carnap wrote: ↑Tue Feb 27, 2018 4:04 am
This quote makes a lot of assertions but doesn't appear to provide any arguments for them. If someone is going to claim something is "in no way rational" then I think they are obligated to make a strong argument for their case. I'd love to hear the argument.
I thought what I said, and the link (did you read it?), would be enough to give you the general idea.
I'll try to explain in more detail:
carnap wrote: ↑Tue Feb 27, 2018 4:38 am
If the impact is not measurable it will have no impact on production figures, farmers based their investments and the number of animals to raise on things they can measure. "Vote with your dollars" is a feel good slogan, but what he do as individuals often has no measurable impact.
Only literally NO impact will never change measurement. Believing otherwise is a misunderstanding of measurement on your part.
In science, measurements are imprecise, but statistical in nature.
Take your lake example, which is a complete misunderstanding of how measurement works:
carnap wrote: ↑Tue Feb 27, 2018 4:38 amThink of a large lake, one drop in the lake has no measurable impact on the level of the lake and while it still exists in an abstract sense not in a measurable sense and that is what matters here.
See Sorites paradox:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox
Which you're essentially asserting about the effects of individuals here.
The sorites paradox (/soʊˈraɪtiːz/;[1] sometimes known as the paradox of the heap) is a paradox that arises from vague predicates.[2] A typical formulation involves a heap of sand, from which grains are individually removed. Under the assumption that removing a single grain does not turn a heap into a non-heap, the paradox is to consider what happens when the process is repeated enough times: is a single remaining grain still a heap? If not, when did it change from a heap to a non-heap?[3]
When dealing with scientific measurements, we're always struggling with some margin of statistical noise (which is why measurements have margins of error).
Imagine a situation in which we are measuring the level of the lake with a precision of centimeters.
Before adding the drop, the level of the lake was in actual reality 999.50000... cm
Measurements would cluster around that based on whatever noise we were dealing with, mostly giving us 999 or 1000, with a few odd 998s 997s 1001s and 1002s, and occasional outliers spread past that.
IF you took enough measurements (an implausibly large number), you could determine that the distribution is the same on each side of 999.5 and that the true number was half way in-between.
AFTER adding one single drop, most of your measurements will look the same, but not
all of them.
Statistically speaking, you will end up with slightly more 1000 measurements and higher.
Is it anything you'd ever notice? Not likely, but that doesn't matter. Ethics is not about what you
notice.
When we're dealing with not very careful or rigorous measurements, where people might only be taking a few samples to inform their opinions, the slightly increased chance of having a higher or lower measurement gives a big potential effect.
This is what we mean by "having a
small chance of making a
big difference".
It doesn't matter how you want to model it (bottom up or top down from watching the market), the effect is there.
You can even imagine it in terms of you being the last consumer of a large group, the straw that breaks the camel's back and manifests the change of demand through crude measurement if you want.
You came close to understanding that here:
carnap wrote: ↑Tue Feb 27, 2018 4:38 am
At some point it should reduce supply, but how exactly that occurs is specific to the market.
The bottom line: ignoring small probabilities of very large effects is a common form of ethical malpractice, but I'd hope you're above that once it's been explained.
carnap wrote: ↑Tue Feb 27, 2018 4:38 am
What is the contradiction exactly? It seems clear that you're assuming certain moral principles here.
carnap wrote: ↑Tue Feb 27, 2018 4:04 am
I don't see how statistics bridges the gap here, but if you think it does provide an argument in gross form to show that no additional premises are required to show a contradiction.
The principle that you have a small chance of causing a large effect should be evident.
Do you deny the role of probability in ethics?
If you, blindfolded, fire a gun into a dispersed crowd, you have a small chance of hitting or killing somebody. But whether you get very unlucky and kill somebody, or you get ever so slightly lucky and hit nobody (which was most likely), neither outcome makes you any more or less morally culpable. Good luck does not exculpate you.
If you don't agree, I can show how consequentialism does not work -at all- without considering probabilistic effects.
It doesn't matter what "actually" happens as to the ethics of behavior. The probability matters.
carnap wrote: ↑Tue Feb 27, 2018 4:38 am
Its always demand and supply at a given price, what would happen would depend on the specific supply/demand curve. A reduction in demand does not typically result in a step-wise decrease in demand because pricing will shift. That is, any downward movement in prices will increase demand so if something changes a new equilibrium is found.
You can try to make the case that eating one cow or one chicken statistically kills slightly fewer than one cow or one chicken, but that in itself is a hard argument to make because demand for meat is relatively inelastic and as explained previously there are statistical effects on supply.
Things are complicated by subsidies, so it's not a perfectly free market, but the industry's profitability also affects that.
There is also the fact that there's more than one animal killed per animal eaten, and there are also forces that magnify your effects in the market like increasing the availability and affordability of alternatives which influence other consumers.
On balance, "not eating one cow = one less cow raised and killed" is the reasonable assumption without evidence to the contrary based on an extensive analysis of all other forces.
Either way, even if it were true that two fewer animals eaten caused one fewer animal to be raised in confinement and killed, that's still morally relevant.
carnap wrote: ↑Tue Feb 27, 2018 4:38 am
For aggregate meat production to really decline you'd need an aggregate drop in demand for meat throughout the world.
We don't need to see a net drop in demand for our actions to be morally relevant; even a
slowing of the rate of demand increase is relevant.
It's hard to overcome the force of changes in the developing world, but we can mitigate them a little in the mean time rather than ADDING to them.
carnap wrote: ↑Tue Feb 27, 2018 4:04 am
It was intentionally generic, but it could mean promoting improved welfare regulations for farm animals. It could mean promoting cooking techniques that involve less frequent use of meat or alternatives. And so on.
I meant "what do you do?"
carnap wrote: ↑Tue Feb 27, 2018 4:04 am
Now my diet is oriented around my health, my intake of meat is low, dairy is probably average and very little eggs.
It's good to hear that you don't eat much meat.
Are we talking the one serving (playing card deck size) a day or less, and mostly fish, as per the diets of the longest lived populations?