I.
The other day I was asking someone why he didn’t identify as an EA. “I’m just not a very moral person,” he said. “Oh,” I hastened to reassure him, “I mean, me neither.”
II.
I was thinking about Scott’s recent post on his trouble with accepting that animals have moral value. Lots of people have trouble with this, and lots of other people will tell you it’s because it’s really hard to accept that you’re committing a horribly immoral act every time you eat a steak. But I realized I’ve always found that kind of odd, because for me it wasn’t hard at all.
I think I always implicitly believed that animals mattered. But my first contact with animal rights memes wasn’t until high school, when I learned that animals on factory farms lead really terrible lives. And my reaction was, “Okay. I guess eating meat is really terrible then.” And I kept on eating meat for the next three years, eating less and less and eventually realizing that I’d found enough vegetarian foods I liked that going vegetarian wouldn’t be much of an inconvenience.
When I heard the Peter Singer drowning child thought experiment, my reaction was, “Hmm, I guess spending money on myself beyond the basic requirements of living rather than donating it is morally equivalent to murder. Maybe I should start donating 10%.”
When I heard that animals farmed for eggs and milk suffer just as much as those farmed for meat (this somehow never occurred to high school me) my reaction was, “Okay, I guess eating eggs and milk is morally equivalent to torturing animals for fun.” This was two years ago and giving up dairy is still on my to-do list, somewhere between “read more books” and “learn to do makeup.” But it took me about a day to intellectually accept the idea, and right now I eat ice cream all the time and feel no guilt at all.
III.
I think if I were more scrupulous I would be more inclined to extreme acts of altruism. I’d be more likely to give, say, 50% of my income (once I get a job) if I had some guilt motivating me; as it is I don’t know if I’ll have enough willpower to give that much. But my lack of scrupulosity does make it easier to take moral ideas seriously, and I think as an EA that’s really important.