Philosophical Vegan Forum

I’ve been a part-time vegan for the last few years. I have a hard time sticking to a full vegan diet for a long period of time. One of the reasons for this is that I’m not sure the ethical argument in favor of me following a vegan diet is completely sound. The ethical approach that seems best to me is a utilitarian one. I believe that I don’t need to eat animal products to be healthy, and I believe that animal agriculture is harmful to the well-being of farmed animals and for the environment, so any activity I do that results in more animals being farmed is unethical. The problem is, I’m not sure that my decision to consume animal products or not has any actual effect on how many animals are reared on farms. I live in a big city in the US and when I do buy animal products I’m buying them from a grocery store. The products have been produced by large corporations that rear millions of animals to feed a very large market. This kind of market is not sensitive to the buying patterns of 1 individual, meaning they will keep rearing exactly the same number of animals regardless of my decision to buy animal products or not. The way animals are treated on factory farms is far worse than how they’re treated if you rear them yourself, but there is weird kind of ethical ‘loophole’ where if you chose to buy animal products from a big corporation it makes no difference to how many animals they rear, as you’re just 1 individual and they can’t tailor how much they produce to match the demand exactly. If you chose not to buy their products, they won’t notice that and start to produce less. So when I start to find it tough to keep to a vegan diet for other reasons (taste preference, convenience etc), I start to think ‘what’s the point, I’m not making any difference anyway!’. People sometimes respond to this by saying something like ‘by being a vegan you’re a part of a larger group that does make a difference’, but that doesn’t change the fact my decision to eat animal products or not has no actual effect on how many animals are farmed. If anyone has any thoughts on this, please let me know!

Hi wesley, and welcome to the forum.

My first thoughts on your argument are that your refusal to buy animal products does make a difference. I've read that each individual vegan saves between 3 and 7 (different sources) animals' lives a week.

My second thought is that veganism has become a fast-growing trend. Meat companies are beginning to look at the fake meat market so that they can stay in business, for instance. There are many other evidences of this trend.

Another one - searches for 'vegan' on Google have increased by almost 200% over recent weeks - and 50,000 people have signed up for Veganuary 2017:

https://veganuary.com

Thirdly, by avoiding meat and dairy, etc, you'll be much healthier - and your conscience will be clear.

Good luck!

Utilitarianism has some problems, although it's a fair approximation for these purposes.

wesley wrote:The problem is, I’m not sure that my decision to consume animal products or not has any actual effect on how many animals are reared on farms.[...]People sometimes respond to this by saying something like ‘by being a vegan you’re a part of a larger group that does make a difference’

I don't get what problem you have with that. Is every member's contribution zero?
You realize that the vast majority of people live in cities, and the vast majority of people buy from grocery stores, which get meat from these large producers, right? Yours is the typical case.
How is it logically possible that each and every consumer literally has zero impact, and yet the whole has a large and very measurable impact?

That's like some Zeno's paradox nonsense there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno%27s_paradoxes

The dairy industry is really taking a hit this year due to non-dairy milk, and Tyson even invested in beyond meat. There are empirically verifiable effects of the whole. Fewer animals are suffering and dying because of this.

Because you are a typical consumer, and the movement is being driven by typical consumers, it is not logically possible that you have no effect. Something is wrong in your reasoning to surmise that.
If the whole has an effect, then the parts each own their fair share of that effect.

If you can not push a car, and your friend can not push a car, but you push it together, does that mean that you each did nothing?
If you are not strong enough to pull a drowning man from the water, but you and another pedestrian together can do it, does that mean that you did nothing and deserve no credit for the act so you might as well not bother?

The fallacy here is in seeing an effect as so small relative to the total, that you equate this small influence to zero.
It is most certainly not zero.

It does have an effect, although the effect is part of a larger trend (where the whole is larger than its parts), and also statistical in nature on the individual level.
Sometimes the whole is larger than the sum of the parts, too, when people work together, but when it is the credit for the whole is still shared between every contributor.

I'll get to the statistical part in a second.

wesley wrote:I live in a big city in the US and when I do buy animal products I’m buying them from a grocery store. The products have been produced by large corporations that rear millions of animals to feed a very large market. This kind of market is not sensitive to the buying patterns of 1 individual, meaning they will keep rearing exactly the same number of animals regardless of my decision to buy animal products or not.

Incorrect.

For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the message was lost.
For want of a message the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_Want_of_a_Nail

I'll explain what I mean. Things are sold in large volumes, and because they are not infinitely discrete, what we're dealing with is thresholds. We're dealing with cases of meat, or units of tons, and we're dealing with tight competitive profit margins.

Your store would have to see a certain level of demand drop, or a certain loss, to change what it's stocking or the space dedicated to certain items.
If something just isn't moving, and it's going to waste more often than not, the store management will eventually scale back that section and buy less.
Likewise, if your store is selling out of something often, that means lost money. Even if YOU never ask the store to stock more, other customers will bring it to the management's attention.

It goes both ways, and your purchasing behavior affects both -- not consistently, but statistically. Sometimes the product you buy will sell out and encourage the store to order more. Sometimes the distributor will sell out, and order an extra case next month. Sometimes your purchases will push the profit margins for some product over whatever arbitrary line the management sets, or over the alternative, keeping it competitive for another quarter.
Decisions at the executive level between stocking this or that can be made on razor thin differences in profit margins.

There's a lot of chaos in the system, but don't let that deceive you into thinking you have no effect when your effect is statistical in nature.

Your effect for 99 purchases straight may be nothing, but one purchase could mean the difference between the store and the distributor increasing their orders, resulting in higher profit margins and larger orders for the producer.
Your effect does, not necessarily always, but statistically affect the number of animals killed. And because we aren't psychic, it's statistical probability of effect that is morally relevant. You can't fire a gun into a crowd and call yourself blameless because you got lucky and it missed everyone; it's the probability of harm that matters to the personal ethics of your decision, and the probability of harm with purchasing animal products in these contexts makes it a clear evil.

Only freegan meat has no encouraging effect on the market , because the meat they eat has already been written off since it was fetched from a dumpster; it will not inspire additional stocking, not even randomly. It's an unloaded gun with the safety on 'fired' into an empty box in a vacant field.

wesley wrote:The way animals are treated on factory farms is far worse than how they’re treated if you rear them yourself, but there is weird kind of ethical ‘loophole’ where if you chose to buy animal products from a big corporation it makes no difference to how many animals they rear, as you’re just 1 individual and they can’t tailor how much they produce to match the demand exactly

Again, you're part of a larger movement. In ethics, often you have to try to behave in a way that is extensible to others and that, if everybody acted that way, the effects would be good. Look into rule consequentialism, that will probably help you more than utilitarianism. A major failing with much of consequentialism in practice is the inability of people to rationally evaluate their effects, and the tendency to fall into fallacies of thinking; many statistical effects in particular can be nonintuitive or even counterintuitive.

It does make a difference, though, even if you don't get lucky enough a particular time to tip the scale with any order. It always makes a difference to the bottom line, and that always has an effect over time, particularly with respect to advertising and sales; stores have to charge more the less they make on things, and that is a highly local decision. Higher prices affect many other consumers too, so there's a ripple effect.

You could study and quantify the effects of different purchasing habits, but I guarantee you they are non-zero in any competent and rational market.

Hi brimstoneSalad,

Thank you for your very thorough response. My response is going to be quite long, so just to be clear, I’ll say at the beginning that I agree with you. You have changed my mind and I now believe that my decisions about what I purchase do make a difference, so that’s good!

The reason I was concerned that an individuals decision to purchase animal products has no actual effect on the amount of animal products produced was because of the huge size of the market and the fact that’s impossible for the producer to produce exactly the right amount of product for the demand. I was imagining 2 scenarios, in one there are (for example) 300 million carnists and 1 million vegans, and in another there are 300 million and 1 carnists and 999999 vegans (with me being the extra carnist in the second scenario!), and thinking about how many animals would be reared on farms to meet the demand, and assumed it would be the same number of animals, because of the inability of the producers to assess the demand precisely. This conclusion, that the 1 individual in the group of 1 million vegans makes no difference to how many animals are raised, and yet the whole group of 1 million vegans does make a difference, does present a paradox, as you pointed out. The way I was thinking about that is that producers will only notice changes in demand caused by the actions of groups of consumers rather than individuals, so you might for example need 100 consumers to stop buying a product before the producer notices a change, and so the amount of production would depend on the demand in increments of 100 in this example. I was assuming then that my contribution of 1 to the million vegans would go unnoticed (I now think the statistical effect you describe applies in this example too – it’s actually possible that I am the 100th person out of a group of 100, so I could tip the balance to make the production amount increase or decrease).

This concern, that my purchasing decisions might not actually be making a difference, was a big problem for me as far as my motivation for staying vegan. When I’ve discussed this with other people (including vegans/vegetarians), they failed to notice the issue with the reasoning (for this I am very grateful to you!), and their response was usually that there is still a reason to follow a vegan diet, just on the principle that animal agriculture is unethical and so buying those products is wrong. Even if your individual action is not actually making a difference to real world consequences, you should still behave in certain ways on principle. I have a hard time seeing why you should do something on principle if you believe your action is not having any consequence. This had actually lead me to a weird conclusion that buying animal products from mass producers, where the animals are treated horribly, might be more ethical than rearing the animals yourself and treating them well, because I thought that buying from the mass producers did not make a difference to how many animals are produced, but if you raise the animals yourself you clearly do make a difference to how many animals are produced.

Following your response to my comment, and now that I think more about how the purchasing decisions are made by grocery stores, distributors etc, I think you have a good point about the statistical effects of my purchases, and the possibility that a single purchase can tip the balance in to stimulating more production (I really like the analogy you made about shooting a gun into a crowd!). A couple of things make me a bit hesitant about accepting this argument, but I don’t think these are really problems. The first is that I suspect that when it comes to food items, there is pretty much always an excess of production, at least from the sources I use to buy food. I don’t think my local grocery stores have ever run out of anything that I wanted to buy (I suspect this is because I live in New York City where people are very demanding and there’s lots of competition, so retailers think it’s better for business to always keep an excess of everything to make sure they never sell out and irritate their customers, even though this means more waste). The second is that I don’t have so much confidence in the ability of grocery stores to do a great job at being optimal, despite the desire of their management to optimize their purchasing (this may be an unfair opinion, but I used to work in a store and it was pretty disorganized at the level of the store workers). But in any case, all these concerns will do is mean that the model of how demand stimulates production is more complicated and has more noise in it, but does not change the fact that decisions about how much of a product to order are made based on previous sales, and so there is still a statistical effect of every purchase I make, and from time to time a single purchase can actually tip the balance.

Thanks again for taking the time to reply, it was very helpful! Your comments about looking in to rule utilitarianism and the problem with predicting consequences of individual actions are also good ones. I have looked in to rule utilitarianism a little bit, not really enough to say much about it yet, but my initial thought was that individuals may be tempted to ‘cheat’, meaning they might assume that if they don’t follow the rule but everyone else still does, that will still result in the same overall consequences as if they do follow the rule. This is actually quite like the situation I was describing with regard to me consuming animal products or not as part of a larger group, and in this case it seems my individual actions do actually make a difference to the overall consequences.

Hi Take5,

Thanks for your response. I definitely agree with you on the points you make about increase in numbers of people who are becoming vegan or at least thinking about it, so that’s good. I was just concerned that my individual contribution to that group might not be making a difference. But thanks to the response from brimstoneSalad I can see the flaw in my reasoning on that issue.

I see your point, but then why would you vote for exemple (political)? One vote does not decides anything. There are many things that looking that way doesn't really make sense. What I believe is that every restaurant you go and ask for a vegan meal you show your interest, and people start to see they have a market for these people. I really want to see the side that the vegan market is going, and while doing that taking some space from the meat industry. So looking this way, how many times in a year you will ask if they have something vegan on the menu showing the increase in the interest for that kind of food?
I may be wrong, but I feel best when I go to sleep being vegan, so for me it's worth it. You've got to ask yourself if it is for you (:

Glad I was able to help. Sounds kind of like an issue of not seeing the forest for the trees.

wesley wrote:I now think the statistical effect you describe applies in this example too – it’s actually possible that I am the 100th person out of a group of 100, so I could tip the balance to make the production amount increase or decrease

right.

wesley wrote:their response was usually that there is still a reason to follow a vegan diet, just on the principle that animal agriculture is unethical and so buying those products is wrong. Even if your individual action is not actually making a difference to real world consequences, you should still behave in certain ways on principle.

This is where rule consequentialism comes in handy. People usually are not equipped to correctly and rationally evaluate the consequences of their actions; case in point, your mistake in reasoning on this topic.
You should generally act in such a way that it would be good for all people to act. Think in terms of groups or social trends.

There are even more reasons than what I discussed why being vegan has better consequences (like social influence).

Regarding waste: that exists as a margin on any product. Stores ideally try to maintain a buffer to make sure there's product, but if consumption goes up, that doesn't mean waste is reduced; it means they stock more AND waste more. It's always a trade off between loss due to waste vs. lost due to customers not finding what they want, and there's an ideal buffer there. We see this more clearly on larger scales, but the statistical trend applies to small scales as well.
One surefire way to live on the waste is to go freegan, as I mentioned. Get the meat that was already discarded.

wesley wrote:The second is that I don’t have so much confidence in the ability of grocery stores to do a great job at being optimal,

As long as it's not totally blind, it works out statistically, as you said.

Even there were a totally blind store that didn't track or pay attention to anything, and they always stocked so much extra there was a huge amount of waste, it would make the most sense not to shop at that store so they'd go out of business and something less wasteful could take its place.

brimstoneSalad wrote: There are even more reasons than what I discussed why being vegan has better consequences (like social influence).

I assume by this you mean that our actions affect other people's actions? So we might also influence other people's decisions about what to eat and this can make a bigger difference than if we acted in isolation. This is something I've also been thinking about. In my case, I'm not planning to become a vegan advocate, so I'm not expecting to influence a lot of other people. But I do eat socially, with friends and family, and so people I know become aware of what and why I'm eating without me making any extra effort to try to influence people. So it's possible that if I follow a vegan diet I will also encourage some people to do the same, or at least to reduce how many animal products they consume. And all the people I know have their own networks of people they interact, so it's actually possible that a single person can influence a lot of other people. There is the idea of a 'tipping point' in any social trend where a phenomenon reaches a certain threshold and then explodes, so that the difference between a phenomenon dying out or catching on can be quite small. It's actually possible in theory (although I'm sure extremely unlikely) a single individual choosing to be vegan or not today could be the difference between the whole world being vegan or most people still eating animals in 500 years from now! In the past, this thought by itself has not been enough to make me stick to a fully vegan diet (because if I'm realistic I don't expect to influence all that many people). But hopefully now that I also think my own choices do have an impact on their own, this will be enough.

Hi let_dias

thanks for your reply.

let_dias wrote:I see your point, but then why would you vote for exemple (political)? One vote does not decides anything.

the problem with the voting analogy, is that it isn't exactly comparable to the situation I was in. With voting in an election, it's extremely unlikely that your vote is going to make a difference to the outcome, but your vote does still get counted. You still have 1 vote out of 100 million (or whatever the number is). The problem was that I thought my 'vote' was counting as literally 0, not just as 1, because of the way animal products are produced on massive scales (but if you read over the other comments, you'll see this was a mistake).

Now, I do think my 'vote', as far as what I choose to eat, does counts for something (which is good!), and the situation is actually better than it is with voting in an election. In an election (if it's 'winner takes all' as in the recent US presidential election) your vote really is not going to make a difference to who wins, but when it comes to what you eat, you can actually make a small but actual difference to how many animals are put through the farming process.

wesley wrote:In my case, I'm not planning to become a vegan advocate, so I'm not expecting to influence a lot of other people.

By just being a social, sensible, and healthy vegan you have a substantial influence.
But I would recommend being a reducetarian advocate; it's a message people can really consider, and that isn't alienating. Just encouraging people to cut back a little can make a big difference (friendly encouragement).
Also, try to introduce them to high protein vegan foods and replacements; a message of "don't eat this" is much less effective than "try this out".

wesley wrote:So it's possible that if I follow a vegan diet I will also encourage some people to do the same, or at least to reduce how many animal products they consume.

It's very likely. Even just by bringing vegan dishes and exposing people to new foods you can do a lot.
I think this has more of an impact than a quiet or socially isolated vegan.

wesley wrote:There is the idea of a 'tipping point' in any social trend where a phenomenon reaches a certain threshold and then explodes, so that the difference between a phenomenon dying out or catching on can be quite small. It's actually possible in theory (although I'm sure extremely unlikely) a single individual choosing to be vegan or not today could be the difference between the whole world being vegan or most people still eating animals in 500 years from now!

Eh, the tipping point thing has some merit, but you're thinking about this the wrong way.
Don't think of it in terms of a tiny chance of you making it happen 500 years earlier (even if it were, morality is about probability, a small chance of doing an astronomically large good is still very very good), but a large chance of you making it happen days or hours sooner. How many animals are killed a day? How many an hour? That's still very large. Even if we break it down by seconds, you save many many lives.

You have to try to think in terms of rule consequentialism to avoid errors in reasoning like this.