Epistemic Status: Shower thoughts on how to tweak our unconscious habits to be significantly more impactful

Summary: We have various habits that allow us to consistently make better decisions without thinking. In this post, I argue that a popular one is inefficient and advocate for one that I think would be more impactful.

Disclaimer: I'm a vegetarian who doesn't eat eggs. Also, I did no prior research before writing this post and wrote it in less than an hour. My point isn't that being a vegetarian/vegan is bad or stupid, only that we should look for better and more impactful habits to live our lives by.

Moral assumptions I hold (although some might not be necessary for my argument to work): Consequentialism, hedonic utilitarianism, no speciesism, harmful action is equally as bad as harmful inaction

Money pump

I'm a vegetarian who likes boba. If it's worth the personal cost for me to eat a vegetarian meal to reduce animal suffering slightly, and it's worth the personal cost for me to buy boba instead of donating enough to SWP to save 80,000 shrimp from suffering, then I could be money pumped like this:

1. I give up one animal product-based meal in exchange for a less filling, vegetarian meal, which results in a slightly higher expected quality of life for some animals.
2. I give up that animal quality of life in exchange for 1/80,000th of a boba
3. I give up my 1/80,000th of a boba in exchange for 2 grains of rice

In the end, I'm left with no animal welfare benefits, a smaller vegetarian meal, and 2 grains of rice, which might as well be a rounding error. 

Takeaways

I'm willing to sacrifice the animal welfare gains from eating a vegetarian meal in exchange for basically nothing. So, either my preferences are irrational, I should stop enjoying small luxuries completely, or the benefit I receive from being a vegetarian is something other than direct animal welfare gains.

Aside from the social signalling/anti-value drift benefits, I think that vegetarianism functions as a "moral heuristic" that allows me to consistently do some amount of good when I otherwise might not. A moral heuristic is what I call a mental shortcut we use to make better moral decisions quickly. It's annoying to think about optimization constantly, but as a vegetarian, I can just let System 1 take over when I eat my meals by defaulting to the plant-based options. This is probably sub-optimal in many ways, but it increases the amount of good I do in the real world. Still, it seems inefficient: donating to SWP is clearly more impactful than vegetarianism.^[1] How can we design more impactful moral heuristics?

What makes for a good moral heuristic? 

A good moral heuristic allows you to make good decisions quickly and with little thought. At the margin, they can probably be pressed to demonstrate an irrational preference, but generally, they do real-world good. Here are some examples of what I consider moral heuristics:

1. Taking a Giving What We Can pledge
2. Maintaining various dietary restrictions for animal welfare purposes
3. Tipping

All of these are generally seen as virtuous, require little thought to do, and can probably be shown to be sub-optimal in some way. However, by frequently presenting themselves to people, they motivate people to do good persistently.^[2] Of course, not all moral heuristics are created equal in terms of their impact and sacrifice.

My ideal moral heuristic would be impactful, easy to maintain, and resolve the money pump that I created before.

My Suggestion

I think an easy (and more impactful) moral heuristic would be a self-imposed tax on the luxury goods I purchase, like boba. This tax money would then be donated to various effective charities. In a purely efficiency-maximizing sense, this probably isn't perfectly optimal. However, it softens my money pump (assuming that I can't buy boba without paying this tax, and that I realistically would not use the money I save on not buying boba to donate, which is true), forces me to do more good, and makes me feel a little more internally consistent. 

Image by GPT 5.2

What's a good tax rate? 

I don't know. Something less than 50%, but more than 5%. For the next month, I'll try taxing myself at 20% to see how that goes. I'm not sure how to calculate an optimal number, as most taxes aren't really designed with this type of thing in mind. I'll pay these taxes at the end of every month to minimize transaction fees and annoyance.

"What about dead weight loss?" 

I think the efficiency/impact of this tax system probably outweighs the tiny amount of inefficiency created in my spending habits due to DWL.

If you do this, should you still be a vegetarian? 

Presumably, we all have a maximum willingness-to-sacrifice that, when exceeded, causes us to "burn out" and give less. If you can be a vegetarian, take GWWC, and do this, that's great! However, if you have to choose between adopting a personal luxury good tax at a rate of 1% and abstaining from animal products entirely, I would say that you should take on the tax. It still seems good to choose beef over chicken when given the choice, though.

1. ^{^}

   Abstaining from eating 100 shrimp helps some number fewer than 100 shrimp in expectation (due to complications with elasticities), while giving a dollar to the SWP helps A LOT more shrimp and is probably easier.

2. ^{^}

   All of these things also send valuable social signals to other people. I'm not sure how relevant that is to our current dilemma, though.