At what step do you stop agreeing with this logical argument relating to animals? For each step, I’m also showing the percentage of disagreements on social media that involved this step (either direct disagreements with the step or disagreements with its premise). (There were a total of 63 such disagreements described across my posts on Facebook and X.)

Note: any time the argument mentions something being wrong or immoral, you can treat it either as referring to something being (a) objectively wrong (if you believe in objective moral truth) or (b) wrong according to your own personal moral values (if you don’t believe in objective moral truth).

Step 1: Mammals (like dogs, cats, and pigs) and birds (like parrots and chickens) are capable of suffering.

1.6% of disagreements shared with me on social media involved this step.

Step 2: It’s wrong to cause suffering to dogs and cats if the reason you do it is just because it leads to you getting a small amount of pleasure relative to the suffering caused (e.g., if someone finds it fun to kick dogs and cats, it’s immoral for them to do so merely for pleasure).

11.1% of disagreements shared with me on social media involved this step.

Step 3: It’s wrong to cause suffering to pigs and chickens if the reason you do it is just because it leads to you getting a small amount of pleasure relative to the suffering caused (e.g., if someone finds it fun to kick pigs and chickens, it’s immoral for them to do so merely for pleasure).

None of the disagreements shared with me on social media involved this step.

Step 4: It’s wrong to cause suffering to pigs and chickens if the only reason you do it is a small amount of convenience relative to the suffering caused (e.g., if kicking a dog or pig in the face is more convenient because it causes it to go into its pen a little faster, it’s immoral to do so merely for this convenience).

6.3% of disagreements shared with me on social media involved this step.

Step 5: It is wrong to cause suffering to pigs and chickens merely for pleasure and convenience, even if the mechanism by which you cause this suffering is by paying someone else who then creates the suffering (e.g., if you pay someone to kick an animal because you enjoy seeing an animal be kicked, or you pay someone to kick an animal because the animal is in your way, that is still immoral even though you didn’t cause the harm with your own body).

4.8% of disagreements shared with me on social media involved this step.

Step 6: On large factory farms in the U.S., most of the pigs and chickens suffer a great deal and experience more pain than pleasure (i.e., net negative utility) throughout their lives (e.g., most egg-laying hens live in tiny cages where they can barely move most of their lives, and pigs are often kept in crowded barns with concrete floors and no ability to roam).

11.1% of disagreements shared with me on social media involved this step.

Step 7: The vast majority of egg and (non-fish) meat products sold at stores in the U.S. come from large factory farms.

None of the disagreements shared with me on social media involved this step.

Step 8: By purchasing egg and pork products from stores that use large factory farms as the suppliers for these products, throughout your whole life, you increase the number of chickens and pigs raised on factory farms (in an expected value sense – just as predicted by standard economic theory regarding what happens to production when demand increases).

1.6% of disagreements shared with me on social media involved this step.

Step 9: The vast majority of people in the U.S. could switch to a diet that doesn’t involve eating factory-farmed pork and eggs without increasing the amount of money they spend on food (e.g., most could find an egg-free vegetarian diet that is as cheap or cheaper than their current diet, or a diet that otherwise avoids factory-farmed pork and eggs).

12.7% of disagreements shared with me on social media involved this step.

Step 10: The vast majority of people in the U.S. could switch to a diet that doesn’t involve eating factory-farmed pork and eggs without sacrificing their health (e.g., most could find an egg-free vegetarian diet that’s as healthy or healthier for them than their current diet, or a healthy diet that otherwise avoids factory-farmed pork and eggs).

19.0% of disagreements shared with me on social media involved this step.

Step 11: Something having been done naturally by our ancient ancestors, or being a tradition, or being a result of evolution, does not make something morally okay (e.g., even if it was common for humanity’s ancient ancestors to commit rape, or if a group had a tradition of committing rape, or if human evolution favored those who raped, that would not make rape any less immoral).

3.2% of disagreements shared with me on social media involved this step.

Step 12: For most Americans, the only sacrifices they’d be making to switch to a well-thought-through diet free of factory-farmed pork and eggs would be a reduction of some pleasure (if they enjoy factory-farmed pork and eggs) and a loss of some convenience (when alternative food is not as convenient to obtain).

22.2% of disagreements shared with me on social media involved this step.

Step 13: In most cases (e.g., when there aren’t overriding health concerns, dietary restrictions, or a lack of availability of alternative foods), it is immoral for Americans to buy most pork and egg products from most stores in the U.S.

3.2% of disagreements shared with me on social media involved this step.

Step 14: The majority of Americans are acting immorally in their current purchasing behaviors regarding pork and eggs, but most of them could switch their behavior without excessive difficulty so as to have more ethical food purchasing behaviors (e.g., by adopting an egg-free vegetarian diet, or by avoiding buying animal products that come from factory farms, etc.).

3.2% of disagreements shared with me on social media involved this step.

This piece was first written on November 9, 2024, and first appeared on my website on January 22, 2025.

This is the second of five posts in my sequence of essays about my life philosophy, Valuism – here are the first, third, fourth, and fifth parts.

Pretty much all of us have multiple intrinsic values (things we value for their own sake, not merely as a means to an end). This means that sometimes our intrinsic values come into conflict. For example, you might value:

• Both achieving ambitious goals and experiencing pleasure 
• Both your family’s well-being and the well-being of all people on Earth
• Both honesty and kindness

In cases like these, it can be difficult to maximize both values because working on one takes away from the other. If you spend most of your free time pursuing fun hobbies that give you pleasure, it may be difficult to achieve your ambitious goals; if you spend all your money on nice things for your family, you won’t have anything left to give to strangers; if you seek to be honest in all your interactions, you will sometimes say things that are unkind.

In this post, I describe how I approach dilemmas like this (as seen through the lens of Valuism – my life philosophy).

Handling Conflicting Values

When you’re in a situation where your intrinsic values conflict with each other, I think it is most helpful to avoid rejecting any of the values involved – yet we often do exactly that. We may try to dismiss (or act as if we do not have) one or more of our intrinsic values, especially if our social group or the culture around us respects some of our values but not others. For instance, if you value both ambitious achievement and having a pleasurable life, but the culture around you denigrates pleasure, you may want to assign pleasure a weight of zero (i.e., you may act as if you do not value pleasure) any time that it comes into conflict with ambition.

Rather than rejecting any of your values, I think it’s usually more helpful to carefully consider how your values trade off against each other in a given scenario.

To illustrate this with another example, many people value the happiness of other people but also value speaking the truth. Sometimes these collide. If a friend of yours writes a play and asks you if you like it, but you think it is terrible, you might feel conflicted between telling the truth and saying what you think will make your friend feel happy. If you value both truth-telling and your friend’s happiness, then both are worth taking into account in the decision.

Many people who strongly value both truth and happiness would find it worthwhile (according to their values) to sacrifice a little truth to produce a lot of happiness. They might, for example, be willing to tell a white lie to protect a friend from strong negative feelings. But they may not think it worthwhile to sacrifice a lot of truth to produce just a little happiness, for instance, by making up an elaborate lie just to make a friend feel slightly happier.

Intrinsic values can be difficult to compare – they may at first seem simply incommensurable or uncompromising. But in practice, we do often have value clashes like this in life, and so, whether implicitly or explicitly, we are forced to make tradeoffs between our values. I take the view that you should recognize when these conflicts arise and reflect carefully on which intrinsic values you value more in the given circumstance.

So when presented with such a scenario pitting the happiness of a friend against truth-telling, it can be useful to ask yourself: how much truth am I willing to give up for how much of a friend’s happiness? There is no logically correct answer to this question – finding the answer will involve paying close attention to your intuition (and, in particular, the part of your mind that assigns values to states of the world). Your intuition may be aided by thought experiments, such as:

• If I had to tell a much more severe lie, but doing so would give my friend only as much happiness as is involved in this situation, would it be worth it in that case?
• If my friend were to be made much happier than they are in this scenario, would it be a no-brainer that it is worth it to tell this small lie?

By pushing the boundaries of the scenario with thought experiments such as these, it can bring the relative strengths of your values to light.

The Subtlety of Values

The process of reflecting on the relative strength of your intrinsic values is subjective because you’re drawing on a subtle operation of your mind: the ability to assign value to different states of affairs. It’s unlikely that you’ll be able to work out precise “units of exchange” for your intrinsic values, such as: “I value one happy day for a family member the same as one happy year for a stranger.” That’s okay because you can almost always make decisions without needing such precision. Furthermore, these units are unlikely to be constant anyway. And in cases where both sides of the equation seem nearly equally balanced from a values perspective, that may merely indicate that it doesn’t matter which choice you choose (from the point of view of your intrinsic values).

Empirically, I’ve observed that people’s values often seem to obey a form of diminishing marginal returns: if they try to let one value dominate over the others, the pull of other values becomes stronger. For instance, imagine you intrinsically value working towards your long-term goals, but you also intrinsically value your own happiness. You push yourself really hard at work so as to achieve your goals, but this makes you unhappy. At this point, your intrinsic value of happiness may start to gain more strength when you reflect carefully on what you value. This quirky property of values is not necessarily how you’d design a value-seeking robot, but I think it’s how many of us humans seem to work. 

A Values-Informed Decision-Making Process

I’ve observed that some of the most difficult decisions to make are ones where multiple values we care a lot about are pitted against each other (whether we realize that’s what is happening or not). In my experience, though, we can often make really hard decisions easier if we look at them through a values lens.

Here’s a step-by-step procedure you may find useful for decisions involving conflicts in your intrinsic values.

Step 1: Identify which of your intrinsic values are at play in the decision. It may help to write down a list of these values of yours that are at play. It may help to have a look at the intrinsic values wheel.

Step 2: Reflect on the relative importance of those intrinsic values to you (e.g., by using thought experiments to tease out how they trade off against each other – e.g., “would this decision be easy if one of the values wasn’t at stake?” or “would this decision be easy if one of the values was being sacrificed a bit more?”).

Step 3: Brainstorm different actions that you could take in this scenario. During brainstorming, it’s usually best to withhold judgment – just get all the ideas out that you can. Some potentially useful brainstorming prompts to try are: “what is an action that would support just one of my values?” and “is there a win-win action that looks good from the point of view of all the values of mine that are at stake?” and “is there a compromise action I could take that is pretty good from the point of view of all my values even if it isn’t ideal from the point of view of any of them?”

Step 4: Evaluate how good each action looks from the perspective of each of your relevant intrinsic values.

Step 5: Select among the actions based on how well they achieve your intrinsic values overall, attempting to take into account all the relevant intrinsic values of yours and the relative importance of each of those values to you.

As an example, recently, a friend came to me when stuck deciding between two options related to one of their relationships. After talking it through carefully, we decided that what made it so hard was that:

• Option 1 looked good from the perspective of their intrinsic values of honesty and loyalty, while

• Option 2 was better for helping them achieve their own long-term goals.

Once we had figured that out together, my friend reported feeling more clarity about the situation. Now, at least, they had a clear idea about what the tradeoffs involved were.

Thankfully, with some brainstorming, we were able to craft a third option for what to do that was able to preserve a substantial amount of all of their intrinsic values that were at stake.

Common Pitfalls

Here are some values-related mistakes I think are common during decision-making that it may be useful to be on the lookout for:

• Not noticing which intrinsic values of yours are at stake in the situation. For example, it’s easy to anchor on trying to figure out which is the “right” or “good” choice rather than reflecting on what the tradeoffs between the choices are (according to your own values) or focusing on the values of those around you rather than your own values. For instance, you might choose to cover up for your friend who has done a bad thing because of a heuristic you have that it’s the “right” thing to do, even though covering up for your friend, in this case, involves betraying other important intrinsic values you have.
• Completely dismissing one or more intrinsic values of yours that are at stake rather than balancing them based on careful consideration of how important they each are to you. For instance, you might assign no weight to your intrinsic value of having a pleasurable life.
• Not generating enough options for what choice to pick and anchoring on just the most obvious options or the ones you came up with first. For instance, you might frame a decision as “quit your job” or “stay in your role” without considering possibilities like “renegotiate your role at your job” or “transfer internally at the same company.”
• Choosing based only on what is instrumentally valuable, even when misaligned with your intrinsic values. For instance, you might choose based on what gets you the most money rather than based on what produces the most of what you intrinsically value.

So remember: the next time you’re in a difficult decision-making scenario, you may find it useful to reflect on what intrinsic values of yours are at stake, and you may want to consider using a step-by-step process for incorporating your values into the decision, such as the one outlined above.

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You’ve just finished the second post in my sequence of essays on my life philosophy, Valuism – click here to go to the third post.

1. Parkinson’s Law: Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.
2. Hofstadter’s Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.
3. Gates’ Law: Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.
4. Goodhart’s Law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
5. Hanlon’s Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity (or, don’t invoke conspiracy when ignorance and incompetence will suffice, as conspiracy implies intelligence).
6. Acton’s Dictum: Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
7. Amara’s Law: We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.
8. Benford’s Law: In a diverse collection of unrelated statistics, a given statistic has roughly a 30% chance of starting with the digit 1.
9. Betteridge’s Law: Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word ‘no’.
10. Brooks’ Law: Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.
11. Chesterton’s Fence: Reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood.
12. Claasen’s Law: Usefulness = log(technology).
13. Clarke’s First Law: When a distinguished elderly scientist states that something is possible, they are almost certainly right, but when they state something is impossible, they are probably wrong.
14. Cromwell’s Rule: Nothing but logical impossibilities have a prior probability of 0 or 1.
15. Cunningham’s Law: The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question, it’s to post the wrong answer.
16. Doctorow’s Law: When someone puts a lock on a thing you own, against your wishes, and doesn’t give you the key, they’re not doing it for your benefit.
17. Dunbar’s Number: Most people can’t maintain stable social relationships with more than 150 people.
18. Eroom’s Law: Drug discovery is becoming slower and more expensive over time, despite improvements in technology.
19. Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect: You’ll believe articles outside your area of expertise, even after acknowledging that neighboring articles in your area of expertise are completely wrong.
20. Gibson’s Law (or the Expert Witness Law): For each PhD (to use as an expert witness for one side) there’s an equal and opposite PhD.
21. Godwin’s Law: As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.
22. Morley-Souter’s Law (Rule 34): There is porn of it (no exceptions).
23. Greenspun’s Tenth Rule: Any sufficiently complicated C program contains an ad hoc, informally specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.
24. Hebb’s Law: Neurons that fire together wire together.
25. Hubble’s Law: Galaxies recede from an observer at a rate proportional to their distance to that observer.
26. Hume’s Guillotine (Is-Ought Problem): Normative statements (about what’s moral/immoral/right/wrong) cannot be deduced exclusively from descriptive statements.
27. Humphrey’s Law: Conscious attention to a task normally performed automatically can impair its performance.
28. Kranzberg’s Law: Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.
29. Lamarck’s Principle (or “Use it or Lose it”): Use it or lose it (evolutionarily speaking, but also in the brain).
30. Lewis’s Law: The comments you’ll inevitably find on any article about feminism justify feminism.
31. Littlewood’s Law: Individuals can expect miracles to happen to them, at the rate of about one per month.
32. Maes–Garreau Law: Favorable predictions about future technology will fall at the latest possible date they can come true and still remain in the lifetime of the predictor.
33. Metcalfe’s Law: The value of a system grows as approximately the square of the number of users of the system.
34. Miller’s Law: To understand what another person is saying, you must assume that it is true and try to imagine what it could be true of.
35. Moore’s Law: Computation per dollar grows exponentially (or: number of transistors per circuit doubles roughly every 24 months).
36. Murphy’s Law: Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.
37. Alder’s Law: What cannot be settled by experiment is not worth debating.
38. O’Sullivan’s Law: All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing.
39. Pareto’s Principle (80/20 Rule): For many phenomena 80% of consequences stem from 20% of the causes.
40. Peter’s Principle: In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.
41. Poisson’s Law (or Law of Large Numbers): For independent random variables with a common distribution, the average tends to the mean as sample size increases.
42. Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy: In bureaucracy, those devoted to the bureaucracy get control, those devoted to what it’s supposed to achieve lose influence.
43. Putt’s Law: Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand.
44. Rosenthal Effect (Pygmalion Effect): High expectations lead to an increase in performance, low expectations to a decrease in performance.
45. Schneier’s Law: Any person can invent a security system so clever that she or he can’t think of how to break it.
46. Shermer’s Law: Any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial intelligence is indistinguishable from God.
47. Zipf’s Law: The frequency of use of the nth-most-frequently-used word in any natural language is approximately inversely proportional to n (few words are used often, most are used rarely).
48. Wirth’s Law: Software gets slower more quickly than hardware gets faster.
49. Sturgeon’s Law: Ninety percent of everything is crud.
50. Stigler’s Law: No discovery is named after its original discoverer, including this one.

This piece was first written on July 6, 2020, and first appeared on my website on May 30, 2026.

In my view, fundamental incentive misalignment affects many parts of society.

Companies: 

There are many ways to make money that are net harmful to the world (e.g., see here for 13 ways).

Non-profits: 

(1) The people that sponsor the work of a non-profit organization aren’t the ones that benefit from it.

(2) Donors can’t easily tell how much benefit their donation caused the organization to create.

(3) The act of marketing effectively to people to attract their donations is usually quite different from the act of helping people.

Democratic government: 

(1) What is good for the world in the long term is not necessarily what is good for it during one political term. 

(2) What is good for the entire country is not necessarily what is good for a politician’s core constituents. 

(3) What is most helpful is not necessarily what sounds most appealing to voters. 

(4) What is good for one country is sometimes bad for the world.

Science: 

(1) Getting papers published in top journals does not necessarily require discovering non-obvious, or potentially useful, or even true things. 

(2) Trivially new results, trendy but useless results, or false positives, may be almost as publishable but much easier to produce.

Education: 

(1) Getting children to behave in class, perform well on tests in traditional academic subjects, or pass to the next grade, is only somewhat related to turning them into happy, helpful, intelligent, self-sufficient, effective adults.

(2) You can optimize for the former things while having very little impact (or even a negative impact in some cases) on the latter things.

Ourselves: 

(1) Doing what feels good or easy now is different from doing what benefits us in the long term (e.g., denying our weaknesses is often much more pleasant than working to understand and correct them).

(2) Doing what is “right” for others or the world is, in plenty of cases, not the same as doing what benefits us.

(3) What the truth is, quite often, conflicts with what we want to believe is true.