The Nonlinear Library EA - Confessions of a Cheeseburger Ethicist by Richard Y Chappell
Nov 18, 2023
07:23
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Confessions of a Cheeseburger Ethicist, published by Richard Y Chappell on November 18, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
Eric Schwitzgebel invokes the "cheeseburger ethicist" - a moral philosopher who agrees that eating meat is wrong, but eats meat anyway - as the paradigm of failing to walk the walk of one's moral philosophy.
The example resonates with me, since people often assume that as a utilitarian I must also be vegan. It can be a little embarrassing to have to correct them. I agree that I should be a vegan, in the sense that there's no adequate justification for most purchases of animal products. I certainly think highly of vegans. And yet… I'm not one. (Sorry!)
So I am a "cheeseburger ethicist". And yet… I'm not unmoved by the practical implications of my moral theorizing. I'm actually quite committed to putting my ethics into practice, in a number of respects (e.g. donating a substantial portion of my income, pursuing intellectually honest inquiry into important questions, and maintaining a generally forthright and co-operative disposition towards others). I'm just not especially committed to avoiding moral mistakes, or acting justifiably in each instance.
If I'm right about this, then even a "cheeseburger ethicist" may still be "walking the walk", so long as their practical priorities correspond (sufficiently closely) to those prescribed by their moral theory.
But while disagreeing with Schwitzgebel about the significance of self-ascribed error, I take myself to be further confirming his subsequent claim that "walking the walk" helps to flesh out the substantive content of a moral view. After all, it's precisely by reflecting on how I take myself to be living a broadly consequentialist-approved life that we can see that avoiding moral mistakes per se isn't a high priority (for consequentialists of my stripe). It really matters how much good it would do to remedy the mistake, and whether your efforts could be better spent elsewhere.
Don't sweat the small stuff
As I wrote in response to Caplan's conscience objection:
[W]e aren't all-things-considered perfect. It's really tempting to make selfish [or short-sighted] decisions that are less than perfectly justified, and in fact we all do this all the time. Humans are inveterate rationalizers, and many seem to find it irresistible to contort their normative theories until they get the result that "actually we've most reason to do everything we actually do." But when stated explicitly like this, we can all agree that this is pure nonsense, right?
We should just be honest about the fact that our choices aren't always perfectly justified. That's not ideal, but nor is it the end of the world.
Of course, some mistakes are more egregious than others. Perhaps many reserve the term 'wrong' for those moral mistakes that are so bad that you ought to feel significant guilt over them. I don't think eating meat is wrong in that sense. It's not like torturing puppies (just as failing to donate enough to charity isn't like watching a child drown in this respect). Rather, it might require non-trivial effort for a generally decent person to pursue, and those efforts might be better spent elsewhere.
That doesn't mean that eating meat is actually justified. Rather, the suggestion is that some genuinely unjustified actions aren't worth stressing over. On my view, we should prioritize our moral efforts, and put more effort into making changes that have greater moral payoffs. For most people, their top moral priority should probably just be to donate more to effective charities.[2] Some may be in a position where they can do even more good via high-impact work.
Personal consumption decisions have got to be way down the list of priorities, by contrast. And even within that sphere, we can subdivide it into the "low hanging fruit" ...
Eric Schwitzgebel invokes the "cheeseburger ethicist" - a moral philosopher who agrees that eating meat is wrong, but eats meat anyway - as the paradigm of failing to walk the walk of one's moral philosophy.
The example resonates with me, since people often assume that as a utilitarian I must also be vegan. It can be a little embarrassing to have to correct them. I agree that I should be a vegan, in the sense that there's no adequate justification for most purchases of animal products. I certainly think highly of vegans. And yet… I'm not one. (Sorry!)
So I am a "cheeseburger ethicist". And yet… I'm not unmoved by the practical implications of my moral theorizing. I'm actually quite committed to putting my ethics into practice, in a number of respects (e.g. donating a substantial portion of my income, pursuing intellectually honest inquiry into important questions, and maintaining a generally forthright and co-operative disposition towards others). I'm just not especially committed to avoiding moral mistakes, or acting justifiably in each instance.
If I'm right about this, then even a "cheeseburger ethicist" may still be "walking the walk", so long as their practical priorities correspond (sufficiently closely) to those prescribed by their moral theory.
But while disagreeing with Schwitzgebel about the significance of self-ascribed error, I take myself to be further confirming his subsequent claim that "walking the walk" helps to flesh out the substantive content of a moral view. After all, it's precisely by reflecting on how I take myself to be living a broadly consequentialist-approved life that we can see that avoiding moral mistakes per se isn't a high priority (for consequentialists of my stripe). It really matters how much good it would do to remedy the mistake, and whether your efforts could be better spent elsewhere.
Don't sweat the small stuff
As I wrote in response to Caplan's conscience objection:
[W]e aren't all-things-considered perfect. It's really tempting to make selfish [or short-sighted] decisions that are less than perfectly justified, and in fact we all do this all the time. Humans are inveterate rationalizers, and many seem to find it irresistible to contort their normative theories until they get the result that "actually we've most reason to do everything we actually do." But when stated explicitly like this, we can all agree that this is pure nonsense, right?
We should just be honest about the fact that our choices aren't always perfectly justified. That's not ideal, but nor is it the end of the world.
Of course, some mistakes are more egregious than others. Perhaps many reserve the term 'wrong' for those moral mistakes that are so bad that you ought to feel significant guilt over them. I don't think eating meat is wrong in that sense. It's not like torturing puppies (just as failing to donate enough to charity isn't like watching a child drown in this respect). Rather, it might require non-trivial effort for a generally decent person to pursue, and those efforts might be better spent elsewhere.
That doesn't mean that eating meat is actually justified. Rather, the suggestion is that some genuinely unjustified actions aren't worth stressing over. On my view, we should prioritize our moral efforts, and put more effort into making changes that have greater moral payoffs. For most people, their top moral priority should probably just be to donate more to effective charities.[2] Some may be in a position where they can do even more good via high-impact work.
Personal consumption decisions have got to be way down the list of priorities, by contrast. And even within that sphere, we can subdivide it into the "low hanging fruit" ...