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.
The causal impotence people think there are empirical reasons to deny 1 — I think they’re right that you can’t calculate the EV of giving up chicken in the real world a priori
On Crummett’s argument: the argument assumes that the EV of giving up chicken — even if less than a reduction by one consumer’s worth — has a good chance of being decently high (non-negligible)
Yeah that sounds more reasonable, but I think the impotence arguers would deny there is any non-negligible risk because the probability that you make a difference is *astronomically* small given the empirical facts about production decisions
But is the chance that they are wrong about it being astronomically small also astronomically small? I was assuming (if I recall correctly) that there is some uncertainty about how to calculate the probability that you make a difference, in which case higher-order uncertainty should lead you to assign a non-negligible EV.
I think at the end of the day there's no substitute for doing the expected value calculations. Here's an example:
If we assign 90% credence to Shahar's argument, then when you buy a chicken, there's a 10% chance that you harm ~1 chicken (in expectation).
So, what should we say about this case? Well, people eat about 20 chickens/year. So is half a years worth of chicken pleasure worth the suffering of one chicken? My guess is probably not, but we had to work through the details, and we're not dealing with astronomical credences here.
I wonder what credence Shahar assigns to his argument?
I don't think the causal impotence people deny 1. (That would be crazy!) You're right that it is an empirical question exactly how much production would decrease if 1 million people gave up eating meat. (That's why there's a squiggle before the 1 million number - the precise number depends on empirical details, e.g. the price elasticity of meat.)
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:
=================
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.
I’m open to non-consequentialist arguments for veganism working out as well; I don’t use them because I think they’re less dialectically effective (at least in the circles I move in), and because I’m not sold on any specific non-consequentialist principle wrt animal rights, the moral value of taking a stand even when one’s actions have no expected effect, etc. Hopeful that I eventually will be though!
But the cow I murder after living a happy life eating grass doesn't exist if cows aren't bred for food an eaten. Sure, that cow wants to live, to the extent that it's an organism that responds to stimuli and eats and breathes. I'm actually not sure that it's more than this -- I don't think the cow really has a concept of the self, or the ability to grasp itself as an entity with continuing existence through time.
On balance, the cow that I murder after being humanely raised and allowed to eat grass for several years lived a happy life, to the extent that makes sense for cows. It had one bad day, after which it ceased to have any consciousness. On balance, the cow's utiles from life are positive.
If you get your way, no cow in the first place, so no happiness eating grass.
And I'll add that hunting probably reduces animal suffering on the whole. If I take a deer, which I eat, that reduces the starvation of other deers. Deer as a whole are probably happier because hunting exists. Likewise, wild boar are such an environmental menace that they'd have to be murdered in job lots, even if we didn't eat them.
So, based upon your moral argument here, do you support the legal abolition of currently standard pig and chicken farming, which clearly involve immense suffering throughout life?
Support would be too strong a term. I don’t have strong objections to minimal humanitarian standards. My one concern is that vegan activists might make them so onerous that they amount to a de facto ban.
I think there is a reason to fuss with probabilities. The claim at work is that — if some number of consumers boycotts meat — then there will be some worthwhile reduction in meat production. Suppose that, if 100 people go vegan, there will be a worthwhile reduction in meat production (even if it’s less than 100 consumers’ worth, as defenders of the causal inefficacy argument claim.) You only have a 1% chance if triggering the threshold. But, vegans claim, the expected value of boycotting is high enough that you ought to throw your hat in the ring: you have a small chance of making any difference, but if you make a difference, the difference will be huge. Hence, if this empirical claim is right, you should boycott meat for the same reason that you (sometimes) ought to engage in any moonshot, high-reward moral gamble.
Nope. I have no remotely significant chance of changing meat production through my choices at the grocery store. Surely that is true for "I don't eat meat for an hour". But the same holds for "I don't eat meat for a month" and "I don't eat meat for a year". Both of them are causally impotent in any worthwhile sense. To think "Yeah, the one-hour thing is silly but the one-year or one-decade ones aren't" is to fail to appreciate the absurdly low probabilities here. Or so it seems to me. It's like saying I have a non-zero chance at winning Wimbledon next year. True, but silly.
I agree that the chances are non-zero in each case, at least in some sense of probabilities. But so what? They are still just so ridiculously tiny that it's silly to pay attention to them. It's like spitting in the ocean.
Your antecedent, "if 100 people go vegan", is irrelevant. I still think it is waaaaaay too low, given that there are 100s of millions of people eating meat. But even so, when it comes to my diet choices, I will have no effect on meat production, period.
personally, i don’t find the idea about a ‘T’th’ purchase that intuitive for the argument. even if we have uncertainty of the value of T, i don’t believe this to be relevant to the causal impotence objection. i don’t really know how to explain it, but if our uncertainty is irrelevant, then our erring on the side of caution does not follow, so the conclusion of your article is not reached
so maybe this is it: removing yourself from the collection of people which compose the built-up to the "T'th" person will not lead to the stopping of any animals being killed. This is because, although delayed, your removal from the collection will only be replaced by the next customer of the constant influx of customers, such that the "T'th" person will be reached anyway.
Let's say you remove yourself from all collections of the build-up to the "T'th" purchase that you would be a part of otherwise. Assuming you buy meat, let's say, for six days a week, you would remove yourself from six collections per week. It does not follow that you would be reducing the number of animals killed by 6×(1/T), as your removal would just be replaced by the next customer, so you have a minimal effect on the number of animals killed (my maths is probably wrong so please correct the "6×(1/T)" part as i ain't got a clue).
Maybe I have misunderstood your presentation of the argument, but if my objection is somewhat relevant, I think we could sharply decrease our perceived amount of suffering reduced by veganism, so that our credence / doubt of how much suffering is caused by omnivore-ism can be reduced to a level where we are comfortable with eating meat.
Just a thought, though I believe i might be mistaken. Thanks for the article, it is interesting to think about
You seem to assume that factory farming is the only way to eat meat.
I am actually convinced that animal torture is bad and is not morally justified, but I am less convinced that animal murder is bad, particularly if the murdered animal would not have lived at all if it weren't a food animal.
This is why, as a relatively affluent resident of a First World country, I limit my purchases to humanely raised animals. These animals are indeed murdered -- and that might not be totally painless. But they have one really bad day after a reasonably happy life.
I'll add that vegans really don't want to do the math on animal loss of life during farming. Field mice are killed by wheat and corn production, for example; insects are killed in almost any sort of husbandry. Literally the only way to avoid taking any animal lives is to commit suicide.
And animal suffering in nature could only be eliminated by the extermination of all life on Earth.
I take the point that plant farming involves killing animals. But if you're a vegan who wants to remain alive, it still is better than eating meat, which relies on even more plant farming.
I’m saying that if you take the moral arguments for veganism seriously, you should commit suicide. Or, at a minimum, reduce your diet to the barest number of calories needed to support life. And never travel.
I think you can take a moral argument seriously without seeking to apply it absolutely or across every area of your life. And meat is clearly less necessary than travel.
Travel for recreation isn’t necessary at all. If you drive to an amusement park, your car windshield will hit bugs. You might even run over a squirrel. And walking around all day will burn calories, which will require you to eat more vegan food, which kills more field mice.
Only go to the grocery store once a year. You can stock up on enough to avoid starvation. Most medical care is unnecessary, and if you die of something it reduces animal death.
Probably. It’s certainly a more expensive market in the US, and shifting to that method would reduce output and therefore increase prices. I agree humane animal husbandry has scale and cost issues.
A while back there was a substack article (and I forget who wrote it, sorry) that argued that shrimps and fish don’t have the sorts of complex nervous systems that make awareness of pain a big issue. I found it compelling. So another approach is to move down the sentience scale -- eat fish, not pigs. I do think the worries about shrimp suffering are overwrought, and the Nietzschean in me finds it pathetic.
Animal minds are such complex phenomena — our understanding of them dominated by the gaps in our knowledge (including how our own brains conjure up the vivid worlds we occupy like fish in a coral sea).
My hoped-for-preference is to one day jump all the way to industrial (cultured, fermented, etc) proteins where the probability of sentience and suffering is nil.
I feel like Crummett's argument could easily be applied to several other scenarios, including watching porn, since it is difficult to determine when it is produced through exploitative means. Yet, I don't often see vegans applying the same logical processes to issues not involving animals - or maybe they are, and those are just convos I am unaware of.
My concern is that such arguments could feasibly work to make it that we ought to boycott all sorts of crop products (crop deaths) that we’d assume to be vegan friendly to buy.
Though, I’m writing an article atm that tries to show a relevant difference (namely the level of risk involved). But it gets tricky. What level of risk is acceptable vs unacceptable? Hard question. Seems almost impossible to answer, but there does seem to be easy cases as well.
And that's why virtue ethic is better than consequentialism. You think industrial farming is evil ? Don't eat farm animals. Simple to understand, coherent with common sense, directly actionable, and added bonus : it cuts through coordination issues that plagues consequentialism.
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.
The causal impotence people think there are empirical reasons to deny 1 — I think they’re right that you can’t calculate the EV of giving up chicken in the real world a priori
On Crummett’s argument: the argument assumes that the EV of giving up chicken — even if less than a reduction by one consumer’s worth — has a good chance of being decently high (non-negligible)
Yeah that sounds more reasonable, but I think the impotence arguers would deny there is any non-negligible risk because the probability that you make a difference is *astronomically* small given the empirical facts about production decisions
But is the chance that they are wrong about it being astronomically small also astronomically small? I was assuming (if I recall correctly) that there is some uncertainty about how to calculate the probability that you make a difference, in which case higher-order uncertainty should lead you to assign a non-negligible EV.
I think at the end of the day there's no substitute for doing the expected value calculations. Here's an example:
If we assign 90% credence to Shahar's argument, then when you buy a chicken, there's a 10% chance that you harm ~1 chicken (in expectation).
So, what should we say about this case? Well, people eat about 20 chickens/year. So is half a years worth of chicken pleasure worth the suffering of one chicken? My guess is probably not, but we had to work through the details, and we're not dealing with astronomical credences here.
I wonder what credence Shahar assigns to his argument?
I don't think the causal impotence people deny 1. (That would be crazy!) You're right that it is an empirical question exactly how much production would decrease if 1 million people gave up eating meat. (That's why there's a squiggle before the 1 million number - the precise number depends on empirical details, e.g. the price elasticity of meat.)
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:
=================
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.
I’m open to non-consequentialist arguments for veganism working out as well; I don’t use them because I think they’re less dialectically effective (at least in the circles I move in), and because I’m not sold on any specific non-consequentialist principle wrt animal rights, the moral value of taking a stand even when one’s actions have no expected effect, etc. Hopeful that I eventually will be though!
But the cow I murder after living a happy life eating grass doesn't exist if cows aren't bred for food an eaten. Sure, that cow wants to live, to the extent that it's an organism that responds to stimuli and eats and breathes. I'm actually not sure that it's more than this -- I don't think the cow really has a concept of the self, or the ability to grasp itself as an entity with continuing existence through time.
On balance, the cow that I murder after being humanely raised and allowed to eat grass for several years lived a happy life, to the extent that makes sense for cows. It had one bad day, after which it ceased to have any consciousness. On balance, the cow's utiles from life are positive.
If you get your way, no cow in the first place, so no happiness eating grass.
And I'll add that hunting probably reduces animal suffering on the whole. If I take a deer, which I eat, that reduces the starvation of other deers. Deer as a whole are probably happier because hunting exists. Likewise, wild boar are such an environmental menace that they'd have to be murdered in job lots, even if we didn't eat them.
So, based upon your moral argument here, do you support the legal abolition of currently standard pig and chicken farming, which clearly involve immense suffering throughout life?
Support would be too strong a term. I don’t have strong objections to minimal humanitarian standards. My one concern is that vegan activists might make them so onerous that they amount to a de facto ban.
I would object to creating a cow for the purpose of later murdering it, even if the cow had a happy life prior to the murder.
Then you are decreasing total utility.
Hey Amos, I wrote a reply to you and Bentham's arguments on my substack if you're interested. Here's the link https://open.substack.com/pub/outrageousfortune7/p/duking-it-out-with-bentham-and-amos?r=1oshqo&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
Nice argument. I love being vegan ☺️
Lol, I just saw your substack handle
Tofu is like 80% of my diet 😆
Thank you — I love it too!
I still don't understand the objection to the causal argument.
1: If I stop eating meat for an hour, that will have no effect on meat production. None. To think otherwise would be silly.
2: If I stop eating meat for 24 hours, there will be no change in meat production. None, and it would be silly to think otherwise.
3: If I stop for a week, there will be no change in meat production. None. Silly. Etc.
4: If I stop eating meat for a decade, the same result happens: no effect on meat production.
5: If I get my family to stop, for the rest of their lives, we get the same result.
6: If I get the entire USA to stop for a year, then meat production will be changed. Yep, but the antecedent is silly.
There's no reason to fuss with probabilities here, right?
I think there is a reason to fuss with probabilities. The claim at work is that — if some number of consumers boycotts meat — then there will be some worthwhile reduction in meat production. Suppose that, if 100 people go vegan, there will be a worthwhile reduction in meat production (even if it’s less than 100 consumers’ worth, as defenders of the causal inefficacy argument claim.) You only have a 1% chance if triggering the threshold. But, vegans claim, the expected value of boycotting is high enough that you ought to throw your hat in the ring: you have a small chance of making any difference, but if you make a difference, the difference will be huge. Hence, if this empirical claim is right, you should boycott meat for the same reason that you (sometimes) ought to engage in any moonshot, high-reward moral gamble.
Nope. I have no remotely significant chance of changing meat production through my choices at the grocery store. Surely that is true for "I don't eat meat for an hour". But the same holds for "I don't eat meat for a month" and "I don't eat meat for a year". Both of them are causally impotent in any worthwhile sense. To think "Yeah, the one-hour thing is silly but the one-year or one-decade ones aren't" is to fail to appreciate the absurdly low probabilities here. Or so it seems to me. It's like saying I have a non-zero chance at winning Wimbledon next year. True, but silly.
I agree that the chances are non-zero in each case, at least in some sense of probabilities. But so what? They are still just so ridiculously tiny that it's silly to pay attention to them. It's like spitting in the ocean.
Your antecedent, "if 100 people go vegan", is irrelevant. I still think it is waaaaaay too low, given that there are 100s of millions of people eating meat. But even so, when it comes to my diet choices, I will have no effect on meat production, period.
I think the Kagan argument is basically right--I've laid this out in more detail here https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-causal-inefficacy-objection-is?utm_source=publication-search
personally, i don’t find the idea about a ‘T’th’ purchase that intuitive for the argument. even if we have uncertainty of the value of T, i don’t believe this to be relevant to the causal impotence objection. i don’t really know how to explain it, but if our uncertainty is irrelevant, then our erring on the side of caution does not follow, so the conclusion of your article is not reached
Hmmm — I don’t understand either. Lmk when the thought crystallises though, I’m interested to hear what the worry might be.
so maybe this is it: removing yourself from the collection of people which compose the built-up to the "T'th" person will not lead to the stopping of any animals being killed. This is because, although delayed, your removal from the collection will only be replaced by the next customer of the constant influx of customers, such that the "T'th" person will be reached anyway.
Let's say you remove yourself from all collections of the build-up to the "T'th" purchase that you would be a part of otherwise. Assuming you buy meat, let's say, for six days a week, you would remove yourself from six collections per week. It does not follow that you would be reducing the number of animals killed by 6×(1/T), as your removal would just be replaced by the next customer, so you have a minimal effect on the number of animals killed (my maths is probably wrong so please correct the "6×(1/T)" part as i ain't got a clue).
Maybe I have misunderstood your presentation of the argument, but if my objection is somewhat relevant, I think we could sharply decrease our perceived amount of suffering reduced by veganism, so that our credence / doubt of how much suffering is caused by omnivore-ism can be reduced to a level where we are comfortable with eating meat.
Just a thought, though I believe i might be mistaken. Thanks for the article, it is interesting to think about
You seem to assume that factory farming is the only way to eat meat.
I am actually convinced that animal torture is bad and is not morally justified, but I am less convinced that animal murder is bad, particularly if the murdered animal would not have lived at all if it weren't a food animal.
This is why, as a relatively affluent resident of a First World country, I limit my purchases to humanely raised animals. These animals are indeed murdered -- and that might not be totally painless. But they have one really bad day after a reasonably happy life.
I'll add that vegans really don't want to do the math on animal loss of life during farming. Field mice are killed by wheat and corn production, for example; insects are killed in almost any sort of husbandry. Literally the only way to avoid taking any animal lives is to commit suicide.
And animal suffering in nature could only be eliminated by the extermination of all life on Earth.
I take the point that plant farming involves killing animals. But if you're a vegan who wants to remain alive, it still is better than eating meat, which relies on even more plant farming.
I’m saying that if you take the moral arguments for veganism seriously, you should commit suicide. Or, at a minimum, reduce your diet to the barest number of calories needed to support life. And never travel.
I think you can take a moral argument seriously without seeking to apply it absolutely or across every area of your life. And meat is clearly less necessary than travel.
Travel for recreation isn’t necessary at all. If you drive to an amusement park, your car windshield will hit bugs. You might even run over a squirrel. And walking around all day will burn calories, which will require you to eat more vegan food, which kills more field mice.
Okay but that about travel to the grocery store or the doctor?
Only go to the grocery store once a year. You can stock up on enough to avoid starvation. Most medical care is unnecessary, and if you die of something it reduces animal death.
With 8 billion people on the planet any attempt to produce “humanely raised” animal-based food at scale will just end up as a marketing ploy.
Probably. It’s certainly a more expensive market in the US, and shifting to that method would reduce output and therefore increase prices. I agree humane animal husbandry has scale and cost issues.
A while back there was a substack article (and I forget who wrote it, sorry) that argued that shrimps and fish don’t have the sorts of complex nervous systems that make awareness of pain a big issue. I found it compelling. So another approach is to move down the sentience scale -- eat fish, not pigs. I do think the worries about shrimp suffering are overwrought, and the Nietzschean in me finds it pathetic.
Animal minds are such complex phenomena — our understanding of them dominated by the gaps in our knowledge (including how our own brains conjure up the vivid worlds we occupy like fish in a coral sea).
My hoped-for-preference is to one day jump all the way to industrial (cultured, fermented, etc) proteins where the probability of sentience and suffering is nil.
I feel like Crummett's argument could easily be applied to several other scenarios, including watching porn, since it is difficult to determine when it is produced through exploitative means. Yet, I don't often see vegans applying the same logical processes to issues not involving animals - or maybe they are, and those are just convos I am unaware of.
Also, watching porn leads to physical exertion, which increases need for calories, which kills more field mice.
My concern is that such arguments could feasibly work to make it that we ought to boycott all sorts of crop products (crop deaths) that we’d assume to be vegan friendly to buy.
Though, I’m writing an article atm that tries to show a relevant difference (namely the level of risk involved). But it gets tricky. What level of risk is acceptable vs unacceptable? Hard question. Seems almost impossible to answer, but there does seem to be easy cases as well.
And that's why virtue ethic is better than consequentialism. You think industrial farming is evil ? Don't eat farm animals. Simple to understand, coherent with common sense, directly actionable, and added bonus : it cuts through coordination issues that plagues consequentialism.