The Causal Impotence Objection to Veganism
(debunked in a quick five minutes)
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Consider this dairy-free, plain-vanilla argument for going vegan (well, for going mostly vegan), which you’ve probably heard a thousand times before:
(1) it’s wrong to cause vast amounts of suffering to others — including animals — for the sake of comparatively trivial benefits like taste pleasure. (2) factory farming does this. (3) generally, if it’s wrong to do something (e.g., torture and kill an animal for taste), it’s wrong to pay others to do it for you. (4) this holds true for factory farming: if it would be wrong for you to torture the chicken yourself, it’s wrong to pay farmers to do it for you. (5) as a result, you should remove yourself from the factory farming supply chain. (6) doing this, in the Western world, entails going (mostly) vegan. (7) therefore, you should go (mostly) vegan.
Now, as worded above, the argument isn’t perfectly valid. In my opinion, just as it’s wrong to torture animals for trivial taste pleasures, it’s wrong to torture readers with anal-but-logically-valid syllogisms when there’s a more readable and intuitive presentation of the argument that everyone knows could be rendered valid with a few unrhetorical tweaks. Still, it gets the idea across.
Some philosophers — like Danny Sachar, in Why It’s OK To Eat Meat — advance the ‘causal impotence objection’ to the claim that veganism is morally obligatory. It’s not an argument against veganism per se, in that it doesn’t end with ‘therefore, don’t be vegan’. But it does end with ‘therefore, buying meat is morally permissible’, a conclusion I’m unhappy with and want to shoot with nerf gun.
According to the argument for going veganism I gave at the beginning, if it’s wrong to factory-farm, it’s wrong to purchase factory-farmed chicken nuggets. One quick and dirty argument for this claim runs as follows: when I pay for chicken nuggets, the argument goes, I'm sending a market signal which will, in expectation, result in more chickens being tortured and killed.
As philosophers like Sachar rightly point out, this argument is much too quick. Chicken suppliers aren’t perfectly sensitive to demand. Thus, if I, as an individual, don’t buy chicken nuggets, chicken suppliers probably won’t notice the difference, and so won’t reduce supply in response.
Some vegan philosophers — like Shelly Kagan — retort with the following argument:
“[W]e know that there is some triggering number, T (more or less), such that every Tth purchase (more or less) triggers the order of another T chickens (more or less). I don’t have any idea what that number is, but I do know that whatever it is, I have a 1 in T chance (more or less) of triggering the suffering of another T chickens (more or less). And so in terms of chicken suffering, my act of purchasing a chicken still has an expected disutility equivalent to one chicken’s suffering.”
Kagan’s argument is also too quick, for much the same reason as before.
There are features of chicken supply chains besides demand that affect how many chickens get produced: limitations on crate space, the farmer’s option of switching to a different retailer if their current retailer orders less than usual (as opposed to reducing supply), the tendency for chicken farmers to produce more chickens than they need since they’re so easy to stuff into tiny cages in large numbers, etc.
Thus, even if some number of people going vegan will have some reducing effect on the number of chickens produced, the expected value of going vegan in terms of reducing chicken supply may be less than a reduction in chicken supply by one consumer’s worth.
It is a knotty empirical question what the expected value of boycotting chicken and eggs is. (Isaacs et al., have an argument that while the expected value of boycotting chicken, in particular, is slightly less than a reduction in supply by one consumer's worth of chicken purchases, the expected value isn’t that much lower. Thus, if they’re right, there’s still a decently strong consequentialist case against buying chicken.)
But suppose we’re empirically uncertain what the expected consequences of boycotting chicken is (as we probably should be.) Does this ruin the consequentialist case against buying it? Cluck no. For as
argues:“[i]f we are uncertain whether the causal impotence objection succeeds, we still need to make decisions about whether to eat factory-farmed products. [...] it might seem [...] plausible to employ some sort of precautionary principle here. Such a principle would tell us that we should tend to err on the side of caution in cases where a course of action might turn out to be seriously wrong. In the meat-eating case, nothing of great moral value will be lost if we refrain from eating meat: just a bit of gustatory pleasure. But it may be that something very bad will be brought about if we eat meat and thereby trigger a production threshold, namely, the suffering and death of many animals, along with the other negative consequences of factory farming. Here, we might suppose that the burden is on the person who wants to run the unnecessary moral risk to show that their action is sufficiently safe.”
In other words: even if we’re uncertain how about the expect value of boycotting animal products, it’s at least decently likely that it’s somewhat high. And if that’s the case, given the amount of suffering we might reduce, and the triviality of the benefits we get from eating animal products, we should err on the side of caution and give them up.
I think I'm convinced by Huemer's reply to Shahar. Huemer argues that at least some people have to make a difference, or you run into a Sorites paradox. So, we can make this argument:
1. If 1 million people give up meat, meat production will decrease by ~1 million portions.
2. The average impact of a person giving up meat is a reduction in production by 1 million portions / 1 million people (from 1).
3. You're not special (you're not more or less likely to trigger a decrease than any other vegetarian) (premise).
4. Your expected impact from giving up meat is a reduction of 1 meat portion produced (from 2, 3).
I'm not as impressed by Crummett's argument. For one, I think pleasure is important. You can't just wave it off, especially when it is being compared against a potentially negligible risk. For two, and relatedly, it proves too much. When comparing tradeoffs, you have to have some estimate of risk, or else you could never do anything risky. But then once you start quantifying the risk, you invite the causal impotency arguments.
First of all, I view the factory-farming issue as a red herring. I'd be opposed to eating animal products even if those animals were treated humanely and killed painlessly. Animals are sentient beings capable of having experiences and preferences, particularly the preference to continue living (which is a drive or instinct that's programmed into them by evolution). The key point isn't about suffering but rather about whether we have the right to end a conscious being's existence unnecessarily. Just as we would consider it wrong to painlessly kill a human who had lived a good life, we should extend this moral consideration to other sentient creatures when we have viable alternatives (i.e., eating a vegan diet).
Second, I'd like to quote a passage from a now-defunct blog written by philosophy professor Keith Burgess-Jackson. Sorry it's a bit long, but I think it accurately describes a valid objection to eating animal products, even if your actions don't affect the supply:
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Suppose you’re inclined to eat meat but wonder about the moral permissibility of doing so. You think it might be wrong, since it requires the confinement and killing of sentient beings, but then it occurs to you that your forbearance won’t make a difference. Why deprive yourself of a simple pleasure when it’s not clear that doing so will save an animal’s life? It seems pointless, fruitless, wasteful, abnegating.
If you look at it this way, you’ll probably continue to eat meat. But there’s another way to look at it. I’ve always thought of morality in terms of personal integrity -- of having high standards and striving mightily to live up to them. Morality, in this view, is more a matter of what one rules out as unthinkable than of what one decides or does. Do I want to participate in an institution that uses animals as resources -- that confines them, deprives them of social lives, frustrates their urges, alters their diets and bodies, and eventually kills them in the prime of their lives? It’s a matter of not getting one’s hands dirty, of not collaborating with evil. Perhaps other people can do these things, I say, but _I_ can’t. I want no part of such a cruel institution. There will be no blood on _my_ hands.
One view of morality sees it as a mechanism of change, with each person being a lever of the mechanism. The other sees it in terms of what sort of person one is. When you hear that billions of animals are killed every year for food, you might think, "My becoming a vegetarian won’t make a difference, so I may as well indulge my tastes." That’s to take the first view. But why not say that what other people do is not up to you? You control your actions. Your actions reflect _your_ moral values and what sort of person _you_ are. Stand up for something. Say "These things go on, but they do not go on through me!" You’ll feel good about yourself; I guarantee it.