DRMacIver's Notebook
Cheeseburger Ethics
Cheeseburger Ethics
Another draft-amnesty post extracting a usable excerpt from an attempted book length project, though lightly edited from the version in draft. Originally based on a Twitter thread of mine.
An important tool of ethical reasoning I use is the cheeseburger threshold: Asking whether an act is ethically better or worse than eating a cheeseburger.
This is useful because some bad things we do are bad like murder, and some are bad like eating cheeseburgers, and the standards we hold those different types of act to should be very different.This is not unlike the classic distinction between a venial and a mortal sin, but I like making the distinction this way better, both for the examples and because I’m not that interested in whether your action counts as turning away from god.
The key distinguish factor is that something is murder-bad if the ethically correct amount to do of it is zero, while it is cheeseburger-bad if some amount of it is morally permissible and incremental reductions are morally virtuous even if they don’t - and aren’t intended to - get you to zero.There are of coure strict vegetarians who would hold that eating a cheeseburger is as bad as murder, but even most vegetarians who believe that the correct amount of cheeseburgers to eat is zero will generally treat it as being in a different reference class to murder.
Why cheeseburger-bad?
There are clearly negative consequences to eating a cheeseburger - the meat industry has many ethical problems, and even the most ethically produced cheeseburger in which everyone in the pipeline was well paid, all the animals were well treated, etc. has significant environmental costs. Probably even if not vegetarian one should assign some ethical significance to the life of the cows killed in making the cheeseburger (both for the meat and for the cheese), and that too should be factored in.
But also cheeseburgers are convenient and delicious and widely culturally accepted as permissible to eat and so, despite the harms, we eat cheeseburgers.
Possibly you’re vegetarian, or vegan, or hindu, or keep kosher. In which case I encourage you to substitute your own similar badness act for the cheeseburger. I like the cheeseburger example because the harms are so clear - as much as we like to ignore them - and eating it is so clearly culturally permitted. But you could consider, for example, driving a car as another cheeseburger style act (environmental cost, noise pollution, risk of injury to others, etc).
Another cheeseburger-bad act might be pirating movies or TV shows. It’s on its own a “victimless” crime if you wouldn’t otherwise have bought the thing pirated (of course, it’s easy to convince yourself of that. Would you really not have?). Certainly the harms of pirating a digital good are relatively minor. And yet, in aggregate, piracy does seem to cause a lot of harms, especially to independent authors, publishers, and developers.
I will continue to be using cheeseburgers as my example.
The point is that cheeseburger-bad acts are things that we acknowledge have harms, and that a maximally virtuous version of yourself might choose to avoid cheeseburgers entirely. The current version of you could, and possibly should, also choose to eat fewer cheeseburgers, and we would acknowledge this as morally virtuous, without requiring that you cut out on cheeseburgers entirely for it to count.
In contrast, the ethically correct amount of murder is zero. You do not get points for saying “Yeah, I know murder is bad, I’m trying to cut down”. Murder is bad enough that by the time “I’m trying to cut down” is a consideration, you are already beyond the ethical pale.
Although I’ve phrased it as a threshold for how bad an act is, using this tool more a question of how (if at all) you can reform from performing such an act.I think this may be a sign that I’m framing this wrong tbh. “Is it as bad as eating a cheeseburger?” is a useful framing question, but really what I’m talking about is something more like categories of ethical acts. Commensurability of acts is part of it but not all of it. A habitual murderer doesn’t need to cut down, they need to change their very way of being. A habitual cheeseburger-eater just needs to cut down.This is again a subject on which many vegetarians would differ because they would in fact regard cheeseburger-eating as requiring a fundamental reform of your character. I suggest again replacing this with another example.
I think it’s very hard for sufficiently many cheeseburger-bad acts to add up to murder-bad. Someone who eats cheeseburgers for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, is rude to everyone he meets, drives loud gas guzzling cars everywhere, and generally goes out of his way to do every pettily immoral and inconsiderate act he can think of is still not doing something murder-bad. The correct approach here is still to cut down, and every step along the way to doing so is morally praiseworthy.Although they may be enough of a jerk that you don’t want to praise them. You can think of this instead as being incrementally less morally blameworthy.
In contrast, say, running a scam is murder-bad despite not being nearly as bad as murder - you can’t think of reform from this as trying to cut down on the scams you run, you need to become a person who does not run scams.
Why make this distinction?
The main reason is because it’s important to be able to acknowledge that some things we do are bad without it being a big deal. Having a class of actions which we acknowledge are bad but don’t consider ourselves morally obliged to eliminate entirely allows us to make incremental improvements, which has good effects. If we treated all cheeseburger-bad things as murder-bad, this creates a very strong incentive against recognising them as bad at all.
The cheeseburger example works very well here: Even from a strict vegetarian’s point of view, it should be considered preferable for 100% of people to cut out 90% of their meat consumption than for 50% of people to go full vegetarian. Also, most people aren’t and are not going to become vegetarian, and being able to view their actions as worth reducing without having to
Being able to acknowledge the harms of our own behaviour without being overwhelmed with guilt allows us to take a proper reflective look at our own behaviour and, where we decide it’s worth it, improve it, and where we decide that’s too much work, helps put it in perspective.
Afterword
See also Things I believe about ethics and personal development and some of its thoughts on guilt.