When consumers choose to abstain from purchasing meat, they face some uncertainty about whether their decisions will have an impact on the number of animals raised and killed. Consequentialists have argued that this uncertainty should not dissuade consumers from a vegetarian diet because the “expected” impact, or average impact, will be predictable. Recently, however, critics have argued that the expected marginal impact of a consumer change is likely to be much smaller or more radically unpredictable than previously thought. This objection (...) to the consequentialist case for vegetarianism is known as the “causal inefficacy” (or “causal impotence”) objection. In this paper, we argue that the inefficacy objection fails. First, we summarize the contours of the objection and the standard “expected impact” response to it. Second, we examine and rebut two contemporary attempts (by Mark Budolfson and Ted Warfield) to defeat the expected impact reply through alleged demonstrations of the inefficacy of abstaining from meat consumption. Third, we argue that there are good reasons to believe that single individual consumers—not just consumers in aggregate—really do make a positive difference when they choose to abstain from meat consumption. Our case rests on three economic observations: (i) animal producers operate in a highly competitive environment, (ii) complex supply chains efficiently communicate some information about product demand, and (iii) consumers of plant-based meat alternatives have positive consumption spillover effects on other consumers. (shrink)

There is a surprising consensus among vegan philosophers that freeganism—eating animal-based foods going to waste—is permissible. Some ethicists even argue that vegans should be freegans. In this paper, we offer a novel challenge to freeganism drawing upon Donaldson and Kymlicka’s ‘zoopolitical’ approach, which supports ‘restricted freeganism’. On this position, it’s prima facie wrong to eat the corpses of domesticated animals, as they are members of a mixed human-animal community, ruling out many freegan practices. This exploration reveals how the ‘political turn’ (...) in animal ethics can offer fertile lenses through which to consider ethical puzzles about eating animals. (shrink)

This article surveys recent work on some issues in the ethics of food consumption. It is a companion to our piece on food justice and the ethics of food production.

In this open access book, Timothy Aylsworth and Clinton Castro draw on the deep well of Kantian ethics to argue that we have moral duties, both to ourselves and to others, to protect our autonomy from the threat posed by the problematic use of technology. The problematic use of technologies like smartphones threatens our autonomy in a variety of ways, and critics have only begun to appreciate the vast scope of this problem. In the last decade, we have seen a (...) flurry of books making “self-help” arguments about how we could live happier, more fulfilling lives if we were less addicted to our phones. But none of these authors see this issue as one involving a moral duty to protect our autonomy. (shrink)

Those of us who enjoy certain products of the global industrial economy but also believe it is wrong to consume them are often so demoralized by the apparent inefficacy of our individual, private choices that we are unable to resist. Although he was a deontologist, Kant was clearly aware of this ‘consequent-dependent’ side of our moral psychology. One version of his ‘moral proof’ is designed to respond to the threat of such demoralization in pursuit of the Highest Good. That version (...) of the argument says that the capacity that faith and trust in God has to sustain our moral resolve licenses that faith and trust, from a practical point of view. My goal here is to argue that Kant’s proof has a contemporary, secular analogue in modern industrial contexts where the apparent “inefficacy” of an individual consumer’s choices in the face of massive insensitive supply-chains is a threat to her moral resolve. I conclude by suggesting that the Kantian approach may license us in adopting (as an item of defeasible moral faith) an evidential decision-theoretic principle regarding what it is to ‘make a difference.’ This in turn licenses trust -- if not in God then in other right-minded people. (shrink)

Suppose that, for reasons of animal welfare, it would be better if everyone stopped eating chicken. Does it follow that you should stop eating chicken? Proponents of the “inefficacy objection” argue that, due to the scale and complexity of markets, the expected effects of your chicken purchases are negligible. So the expected effects of eating chicken do not make it wrong. -/- We argue that this objection does not succeed, in two steps. First, empirical data about chicken production tells us (...) that the expected effects of consuming *many* chickens are not negligible. Second, this implies that the expected effect of consuming one chicken is ordinarily not negligible. *Parity* between your purchase and other counterfactual purchases and *uncertainty* about others’ consumption behavior each tend to pull the expected effect of a single purchase toward the average large scale effect. While some purchases do have negligible expected effects, many do not. (shrink)

-/- Unde malum? What is evil—if it is anything at all—and whence does it arise? Is evil just badness by another name? Is it the inevitable “shadow side” of the good? Or is it more substantial: an active, striving force that is opposed to the good in a Star Wars, Manichean kind of way? -/- Does evil always originate in the causal powers of nature? Is it sometimes based in the choices of moral agents? Or, perhaps most disturbingly, does evil (...) sometimes have its source in something non-human and impersonal—a malevolent tendency in the universe not just to general winding-down but also to outbreaks of targeted hellishness? -/- Finally, what is radical evil, and how does it differ from other kinds of evil? -/- These are some of the key metaphysical questions that philosophers have raised concerning evil. The goal of this entry is to provide a taxonomy of the most prominent answers: the main theories of evil’s kinds and origins on offer in the western philosophical tradition. This is meant to supplement the discussion in the entry on the concept of evil, although Section 1 begins with some conceptual and semantic issues. -/- Section 2 introduces two key distinctions that are then further developed in Sections 3 and 4. The first distinction has to do with the kinds of evil: insofar as evil is anything at all, is it a deep metaphysical feature of things, or is it always (or at least sometimes) merely an empirical phenomenon? The second distinction has to do with the origins of evil: is evil ever (or always) based in entirely natural phenomena, or does it sometimes (or always) have a moral or supernatural origin? -/- Sections 5 through 7 consider some puzzling cases of hard-to-categorize evils: systemic evil; symbolic evil; and so-called “radical” evil. (shrink)

How can we make moral progress on factory farming? Part of the answer lies in human moral psychology. Meat consumption remains high, despite increased awareness of its negative impact on animal welfare. Weakness of will is part of the explanation: acceptance of the ethical arguments doesn’t always motivate changes in dietary habits. However, we draw on scientific evidence to argue that many consumers aren’t fully convinced that they morally ought to reduce their meat consumption. We then identify two key psychological (...) mechanisms—motivated reasoning and social proof—that lead people to resist the ethical reasons. Finally, we show how to harness these psychological mechanisms to encourage reductions in meat consumption. A central lesson for moral progress generally is that durable social change requires socially-embedded reasoning. (shrink)