[Cross-posted from my blog.]
I've seen some discussion of whether effective altruists have an obligation to be vegan or vegetarian.
The carnivores appear to underestimate the long-term effects of their actions. I see a nontrivial chance that we're headed toward a society in which humans are less powerful than some other group of agents. This could result from slow AGI takeoff producing a heterogeneous society of superhuman agents. Or there could be a long period in which the world is dominated by ems before de novo AGI becomes possible. Establishing ethical (and maybe legal) rules that protect less powerful agents may influence how AGIs treat humans or how high-speed ems treat low-speed ems and biological humans [0]. A one in a billion chance that I can alter this would be worth some of my attention. There are probably other similar ways that an expanding circle of ethical concern can benefit future people.
I see very real costs to adopting an ethical diet, but it seems implausible that EAs are merely choosing alternate ways of being altruistic. How much does it cost MealSquares customers to occasionally bemoan MealSquares use of products from apparently factory-farmed animals? Instead, it seems like EAs have some tendency to actively raise the status of MealSquares [1].
I don't find it useful to compare a more ethical diet to GiveWell donations for my personal choices, because I expect my costs to be mostly inconveniences, and the marginal value of my time seems small [2], with little fungibility between them.
I'm reluctant to adopt a vegan diet due to the difficulty of evaluating the health effects and due to the difficulty of evaluating whether it would mean fewer animals living lives that they'd prefer to nonexistence.
But there's little dispute that most factory-farmed animals are much less happy than pasture-raised animals. And everything I know about the nutritional differences suggests that avoiding factory-farmed animals improves my health [3].
I plan not to worry about factory-farmed invertebrates for now (shrimp, oysters, insects), partly because some of the harmful factory-farm practices such as confining animals to cages not much bigger than the animals in question aren't likely with animals that small.
So my diet will consist of vegan food plus shellfish, insects, wild-caught fish, pasture-raised birds/mammals (and their eggs/whey/butter). I will assume vertebrate animals are raised in cruel conditions unless they're clearly marked as wild-caught, grass-fed, or pasture-raised [4].
I've made enough changes to my diet for health reasons that this won't require large changes. I already eat at home mostly, and the biggest change to that part of my diet will involve replacing QuestBars with a home-made version using whey protein from grass-fed cows (my experiments so far indicate it's inconvenient and hard to get a decent texture). I also have some uncertainty about pork belly [5] - the pasture-raised version I've tried didn't seem as good, but that might be because I didn't know it needed to be sliced very thin.
My main concern is large social gatherings. It has taken me a good deal of willpower to stick to a healthy diet under those conditions, and I expect it to take more willpower to observe ethical constraints.
A 100% pure diet would be much harder for me to achieve than an almost pure diet, and it takes some time for me to shift my habits. So for this year I plan to estimate how many calories I eat that don't fit this diet, and aim to keep that less than 120 calories per month (about 0.2%) [6]. I'll re-examine the specifics of this plan next Jan 1.
Does anyone know a convenient name for my planned diet?
footnotes
0. With no one agent able to conquer the world, it's costly for a single agent to repudiate an existing rule. A homogeneous group of superhuman agents might coordinate to overcome this, but with heterogeneous agents the coordination costs may matter.
1. I bought 3 orders of MealSquares, but have stopped buying for now. If they sell a version whose animal products are ethically produced (which I'm guessing would cost $50/order more), I'll resume buying them occasionally.
2. The average financial value of my time is unusually high, but I often have trouble estimating whether spending more time earning money has positive or negative financial results. I expect financial concerns will be more important to many people.
3. With the probable exception of factory-farmed insects, oysters, and maybe other shellfish.
4. In most restaurants, this will limit me to vegan food and shellfish.
5. Pork belly is unsliced bacon without the harm caused by smoking.
6. Yes, I'll have some incentive to fudge those estimates. My experience from tracking food for health reasons suggests possible errors of 25%. That's not too bad compared to other risks such as lack of willpower.
Orthorexia, the belief that in addition to nutrient values food also contains ethical values. An orthorexic says humans should or should not eat certain things in certain ways because of rights; rights of the eater, rights of the eaten. That rights exist and are known and are universal and can be acted on are all considered axiomatic. Orthorexia can be religious (Genesis 1:30, Quran Chapter 5 Verse 96, Anguttara Nikaya 3.38 Sukhamala Sutta, etc.) and it can be secular (as appears in your case).
Orthorexia holds axiomatic (1) that the emotions of the individual are the same emotions that other humans feel, and (2) that universal human emotions are shared by some or all other living beings. By the first axiom, what is good for the individual is good for others and what is bad for the individual is bad for others. But the good of the individual does not necessarily apply to others; to claim so is an error of category. That which is good for me is that which is good for me. By the second axiom, the unnecessary bridging of the emotions of the individual to others is expanded to the non-human. But the good of humans, even if known and actionable, would not necessarily and naturally be the good of non-humans. I for one would push the 'destroy all human-preying tapeworms' button if given the chance. Bad for all human-preying tapeworms, good for this human.
Orthorexia claims that decisions about food have an influence outside the eater and the eaten, but orthorexia is selective about how far that influence is measured. In the long run - the long, long, long run - it is not possible for any (or all) humans to eat (or not eat) anything and have it influence things more or less than any other choices made in an infinite universe. Given enough time and space (and in an infinite universe that's what we have), all possibilities occur. Orthorexia measures the influence of food choices out far enough to get the desired positive or negative reading then stops.
It is a fine thing to have ideas about what one does and does not eat, and to act on those ideas, and to put those ideas before others for criticism. Orthorexia looks for foundations that are not there and outcomes that do not appear. I suggest it might be more simple, accurate and honest to say what one prefers or dislikes and leave it at that.
I offer a grand prize to the first or loudest reply that misrepresents the above in the following way: I claim rights (in food and elsewhere) do not exist, therefore I claim I have the right (in food and elsewhere) to do something (eat this or that, kill this or that, etc.). Example: 'you say animals have no right to not be eaten, so you must be saying you have the right to eat them.' That is false, but a grand prize is offered for making that misrepresentation.