Since roughly 2009, I’ve wrestled daily with how to be a moral eater. My thoughts and uncertainties have evolved over time, so as both a time capsule for myself and an exercise in writing-clarifies-thinking, I thought I’d jot down my current status.

Where I’m at

Eating

• I don’t eat any land animals.
• I don’t eat sea animals that seem especially smart (e.g. octopuses, dolphins).
• I do eat other sea creatures sporadically, perhaps once a week, and increasingly with unease about the ethics involved.
  • Exception: I’m medium confident oysters don’t get moral consideration and would eat them with abandon if that were logistically and financially easy. Clams, mussels, etc. might fall in the same category; not sure.
• I eat lots of dairy and eggs, though when purchasing myself I’ll pay approximately any price premium for a product that seems likely to come from an animal treated better than factory farm default. In practice this means certified humane eggs and organic dairy, but I think I would pay double that price level for a certified super-extra-humane version.
• I’m excited by plant based replacements for animal based products but haven’t found many worth eating. I think my whole list of recommendations is:
  • Beyond and Impossible breakfast sausage patties (not links, which are strangely dramatically worse);
  • Impossible burgers are tolerable but not obviously better than black bean burgers or falafel;
  • Oat milk replaces dairy milk well most of the time; Leyla and I like Minor Figures;
  • MyBacon is super good mycellium based bacon.

Uncertainties

Topics about which I have only loose opinions and low confidence, in no particular order:

1. What is the nature of consciousness? Which animals are conscious, and to what extent?
2. What is the relationship between consciousness, sentience (if that’s even something else), intelligence, and moral status? What does this imply about various animals’ moral status?
3. What is the effect of various diet choices on animal well-being?
   • This gets especially tricky if you start thinking about wild animal welfare. Which you should. It’s just guaranteed to get you to some wild places.
   • Factory farming seems to be outrageously dismally terrible. I’m not 100% confident in this; I have slivers of credence in worlds where animals lack moral status or for opaque utilitarian reasons factory farming is actually good. But if I had a magic “end factory farming immediately and permanently, no take-backs” button, I think I would press it in good faith.
4. What obligations do humans have to maximize / increase / not drastically harm animal well-being via our dietary choices?
5. To what extent are individuals morally responsible for the direct and indirect results of their actions?
6. Is moral responsibility even a coherent concept, or relevant to how we should act?
7. Even absent obligations and responsibilities, do we have opportunities to reduce suffering / increase justice / etc. via our choices?

Put all this together, and my uncertainty set is roughly the triangle with vertices at

• meat eating a la the typical American diet is morally comparable to a lifetime of being a sadist serial killer and anything shy of full veganism is unacceptable;
• meat eating is morally good;
• dietary choices are unrelated to morality and ethics.

My beliefs are not uniform over that triangle. It seems likely to me that many animals have some consciousness, ability to suffer, and moral standing, and that it is morally good to live in such a way as to reduce the suffering of other conscious creatures. Given that, limiting meat consumption seems like a reasonable precautionary principle. Being fully vegan would probably be maximally precautionary, but I find the lifestyle sacrifices very difficult. I weakly think my current diet avoids the great majority of suffering in a typical American diet, and I seem to have converged here because marginal ethical worries and lifestyle sacrifices balance. But on the scale of decades that equilibrium point has moved, and I wouldn’t be surprised to find myself fully vegetarian in five years or vegan in ten.

I also hope that meat and dairy alternatives (including animal-free production of animal products) become so good that there’s no longer a lifestyle cost to avoiding animal-derived foods. I look forward to being the early adopter who pays 10x market rate for lab grown meat and precision fermented dairy.