Crosspost of my blog.
You shouldn’t eat animals in normal circumstances. That much is, in my view, quite thoroughly obvious. Animals undergo cruel, hellish conditions that we’d confidently describe as torture if they were inflicted on a human (or even a dog). No hamburger is worth that kind of cruelty. However, not all animals are the same. Contra Napoleon in Animal Farm, all animals are not equal.
Cows are big. The average person eats 2400 chickens but only 11 cows in their life. That’s mostly because chickens are so many times smaller than cows, so you can only get so many chicken sandwiches out of a single chicken. But how much worse is chicken than cow?
Brian Tomasik devised a helpful suffering calculator chart. It has various columns—one for how sentient you think the animals are, compared to humans, one for how long the animals lives, etc. You can change the numbers around if you want. I changed the sentience numbers to accord with the results of the most detailed report on the subject (for the animals they didn’t sample, I just compared similar animals), done by Rethink Priorities:
When I did that, I got the following:
Rather than, as the original chart did, setting cows = 1 for the sentience threshold, I set humans = 1 for it. So therefore you should think in terms of the suffering caused as roughly equivalent to the suffering caused if you locked a severely mentally enfeebled person or baby in a factory farm and tormented them for that number of days. Dairy turns out not that bad compared to the rest—a kg of dairy is only equivalent to torturing a baby for about 70 minutes in terms of suffering caused. That means if you get a gallon of milk, that’s only equivalent to confining and tormenting a baby for about 4 and a half hours. That’s positively humane compared to the rest!
Now I know people will object that human suffering is much worse than animal suffering. But this is totally unjustified. Making a human feel pain is generally worse because we feel pain more intensely, but in this case, we’re analyzing how bad a unit of pain is. If the amount of suffering is the same, it’s not clear what about animals is supposed to make their suffering so monumentally unimportant. Their feathers? Their lack of mental acuity? We controlled for that by having the comparison be a baby or a severely mentally disabled person (babies are dumb, wholly unable to do advanced mathematics). Ultimately, thinking animal pain doesn’t matter much is just unjustified speciesism, wherein one takes an obviously intrinsically morally irrelevant feature like species to determine moral worth. Just like racism and sexism, speciesism is wholly indefensible—it places moral significance on a totally morally insignificant category.
Even if you reject this, the chart should still inform your eating decisions. As long as you think animal suffering is bad, the chart is informative. Some kinds of animal products cause a lot more suffering than others—you should avoid the ones that cause more suffering.
Dairy, for instance, causes over 800 times less suffering than chicken and over 1000 times less than eggs. Drinking a gallon of milk a day for a year is then about as bad as having a chicken sandwich once every four months. Chicken is then really really bad—way worse than most other things. Dairy and beef mostly aren’t a big deal in comparison. And you can play around the numbers if you disagree with them—whatever answer you come to should be informative.
I remember seeing this chart was instrumental in my going vegan. I realized that each time I have a chicken sandwich, animals have to suffer in darkness, feces, filth, and misery for weeks on end. That’s not worth a sandwich, no matter how tasty. But if you are going to eat meat, at least lay off the chicken.
So far as it goes, your argument seems correct. But you're leaving out a significant factor here--carbon emissions. Beef cattle are extraordinarily carbon intensive even compared to other animals raised for food. If you eat them, your emissions, combined with other people's emissions, are going to cause a huge amount of both human and non-human suffering.
There's a complication. You could, in principle, offset the damage from your carbon emissions. But you could also, in principle, eat animals who have been raised free range, and whose lives have probably been worth living up to the time they're killed.
Both of these will require you to spend extra money, and investigate whether you're really getting what you pay for. Rather than going to all this trouble--and here we'll agree--it seems a lot better simply to eat an Impossible Burger.
@Vasco Grillo would be well-placed to do the math here, but I have the strong intuition that under most views giving some weight to animal welfare the marginal climate damage from additional beef consumption will be outweighed by animal suffering reduction by a large margin.
Thanks for tagging me, Johannes! I have not read the post, but in my mind one should overwhelmingly focus on minimising animal suffering in the context of food consumption. I estimate the harm caused to farmed animals by the annual food consumption of a random person is 61.2 times that caused to humans by their annual GHG emissions.
Fig. 4 of Kuruc 2023 is relevant to the question. A welfare weight of 0.05 means that one values 0.05 units of welfare in humans as much as 1 unit of welfare in animals, and it would still require a social cost of carbon of over 7 k$/t for prioritising beef reductions over poultry reductions, whereas United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposes one of 190 $/t. If one values 1 unit of welfare the same regardless of species (i.e. if one rejects speciesism), there is basically no way it makes sense to go from beef to poultry (ignoring effects on wild animals; see discussion below).
Vasco, I've read your post to which the first link leads quickly, so please correct me if I'm wrong. However, it left me wondering about two things:
(a) It wasn't clear to me that the estimate of global heating damages was counting global heating damages to non-humans. The references to DALYs and 'climate change affecting more people with lower income' lead me to suspect you're not. But non-humans will surely be the vast majority of the victims of global heating--as well as, in some cases, its beneficiaries. While Timothy Chan is quite right to point out below that this is a complex matter, it's certainly isn't going to be a wash, and if the effects are negative, they're likely to be very bad.
(b) It appears you were working with a study that employed a discount rate of 2%. That's going to discount damages in 100 years to 13% of their present value, and damages in 200 years to 1.9% of their present value--and it goes downhill from there. But that seems very hard to justify. Discounting is often defended on the ground that our descendants will be richer than we are. But that rationale doesn’t apply to damages in worst-case scenarios. Because they could be so enduring, these damages are huge in expectation. Second, future non-humans won’t be richer than we are, so benefits to them don't have diminishing marginal utility compared with benefits to us.
The US government--including, so far as I know, the EPA--uses a discount rate that is higher than two percent, which makes future damages from global heating evaporate even more quickly. What's more, I'd be surprised if it's trying to value damages to wild animals in terms of the value they would attach to avoiding them, as opposed to the value that American human beings do. The latter approach, as Dale Jamieson has observed, is rather like valuing harm to slaves by what their masters would pay to avoid it.
Nice points, Matthew!
I have now clarified my estimate of the harms of GHG emissions only accounts for humans. I have also added:
I have added your name to the Acknowledgements. Let me know if you would rather remain anonymous.
Carleton 2022 presents results for various discount rates, but I used the ones for their preferred value of 2 %. I have a footnote saying:
I used to think this was relevant, but mostly no longer do:
Thanks, Vasco! You are welcome to list me in the acknowledgements. I’m glad to have the reference to Tomasik’s post, which Timothy Chan also cited below, and appreciate the detailed response. That said, I doubt we should be agnostic on whether the overall effects of global heating on wild animals will be good or bad.
The main upside of global heating for animal welfare, on Tomasik’s analysis, is that it could decrease wild animal populations, and thus wild animal suffering. On balance, in his view, the destruction of forests and coral reefs is a good thing. But that relies on the assumption that most wild animal lives are worse than nothing. Tomasik and others have given some powerful reasons to think this, but there are also strong arguments on the other side. Moreover, as Clare Palmer argues, global heating might increase wild animal numbers—and even Tomasik doesn’t seem sure it would decrease them.
In contrast, the main downside, in Tomasik’s analysis, is less controversial: that global heating is going to cause a lot of suffering by destroying or changing the habitats to which wild animals are adapted. ‘An “unfavorable climate”’, notes Katie McShane, ‘is one where there isn’t enough to eat, where what kept you safe from predators and diseases in the past no longer works, where you are increasingly watching your offspring and fellow group members suffer and die, and where the scarcity of resources leads to increased conflict, destabilizing group structures and increasing violent confrontations.' Palmer isn’t so sure: ‘Even if some animals suffer and die, climate change might result in an overall net gain in pleasure, or preference satisfaction (for instance) in the context of sentient animals. This may be unlikely, but it’s not impossible.’ True. But even if it’s only unlikely that global heating’s effects will be good, it means that its effects on existing animals are bad in expectation.
There’s another factor which Tomasik mentions in passing: there is some chance that global heating could lead to the collapse of human civilisation—perhaps in conjunction with other factors. In some respects, this would be a good thing for non-humans—notably, it would put an end to factory farming. It would also preclude the possibility of our spreading wild animal suffering to other planets. On the flipside, however, it would also eliminate the possibility of our doing anything sizable to mitigate wild animal suffering on earth.
Now, while there may be more doubt about the upsides than about the downsides of our GHG emissions, that needn’t decide the issue if the upsides are big enough. But even if Tomasik and others are right that wild animal lives are bad on net, there’s also doubt about whether global heating will reduce the number of wild animal lives. And even if both are these premises are met, I’m not sure they’d outweigh the suffering global heating would inflict on those wild animals who will exist.
I think you have misinterpreted what my article about discounting is recommending. In contrast to some other writers, I’m not calling for discounting at the lowest possible rate. Even at a rate of 2%, catastrophic damages evaporate in cost-benefit analysis if they occur more than a couple of centuries hence, thus giving next to no weight to the distant future. However, a traditional justification for discounting is that if we didn’t, we’d be obliged to invest nearly all our income, since the number of future people could be so great. I argue for discounting damages to those who would be much better off than we are at conventional rates, but giving sizable—even if not equal—weight to damages that would be suffered by everyone else, regardless of how far into the future they exist. My approach thus has affinities with the one advocated by Geir Asheim here.
One implication is that while we’re under no obligation to make future rich people richer, we ought to be very worried about worst-case climate change scenarios, since in those humans could be poorer. Another is that since most non-humans for the foreseeable future will be worse off than we are, we shouldn’t discount their interests away.
Thanks for the follow up, Matthew! Strongly upvoted.
My best guess is also that additional GHG emissions are bad for wild animals, but it has very low resilience, so I do not want to advocate for conservationism. My views on the badness of the factory-farming of birds are much more resilient, so I am happy with people switching from poultry to beef, although I would rather have them switch to plant-based alternatives. Personally, I have been eating plant-based for 5 years.
Just flagging this link seems broken.
Sorry! It sounded so much like you were referring to Weitzman 1998 that I actually did not open the link. My bad! I have now changed "That paper says one should discount" to "One should discount".
I do not think this is a good argument for discounting. If it turns out we should invest nearly all our income to maximise welfare, then I would support it. In reality, I think the possibility of the number of future people being so great is more than offset by the rapid decay of how much we could affect such people, such that investing nearly all our income is not advisable.
This rejects (perfect) impartiality, right? I strongly endorse expected total hedonistic utilitarianism, so I would rather maintain impartiality. At the same time, the above seems like a good heuristic for better outcomes even under fully impartial views.
Thanks, Vasco! That's odd--the Clare Palmer link is working for me. It's her paper 'Does Nature Matter? The Place of the Nonhuman in the Ethics of Climate Change'--what looks like a page proof is posted on www.academia.edu.
One of the arguments in my paper is that we're not morally obliged to do the expectably best thing of our own free will, even if we reliably can, when it would benefit others who will be much better off than we are whatever we do. So I think we disagree on that point. That said, I entirely endorse your argument about heuristics, and have argued elsewhere that even act utilitarians will do better if they reject extreme savings rates.
FYI the link doesn't work for me either
Odd! Perhaps this one will work better.
That works!
Research related to the research OP mentioned found that increases in carbon emissions also come with things that decrease (and increase) suffering in other ways, which has complicated the analysis of whether it results in a net increase or decrease in suffering. https://reducing-suffering.org/climate-change-and-wild-animals/ https://reducing-suffering.org/effects-climate-change-terrestrial-net-primary-productivity/
Beef cattle are not that carbon-intensive. If you're concerned about the climate, the main problem with cattle is their methane emissions.
If I eat beef, my emissions combined with other people's emissions does some amount of harm. If I don't eat beef, other people's emissions do approximately the same amount of harm as there would have been if I had eaten it. The marginal harm from my food-based carbon emissions are really small compared to the marginal harm from my food-based contribution to animal suffering.
Even within the dairy and red meat categories, there are ways to reduce your greenhouse gas emissions. Milk is better than cheese, and lamb is better than beef. Also, mussels and oysters do well on climate and (probably) welfare grounds.
Perhaps it is included in existing comments but there is a forum post on climate change vs global development showing that one should hesitate about always prioritizing the former. Then, as I understand it, if one gives only some weight to animals compared to people, I would expect is very roughly follows that one should definitely be cautious about prioritizing climate change over animal welfare. Hopefully we can find a solution that lets us avoid this trade-off though!