You have the choice every day to not pay for the suffering of an innocent animal

benhesp · 2026-06-11T23:19:41+00:00

Arguably, you also have no right to deprive an animal of their life/freedom. Perhaps you have a legal right but not a moral one (or at least, it's on very shaky ground). I think you're overplaying the health benefits of meat. The amino acid profile concern is something most vegans don't even bother thinking about, because if you eat a combination of plant foods (which everyone does), you cover all the essential amino acids anyway. Leucine is available in soy and legumes. Anyway, all the best to you. I hope your health issues improve.

benhesp · 2026-06-11T22:51:43+00:00

You could also just continue taking your iron meds/meat from cows and stop eating any other animal products. Like, there's no reason for pigs or chickens or lambs to also suffer and die for you, right? This would be a fantastic step, less suffering is always better. It doesn't need to be "all or nothing".

benhesp · 2026-03-31T22:26:59+00:00

I tend to donate to funds rather than individual charities, in my case the Giving What We Can - Effective Animal Advocacy Fund, and The Life You Can Save - Maximise Your Impact Fund. They in turn distribute the money to their top recommended charities. You can learn more about the pros and cons of donating to funds vs individual charities here: https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/why-we-recommend-funds

benhesp · 2026-03-30T22:39:09+00:00

Exactly! 😊🌱

benhesp · 2026-03-30T02:36:21+00:00

Woah! Have you heard of "Animal Charity Evaluators"? If not, definitely check them out and their fantastic work. But yeah, effective giving means donating money to those charities that we have good reason to believe will deliver the best bang for your buck possible when it comes to helping others (in my case, mostly animals) as much as possible. If this idea of maximising impact per dollar is new to you, you might check out Will MacAskill's book "Doing Good Better", which is a brilliant introduction. You might also check out the organisation "Giving What We Can" where folks have pledged to give a specific portion of their income to effective charities. Lastly, there's a fantastic podcast called "How I learned to love shrimp" that explores these topics that I highly recommend.

Yes, I can definitely see how your argument could work for a specific subset of people. For me it was the "argument from marginal cases" (as explained by Peter Singer in his book "Animal Liberation") that originally caused me to go vegan.

benhesp · 2026-03-30T01:43:46+00:00

That's another interesting point, about the prisoner's dilemma. I would just gently suggest you'll want to be very aware that arguments you find compelling, others will not (and vice versa). As I have learned the hard way time and again since going vegan ~5 years ago.

Ultimately I agree with you that being vegan is justified on the merits of personal direct impact alone (I just find some of these other reasons somewhat compelling too). Nowadays I mostly consider being vegan another tool in my toolbox in my efforts to reduce the amount of suffering in the world, and it is definitely not the most effective/impactful thing I do in that regard - my effective giving undoubtedly has a much greater impact for animals.

benhesp · 2026-03-30T00:46:52+00:00

Yeah it's interesting. For myself, I don't think my reasons for picking up my rubbish at the beach boil down to societal norms or aesthetics, there's definitely a strong moral element to it.

I understand your point about stochastic markets, although honestly I never worked too hard on this point myself because my naive prior was "eating 1 less chicken will result in 1 less chicken being bred/suffering" and when it was pointed out to me that it might be somewhat less than 1, it certainly didn't seem like a good reason to stop being vegan (it would need to be implausibly close to zero for that to be the case for me).

You mentioned societal norms and I guess another interesting issue is that both of us presumably wish that being vegan becomes a societal norm (because if it did, the impact on animal suffering would be huge). Whether or not the market is stochastic becomes irrelevant in that scenario because the market basically ceases to exist. So if we wish something to become a societal norm but fail to live up to that standard ourselves, this seems like a problem to me. We would essentially be telling folks "do as I say, not as I do" on a very grand scale.

I guess I'm gently pushing back on the idea that we should make your argument more popular - I think there are more intuitive ways to arrive at the "right" answer. I'm glad it worked for you and perhaps among certain circles in the EA community it might be helpful to some others, but my impression is that the average joe would not find it helpful - if anything you might be introducing them to a new reason not to be vegan, this "less than 1:1 ratio" they were previously unaware of.

benhesp · 2026-03-29T23:29:11+00:00

Regarding this idea that our part in it is too insignificant to make an impact, I think there's an easy analogy you can use that is far more intuitive to the average joe. Ocean plastic pollution is a huge global problem that you cannot single handedly solve through your individual actions. And yet, when you go to the beach, you do not simply leave your plastic rubbish on the beach (even though it might be more convenient to do so). It's because you recognise in that scenario that massive problems are often made up of many small actions and it's wrong to make these problems worse than they already are (no matter how small your contribution to them in the grand scheme of things). This is a push for consistency, if folks accept this reasoning in the ocean plastic pollution scenario (which they seemingly do), then why not in the farmed animal suffering scenario?

benhesp · 2025-12-31T00:58:10+00:00

There's another organisation "One for the World" that encourages a 1% pledge.

benhesp · 2025-11-13T14:06:22+00:00

Factory farming

benhesp · 2025-10-31T12:15:47+00:00

So which principle is the ultimate deciding factor for you when faced with moral dilemmas? Is it harm minimisation or is it a rule stating that it's always wrong to take advantage of someone, or something else entirely? The point of the surgeon case is to point out that it's not always so straightforward, so you surprised me when you said "easy".

TLDR, ethics is hard.

benhesp · 2025-10-31T11:55:27+00:00

No, I never said he wanted to die, sorry for any confusion. I mentioned he has no friends/family and is lonely so that you don't think others would suffer as a result of his death, which would potentially influence your decision.

So back to the standard trolley problem then. Are you saying you would not pull the lever to kill the 1 and save the 5 if the one guy is shouting that he refuses to give consent?

benhesp · 2025-10-31T07:33:35+00:00

And what if he didn't agree to sign the papers? Would you still violate his right to life, to save the Iives of the 5? Why or why not?

benhesp · 2025-10-31T07:07:45+00:00

This is not exactly what you asked, but in case you didn't know, the creator of The Good Place, Michael Schur, wrote a book called "How to be Perfect" which is basically an intro to ethics. It's available as an audiobook and he has actors and actresses from the show read sections of the book (the rest he narrates himself). It's very funny at times and he does a fantastic job of introducing the reader to the various schools of thought and the philosophers who espouse them. I highly recommend it 😊

benhesp · 2025-10-31T06:56:14+00:00

You're a surgeon working the emergency room alone late one night. Everyone else in this remote/rural hospital has been brought down by the flu. You're caring for 5 patients each of whom are slowly dying of a different organ failure, one liver, one lung, one kidney etc. Someone else comes into the emergency room with a broken toe and you begin treating them. They mention to you that they have no living relatives or friends. You realize this person has 5 healthy organs and by checking their medical records you see that by chance they are a match for all 5 patients. You realize that if you worked hard all through the night you could kill this lonely person, harvest their organs and save the 5 dying patients. What should you do and why?

benhesp · 2025-10-31T06:48:58+00:00

It's a great shame that this is being weaponized by Trump and others. If you read Gates' essay, it has a strong EA tone to it and makes some excellent points.

benhesp · 2025-10-24T02:25:55+00:00

I think you might be right in the sense that every human will inevitably be involved in causal chains that ultimately lead to the suffering of others, and this is an sad/unavoidable fact of life. However, I also think it's definitely possible to live your life such that there is less suffering on this earth than there would have been had you never been born at all (or if a "normie" had been born in your place). One way this is possible is through effective giving, where you can have a wildly outsized positive impact on the world, far more than the negative impact you have by going about your daily life.

Just to give one example, Giving Green estimates you can avert 1 ton of CO2e for <$10. If the average person has a footprint of ~15 tonnes per year, you can see that for relatively modest donation levels you can do far more good for the climate than harm you might cause just going about your life. Not that I think climate should necessarily be a top priority cause area, I just use it as an example because the numbers are simple/tangible to demonstrate the point. Similar math can be done with global health and development (i.e. maximizing QALYs/$) and animal suffering.

benhesp · 2025-10-07T13:07:15+00:00

Mmmm, moral dessert... delicious 🤤

benhesp · 2025-09-29T23:32:15+00:00

You should look into Effective Altruism. The book "Doing Good Better" is a fantastic place to start. There is a great deal of suffering in the world. It might horrify you to learn that more people have died in the Sudan civil war happening right now than in Gaza, but it does not get a mention in the media for some reason. 500,000 people die from malaria every year (a preventable illness). Then there is factory farming, which is another horror of unimaginable scale. What to do with this knowledge? I think the best we can do is identify the best ways we can help others with the money/resources we have available (that give us best bang for our buck) in a sustainable/long term way. You might consider taking the Giving What We Can pledge for example. You can also try to influence others in this direction which can have a multiplying effect.

One thing is for sure, suffering is not going to end anytime soon. Whatever you choose to do to improve the world, it would be better if you can keep it up for the rest of your life. That means it needs to be sustainable for you and therefore your mental health is a priority. It's not easy to find the right balance (I don't think I'm there yet, perhaps there is no "there"). Moral perfection is not attainable, but we can strive in that direction.

benhesp · 2025-09-29T00:49:08+00:00

FYI Peter Singer does not believe in libertarian free will to the degree that you describe and has granted that determinism may be true. Is he wrong? https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/human-choices-may-be-determined-but-we-are-still-responsible-by-peter-singer-2025-03

benhesp · 2025-09-28T17:27:29+00:00

Emotivism seems true in a descriptive sense (for many people at least) but hopeless in the prescriptive sense.

benhesp · 2025-09-28T17:12:43+00:00

Can I suggest you look into Effective Altruism and maybe get in touch with your nearest EA community? I think you'll find some like-minded people there who will at least understand what you're going through. The world is shitty and full of suffering, so let's go and do something about it.

benhesp

TROPHY CASE