a life is good (its one of the first moral reflex if it happens in front of you and)
• You never know what people will do with their life. They probably eat local non industrial products and dont cause much pollution if they are poor.

My opinion : Saving a human life will probably do a little bad because it causes the death of some animals (not necessarily factory farm) and causes pollutions - we are not sustainable (dependent of polluting fertilizer N,P,K). Saving animals will probably do a little good because we would be more sustainable. So I would focus on saving non-human animals because it will probably help all animals and the opposite is probably false.

Now my advice : 

• If you don't know the answer find some informations. When you have your answer keep being open-minded. I think this topic could be researched a hole lifetime without covering every aspect of it. Keep in mind since morals are subjectives there is no right answer. But since this quesion is important you should research the subject. I believe collective intelligence is the best "moral objectivity" we could acheive if everybody is well informed. 
• Life is never black or white and full of other dilemnas. Saving a human life or other animals are not your only two options wich brings me to my last opinion : before doing one or the other we should focus on discussing this subject with the most people possible. Or at least make sure everybody knows animals suffer (especially factory farmed) and everybody knows we can save lives with 5000$

Two things to consider:

• Animal suffering is currently invertly U-shaped in income.
• The rise of lab-grown meat could surely dramatically increase the negative relationship between animal suffering and income at high-levels.

If you find this question truly compelling—if it’s more than just an intellectual challenge for you—I would suggest reconsidering vegetarianism. When expanding your empathy starts to hinder your basic empathy for humans, or when being a vegetarian makes you think of your aunt as a "meat-eater" rather than as a warm and kind person...

I acknowledge that I haven’t provided a strong justification for my answer, and I don't know your full set of beliefs and experiences, so this is definitly not a judgment. However, I do strongly believe that the "aunt" argument is a valid one.

This makes me think that countries who as of yet don't have an entrenched factory farming lobby/industry would benefit advocacy groups similar to Shrimp Welfare Project (work in the reverent countries with stakeholders to improve the wellbeing of farmed animals).

 I began wondering if any org was approaching this similar to SWP. There seem to be two EA groups working on this:

• Animal Advocacy Africa 
• Education for Africa Animal Welfare