Should anyone be vegan?
Epistemic status: I might disagree with this in a month, not sure
As someone who is vegan, “should you be vegan” seems like a stupid question. Why the hell would you be vegan if you didn’t think it was a good idea?
Animal welfare charity evaluators initially started by pushing make-people-go-vegan interventions like vegan leafletting. That is, until the rather obvious fact that almost no-one goes vegan by reading a leaflet was discovered.
The movement then broadly pivoted away from direct interventions to campaigning to improve the lives of farmed animals on the margin – things like corporate campaigning to get egg producers to commit to not caging their hens, or lobbying governments to ban or phase out the cruelest practices that farmers used when raising animals for food.
On the surface, being vegan seems obviously not worth it. There’s a huge personal cost, and for pennies you can massively improve the lives of farmed animals through personal donations.11. It’s beyond the scope of this post, but one could argue that reducing one’s own meat intake isn’t fungible with donating to animal charities. Some of those charities will do things that are positive in expectation but don’t pan out – bringing a legal case that they lose, for example. You might prefer the certainty of not eating animals, although of course it’s possible that the difference in the number of animals killed for food is smaller than expected (or at least is again positive only in expectation), assuming that the supply of animal products isn’t perfectly elastic.
Going below zero
There’s a parallel with people who valiantly strive to reduce their carbon footprint by not flying or by leaving the central heating off: you can’t reduce your energy use below zero, whereas if you simply bought carbon offsets then the your bank account is the limit.
(This applies beyond the personal level – Britain is responsible for 0.8% of global CO2 emissions, so we can by definition only reduce global emissions by that much.)
The most beautiful case of this was the Guardian out-Guardianing itself by suggesting that, instead of flying places, you should go by container ship. It makes for a cute story and who knows, maybe it’s fun to spend two weeks on the Ever Given and hope it doesn’t get stuck in the Suez Canal. But here’s how it stacks up against flying:
The container ship + train option took 15 days and costs at minimum €1900 including offsets, and probably closer to €3500 if you use a realistic sleeper berth price
Flying takes 24 hours with one stopover and costs €330 (and emits about 0.4 tonnes of CO2)
So the grown up answer is: fly, and use the money left over to buy high-integrity carbon offsets and offset sixty tonnes of CO2 – enough for you and 150 other passengers on the plane.22. I’ve found that some people immediately respond by saying “carbon offsetting doesn’t work/is a scam”, which is mostly motivated reasoning – if done well, carbon offsetting definitely works. And if for some reason you don’t want to believe that, you can instead donate to the Clean Air Task Force, which advances technologies and policies to reduce carbon emissions and is a top-rated charity in the space.
Offsetting your evil non-veganism
Going vegan doesn’t really make sense for the same reason: you can just not be vegan and instead spend your money on donations to effective animal charities. And even if you’re not willing to assign a dollar value to the personal cost of being vegan, you could take the extra money you’re spending on vegan food and then donate that to animal charities, and you’re almost certainly still ahead.
Money is the unit of caring and if you really want to make a difference, you give your money to people who can do that most effectively rather than socially signalling you are a good person by e.g. not flying.
Charity FarmKind offers ‘moral offsetting’ (although they don’t use the term): through their website you can donate to effective animal charities and reduce the suffering of farmed animals to offset the harm you cause by eating meat.
They suggest that for $26 a month you can offset the average American’s animal product consumption, plus buy offsets for the CO2 emitted from farming those animals. This is pretty cool: it helps animals, and it puts the idea of offsetting into the memeplex, which broadly seems a good thing (like carbon offsets, which are just robustly better than reducing your own carbon dioxide output). If people aren’t going to go vegan or vegetarian (they aren’t), this is a very good second best.
Given I’ve just written 500 words on why being vegan is stupid, you might think this is the post telling the world I’m no longer vegan. So why don’t I bite the bullet and take my own advice?
Spreading the meme is valuable
There’s some basic human trait that says: what you do is who you are, and changing your behaviour in a costly way tells others that you’re taking it seriously. People see you doing things that are clearly difficult and it makes them realise wow, this guy actually is putting his money where his mouth is.
Ultimately, the thing that made me go vegan was dating two vegan girls in quick succession.
Neither was critical of me being non-vegan. And neither attempted to make me go vegan, or even suggested it. They were just there, being angelically moral superhumans, cooking delicious vegan meals and judging me silently not mentioning it.
To be clear, I don’t think this is an effective strategy in the conventional sense. Them quietly hoping I would go vegan through the mere exposure effect was surely less effective than just donating a bunch of money to The Humane League. And them not caring about me going vegan makes even less sense. But it wasn’t nothing, and they meaningfully spread the meme, and so I spread the meme unto you, like some sort of tofu-loving apostle.
Internal inconsistency feels bad
There’s another benefit to living in accordance with your values:
You get to live in accordance with your values.
Doing the thing you know is bad and then paying money to offset it has a cost. Some will feel bad about it, dirty. You know you’re doing something wrong, and that you believe to be wrong, even if you’re buying yourself an affordance. Being a certain way propagates values (even if just to yourself) in a way that paying doesn’t replicate.
Living in accordance with your values is its own reward. Or at the very least, not living in accordance with your values exerts a constant, ongoing cost on your psyche.
That was the other part of my going vegan: the constant gnawing sense of doing something I know is wrong.
I don’t think non-vegans should beat themselves up, nor should vegans self-flagellate when they cave and buy a Twix (mmm). But there is something exhausting about constantly reminding yourself that you’re doing something you know to be wrong.
You get to model a better world
Ultimately, we strive for a world where animals are not bred, imprisoned and tortured because they and their secretions taste good.
(I also don’t think this applies to carbon offsetting. Moving around where carbon dioxide is emitted does not have the same moral cost as paying someone to improve animal welfare while still funding the industry that harms them. It’s possible you believe that getting to net zero will require a total phase-out of fossil fuels; I don’t personally believe this.)
It’s possible to donate to charities that have this as their specific aim, if that’s what you prefer – whether by doing vegan advocacy directly, like DxE or Animal Equality, or by working to create technologies to replace animal products altogether, like GFI. (I am not convinced this is the right approach, but that’s beyond the scope of this post.)
But being non-vegan is still in some sense being complicit in the system which you wish to destroy. I think this is at least somewhat… strange. It feels like an abolitionist keeping slaves, while donating to an anti-slavery charity because it’s more effective. If he’s only going to do one thing he should do the more effective one, I guess, but I still think he should do both.
Not everyone will feel bad about doing harm, even those who are animal welfare-pilled. Maybe you can be just fine eating pork and giving money to FarmKind. But I found that, after many years of taking psychic damage, I just didn’t want to do it any more.