Moral intuitions on killing vs. exploiting, cows vs. chickens

I have some questions about moral intuitions. I’m trying to pull a research design out of them. If you have ideas, please do tell! In the meantime, here are some observations.

It’s good when moral reasoning and social incentives coincide

1. I think most people try to behave ethically as they understand it.

2. Social norms generally dominate over moral intuitions. That’s why we can look back at almost everyone in history and think: wow I can’t believe those people had slaves/burned cats for entertainment/etc. Good thing we don’t do anything like that!

3. This is impolite, but there is variance in how much effort people put into behaving ethically. Ask folks in your life: is there an ethical issue where you part substantially from your friends and family, where you routinely say so out loud in a way that puts you and them at loggerheads? I think most people will struggle to come up with an answer. (I suppose this is what Michael Huemer is thinking of when he wonders “whether average human beings possess a conscience.”)

4. Going through more effort can invite more opprobrium — vocally opposing the sexual revolution or abjuring washing machines and celebrating the communal potential of washing clothes by hand, for example — or simply more head-scratching. ‘Vegan’ is easy to explain. Abstaining from all animal products except beef because of beef cattle’s comparatively higher living standards, or because more beef means fewer nematodes and therefore animal less suffering overall, requires explanation. Likewise, buying carbon offsets for your flights puts you in the virtuous category, but not flying at all puts you out of lockstep. It’s good to have a social label around your deviant ideas.

Conflict between folk intuition and expert knowledge

1. Vegetarianism (✅ to eggs & dairy) is probably the socially optimal category in my little world. You get the social benefits of being a conscientious objector to our food system — maybe a little less ingroup solidarity with vegans, but we’re weird so who cares — and you probably almost never make a group choose a new restaurant to accommodate you. Likewise, pescatarian, reducetarian, mostly vegetarian, or avoiding all red meat are legible, virtuous, straightforward-to-oblige categories.

2. But these food choices don’t line up with expert opinion about how to reduce animal suffering. Experts generally accept that beef is less bad for animals than chicken is (likewise for dairy and eggs) for some intuitive-once-you-think-about-them reasons:

   1. Cows are very large, so the average cow produces about 800 lbs of meat, which is about 3200 quarter pounders, vs. ~3.74 lbs of meat per chicken. If you have a beef burger once a week for about six decades, at the end of that, you’ll be single-handedly responsible for killing one cow. It takes 3-4 months of eating a chicken sandwich once a week to eat through the entire chicken. (This guy managed it in a single sitting.)

   2. The same logic applies to milk and eggs. A productive dairy cow produces about 12 tons of milk per year (!) and is slaughtered at somewhere between 4.5 and 6 years old. The average egg-laying hen produces ~300 eggs/year and is slaughtered between 18 and 28 months, depending on where she is raised. Point is, these numbers aren’t even close. A glass of milk is way, way less of a contributor to a dairy cow’s existence/suffering/death than the equivalent of eating eggs.

   3. Ranking farmed animals in terms of welfare, it’s probably beef cattle > dairy cattle > broiler chickens > egg-laying hens.

      1. The within-animal comparisons are hard but the cross-animal comparisons are not: it’s widely accepted that farmed cows live better lives than farmed chickens.

3. Now a tough one: beef vs eggs.

   1. As with egg-laying hens, beef cattle are typically slaughtered at about 18-24 months.

   2. Beef cattle typically live free range for about a year, whereas egg-laying hens spend most of their lives in absolutely brutal conditions. (There has been some progress on the cage-free front.)

   3. Beef cattle produce ~5-7X as many burgers as chickens produce eggs (3200 burgers vs. 450-600 eggs lifetime). A three-egg omelette is about 1% of an egg-laying hen’s annual output.

   4. So, solely in terms of animal suffering, assuming you’re buying factory farmed animal products (you probably are unless you’re making a special effort to avoid it), I’d say beef is better than eggs.

4. But here’s the kicker: there’s a widely shared intuition that killing is wrong in a way that exploiting is not. Eating a burger feels like you’re contributing to killing the animal directly but eating eggs doesn’t. I think this intuition is wrong. But I feel it too. Expert beliefs don’t dislodge my intuitions here.

5. Two ways we might resolve this:

   1. You might add a global warming penalty on beef relative to chicken products. But how large should this penalty be? Back of the envelope, eating a hamburger creates about as much CO2 as driving a RAV4 about 17 miles. Is that something you’d feel guilt about? I doubt it.

   2. You might say a cow’s life is worth more than a chicken’s because they’re higher up on the intelligence chain or something that rhymes with that (sentience or whatever you want to call it). The research I know on this topic suggests people value a cow’s life 8-10X as much as a chicken’s. That would approximately close the gap to making a burger about as ethically bad as a single egg if their lives were of equal quality up to that point, which they almost certainly weren’t. (Comparing beef to chicken meat, again, it’s not even close.)

I think this is interesting, i.e. a good research topic

But what question I want to ask, I don’t know yet:

1. What do vegetarians think about this? What kinds of mental categories do they use?

2. Do the facts matter, i.e. are vegetarians persuadable if I hammer them with how bad eggs are? Or is this really about social identity and is “no meat” a big obvious flag to rally around?

3. Do the global warming differences swamp the animal welfare differences in the decision-making process?

   1. Is that rational? Does it matter?

4. Should we get more vegetarians to switch from eggs to beef? My intuition is yes, but I better be pretty darn sure before I start advocating.

5. Is there some crossover popularity threshold where lactarianism becomes enough of a widely recognized category that it provides a strong virtue signal?

   1. How much stronger would it need to be than the virtue signal of just being vegetarian to make it worth it to give up eggs? (Are social utility and eating utility directly comparable like this? Do people make these kinds of tradeoffs regularly?)

I don’t know the answers to these questions, or whether these are the right questions to be asking. But this is what I’ve been thinking about lately.

If you have ideas for turning this research topic into a research question, I’d be glad to hear them.