It’s wrong to kill and eat other sentient creatures

Drew is Against Veganism. Local vegan is Against Drew. There’s another guy involved. I just like being in a mob.

I was really hoping to get into a blog beef (bleef) with Drew over his veganism post. I was going to get all offended and fired up and totally DESTROY him with FACTS and LOGIC, but I ended up concluding that the lifestyle implied by Against Veganism is pretty close to my existing lifestyle.

I care about animal welfare more than most people, but I’m a reducetarian or ameliatarian, not a vegan. I’ll eat hunted meat or wild-caught fish, but I won’t eat farmed poultry or fish or pork. I won’t eat eggs unless I’ve met the chicken whose butt they exited and verified that she seems to be doing okay.¹ I will eat beef, because American beef cows plausibly live net-positive lives. If I’m wrong, cows are so large that if I stopped eating beef, my impact on the number of cows who are farmed will be minimal. I don’t avoid dairy, for similar reasons. I’ll eat oysters and mussels, because they’re plausibly just vegetables that happen to be made out of animal tissue.²

Maybe I’m actually doing these guys a favor by subsidizing their cushy lifestyles

This all makes good utilitarian sense. I mostly get to eat foods I like and have no problems with nutrition the way I certainly would if I tried to be fully vegan or even vegetarian.³ It probably even has benefits in convincing other people to adopt my diet—instead of telling dinner party guests that I’m a vegetarian, I get to give the whole shpiel about how bad eggs and poultry and farmed fish are, and sometimes I get satisfying responses like “Hm, well I don’t think I could be a vegetarian, but maybe I’ll stop eating salmon.”

Isn’t that what effective altruism is all about? Minimal sacrifice for maximum benefit? Is this not what Goodness is?

As the last card-carrying effective altruist who never sold out and went “adjacent,” this is embarrassing to admit, but I actually just don’t believe that at all.

I think it’s wrong to kill and eat something that wants to be alive just because you want to eat it.

Sorry!

I’m not reorienting my life around this fact. I very much eat animals that were killed specifically so that I could eat them. I don’t actually have to do this. I could be a vegan. I am living a life of moral failure in this regard, and it would be better if I wasn’t. In a meaningful sense, a vegan is my moral superior. None of the arguments otherwise hold any water whatsoever:

It’s natural. Wild animals eat each other all the time

Human beings are meaningfully morally different from wild animals. There are many things that a lion does that you should not do. Killing and eating other sentient creatures is one of them.⁴

Veganism isn’t healthy

It is better to be somewhat less healthy and take the occasional supplement than it is to kill and eat other sentient creatures.

It’s arbitrary to draw a distinction between animals and plants

Don’t be cute. No it isn’t.

Veganism is just about moral posturing

Maybe, but the posture is correct—it’s wrong to kill and eat other sentient creatures.

Those creatures aren’t even sentient

Are you sure? Are you really, really, really sure? So sure you’d stake a life on it?

Veganism is anti-life. Isn’t it better for an animal to live a short, comfortable life than it is for it never live at all?

It’s even more betterer for it to live a long, comfortable life.⁵

It would be very difficult for me to be vegan

Nevertheless, it would be better to avoid killing and eating sentient creatures.

Being vegan isn’t a very effective way to save animals from being factory farmed, compared to donating to effective animal organizations

That’s true, but it’s still wrong to kill and eat other sentient creatures.

I am an effective altruist and I am doing very important work. If I put in the effort to become vegan, it would reduce my effectiveness at completing my very important work

That might be true it or it might be cope, but either way, it doesn’t change the fact of the matter: it is better to avoid killing and eating sentient creatures.

I feel morally attacked by your rhetoric and now instead of considering reducing my salmon consumption I’m going to ignore you completely and slonk 15 eggs in a row

Well, you shouldn’t.

Lepitition regitimizes

Maybe you are a rationalist (me, too) and you are annoyed with me for baldly asserting a moral claim over and over again instead of defending it with Facts and Logic. “Soldier mindset!” you are wailing hysterically, flopping on the floor like a helpless fish, beating your fists against the ground. “You can’t just make a claim! It has to be well-grounded in empirically verifiable facts! You have to use reason!”

That’s so. You actually have to use quite a lot of reason to avoid the obvious truth that it is wrong to kill and eat other sentient creatures. We actually have to have an entire edifice of modern infrastructure to help you avoid this fact.

Ancient hunters knew that it was wrong to kill and eat other sentient creatures, even if it was necessary. Think about the process of actually having to end the life of a living being, which you must do in order to live. You have to look into its eyes—which are, unavoidably, not so different from your own eyes, possessed of the same basic kind of soul—and watch the life go out of them. You feel its hot blood on your hands and spill its organs on the ground—the same set of organs you have yourself. But if you don’t do it, your tribe will starve.

It is speculated that much of early religion, which comes to us now in the form of folklore and fairy tale, was centered around coping with this fact.⁶ Consider how many ancient stories are about animals in some way—marrying them, transforming into them, making deals with them. Ancient people seemed to understand this basic equivalence between us and the animals.

Humans have always killed and eaten other sentient creatures, but they have never regarded it as a morally neutral act. It was always emotionally fraught, at best.

I know it is wrong to kill and eat other sentient creatures, and I do it all the time.

Laying in the gutter

Many effective altruists suffer from moral scrupulosity. Sometimes EA can exacerbate scrupulosity with the sheer scale of the stakes it points to, but that’s explicitly not by design.

EA tells you: you can do a lot of good, way more than most people, without sacrificing much at all. Avoid farmed fish, eggs, and poultry, but don’t worry about beef and dairy. You should donate 10% of your income—and not necessarily more. Change your career, but no need to sacrifice all your hobbies and friends. Remember to rest and recharge, it’s no good to eat your seed corn.

I think that’s all well and good. Tactically and strategically, it’s sound. I endorse it wholeheartedly.

But morally, spiritually, emotionally—it just doesn’t feel sufficient. There’s a reason that EA can exacerbate scrupulosity as well as soothe it. It’s a greedy algorithm. Once your eye has been guided to the scale of the world’s horrors and gently encouraged to go do something about them, it can be very difficult to not throw yourself off that cliff.

This is because there is something emotionally true and resonant about the idea that it’s correct to throw yourself off that cliff.

I’m not a Christian. I don’t really like the idea of sin, let alone original sin, but there is something to the idea that it is ~impossible to live a genuinely moral life.

Jews have this idea too—and it’s an important one. There is a reason that Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, is our most important holiday.

It is more or less impossible to get to Yom Kippur and have nothing to atone for. Even if you committed no sins, that’s not good enough. You’re not just on the hook for bad things you did—you’re on the hook for all the good things you failed to do. And the space of good you might have done is impossibly vast. On Yom Kippur, you are Oskar Schindler, breaking down sobbing, because you could have done more.

This is right and true. You could always have done more. It is right to experience this as the unspeakable tragedy that it is. You beg for a forgiveness that you don’t deserve, because the pool of suffering and evil is vast and deep, and this year you failed to empty it. The fact that this was impossible does not in any sense make it “okay”—it is awful and wrong and bad and the sheer vileness of this state of affairs should by all rights tear you into pieces.

But you only do this once a year.

Once a year, you feel the whole weight of it, the awful moral responsibility of being a human being alive in a world full of pain and death. It’s important to do this—it’s no good getting complacent, falling into cope, and convincing yourself that Actually It’s Fine. It’s very much not fine.

But it’s also no good to dwell on it constantly. You can’t live a good life while being torn into pieces.

So on Yom Kippur, you fast. You deprive yourself. You beat your breast. You desperately scramble to atone.

And then—importantly—you stop.

1. I used to buy extra expensive pasture-raised eggs but stopped after learning how often those companies just straight up lie about their product. It is not really feasible to get reliably torture-free eggs sight-unseen.

2. I’m not really sure about clams or scallops. I don’t really want to eat 15 of anything that runs away from you if you try to catch and eat it.

3. It’s hard to consistently eat enough to be healthy when you have next to no desire-for-food drive

4. Technically lions (and other cats) are obligate carnivores, so if we were sentient lions we would have a borderline impossible time being vegan—at any time prior to the 2020s, where plant-based meat alternatives are available even in podunk grocery stores, and cultivated meat is starting to turn the corner on commercial availability.

5. I acknowledge that there is approximately nothing wrong with eating animals that have died for a reason besides “they were killed for the explicit purpose of being eaten”

6. Source: I read it in a book once and never verified it. I think it might have been A Short History of Myth by Karen Armstrong. It’s a very good (popular) book so I strongly encourage you to read it, track down her sources, and determine whether this is a credible claim. C’mon, do it pussy. You might get to call me a liar at the end. Wouldn’t that feel good?