I Am Paying Reparations to the Shrimp

Richard Hanania's Newsletter

I’ve written about my struggles with animal rights before. On the one hand, every ethical argument in favor of veganism is correct. On the other, I want a diet that is high in lean protein and satisfies my taste, and that means eating a lot of chicken and seafood, which are among the worst options from the perspective of minimizing suffering.

Luckily, there’s a way to make myself feel better. Bentham’s Bulldog writes about the Shrimp Welfare Project, which gets corporations to stun shrimp before they are killed and promise not to crush their eyes in order to increase fertility. One can save from an agonizing death an estimated 1,500 shrimp per dollar per year through donating to this charity. I had been thinking for a while about paying reparations to the animals I’ve wronged but hesitated, figuring it would be tax deductible. This would mean I’d have to save the receipt and do more paperwork. I probably would’ve been more likely to seek out something like the Shrimp Welfare Project sooner if charitable donations weren’t tax deductible at all.

What I get from ChatGPT when I tell it to draw “Richard Hanania paying reparations to shrimp and asking for their forgiveness.” Hover over for how ChatGPT interpreted its instructions.

The fear of paperwork exerts a stronger pressure on my psyche than either the thought of losing money or the guilt I feel about my sins against the shrimp. Anyway, this is very dumb, so Bentham’s writing on this motivated me to just give $1,000 to the Shrimp Welfare Project. This means I have now personally saved 1,500,000 shrimp in one year alone from an agonizing death.

The problem with going full utilitarian is that you can always demand more of yourself. I estimate that I eat perhaps 40 shrimp a week x 52 weeks = 2,080 shrimp a year. I could easily put my shrimp-saving ledger even more in the black by not doing that, finding a cheaper source of food, and donating any money I saved to helping more shrimp. Pure utilitarianism strikes me as madness, but so does the idea that we should reject the ethical arguments against torturing animals because they’re too depressing to think about, so I end up somewhere in between. A thousand dollars once in a while seems like a good compromise, covering well more than I could ever eat.

I’ve always felt that in a cosmic sense I had a kind of debt that I owed to shrimpkind. They are now better off because of my existence. It seems like I should do something for the chickens too, even though Bentham says that the same amount of money goes a lot further when it’s put towards saving the shrimp. Should I consider that I have a debt to each individual species, or animals as a whole? How about breaking them up into two categories: those on land and those in water?

These are all things worth thinking about. But a thousand dollars is a nice round number, and me and the shrimp are now more than even. There’s a Korean market I sometimes go to where there’s a tank full of shrimp that I just look at and feel sad about. Now I can walk by them, give a knowing nod, and somehow try to communicate the message that I am not the problem.

If I could get some of you to donate money to the Shrimp Welfare Project with me, that would be even better.