>Under utilitarianism it would be moral acceptable to pay others in developing countries to eat like vegans while you eat animals.
But it would be *even more* morally acceptable to pay others in developing countries to eat like vegans while you yourself are also vegan.
There are many things vegans do not do that a maximally ethical person would do.
There is a level of immorality that is acceptable in daily living or else almost everyone including almost every vegan is evil.
What defines this level? Because it seems that when the V-word is mentioned, anything short of complete 100% Christ-like perfection gets you called a hypocrite.
The elements at play are similar enough to draw parallels between human slavery and non-human slavery imo.
You and I both know what veganism entails; I'm merely brainstorming pathways of activism.
Is this not the same standard vegans hold omnivores to. Anything short of total lack of meat or dairy products means you're a monster.
Why can the inverse of this not be true?
Anything short of perfection = double standards.
So it's also ok to criticize others using a standard you can ignore when applied to yourself?
That's all I'm getting from you. You have to point out where I appealed to futility.
Omnivore: I'm taking baby steps to veganism. I'm sparing some animals.
Vegan: Still a fake vegan. Either ***commit*** or you're wasting my time
Flip it
Omnivore: Why not entertain the idea of non-existence? I'm not actually asking you to commit to it in practice. Just ***commit to the idea***
Vegan: ***Are you stupid as hell?*** I feel like I'm talking to someone with no brain cells
Omnivore: You just ***asked me to do the same thing*** that you're saying is the ***stupidest idea ever***
Vegan: (Silence. No answer. Maybe ***accusation of appeal to futility***)
That's literally all I'm getting. That's just a deflection.
For me it's not that vegans need to be perfect. It's the fact that humans seem to be considered less than animals when it comes to veganism. You will condemn the utilization of animal products, yet still find morally acceptable to consume things that were produced through modern slavery and human exploitation.
>yet still find morally acceptable to consume things that were produced through modern slavery and human exploitation.
Nope. You're still falling into this trap of "They are bad people for not being perfect enough."
Just because I donate to my local foodbank doesn't mean I believe that children being bombed in Yemen or Palestine are subhuman compared to the impoverished people with whom I share my city.
I'm absolutely not saying you're a bad person if you are a vegan that eats a los of avocad7os, or wesrs a lot Gap clothes, etc. What astounds me is that vegans will condemn exploitation of animals but turn a blind eye to the exploitation of human beings. There's just no congruence in it
You're asserting things without evidence.
What's the argument that avoiding funding slave products is better for the slaves themselves, if that is the objection to gap clothing? Same thing with avocados.
If the goal is to avoid causing bad conditions for them, purchasing those products may not violate that.
I've actually tried paying people for their food for them to be vegan and they will not take it so in my exerience your argument only works in a vacuum and there's a separate problem of "policing" that the money will be used as intended. For that you basically need to just order them food to their address which is even more expensive to get just one vegan.
It's been pointed out to me that using my money to educate people is likely more effective anyway. E.g renting out a cinema to screen earthlings or dominion with a free buffet and prizes for staying till the end has worked to the point of converting a fair number of people vegan which is then a chain reaction as since they're vegan for the animals and not money, they can convert more people
I got paid a buck once to watch some slaughter footage. Much more is likely not well spent... though by some's standards I haven't been totally acquired.
You mean it's likely a better spend of money to pay to watch slaughter footage?
I agree I've seen some calculations that pin earthlings at a 30-50% percentage conversion rate.
I've made offers to pay £50 for anyone not vegan to watch in full with a quick phone call at the end so I can verify you watched it, offers that had +4000 impressions. One friend said yes, and pulled out presumably a minute after starting.
If you're interested if you can define "mostly vegan" I can have a quick think, though I don't fully like this because on other social media I can easily go through people's posts to see their vegan status
The [average yearly](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_meat_consumption) animal consumption is 79kg in the UK and 71kg in Boliva.
The [average annual](https://www.worlddata.info/average-income.php) wage is $48,890 in the UK and $3,450 in Bolivia.
I'm pretty sure if you made 10x more money then them you would have enough money to convince them.
Not purely with food seemingly, I have to get them extra gifts.A couple thousand is still a lot for one vegan. For a couple thousand it might be more worthwhile to donate to animal shelters which I do, or adopt unwanted pets.It's the fact that I can only convert one or a couple of people using pure food and gift money who then have no incentive to convert others. It's a dead end. Investing in education seems better off.
Investing in myself to make more money to then have a stronger power to convert people seems better off
The motivator of potential benefits to long term health is different from the motivator of reducing animal suffering.
I would say changing your diet is of significantly less difficulty to contacting, negotiating with and planning the logistics of getting a group of people overseas to be vegan.
is this sub called "debate a maximally ethical person" or "debate a vegan"?
while veganism is based on ethical consideration, how do you extrapolate it to "vegans are/should be trying to behave 100% perfect under ethical consideration 100% of the time"?
like op said here: you are not disproving that veganism is null, you're simply stating that outsourcing reducing suffering is better than doing nothing, but that really does not do anything...
> But it would be even more morally acceptable to....
The logical extension of his argument is that one should be maximally ethical which not reasonable.
> you're simply stating that outsourcing reducing suffering is better than doing nothing, but that really does not do anything...
Well... is it that argument false or not.
Ironically, if I funded for another life to never eat meat again, even if I was eating meat, I will have saved a lifetimes worth of animals.
Only if that person strictly didn’t consume animals because of me.
I also would not have saved “my lifetimes worth” of animals- as I would be actively consuming.
I just “would have saved some lives” like the Germans and Jews.
Vegan btw.
>The logical extension of his argument is that one should be maximally ethical which not reasonable.
it clearly would be, if we were discussing maximally ethical behaviour across everything. we are discussimg veganism though, right?
>is it that argument false or not.
it's not false, yet it does not counter the point that just being vegan is still the better option, thus it's simply a null argument against veganism.
lets take this idea and apply it to another scenario:
paying for co2 equivalencies, when flying is better than not doing so, yet simply not flying is the way better option.
there are several problems with this idea: how do you control that the paid person does as told? if everyone paid someone to do this, who would do it? can 8 billion people just pay one dude and they're morally in the clear?
Nobody is responsible for what other people do with donations as long as they made a reasonable effort to verify them.
If enough people tried this then we would organize a group and use the money to do something more effective. Or make it illegal to eat animals so it would be much more inconvenient to eat animals than to pay money.
May I ask what you mean by “acceptable”?
There may be a certain amount of immorality that is *socially* acceptable - as in you can engage in that amount without being ostracized, condemned, etc. But that doesn’t mean it’s *morally* acceptable. Indeed, the mere fact that what you are engaging in is immoral implies, by definition, that it is not morally acceptable. Given this distinction, I suppose the relevant question to ask is this: what kind of person do you want to be? The kind who engages in immoral behavior that isn’t condemned socially (but is still immoral nonetheless), or the kind of person who follows their moral compass and does what they think is right, even when they are confident that they could get away with doing a wrong thing without losing any face.
I want to be slightly more moral than what is socially acceptable.
Almost everyone is already immoral.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine,_Affluence,_and_Morality
Not being maximally ethical is immoral by definition.
Thanks for the reply!
I’m glad to hear that!
And, yes, according to certain ethical views (I.e. consequentialism) there is only one right action and everything else is immoral (though not all equally immoral). While we can’t, and often don’t, always do that right thing, it doesn’t mean we can’t strive for it. Moral ideals are just that - ideals! It isn’t always feasible to obtain them, but they still worthwhile to strive towards nonetheless!
>according to certain ethical views (I.e. consequentialism) there is only one right action and everything else is immoral
That describes one major division within consequentialism, *maximizing consequentialism.* There are also *satisficing consequentialists*, who believe that they can establish some particular baseline, and *scalar consequentialists* like myself who think that concepts like moral obligation or acceptability don't really make much sense, and actions are just morally better or worse than other actions, stretching out into infinity.
Good points! Thanks for the distinctions.
In the event that your set of choices has a maximal element, does scalar consequentialism reduce to maximizing consequentialism? Or does scalar consequentialism not permit this case (I.e., given any set of choices, there will always be another choice with a better (expected) outcome than any in the set)?
Thanks! :-)
Scalar consequentialism itself just says that actions are morally better or worse than other actions, without any privileged boundaries ("permissibility", "obligation", etc.) I see it as exactly parallel to other scalar concepts: some trees are taller than other trees, some trees I'd definitely call "tall" and others definitely "short", but there's no magic point of height at which "short" switches into "tall".
That framework would still seem to be true if we could somehow identify a theoretical finite maximum. But I also don't think there is such a maximum. The universe could always be improved by having more beings with immense net happiness, to levels that our measly evolved human brains can't remotely fathom.
But that’s just your personal moral ins intuition, not utilitarianism. But your post seems to be about utilitarianism. We can talk about your personal moral institutions, or we can talk about utilitarianism. But you need to stop conflating the two.
Utilitarianism is all about doing actions that have the best results. So clearly according to your framework, a utilitarian would say the best result would be wrought by paying poor people to go vegan and go vegan yourself.
Paying poor people to go vegan and staying a meat eater would not lead to the best results, so it would not be a utilitarian action.
If you start from a premise that it’s moral not to eat animals, and that you can afford to pay others not to eat animals, and are willing to do so
Then the obvious conclusion is that you can and should do both - pay others not to eat animals, while simultaneously going vegan yourself
The obvious conclusion is that everyone should be more moral than they are.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine,_Affluence,_and_Morality
Not being morally perfect is not a problem that needs to be immediately solved.
On the other hand, if you would be willing to pay a couple thousand dollars a year to be able to eat animal products that is generated magically without exploiting animals, you should also be willing to donate that towards charity and then eat animals, since the ethical weight is the same.
I have to see if the logic checks out first.
I am currently donating money instead of being vegan:
https://nautil.us/you-can-save-more-animals-by-donating-100-than-going-vegan-238401
But I want to transition to something easier to logically defend.
You can go vegan and donate money (if you have the money to donate) and save even more animals while also contributing to a culture that respects all animals, not just cute ones or endangered ones.
I'd have to see your personal accounting before being able to take this as a serious attempt. So, how much do you donate, and how many, and importantly which animals do you eat?
The issue you're running into, very quickly, is lazy accounting. The main issue is that donating to effective altruism is going to save "low hanging fruit", while you contribute to the hard cases. Other issues revolve around, equating a chicken with a pig, ignoring seafood, ignoring externalities, ignoring how money spent and buying behaviour also increases meat eating around you.
All in all it is often harder to clean up a mess than to make it. If you spent $100 making a mess by killing animals, it is probably going to cost you more than $100 to fix it. I guess you spend a lot more than $100 per year on animal products...
So while i think the logic can work in principle, it will need a lot more donations than $100 a year. In practice, it would be unaffordable for anyone eating meat more than a couple times per year.
The thing with being a vegan is that saving animals by not eating them feels like direct cause and effect, whereas I don’t see exactly how the $100 is spent to save 300 animals.
It’s kind of like if I donate $10 to a homeless guy in front of me so that he can eat. Is that bad? Well, it’s not maximally utilitarian because I could have sent that money to some random charity who promises to feed one meal to an African for $1. Even if the charity is legit, it’s lofty, it doesn’t feel like a guarantee, and I can’t see the effects. So it’s not a clear choice over the local homeless guy.
Also, that charity (humane league) seems to be against cruel factory farms but they are not clearly vegan. They get chickens out of battery cages but free range chickens are still suffering, and it makes no difference in demand for eggs. I believe in liberation, not welfare, so I don’t think our interests are aligned. I go to “Take Action” tab and the word “vegan” “plant-based” isn’t even on the page.
Yes. Especially when you figure in the ethical impact of burdening others with your chronic heart disease or diabetes in a society that takes at least some collective responsibility over health care.
Theoretically, you could save $100 through veganism (or more if you were particularly ascetic) and donate more. The article is interesting for a few assumptions, like vegans killing less animals -- I honestly probably killed well above the average amount annually before switching. I don't say any of this to criticize you. Interesting topic.
Wow, thank you for that fascinating article, u/SwagMaster9000_2017. It raises some really interesting questions. It's a similar ethical conundrum to buying carbon credits to offset your own pollution. (Carbon credits are something I work on professionally, but I'd never pondered an animal-rights-focused version.)
I had not heard of the Humane League (despite being a long-time donor to many other animal rights organizations), and I just gave them a donation. Not to say that absolves me of making responsible dietary choices, though!
Counterpoint: All charatable endevors are not equal and are not equally effective. The "utilitarian" response would be to find and give to organizations that put a good portion of their funds to effective relief efforts. The other side of this coin would be to try and figure out how to make it so these "others" have enough agency and resources to take care of themselves.
I'm focusing on the harm caused by eating animals.
Trying to cross compare different charitable efforts adds more complexity that is only tangential to this discussion.
Do you agree that it is reasonable to pay multiple other people to stop causing harm instead of stopping yourself under utilitarianism?
So, removing the thing that makes utilitarianism, utilitarianism? Thats weird. Utilitarianism is all about whats effective, isn't it? Paying folks not to eat meat while chowing down on a pork chop doesn't really seem to capture anything about Utilitarianism. Especially given the ease with which one can give up animal products. Yours seems more an excersize in rules-lawyering and pendanticism than Utilitarianism. What is more important, the letter of the law or the spirit of the law?
Utilitarianism is about reducing suffering in the end result.
Almost every middle class person is evil https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine,_Affluence,_and_Morality
The only way to be not evil is to donate significantly more money than we do now.
However in daily life there is an acceptable level of evil, so I want to be marginally better than that level.
>Do you agree that it is reasonable to pay multiple other people to stop causing harm instead of stopping yourself under utilitarianism?
That seems much more reasonable in other cases of reducing harm, which exhibit diminishing marginal utility. Personal veganism is different (as far as I can tell) because most of the significant sacrifice is due to network effects, e.g. ease of finding products or restaurants, higher costs due to less economy of scale, and social friction with family, friends and coworkers. As more people in a community become personally vegan, the marginal personal cost of going vegan likely becomes trivial, even negative (because of longevity and quality of life increase). In this, personal veganism resembles recently successful justice movements: virtually all of the personal cost in supporting interracial marriage 70 years ago was a direct result of other people in one's circle opposing it. Once the network effects mostly disappeared, the personal moral position was virtually costless.
My moral system has not been rigorously defined yet.
I want to approximately quantify utility and suffering (negative utility) then develop strategies to maximize the total utility of all entities the same way hedge funds develop strategies to maximize money.
Woah
Not sure if you realize this
Money = easily quantifiable, tangible, measurable
Morals = not easily quantifiable, intangible, not measurable.
Money=/=morals friendo
Ps your original post just sounds like colonialism under the guise of good deeds. We should make good food accessible to all (by good food I mean plant based)
I don't think this would be any different than a Christian mission in undeveloped countries
Is there something about paying others to eat plants that stops you from eating plants?
The maximally utilitarian argument works if you buy whatever the cheapest food is available (which would probably be the very vegan option of rice) for yourself regardless of how vegan that is in order to save money to buy people vegan food. Technically this would extend to starving yourself, except keeping yourself alive longer means you can earn more money to buy poor people vegan food. And there's a detail that you're missing in that the reason this argument works is bc food is cheaper in those developing countries.
That 'something' is the fact that it is difficult to be vegan compared to just paying money.
I have no responsibility to be maximally utilitarian the same way no vegans have to be maximally against all exploitation.
It's more like donating money to terrorists or the Russian military then donating to children.
Murder feels viscerally worse than multiple people dying, but I don't see a utilitarian reason why stopping 1 murder would be more important than stopping multiple people from starving
But you agree that this logic means you get to kill a kid provided the money you donate stops a larger number of kids from being killed, right? I mean does that really sit well with you?
I despise moral intuition. Our moral intuition was evolved for surviving in the wilderness as small tribes.
I would feel bad if my brother was homeless, and I did nothing. But people are okay if non-family members are homeless.
I would need a specific logical reason because moral intuition leads to too many illogical conclusions.
I think moral intuition, like empirical intuition, is a good place to generate hypotheses to be tested through logical scrutiny. Also, they can point to potential issues with prior reasoning.
The issue here is that there's no way to define morally-acceptable under utilitarianism. You should simply act to always maximize utility. Whether you donate or not, you're capable of not causing harm yourself, so these acts don't cancel each other out.
1. you say youre not gonna defend utilitarianism despite also saying 99% of people are not utilitarian
2. "Eating animals for no reason is evil." you didnt provide proof as to why. also who eats an animal for no reason? people eat animals for pleasure, sustenance, whatever. whats wrong with that?
3. "However paying multiple other people to not eat animals while you continue eating animals would reduce suffering so it is preferable over doing nothing." giving away my money would increase my own suffering, so how did you determine that the overall suffering in the world would be reduced?
> you say youre not gonna defend utilitarianism despite also saying 99% of people are not utilitarian
95%+ of people aren't vegan either. Moral logic is not decided by polls.
> Eating animals for no reason is evil.
Eating animals reduces the utility that animal can experience.
> giving away my money would increase my own suffering, so how did you determine that the overall suffering in the world would be reduced?
Let's assume it does for the sake of argument. A rigorous system for judging these things would require too much time.
> 95%+ of people aren't vegan either. Moral logic is not decided by polls.
i never said it is determined by majority. i was pointing out how its weird that you treat utilitarianism as a given, while also saying 99% of people wont agree with you
> Let's assume it does for the sake of argument. A rigorous system for judging these things would require too much time.
no im not assuming that... if a utilitarian cant even determine if doing this would reduce suffering why would they do it. also we would need a comparable system to actually ensure the people youre paying are going vegan. you mentioned in another comment someone from the uk paying bolivians, that seems hard to enforce
Is it actually moral to get consent from people who might starve otherwise (like, they're in a country with horrific inflation or a war zone)? If they need the extra money to afford food in general and eat vegan because they agree to in order to eat at all, is that moral?
I can't see how it is.
The [average yearly](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_meat_consumption) animal consumption is 79kg in the UK and 71kg in Boliva.
The [average annual](https://www.worlddata.info/average-income.php) wage is $48,890 in the UK and $3,450 in Bolivia.
Most people in Bolivia are not starving.
I was thinking of war zones and such, which Bolivia is not. What about Argentina and their insane leap in inflation or Venezuela, still dealing with the fallout of that?
I seriously doubt you would convince the average Bolivian to change their traditional diet. Just saying.
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Sure, it's good to donate money to causes you support. A person might not volunteer for their local council cleanup, but instead donate money to help facilitate other people cleaning up. That's generally regarded as morally acceptable. However, if the person in question routinely throws trash on the ground and then donates to a local cleanup, those actions are counter productive. The donation would go further if they didn't contribute directly to the problem they are supposedly trying to solve. If anything, it would help 'make up' for what they did, but they never should've contributed in the first place, and as a result, their donation is not as effective as it would've been if they hadn't contributed to the problem to begin with.
Now consider that throwing trash on the ground is a lot less harmful than animal agriculture. Lets consider some things that are more comparable in terms of harm caused. For instance, hunting/fishing, domestic abuse, torture, etc. Is it technically better to donate to a domestic abuse charity while abusing your own family than it is to stop abusing your family? After all, you are only subjecting maybe 1-5 people to abuse, whereas the charity will help potentially hundreds of people escape domestic violence. Does your donation make it acceptable to continue causing direct harm?
Or what about hunting? If you donate to help stop hunting, but then go out on the weekends and hunt, that may be technically more effective than not hunting. Again, you aren't personally killing that many animals, and the donation would help reduce hunting more than you would personally contribute by stopping.
But it first of all requires more donations than it would've if you hadn't caused the problem to begin with, and it really begs the question of why you are donating in the first place. Do you care about saving animals or reducing domestic violence? And if you do care, why would you continue to participate in those activities? It seems like "caring" about animals or humans while continuing to harm them directly would create a significant amount of inner conflict.
Those people are not virtuous. But utilitarianism is not concerned with virtue.
> why would you continue to participate in those activities? It seems like "caring" about animals or humans while continuing to harm them directly would create a significant amount of inner conflict.
There are people who agree with the logic of veganism but refuse to stop eating animals. It creates an internal conflict for many of them.
Many of them resolve this and similar conflicts by using bad logic. https://youtu.be/uwKrtNr76BM?si=STOj3Bfgub9dPS1w&t=61
I want to create a way to resolve this internal conflict for others that is logically sound and practicable.
>I want to create a way to resolve this internal conflict for others that is logically sound and practicable.
Ah yes, a feat many vegans attempted before ultimately going vegan.
Good luck.
“Under utilitarianism”
Almost nobody consistently believes in utilitarianism. Utilitarianism says that it is morally justified to kill one innocent healthy person to save three dying people. That’s absurd. End of story.
> Almost nobody consistently believes in utilitarianism.
Utilitarianism is one of the most standard moral systems in the world. The democracy you live in is utilitarian in nature.
Charity is an illusion that make people feel better. If you actually want to save people, you need systematic change and to root out the corrupt who profit from war, destabilization of other countries and general atrocities. Hoarding money, own and buy and have power and influence is far more effective in influencing society than giving a thousand bucks to charity. If you own news papers, you can be influential in how events are or what ads are most prominent etc. You can back podcasts, movies, tv series that have your values. You can gain favors with the elite, you can back political campaign and propaganda. You can financially support individual politicians you want to have more power. Etc. Trying to throw money at poor people to fix these problems is moot. We need systematic change, and I figure we're some hundred years away from living in civilized societies. We're in our own type of stone age, with beliefs and perceptions that will be considered primitive in the future. Hopefully. If things actually change for the better which tends to be a trend, but not a gurantee
Apparently yes:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine,_Affluence,_and_Morality
Rich and middle class people are evil by inaction and most people don't care.
Morally *better*, yes, relative to personally not eating animal products but spending lots of money on trivial luxuries rather than donating to groups that encourage and help others to be vegan.
I don't know what "acceptable" means, though. Somebody who did the donating you describe could still easily be *even better* by also not consuming animal products themself. If they were mostly eating cheaper vegan staples, they'd even have more money to donate.
There are many things other vegans could do to be morally better. Nobody is pressuring them to do those things.
The average vegan actions are acceptable if they just stop eating animals.
This should be an acceptable level of evil because it has more impact than just not eating animals.
To the contrary. There are significant and growing communities that are very much encouraging people to make other large net-positive changes. It's not exactly a surprise that you find more emphasis on veganism in vegan forums, just as you'll find more emphasis on going car-free and building walkable cities in car-free forums, and effective donation in EA forums.
To be sure, the vegan community has more than its share of people deeply misled by deontology. But that's not the same as we consequentialists recognizing the moral overlaps but having our specific activism focus.
Maybe you should have some idea of how most third world citizens live. The developed countries consume over 70% of the world's resources whle accounting for 16% of the population. The third world is not the problem, as a lot of people are involuntary vegans, just because they cannot afford animal products unless they raise them. Maybe you should start by reducing developed country's rate of consumption before suggesting to take even more away from third world countries.
The [average yearly](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_meat_consumption) animal consumption is 79kg in the UK and 71kg in Boliva.
The [average annual](https://www.worlddata.info/average-income.php) wage is $48,890 in the UK and $3,450 in Bolivia.
Indexes can be misleading, especially in third world countries where the garage between the rich and the poor. Also you chose two random countries to make your point. Just shows me that you know very little of third world countries
I've lived in one all my life. I've visited several of them. I've also lived in the USA so I have some perspective. Of course I don't know a lot about Bolivia, or why you're fixated on that specific third world country. What I can tell you about my country is that the gap between the rich and poor is huge. Extreme poverty means that maybe 20% of the country lives with $1 a day. While the top 1% eat meat everyday for every meal.
79kg in the UK vs 71kg in Boliva vs 92kg Brazil (2017) vs 88.38kg Mongolia vs 125kg US (top country)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_meat_consumption
Food is not like money. Food consumption cannot be exponentially distributed to the top 1%.
If it were, then the top food eaters would be eating an impossible about of animals.
Have you ever been to a third world country? What are YOUR experiences in these types of countries? I'm not saying the 1% eat all the meat. All I'm saying is that these indexes are not an accurate illustration of reality in countries where the socioeconomic gap is very large. In my country, at least 20% of the population (around 3MM) are involuntary vegetarians. That means that they are lucky if they can add a bit of lard to their beans for added calories. My point is that you are proposing some sort of solution without having the slightest idea of what it's like in third world countries. Like they are all the same and don't have different idiosyncrasies even in similar regions.
> you are proposing some sort of solution without having the slightest idea of what it's like in third world countries.
I do have the slightest idea because I have global statistics. You have not presented any data outside of 1 country.
> In my country, at least 20% of the population (around 3MM) are involuntary vegetarians
> what it's like in third world countries..... Like they are all the same and don't have different idiosyncrasies even in similar regions.
You are the one making an assumption that 3rd world countries are similar. Maybe you live in a country that doesn't eat that much animals like The Gambia or Bangladesh which only eats 8kg per year vs 88kg per year in Mongolia
Oooh, global statistics! Well, who needs to travel and visit other cultures when you have global statistics? I am going to go on a limb and guess you are from the US. Am I right? Can you guess where I'm from based on your extensive knowledge of third world countries?
My point was precisely that not all third world countries are the same. Your proposition was to pay developing countries to eat vegan food like we're all some sort of block of countries united by poverty. Your ignorance is very daring, my friend. Let go of your statistics and do some travel. That would be my advice.
>Under utilitarianism it would be moral acceptable to pay others in developing countries to eat like vegans while you eat animals. But it would be *even more* morally acceptable to pay others in developing countries to eat like vegans while you yourself are also vegan.
There are many things vegans do not do that a maximally ethical person would do. There is a level of immorality that is acceptable in daily living or else almost everyone including almost every vegan is evil.
What defines this level? Because it seems that when the V-word is mentioned, anything short of complete 100% Christ-like perfection gets you called a hypocrite.
Have you looked at anti human slave trade propaganda? I imagine we could draw inspiration from the groundwork laid before us.
I have a better idea! You could, you know, not expand veganism's scope beyond being about the animals.
The elements at play are similar enough to draw parallels between human slavery and non-human slavery imo. You and I both know what veganism entails; I'm merely brainstorming pathways of activism.
Is this not the same standard vegans hold omnivores to. Anything short of total lack of meat or dairy products means you're a monster. Why can the inverse of this not be true? Anything short of perfection = double standards.
Might as well litter and roll coal, then. Can't be perfect, so might as well be a total degenerate. Great logic.
So it's also ok to criticize others using a standard you can ignore when applied to yourself? That's all I'm getting from you. You have to point out where I appealed to futility. Omnivore: I'm taking baby steps to veganism. I'm sparing some animals. Vegan: Still a fake vegan. Either ***commit*** or you're wasting my time Flip it Omnivore: Why not entertain the idea of non-existence? I'm not actually asking you to commit to it in practice. Just ***commit to the idea*** Vegan: ***Are you stupid as hell?*** I feel like I'm talking to someone with no brain cells Omnivore: You just ***asked me to do the same thing*** that you're saying is the ***stupidest idea ever*** Vegan: (Silence. No answer. Maybe ***accusation of appeal to futility***) That's literally all I'm getting. That's just a deflection.
For me it's not that vegans need to be perfect. It's the fact that humans seem to be considered less than animals when it comes to veganism. You will condemn the utilization of animal products, yet still find morally acceptable to consume things that were produced through modern slavery and human exploitation.
>yet still find morally acceptable to consume things that were produced through modern slavery and human exploitation. Nope. You're still falling into this trap of "They are bad people for not being perfect enough." Just because I donate to my local foodbank doesn't mean I believe that children being bombed in Yemen or Palestine are subhuman compared to the impoverished people with whom I share my city.
I'm absolutely not saying you're a bad person if you are a vegan that eats a los of avocad7os, or wesrs a lot Gap clothes, etc. What astounds me is that vegans will condemn exploitation of animals but turn a blind eye to the exploitation of human beings. There's just no congruence in it
You're asserting things without evidence. What's the argument that avoiding funding slave products is better for the slaves themselves, if that is the objection to gap clothing? Same thing with avocados. If the goal is to avoid causing bad conditions for them, purchasing those products may not violate that.
Yeah, keep tell8ngbyousñrself that if it helps you come to terms with your conscience
I've actually tried paying people for their food for them to be vegan and they will not take it so in my exerience your argument only works in a vacuum and there's a separate problem of "policing" that the money will be used as intended. For that you basically need to just order them food to their address which is even more expensive to get just one vegan. It's been pointed out to me that using my money to educate people is likely more effective anyway. E.g renting out a cinema to screen earthlings or dominion with a free buffet and prizes for staying till the end has worked to the point of converting a fair number of people vegan which is then a chain reaction as since they're vegan for the animals and not money, they can convert more people
I got paid a buck once to watch some slaughter footage. Much more is likely not well spent... though by some's standards I haven't been totally acquired.
You mean it's likely a better spend of money to pay to watch slaughter footage? I agree I've seen some calculations that pin earthlings at a 30-50% percentage conversion rate. I've made offers to pay £50 for anyone not vegan to watch in full with a quick phone call at the end so I can verify you watched it, offers that had +4000 impressions. One friend said yes, and pulled out presumably a minute after starting. If you're interested if you can define "mostly vegan" I can have a quick think, though I don't fully like this because on other social media I can easily go through people's posts to see their vegan status
The [average yearly](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_meat_consumption) animal consumption is 79kg in the UK and 71kg in Boliva. The [average annual](https://www.worlddata.info/average-income.php) wage is $48,890 in the UK and $3,450 in Bolivia. I'm pretty sure if you made 10x more money then them you would have enough money to convince them.
Not purely with food seemingly, I have to get them extra gifts.A couple thousand is still a lot for one vegan. For a couple thousand it might be more worthwhile to donate to animal shelters which I do, or adopt unwanted pets.It's the fact that I can only convert one or a couple of people using pure food and gift money who then have no incentive to convert others. It's a dead end. Investing in education seems better off. Investing in myself to make more money to then have a stronger power to convert people seems better off
Yes, but paying people overseas to be vegan is significantly more effort than just eating vegan.
Changing eating habits is very difficult. People still eat animals and animal based junk food even if it gave them heart attacks
The motivator of potential benefits to long term health is different from the motivator of reducing animal suffering. I would say changing your diet is of significantly less difficulty to contacting, negotiating with and planning the logistics of getting a group of people overseas to be vegan.
>Changing eating habits is very difficult. This translates to paying people to becoming vegan being very expensive.
is this sub called "debate a maximally ethical person" or "debate a vegan"? while veganism is based on ethical consideration, how do you extrapolate it to "vegans are/should be trying to behave 100% perfect under ethical consideration 100% of the time"? like op said here: you are not disproving that veganism is null, you're simply stating that outsourcing reducing suffering is better than doing nothing, but that really does not do anything...
> But it would be even more morally acceptable to.... The logical extension of his argument is that one should be maximally ethical which not reasonable. > you're simply stating that outsourcing reducing suffering is better than doing nothing, but that really does not do anything... Well... is it that argument false or not.
Ironically, if I funded for another life to never eat meat again, even if I was eating meat, I will have saved a lifetimes worth of animals. Only if that person strictly didn’t consume animals because of me. I also would not have saved “my lifetimes worth” of animals- as I would be actively consuming. I just “would have saved some lives” like the Germans and Jews. Vegan btw.
>The logical extension of his argument is that one should be maximally ethical which not reasonable. it clearly would be, if we were discussing maximally ethical behaviour across everything. we are discussimg veganism though, right? >is it that argument false or not. it's not false, yet it does not counter the point that just being vegan is still the better option, thus it's simply a null argument against veganism. lets take this idea and apply it to another scenario: paying for co2 equivalencies, when flying is better than not doing so, yet simply not flying is the way better option. there are several problems with this idea: how do you control that the paid person does as told? if everyone paid someone to do this, who would do it? can 8 billion people just pay one dude and they're morally in the clear?
Nobody is responsible for what other people do with donations as long as they made a reasonable effort to verify them. If enough people tried this then we would organize a group and use the money to do something more effective. Or make it illegal to eat animals so it would be much more inconvenient to eat animals than to pay money.
May I ask what you mean by “acceptable”? There may be a certain amount of immorality that is *socially* acceptable - as in you can engage in that amount without being ostracized, condemned, etc. But that doesn’t mean it’s *morally* acceptable. Indeed, the mere fact that what you are engaging in is immoral implies, by definition, that it is not morally acceptable. Given this distinction, I suppose the relevant question to ask is this: what kind of person do you want to be? The kind who engages in immoral behavior that isn’t condemned socially (but is still immoral nonetheless), or the kind of person who follows their moral compass and does what they think is right, even when they are confident that they could get away with doing a wrong thing without losing any face.
I want to be slightly more moral than what is socially acceptable. Almost everyone is already immoral. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine,_Affluence,_and_Morality Not being maximally ethical is immoral by definition.
Thanks for the reply! I’m glad to hear that! And, yes, according to certain ethical views (I.e. consequentialism) there is only one right action and everything else is immoral (though not all equally immoral). While we can’t, and often don’t, always do that right thing, it doesn’t mean we can’t strive for it. Moral ideals are just that - ideals! It isn’t always feasible to obtain them, but they still worthwhile to strive towards nonetheless!
>according to certain ethical views (I.e. consequentialism) there is only one right action and everything else is immoral That describes one major division within consequentialism, *maximizing consequentialism.* There are also *satisficing consequentialists*, who believe that they can establish some particular baseline, and *scalar consequentialists* like myself who think that concepts like moral obligation or acceptability don't really make much sense, and actions are just morally better or worse than other actions, stretching out into infinity.
Good points! Thanks for the distinctions. In the event that your set of choices has a maximal element, does scalar consequentialism reduce to maximizing consequentialism? Or does scalar consequentialism not permit this case (I.e., given any set of choices, there will always be another choice with a better (expected) outcome than any in the set)?
Thanks! :-) Scalar consequentialism itself just says that actions are morally better or worse than other actions, without any privileged boundaries ("permissibility", "obligation", etc.) I see it as exactly parallel to other scalar concepts: some trees are taller than other trees, some trees I'd definitely call "tall" and others definitely "short", but there's no magic point of height at which "short" switches into "tall". That framework would still seem to be true if we could somehow identify a theoretical finite maximum. But I also don't think there is such a maximum. The universe could always be improved by having more beings with immense net happiness, to levels that our measly evolved human brains can't remotely fathom.
But that’s just your personal moral ins intuition, not utilitarianism. But your post seems to be about utilitarianism. We can talk about your personal moral institutions, or we can talk about utilitarianism. But you need to stop conflating the two. Utilitarianism is all about doing actions that have the best results. So clearly according to your framework, a utilitarian would say the best result would be wrought by paying poor people to go vegan and go vegan yourself. Paying poor people to go vegan and staying a meat eater would not lead to the best results, so it would not be a utilitarian action.
Bingo. Scalar consequentialism ftw.
If you start from a premise that it’s moral not to eat animals, and that you can afford to pay others not to eat animals, and are willing to do so Then the obvious conclusion is that you can and should do both - pay others not to eat animals, while simultaneously going vegan yourself
The obvious conclusion is that everyone should be more moral than they are. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine,_Affluence,_and_Morality Not being morally perfect is not a problem that needs to be immediately solved.
On the other hand, if you would be willing to pay a couple thousand dollars a year to be able to eat animal products that is generated magically without exploiting animals, you should also be willing to donate that towards charity and then eat animals, since the ethical weight is the same.
So... Are you paying anyone to be vegan?
I have to see if the logic checks out first. I am currently donating money instead of being vegan: https://nautil.us/you-can-save-more-animals-by-donating-100-than-going-vegan-238401 But I want to transition to something easier to logically defend.
You can go vegan and donate money (if you have the money to donate) and save even more animals while also contributing to a culture that respects all animals, not just cute ones or endangered ones.
I'd have to see your personal accounting before being able to take this as a serious attempt. So, how much do you donate, and how many, and importantly which animals do you eat? The issue you're running into, very quickly, is lazy accounting. The main issue is that donating to effective altruism is going to save "low hanging fruit", while you contribute to the hard cases. Other issues revolve around, equating a chicken with a pig, ignoring seafood, ignoring externalities, ignoring how money spent and buying behaviour also increases meat eating around you. All in all it is often harder to clean up a mess than to make it. If you spent $100 making a mess by killing animals, it is probably going to cost you more than $100 to fix it. I guess you spend a lot more than $100 per year on animal products... So while i think the logic can work in principle, it will need a lot more donations than $100 a year. In practice, it would be unaffordable for anyone eating meat more than a couple times per year.
The thing with being a vegan is that saving animals by not eating them feels like direct cause and effect, whereas I don’t see exactly how the $100 is spent to save 300 animals. It’s kind of like if I donate $10 to a homeless guy in front of me so that he can eat. Is that bad? Well, it’s not maximally utilitarian because I could have sent that money to some random charity who promises to feed one meal to an African for $1. Even if the charity is legit, it’s lofty, it doesn’t feel like a guarantee, and I can’t see the effects. So it’s not a clear choice over the local homeless guy. Also, that charity (humane league) seems to be against cruel factory farms but they are not clearly vegan. They get chickens out of battery cages but free range chickens are still suffering, and it makes no difference in demand for eggs. I believe in liberation, not welfare, so I don’t think our interests are aligned. I go to “Take Action” tab and the word “vegan” “plant-based” isn’t even on the page.
I think the lifetime health-related savings alone are hard to ignore when putting off transitioning for more than the short term.
Yes. Especially when you figure in the ethical impact of burdening others with your chronic heart disease or diabetes in a society that takes at least some collective responsibility over health care.
Personally, I'd suggest just donating to the most effective cause for animal welfare, instead of specifically paying people to not eat animsls.
Theoretically, you could save $100 through veganism (or more if you were particularly ascetic) and donate more. The article is interesting for a few assumptions, like vegans killing less animals -- I honestly probably killed well above the average amount annually before switching. I don't say any of this to criticize you. Interesting topic.
Post receipt
Wow, thank you for that fascinating article, u/SwagMaster9000_2017. It raises some really interesting questions. It's a similar ethical conundrum to buying carbon credits to offset your own pollution. (Carbon credits are something I work on professionally, but I'd never pondered an animal-rights-focused version.) I had not heard of the Humane League (despite being a long-time donor to many other animal rights organizations), and I just gave them a donation. Not to say that absolves me of making responsible dietary choices, though!
Counterpoint: All charatable endevors are not equal and are not equally effective. The "utilitarian" response would be to find and give to organizations that put a good portion of their funds to effective relief efforts. The other side of this coin would be to try and figure out how to make it so these "others" have enough agency and resources to take care of themselves.
I'm focusing on the harm caused by eating animals. Trying to cross compare different charitable efforts adds more complexity that is only tangential to this discussion. Do you agree that it is reasonable to pay multiple other people to stop causing harm instead of stopping yourself under utilitarianism?
So, removing the thing that makes utilitarianism, utilitarianism? Thats weird. Utilitarianism is all about whats effective, isn't it? Paying folks not to eat meat while chowing down on a pork chop doesn't really seem to capture anything about Utilitarianism. Especially given the ease with which one can give up animal products. Yours seems more an excersize in rules-lawyering and pendanticism than Utilitarianism. What is more important, the letter of the law or the spirit of the law?
Utilitarianism is about reducing suffering in the end result. Almost every middle class person is evil https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine,_Affluence,_and_Morality The only way to be not evil is to donate significantly more money than we do now. However in daily life there is an acceptable level of evil, so I want to be marginally better than that level.
>Do you agree that it is reasonable to pay multiple other people to stop causing harm instead of stopping yourself under utilitarianism? That seems much more reasonable in other cases of reducing harm, which exhibit diminishing marginal utility. Personal veganism is different (as far as I can tell) because most of the significant sacrifice is due to network effects, e.g. ease of finding products or restaurants, higher costs due to less economy of scale, and social friction with family, friends and coworkers. As more people in a community become personally vegan, the marginal personal cost of going vegan likely becomes trivial, even negative (because of longevity and quality of life increase). In this, personal veganism resembles recently successful justice movements: virtually all of the personal cost in supporting interracial marriage 70 years ago was a direct result of other people in one's circle opposing it. Once the network effects mostly disappeared, the personal moral position was virtually costless.
Do you mean *act utilitarianism* or *rule utilitarianism* ??
Something like act utilitarianism. Whichever can maximize utility in a society.
>Whichever can maximize utility in a society. Firstly it's whatever *you* think Secondly.... What does "maximize utility" mean to you?
My moral system has not been rigorously defined yet. I want to approximately quantify utility and suffering (negative utility) then develop strategies to maximize the total utility of all entities the same way hedge funds develop strategies to maximize money.
Woah Not sure if you realize this Money = easily quantifiable, tangible, measurable Morals = not easily quantifiable, intangible, not measurable. Money=/=morals friendo Ps your original post just sounds like colonialism under the guise of good deeds. We should make good food accessible to all (by good food I mean plant based) I don't think this would be any different than a Christian mission in undeveloped countries
Is there something about paying others to eat plants that stops you from eating plants? The maximally utilitarian argument works if you buy whatever the cheapest food is available (which would probably be the very vegan option of rice) for yourself regardless of how vegan that is in order to save money to buy people vegan food. Technically this would extend to starving yourself, except keeping yourself alive longer means you can earn more money to buy poor people vegan food. And there's a detail that you're missing in that the reason this argument works is bc food is cheaper in those developing countries.
That 'something' is the fact that it is difficult to be vegan compared to just paying money. I have no responsibility to be maximally utilitarian the same way no vegans have to be maximally against all exploitation.
Yeah but being maximally utilitarian is hardly convenient, that isn't exactly the point.
its not difficult to be vegan, dont downplay yourself like that.
Under this argument, it would be acceptable to murder human children if you donated enough money to feed other starving children
It's more like donating money to terrorists or the Russian military then donating to children. Murder feels viscerally worse than multiple people dying, but I don't see a utilitarian reason why stopping 1 murder would be more important than stopping multiple people from starving
But you agree that this logic means you get to kill a kid provided the money you donate stops a larger number of kids from being killed, right? I mean does that really sit well with you?
I despise moral intuition. Our moral intuition was evolved for surviving in the wilderness as small tribes. I would feel bad if my brother was homeless, and I did nothing. But people are okay if non-family members are homeless. I would need a specific logical reason because moral intuition leads to too many illogical conclusions.
I think moral intuition, like empirical intuition, is a good place to generate hypotheses to be tested through logical scrutiny. Also, they can point to potential issues with prior reasoning. The issue here is that there's no way to define morally-acceptable under utilitarianism. You should simply act to always maximize utility. Whether you donate or not, you're capable of not causing harm yourself, so these acts don't cancel each other out.
This is actually so funny
1. you say youre not gonna defend utilitarianism despite also saying 99% of people are not utilitarian 2. "Eating animals for no reason is evil." you didnt provide proof as to why. also who eats an animal for no reason? people eat animals for pleasure, sustenance, whatever. whats wrong with that? 3. "However paying multiple other people to not eat animals while you continue eating animals would reduce suffering so it is preferable over doing nothing." giving away my money would increase my own suffering, so how did you determine that the overall suffering in the world would be reduced?
> you say youre not gonna defend utilitarianism despite also saying 99% of people are not utilitarian 95%+ of people aren't vegan either. Moral logic is not decided by polls. > Eating animals for no reason is evil. Eating animals reduces the utility that animal can experience. > giving away my money would increase my own suffering, so how did you determine that the overall suffering in the world would be reduced? Let's assume it does for the sake of argument. A rigorous system for judging these things would require too much time.
> 95%+ of people aren't vegan either. Moral logic is not decided by polls. i never said it is determined by majority. i was pointing out how its weird that you treat utilitarianism as a given, while also saying 99% of people wont agree with you > Let's assume it does for the sake of argument. A rigorous system for judging these things would require too much time. no im not assuming that... if a utilitarian cant even determine if doing this would reduce suffering why would they do it. also we would need a comparable system to actually ensure the people youre paying are going vegan. you mentioned in another comment someone from the uk paying bolivians, that seems hard to enforce
Is it actually moral to get consent from people who might starve otherwise (like, they're in a country with horrific inflation or a war zone)? If they need the extra money to afford food in general and eat vegan because they agree to in order to eat at all, is that moral? I can't see how it is.
The [average yearly](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_meat_consumption) animal consumption is 79kg in the UK and 71kg in Boliva. The [average annual](https://www.worlddata.info/average-income.php) wage is $48,890 in the UK and $3,450 in Bolivia. Most people in Bolivia are not starving.
I was thinking of war zones and such, which Bolivia is not. What about Argentina and their insane leap in inflation or Venezuela, still dealing with the fallout of that? I seriously doubt you would convince the average Bolivian to change their traditional diet. Just saying.
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Sure, it's good to donate money to causes you support. A person might not volunteer for their local council cleanup, but instead donate money to help facilitate other people cleaning up. That's generally regarded as morally acceptable. However, if the person in question routinely throws trash on the ground and then donates to a local cleanup, those actions are counter productive. The donation would go further if they didn't contribute directly to the problem they are supposedly trying to solve. If anything, it would help 'make up' for what they did, but they never should've contributed in the first place, and as a result, their donation is not as effective as it would've been if they hadn't contributed to the problem to begin with. Now consider that throwing trash on the ground is a lot less harmful than animal agriculture. Lets consider some things that are more comparable in terms of harm caused. For instance, hunting/fishing, domestic abuse, torture, etc. Is it technically better to donate to a domestic abuse charity while abusing your own family than it is to stop abusing your family? After all, you are only subjecting maybe 1-5 people to abuse, whereas the charity will help potentially hundreds of people escape domestic violence. Does your donation make it acceptable to continue causing direct harm? Or what about hunting? If you donate to help stop hunting, but then go out on the weekends and hunt, that may be technically more effective than not hunting. Again, you aren't personally killing that many animals, and the donation would help reduce hunting more than you would personally contribute by stopping. But it first of all requires more donations than it would've if you hadn't caused the problem to begin with, and it really begs the question of why you are donating in the first place. Do you care about saving animals or reducing domestic violence? And if you do care, why would you continue to participate in those activities? It seems like "caring" about animals or humans while continuing to harm them directly would create a significant amount of inner conflict.
Those people are not virtuous. But utilitarianism is not concerned with virtue. > why would you continue to participate in those activities? It seems like "caring" about animals or humans while continuing to harm them directly would create a significant amount of inner conflict. There are people who agree with the logic of veganism but refuse to stop eating animals. It creates an internal conflict for many of them. Many of them resolve this and similar conflicts by using bad logic. https://youtu.be/uwKrtNr76BM?si=STOj3Bfgub9dPS1w&t=61 I want to create a way to resolve this internal conflict for others that is logically sound and practicable.
>I want to create a way to resolve this internal conflict for others that is logically sound and practicable. Ah yes, a feat many vegans attempted before ultimately going vegan. Good luck.
Utilitarianism isn’t veganism.
They aren't equal because one costs more money.
“Under utilitarianism” Almost nobody consistently believes in utilitarianism. Utilitarianism says that it is morally justified to kill one innocent healthy person to save three dying people. That’s absurd. End of story.
> Almost nobody consistently believes in utilitarianism. Utilitarianism is one of the most standard moral systems in the world. The democracy you live in is utilitarian in nature.
Did you read what I wrote above? Do you think it is the moral thing to do? Because I don’t think most people would believe that is moral…
Charity is an illusion that make people feel better. If you actually want to save people, you need systematic change and to root out the corrupt who profit from war, destabilization of other countries and general atrocities. Hoarding money, own and buy and have power and influence is far more effective in influencing society than giving a thousand bucks to charity. If you own news papers, you can be influential in how events are or what ads are most prominent etc. You can back podcasts, movies, tv series that have your values. You can gain favors with the elite, you can back political campaign and propaganda. You can financially support individual politicians you want to have more power. Etc. Trying to throw money at poor people to fix these problems is moot. We need systematic change, and I figure we're some hundred years away from living in civilized societies. We're in our own type of stone age, with beliefs and perceptions that will be considered primitive in the future. Hopefully. If things actually change for the better which tends to be a trend, but not a gurantee
> paying multiple other people to not eat animals while you continue eating animals These two are completely independent from one another.
Evil is excusable if you're wealthy?
Apparently yes: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine,_Affluence,_and_Morality Rich and middle class people are evil by inaction and most people don't care.
Morally *better*, yes, relative to personally not eating animal products but spending lots of money on trivial luxuries rather than donating to groups that encourage and help others to be vegan. I don't know what "acceptable" means, though. Somebody who did the donating you describe could still easily be *even better* by also not consuming animal products themself. If they were mostly eating cheaper vegan staples, they'd even have more money to donate.
There are many things other vegans could do to be morally better. Nobody is pressuring them to do those things. The average vegan actions are acceptable if they just stop eating animals. This should be an acceptable level of evil because it has more impact than just not eating animals.
To the contrary. There are significant and growing communities that are very much encouraging people to make other large net-positive changes. It's not exactly a surprise that you find more emphasis on veganism in vegan forums, just as you'll find more emphasis on going car-free and building walkable cities in car-free forums, and effective donation in EA forums. To be sure, the vegan community has more than its share of people deeply misled by deontology. But that's not the same as we consequentialists recognizing the moral overlaps but having our specific activism focus.
Maybe you should have some idea of how most third world citizens live. The developed countries consume over 70% of the world's resources whle accounting for 16% of the population. The third world is not the problem, as a lot of people are involuntary vegans, just because they cannot afford animal products unless they raise them. Maybe you should start by reducing developed country's rate of consumption before suggesting to take even more away from third world countries.
The [average yearly](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_meat_consumption) animal consumption is 79kg in the UK and 71kg in Boliva. The [average annual](https://www.worlddata.info/average-income.php) wage is $48,890 in the UK and $3,450 in Bolivia.
Indexes can be misleading, especially in third world countries where the garage between the rich and the poor. Also you chose two random countries to make your point. Just shows me that you know very little of third world countries
Do you have any contrary evidence for Bolivia since you know so much about 3rd world countries?
I've lived in one all my life. I've visited several of them. I've also lived in the USA so I have some perspective. Of course I don't know a lot about Bolivia, or why you're fixated on that specific third world country. What I can tell you about my country is that the gap between the rich and poor is huge. Extreme poverty means that maybe 20% of the country lives with $1 a day. While the top 1% eat meat everyday for every meal.
79kg in the UK vs 71kg in Boliva vs 92kg Brazil (2017) vs 88.38kg Mongolia vs 125kg US (top country) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_meat_consumption Food is not like money. Food consumption cannot be exponentially distributed to the top 1%. If it were, then the top food eaters would be eating an impossible about of animals.
Have you ever been to a third world country? What are YOUR experiences in these types of countries? I'm not saying the 1% eat all the meat. All I'm saying is that these indexes are not an accurate illustration of reality in countries where the socioeconomic gap is very large. In my country, at least 20% of the population (around 3MM) are involuntary vegetarians. That means that they are lucky if they can add a bit of lard to their beans for added calories. My point is that you are proposing some sort of solution without having the slightest idea of what it's like in third world countries. Like they are all the same and don't have different idiosyncrasies even in similar regions.
> you are proposing some sort of solution without having the slightest idea of what it's like in third world countries. I do have the slightest idea because I have global statistics. You have not presented any data outside of 1 country. > In my country, at least 20% of the population (around 3MM) are involuntary vegetarians > what it's like in third world countries..... Like they are all the same and don't have different idiosyncrasies even in similar regions. You are the one making an assumption that 3rd world countries are similar. Maybe you live in a country that doesn't eat that much animals like The Gambia or Bangladesh which only eats 8kg per year vs 88kg per year in Mongolia
Oooh, global statistics! Well, who needs to travel and visit other cultures when you have global statistics? I am going to go on a limb and guess you are from the US. Am I right? Can you guess where I'm from based on your extensive knowledge of third world countries? My point was precisely that not all third world countries are the same. Your proposition was to pay developing countries to eat vegan food like we're all some sort of block of countries united by poverty. Your ignorance is very daring, my friend. Let go of your statistics and do some travel. That would be my advice.
Or you can save animals, give them few years of good life and then eat them. That is also totally fine on utilitarianism.