Jesus Christ. First the Block-Huemer debacle, then Brian Caplan says animals are not morally relevant because people hit bugs with their cars, now this. There must be something in the water over in Ancapistan.
I'm not entirely sure. As I recall, a lot hinges on the claim that individual abstention from factory-farmed animal products will directly impact production, and it isn't entirely clear to me that this is true. Huemer cites Norwood and Lusk on this point, but it's been pointed out that their figures "are calculated by comparing overall levels of meat consumption and production at given price levels and do not represent the expected marginal impact of a single person deciding to become a vegetarian" (Shahar 2021, 194n14). Bob Fischer makes this point as well in chapter 4 of The Ethics of Eating Meat.
A point that concerns me (though not one that I recall Huemer making) is that it might be wrong to derive pleasure from factory-farmed animal products even if abstention DOESN'T make a difference. One could appeal here to considerations about virtue.
So this is basically a version of the threshold argument (Huemer straightforwardly says as much at 34:50, and I assume you'd accept that characterization as well). I think this sort of argument might be based on a dubious way of calculating expected utility. Mark Budolfson has some useful work on this: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11098-018-1087-6.
The basic idea is that whenever there is a certain amount of waste in the system (such as market distortions created by government incentives), the kind of reasoning employed in the threshold argument simply turns out to be invalid. Fischer spends a lot of chapter 4 of The Ethics of Eating Meat arguing that such waste is indeed present in the market for animal products, and hence the threshold argument isn't going to work. I'm not 100% sure about all of this, but it does seem to raise some doubts.
As for the examples given in parts 7 and 8 of your post, I don't find them terribly persuasive. The examples all involve inflicting various harms (up to and including painful death) on persons, which seems like a plausibly relevant difference from the factory farming cases, which don't involve harming persons. I assume that wouldn't make a huge difference to your judgement of the cases ("the question is not can they reason..." and all of that), but seeing as I'm not a utilitarian, it is going to impact how I see things.
Again though, I'm not 100% sure about all of this. This gets back to what I said about virtue-based considerations, and whether it's morally acceptable to derive pleasure from factory-farmed animal products even if abstention wouldn't make a difference.
I've read the Budfolson stuff. It doesn't elide the argument at all. If you have very specific knowledge about where the thresholds are, then you might know that you'll have no marginal effect. But the point is that in the meat industry we don't have knowledge that specific. The cases Budolfson gives are ones where you have specific knowledge, so you shouldn't assume you have the average marginal effect. If they try to produce enough meat to be 100,000 more than the number of consumers, then as the number of consumers increase by 1, expected producers will also increase by 1. I also think the uncertainty point is here--if you're not sure, you shouldn't risk doing something deeply, seriously, heinously immoral for the sake of comparatively minor benefits.
I think the virtue-based considerations are on to something. As for parts 7-8, would you consider severely mentally disabled persons to be persons in the relevant sense? Even if so, it seems wrong to, for example, pay for the corpses of tortured nonpersons, even if it doesn't result in more of that.
I think we know enough about the waste present in the meat market to be reasonably confident that our individual purchases won't make much of a difference. We know that supermarkets throw away between 4.5% and 12.1% of fresh meat on average (sources differ). Assume arguendo that it's 4.5%. This means that, month to month, between 1.5% and 7.5% of the supermarket's meat supply will be thrown away. Hence, "it seems highly likely that your buying a chicken breast won’t trigger a new order, since the grocery store has an incentive not to be extremely sensitive to individual purchases: it should tolerate normal variation within that 1.5% buffer, since if it tries to fine tune further, it will run the (unacceptable) risk of having empty cases and, therefore, losing sales overall" (Fischer 2020, 60). It's not only that there is waste in the system; there is also a positive incentive for the stores to tolerate a certain degree of variation in demand.
I do think that severely disabled human beings are persons, yes. My preferred view of personhood is based on natural kinds, and so all human beings are going to qualify. I have in mind something like Vukov's view: https://philpapers.org/rec/VUKPAN.
I think the uncertainty and virtue-based considerations are the strongest, though I have some doubts about the former. After all, even if the threshold argument succeeds, it isn't clear to me that an individual meat purchase would qualify as "deeply, seriously, heinously immoral" (though perhaps a lifetime of meat-purchasing would, in which case you could argue that the point still stands). I do take arguments like this pretty seriously, though; I think uncertainty considerations contribute to the wrongness of lots of actions, including (but certainly not limited to) abortion and capital punishment, so it's not implausible that they could have an impact here.
Jesus Christ. First the Block-Huemer debacle, then Brian Caplan says animals are not morally relevant because people hit bugs with their cars, now this. There must be something in the water over in Ancapistan.
Indeed. What do you think of the case Huemer lays out in dialogues on ethical vegetarianism?
I'm not entirely sure. As I recall, a lot hinges on the claim that individual abstention from factory-farmed animal products will directly impact production, and it isn't entirely clear to me that this is true. Huemer cites Norwood and Lusk on this point, but it's been pointed out that their figures "are calculated by comparing overall levels of meat consumption and production at given price levels and do not represent the expected marginal impact of a single person deciding to become a vegetarian" (Shahar 2021, 194n14). Bob Fischer makes this point as well in chapter 4 of The Ethics of Eating Meat.
A point that concerns me (though not one that I recall Huemer making) is that it might be wrong to derive pleasure from factory-farmed animal products even if abstention DOESN'T make a difference. One could appeal here to considerations about virtue.
He appeals to Norwood and Lusk for elasticity. I'd be curious to hear what you make of these points. https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-causal-inefficacy-objection-is And Huemer made that point in his debate with Shahar, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_OYx88qPuM
So this is basically a version of the threshold argument (Huemer straightforwardly says as much at 34:50, and I assume you'd accept that characterization as well). I think this sort of argument might be based on a dubious way of calculating expected utility. Mark Budolfson has some useful work on this: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11098-018-1087-6.
The basic idea is that whenever there is a certain amount of waste in the system (such as market distortions created by government incentives), the kind of reasoning employed in the threshold argument simply turns out to be invalid. Fischer spends a lot of chapter 4 of The Ethics of Eating Meat arguing that such waste is indeed present in the market for animal products, and hence the threshold argument isn't going to work. I'm not 100% sure about all of this, but it does seem to raise some doubts.
As for the examples given in parts 7 and 8 of your post, I don't find them terribly persuasive. The examples all involve inflicting various harms (up to and including painful death) on persons, which seems like a plausibly relevant difference from the factory farming cases, which don't involve harming persons. I assume that wouldn't make a huge difference to your judgement of the cases ("the question is not can they reason..." and all of that), but seeing as I'm not a utilitarian, it is going to impact how I see things.
Again though, I'm not 100% sure about all of this. This gets back to what I said about virtue-based considerations, and whether it's morally acceptable to derive pleasure from factory-farmed animal products even if abstention wouldn't make a difference.
I've read the Budfolson stuff. It doesn't elide the argument at all. If you have very specific knowledge about where the thresholds are, then you might know that you'll have no marginal effect. But the point is that in the meat industry we don't have knowledge that specific. The cases Budolfson gives are ones where you have specific knowledge, so you shouldn't assume you have the average marginal effect. If they try to produce enough meat to be 100,000 more than the number of consumers, then as the number of consumers increase by 1, expected producers will also increase by 1. I also think the uncertainty point is here--if you're not sure, you shouldn't risk doing something deeply, seriously, heinously immoral for the sake of comparatively minor benefits.
I think the virtue-based considerations are on to something. As for parts 7-8, would you consider severely mentally disabled persons to be persons in the relevant sense? Even if so, it seems wrong to, for example, pay for the corpses of tortured nonpersons, even if it doesn't result in more of that.
I think we know enough about the waste present in the meat market to be reasonably confident that our individual purchases won't make much of a difference. We know that supermarkets throw away between 4.5% and 12.1% of fresh meat on average (sources differ). Assume arguendo that it's 4.5%. This means that, month to month, between 1.5% and 7.5% of the supermarket's meat supply will be thrown away. Hence, "it seems highly likely that your buying a chicken breast won’t trigger a new order, since the grocery store has an incentive not to be extremely sensitive to individual purchases: it should tolerate normal variation within that 1.5% buffer, since if it tries to fine tune further, it will run the (unacceptable) risk of having empty cases and, therefore, losing sales overall" (Fischer 2020, 60). It's not only that there is waste in the system; there is also a positive incentive for the stores to tolerate a certain degree of variation in demand.
I do think that severely disabled human beings are persons, yes. My preferred view of personhood is based on natural kinds, and so all human beings are going to qualify. I have in mind something like Vukov's view: https://philpapers.org/rec/VUKPAN.
I think the uncertainty and virtue-based considerations are the strongest, though I have some doubts about the former. After all, even if the threshold argument succeeds, it isn't clear to me that an individual meat purchase would qualify as "deeply, seriously, heinously immoral" (though perhaps a lifetime of meat-purchasing would, in which case you could argue that the point still stands). I do take arguments like this pretty seriously, though; I think uncertainty considerations contribute to the wrongness of lots of actions, including (but certainly not limited to) abortion and capital punishment, so it's not implausible that they could have an impact here.
Fabian was painfully confused all throughout
My eye twitched a little whenever he used the word valid
Yeah, he seemed lost.