Flexitarianism

People often act funny when you mix morality and food. I'm sure almost everyone knows people who have become vegans or vegetarians for a while and then given up on it. And I'm sure almost everyone has noticed how people can get weird when discussing the ethics of it (I've noticed many carnivorous folks seem to get mad just when thinking about it). My own views lead me to be a flexitarian (to varying degrees), which basically just means to go somewhere in between vegetarianism and the typical American diet of eating as much meat as we want.

I think almost anyone will agree that, to some extent, the suffering of animals matters. Most don't think the life of an ant is of any moral significance, but we do agree that it's horrible for someone to torture a dog. This is easy to justify: we believe suffering is bad, and we also believe that, when a dog is suffering, that sensation is similar to our sensation of suffering, so we can empathize with a dog. But we don't believe an ant really experiences "suffering" as we know it. However, people rarely come to a completely consistent moral view of animal suffering. I can't think of any good reason why we should care to reduce the suffering of a dog but not care at all about the suffering animals in factory farms.

But there are reasons to be skeptical of veganism/vegetarianism as a moral necessity:

• In many times and places, people have no other choice but to eat animals.
• There are potential health concerns with eating no animal products.
• Nature is more cruel than people often realize, and death is inevitable. If we kill an animal quickly, that is likely better than their inevitable natural death (disease, starvation, eaten by a predator that won't care about ending their life quickly, etc.). That's why people euthanize their pets.
• Even if you're a vegan, the very act of farming vegetables leads to a lot of animal suffering and deaths.

However, with the rise of factory farming, where animals sometimes live their whole life unable to even walk around, have to be pumped full of antibiotics everyday to stay alive, and are made so heavy that their legs can snap, there's plenty of reason to be concerned with the impact of our food choices even if you don't think there's anything intrinsically wrong with eating meat.

But I think people have a strange tendency to take an all-or-none approach to moralizing our consumption of animal products. When they seriously think about what it must be like to be a pig in a factory farm, they feel bad for the pig. But they also have reasons to think not eating any animal products isn't necessary or practical, so they just give up on the entire idea of ethical eating. And some people just instantly reject the idea, and I think that's usually for reasons along the lines of something that 80000hours recently posted: "we mostly have a strong desire, arguably a need, to believe that we are good, moral people. This means that if you present someone with a piece of information which seems to contradict that belief, they’re not going to like it very much."

But defensiveness, and our strange tendency to think in an all-or-none way, are not good ways to base our decisions. Even if we don't think vegetarianism is necessary, people should at least be able to agree that we should make some effort to eat less animal products for one or more of the following reasons:

• If animal suffering matters at all, then an act that leads to less suffering is morally preferable to an act that leads to more suffering.
• Most medical institutions that study healthy eating recommend a plant-based diet along the lines of a flexitarian/Mediterranean diet.
• Eating plants is a more efficient use of the world's resources than eating animals. We can use land/water/resources to grow plants and eat directly. But for eating animals, we do that plus more land/water/resources to raise the animals, feed them those plants, then eat the animals. The fact that we don't see this reflected more in the price of meat is largely due to weird policies and subsidies from our government.
• Eating meat leads to more pollution than eating plants (largely for the reasons above). Ruminants in particular (like cows and goats) are basically methane factories.

So, combining everything above, maybe it'd be most helpful to think of our consumption of animals more along the lines that we think about giving to charity. Most agree that, if you are well-off, you should give some of your money to charity. We admire, not criticize for not doing more, someone who gives 10% of their money to charity. But that doesn't mean it wouldn't be more admirable to give 20%. Similarly, we should admit that our choices of what to eat have a variety of effects on the well-being of others. We should try to make choices to reduce suffering rather than increase it, whether by just eating less animal products, choosing chicken over beef more often out of environmental concerns, or choosing to buy free-range meat more often than factory-farmed meat. And like varying degrees of giving to charity, we can view eating no meat as more admirable than eating some meat without implying that people who eat some meat are evil. We are instinctive meat eaters, and it's admirable to resist our impulses to any degree out of concern for the consequences of our actions.

However, also similar to charity, if I'm being honest I have to say the main reason I'm a flexitarian rather than a vegetarian is selfishness. Eating good food is my favorite thing ever, and I really like many types of meat and dairy products. But the fact is that all of our actions are a result of an awkward compromise between the extent of our concern for others and the extent of our selfishness. I'm too selfish to only make eating decisions based off concern for others, but it's not hard to usually order tofu instead of meat if I want Thai food, paneer if I want Indian, falafel if I want Greek, or black beans & guacamole when I go to Chipotle. When buying food to make at home, it's not hard to usually have PB&J over turkey sandwiches, or marinara sauce over meat sauce, or eggs from free-range chickens over factory-farmed chickens. And I think everyone can, and should, take those things into consideration.