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  1. A Moral Argument for Veganism.Daniel Hooley & Nathan Nobis - 2016 - In Andrew Chignell, Terence Cuneo & Matthew C. Halteman (eds.), Philosophy Comes to Dinner: Arguments on the Ethics of Eating. Routledge.
    We offer a relatively simple and straightforward argument that each of us ought to be vegan. We don’t defend this position by appealing to ‘animal rights’ or the view that animals and humans are ‘moral equals’. Rather, we argue that animal agriculture causes serious harms to other animals (such as pain, suffering and death) and these harms are morally unjustified or caused for no good reason. This is true for both ‘factory farming’ and smaller, so-called ‘humane’ farms. We argue that (...)
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  • A Case for Ethical Veganism.Tristram McPherson - 2014 - Journal of Moral Philosophy 11 (6):677-703.
    This paper argues for ethical veganism: the thesis that it is typically wrong to consume animal products. The paper first sets out an intuitive case for this thesis that begins with the intuitive claim that it is wrong to set fire to a cat. I then raise a methodological challenge: this is an intuitive argument for a revisionary conclusion. Even if we grant that we cannot both believe that it is permissible to drink milk, and that it is wrong to (...)
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  • The epistemology of thought experiments: A non-eliminativist, non-platonic account.Hayley Clatterbuck - 2013 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 3 (3):309-329.
    Several major breakthroughs in the history of physics have been prompted not by new empirical data but by thought experiments. James Robert Brown and John Norton have developed accounts of how thought experiments can yield such advances. Brown argues that knowledge gained via thought experiments demands a Platonic explanation; thought experiments for Brown are a window into the Platonic realm of the laws of nature. Norton argues that thought experiments are just cleverly disguised inductive or deductive arguments, so no new (...)
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  • Parental Responsibility and Our Special Relationship with Animal Companions.Sigsbee Dustin - 2024 - Journal of Value Inquiry 58 (1):1-16.
    What is the basis of our obligations to our animal companions? This is an important question for practical reasons, as the relationship that many individuals have with their animal companion is amongst the most intimate of relationships they share with a non-human animal. It is also important for theoretical reasons. One of those reasons is that our commitments to animal companions may appear to present a kind of puzzle. If we think that we have moral commitments to animal companions that (...)
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  • ‘Pass the Cocoamone, Please’: Causal Impotence, Opportunistic Vegetarianism and Act-Utilitarianism.John Richard Harris & Richard Galvin - 2012 - Ethics, Policy and Environment 15 (3):368 - 383.
    It appears that utilitarian arguments in favor of moral vegetarianism cannot justify a complete prohibition of eating meat. This is because, in certain circumstances, forgoing meat will prevent no pain, and so, on utilitarian grounds, we should be opportunistic carnivores rather than moral vegetarians. In his paper, ‘Puppies, pigs, and people: Eating meat and marginal cases,’ Alastair Norcross argues that causal impotence arguments like these are misguided. First, he presents an analogous situation, the case of chocolate mousse a-la-bama, in order (...)
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  • Children and the Argument from 'Marginal' Cases.Amy Mullin - 2011 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 14 (3):291-305.
    I characterize the main approaches to the moral consideration of children developed in the light of the argument from 'marginal' cases, and develop a more adequate strategy that provides guidance about the moral responsibilities adults have towards children. The first approach discounts the significance of children's potential and makes obligations to all children indirect, dependent upon interests others may have in children being treated well. The next approaches agree that the potential of children is morally considerable, but disagree as to (...)
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  • Strategic collective action and the proportionality of reasons to expected benefits.Howard Leo Nye, Madeline Youngman & Avontay Williams - 2024 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy:1-32.
    We argue that, in order to explain the relative strengths of our reasons to contribute to different collective endeavours, approaches to the ethics of collective action must understand the strengths of our reasons to make a given contribution as proportional to its expected benefits, or its chances of bringing about benefits in proportion to their magnitudes. The view that most clearly meets this proportionality requirement is the expected consequences approach, which identifies our reasons to perform an act with its expected (...)
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  • Clean Meat and Muddy Markets: Substitution and Indeterminacy in Consumerist Solutions to Animal Agriculture.Benjamin Hale, Sebastián Dueñas-Ocampo & Alexander Lee - 2024 - Food Ethics 9 (2):1-24.
    Synthetic meat products promise to serve as inexpensive substitute proteins that can replace meat made through conventional animal agriculture. At least some of the excitement about these products stems from ethical and moral concerns regarding animal welfare, environmental costs, and human health. A governing idea behind the creation of substitute meat is that consumers will recognize the ethical and moral concerns of conventional production and substitute one (better) product for another (worse) product. This approach, however, overlooks a much more practical (...)
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  • Why you shouldn’t serve meat at your next catered event.Zachary Ferguson - 2024 - Politics, Philosophy and Economics.
    Much has been written about the ethics of eating meat. Far less has been said about the ethics of serving meat. In this paper I argue that we often shouldn’t serve meat, even if it is morally permissible for individuals to purchase and eat meat. Historically, the ethical conversation surrounding meat has been limited to individual diets, meat producers, and government actors. I argue that if we stop the conversation there, then the urgent moral problems associated with industrial animal agriculture (...)
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  • Utilitarianism, Deontology, and Ethical Veganism.Andrew Nesseler & Matthew Adelstein - 2024 - Journal of Animal Ethics 14 (1):1-8.
    Two individuals can both be ethical vegans but disagree on the normative basis of their moral beliefs. This article will look at the development of two competing theories that hold prominence in debates among animal advocates: utilitarianism and deontology. Next, we turn toward their divergence in epistemology, the moral status of experiences and individuals, and the limits of permissibility. Last, we unite utilitarianism and deontology by noting where they converge. This union comes from enlightenment thinking, the postulation of direct duties (...)
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  • Ethical Extensionism Defended.Joel MacClellan - 2024 - Between the Species 27 (1):140-178.
    Ethical extensionism is a common argument pattern in environmental and animal ethics, which takes a morally valuable trait already recognized in us and argues that we should recognize that value in other entities such as nonhuman animals. I exposit ethical extensionism’s core argument, argue for its validity and soundness, and trace its history to 18th century progressivist calls to expand the moral community and legal franchise. However, ethical extensionism has its critics. The bulk of the paper responds to recent criticisms, (...)
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  • Kantian Ethics and the Attention Economy.Timothy Aylsworth & Clinton Castro - 2024 - Palgrave Macmillan.
    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 (...)
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  • The Duty to Promote Digital Minimalism in Group Agents.Timothy Aylsworth & Clinton Castro - 2024 - In Timothy Aylsworth & Clinton Castro (eds.), Kantian Ethics and the Attention Economy. Palgrave Macmillan.
    In this chapter, we turn our attention to the effects of the attention economy on our ability to act autonomously as a group. We begin by clarifying which sorts of groups we are concerned with, which are structured groups (groups sufficiently organized that it makes sense to attribute agency to the group itself). Drawing on recent work by Purves and Davis (2022), we describe the essential roles of trust (i.e., depending on groups to fulfill their commitments) and trustworthiness (i.e., the (...)
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  • A Christian Ethics of Blame: Or, God says, "Vengeance is Mine".Robert J. Hartman - 2023 - Religious Studies:1-16.
    There is an ethics of blaming the person who deserves blame. The Christian scriptures imply the following no-vengeance condition: a person should not vengefully overtly blame a wrongdoer even if she gives the wrongdoer the exact negative treatment that he deserves. I explicate and defend this novel condition and argue that it demands a revolution in our blaming practices. First, I explain the no-vengeance condition. Second, I argue that the no-vengeance condition is often violated. The most common species of blame (...)
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  • Inefficacy, Pre-emption and Structural Injustice.Nikhil Venkatesh - 2023 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 123 (3):395-404.
    Many pressing problems are of the following kind: some collection of actions of multiple people will produce some morally significant outcome (good or bad), but each individual action in the collection seems to make no difference to the outcome. These problems pose theoretical problems (especially for act-consequentialism), and practical problems for agents trying to figure out what they ought to do. Much recent literature on such problems has focused on whether it is possible for each action in such a collection (...)
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  • Consequentialism and Climate Change.Mattia Cecchinato - 2023 - In Pellegrino Gianfranco & Marcello Di Paola (eds.), Handbook of Philosophy of Climate Change. Springer Nature. pp. 541-560.
    The environmental crisis challenges the adequacy of traditional moral theories, particularly in the case of act consequentialism – the view that an act is morally right if and only if it brings about the best available outcome. Although anthropogenic climate change threatens the well-being of billions of humans and trillions of non-human animals, it is difficult for an act consequentialist to condemn actions that contribute to it, as each individual action makes no difference to the probability of whether climate change (...)
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  • Counting Your Chickens.Yoaav Isaacs, Adam Lerner & Jeffrey Sanford Russell - 2024 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 102 (3):675-692.
    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 (...)
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  • Longtermist Political Philosophy: An Agenda for Future Research.Andreas T. Schmidt & Jacob Barrett - forthcoming - In Jacob Barrett, Hilary Greaves & David Thorstad (eds.), Essays on Longtermism. Oxford University Press.
    We set out longtermist political philosophy as a research field by exploring the case for, and the implications of, ‘institutional longtermism’: the view that, when evaluating institutions, we should give significant weight to their very long-term effects. We begin by arguing that the standard case for longtermism may be more robust when applied to institutions than to individual actions or policies, both because institutions have large, broad, and long-term effects, and because institutional longtermism can plausibly sidestep various objections to individual (...)
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  • The Axiology of Pain and Pleasure.Alycia LaGuardia-LoBianco & Paul Bloomfield - forthcoming - Journal of Value Inquiry:1-24.
    There is little more common in ethics than to think pain is intrinsically bad and pleasure is intrinsically good. A Humean-style error theory of the axiology of pain and pleasure is developed against these commonsense claims. We defend the thesis that the value of pain and pleasure is always contingent and only instrumental. We survey prominent theories of both intrinsic value and pain/pleasure, all of which assume that pain and pleasure are intrinsically valuable. We base our error theory on counterexamples (...)
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  • Feeding Trolls: Against Zangwill's Duty to Eat Meat.Yannic Kappes - manuscript
    Zangwill (“Our Moral Duty to Eat Meat”, “If you care about animals, you should eat them”) has argued that we have a duty to eat meat. In this paper I first show that Zangwill’s essays contain two distinct conclusions: (1) a rather weak thesis that his argument is officially supposed to establish, and (2) a much stronger, advertised thesis that his argument is not officially supposed to establish, but on whose basis he gives concrete recommendations for action and launches polemic (...)
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  • Inefficacy, Despair, and Difference-Making: A Secular Application of Kant's Moral Argument.Andrew Chignell - 2022 - In Luigi Caranti & Alessandro Pinzani (eds.), Kant and the Problem of Morality: Rethinking the Contemporary World. New York, NY: Routledge Chapman & Hall. pp. 47-72.
    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 (...)
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  • Ethical Veganism and Free Riding.Jacob Barrett & Sarah Raskoff - 2023 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 24 (2):184-212.
    The animal agriculture industry causes animals a tremendous amount of pain and suffering. Many ethical vegans argue that we therefore have an obligation to abstain from animal products in order to reduce this suffering. But this argument faces a challenge: thanks to the size and structure of the animal agriculture industry, any individual’s dietary choices are overwhelmingly unlikely to make a difference. In this paper, we criticize common replies to this challenge and develop an alternative argument for ethical veganism. Specifically, (...)
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  • Causal Impotence and Complicity.Richard Galvin & John R. Harris - 2023 - Public Affairs Quarterly 37 (1):47-63.
    Moral problems such as climate change and global poverty result from widespread human action, and hence, are unaffected by changes in any individual's behavior—for instance, the harms of climate change will obtain whether I drive my car or not. This problem of causal impotence seems potentially devastating for consequentialists, but more easily addressed by deontologists. The deontologist can argue that (e.g.) even if our acts will have no effect on climate change, our using fossil fuels makes us complicit in, and (...)
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  • Deceiving versus manipulating: An evidence‐based definition of deception.Don Fallis - 2024 - Analytic Philosophy 65 (2):223-240.
    What distinguishes deception from manipulation? Cohen (Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 96, 483 and 2018) proposes a new answer and explores its ethical implications. Appealing to new cases of “non‐deceptive manipulation” that involve intentionally causing a false belief, he offers a new definition of deception in terms of communication that rules out these counterexamples to the traditional definition. And, he leverages this definition in support of the claim that deception “carries heavier moral weight” than manipulation. In this paper, I argue that (...)
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  • Collective Actions, Individual Reasons, and the Metaphysics of Consequence.Samuel Lee - 2022 - Ethics 133 (1):72-105.
    I defend the view that individual agents have instrumental moral reasons for and against contributing to collective actions. I distinguish three versions of this view found in the literature and argue that only one withstands scrutiny: the version on which each individual contribution to a collective action is a cause of the latter’s large-scale outcomes. The central difficulty with this view is its apparent incompatibility with leading theories of causation. Against these theories I motivate a general structural principle about causation (...)
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  • Seeing the World More Clearly: Strategies for unleashing the full moral potential of thought experiments in the Philosophy Classroom.Dominik Balg - 2022 - Journal of Didactics of Philosophy 6:1-17.
    In this paper, I discuss the effects of using thought experiments for the purpose of conceptual clarification on students’ hermeneutical abilities. On the one hand, by providing opportunities to explore the scope of normatively loaded concepts, thought experiments can effectively help students to interpret their social and moral reality more adequately, which in some cases might even help to reduce existing hermeneutical injustices. On the other hand, given their notorious susceptibility to distorting factors that are philosophically irrelevant, they can also (...)
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  • Existing Ethical Tensions in Xenotransplantation.L. Syd M. Johnson - 2022 - Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 31 (3):355-367.
    The genetic modification of pigs as a source of transplantable organs is one of several possible solutions to the chronic organ shortage. This paper describes existing ethical tensions in xenotransplantation (XTx) that argue against pursuing it. Recommendations for lifelong infectious disease surveillance and notification of close contacts of recipients are in tension with the rights of human research subjects. Parental/guardian consent for pediatric xenograft recipients is in tension with a child’s right to an open future. Individual consent to transplant is (...)
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  • The problem of equal moral status.Zoltan Miklosi - 2022 - Politics, Philosophy and Economics 21 (4):372-392.
    A central puzzle of contemporary moral and political philosophy is that while most of us believe that all or almost all human beings enjoy the same moral status, human beings possess the capacities that supposedly ground moral status to very unequal levels. This paper aims to develop a novel strategy to vindicate the idea of moral equality against this challenge. Its central argument is that the puzzle emerges only if one accepts a usually unstated theoretical premise about value and the (...)
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  • In Defense of the Basic Argument for Vegetarianism.James Simpson - 2021 - Journal of Animal Ethics 11 (2):53-59.
    In a recent article, Timothy Hsiao criticizes the basic argument for moral vegetarianism. In this connection, Hsiao offers an interesting, original argument (that I'll christen Hsiao's Argument) with the conclusion that human consumption of meat solely for the purposes of nutrition trumps the welfare interests of nonhuman animals. In this article, however, I'll argue that if Hsiao's Argument isn't to be problematically circular, we have very strong grounds for thinking that it is either unsound or invalid. Toward the end of (...)
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  • Individual Responsibility, Large-Scale Harms, and Radical Uncertainty.Rekha Nath - 2021 - The Journal of Ethics 25 (3):267-291.
    Some consequentialists argue that ordinary individuals are obligated to act in specific, concrete ways to address large-scale harms. For example, they argue that we should each refrain from meat-eating and avoid buying sweatshop-made clothing. The case they advance for such prescriptions can seem intuitive and compelling: by acting in those ways, a person might help prevent serious harms from being produced at little or no personal cost, and so one should act in those ways. But I argue that such reasoning (...)
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  • An intrapersonal, intertemporal solution to an interpersonal dilemma.Valerie Soon - 2021 - Philosophical Studies 178 (10):3353-3370.
    It is commonly accepted that what we ought to do collectively does not imply anything about what each of us ought to do individually. According to this line of reasoning, if cooperating will make no difference to an outcome, then you are not morally required to do it. And if cooperating will be personally costly to you as well, this is an even stronger reason to not do it. However, this reasoning results in a self-defeating, yet entirely predictable outcome. If (...)
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  • Consequentialism, Collective Action, and Causal Impotence.Tim Aylsworth & Adam Pham - 2020 - Ethics, Policy and Environment 23 (3):336-349.
    This paper offers some refinements to a particular objection to act consequentialism, the “causal impotence” objection. According to proponents of the objection, when we find circumstances in which severe, unnecessary harms result entirely from voluntary acts, it seems as if we should be able to indict at least one act among those acts, but act consequentialism appears to lack the resources to offer this indictment. Our aim is to show is that the most promising response on behalf of act consequentialism, (...)
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  • Against Eating Humanely Raised Meat: Revisiting Fred’s Basement.Jonathan Spelman - 2020 - Journal of Animal Ethics 10 (2):177-191.
    In “Puppies, Pigs, and People: Eating Meat and Marginal Cases,” Alastair Norcross (2004) uses a thought experiment he calls “Fred's Basement” to argue that consuming factory-farmed meat is morally equivalent to torturing and killing puppies in order to enjoy the taste of chocolate. Thus, he concludes that consuming factory-farmed meat is morally wrong. Although Norcross leaves open the possibility that consuming humanely raised meat is morally permissible, I contend that his basic argumentative approach rules it out. In this article, therefore, (...)
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  • Technological Displacement and the Duty to Increase Living Standards: from Left to Right.Howard Nye - 2020 - International Review of Information Ethics 28:1-16.
    Many economists have argued convincingly that automated systems employing present-day artificial intelligence have already caused massive technological displacement, which has led to stagnant real wages, fewer middle- income jobs, and increased economic inequality in developed countries like Canada and the United States. To address this problem various individuals have proposed measures to increase workers’ living standards, including the adoption of a universal basic income, increased public investment in education, increased minimum wages, increased worker control of firms, and investment in a (...)
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  • (1 other version)Letting others do wrong.Tyler Doggett - 2022 - Noûs 56 (1):40-56.
    It is sometimes—but not always—permissible to let others do wrong. This paper is about why that is so.
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  • Shopping with a Conscience? The Epistemic Case for Relinquishment over Conscientious Consumption.Ewan Kingston - 2021 - Business Ethics Quarterly 31 (2):242-274.
    Many people argue that we should practice conscientious consumption. Faced with goods from gravely flawed production processes, such as wood from clear-cut rainforests or electronics containing conflict minerals, they argue that we should enact personal policies to routinely shun tainted goods and select pure goods. However, consumers typically should be relatively uncertain about which flaws in global supply chains are grave and the connection of purchases to those grave flaws. The threat of significant uncertainty makes conscientious consumption appear to be (...)
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  • Public Policy, Consequentialism, the Environment, and Non-Human Animals.Mark Budolfson & Dean Spears - 2020 - In Douglas W. Portmore (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Consequentialism. New York, USA: Oup Usa. pp. 592-615.
    The focus of this chapter is public policy and consequentialism, especially issues that arise in connection with the environment – i.e. the natural world, including non-human animals. We integrate some of the existing literature on environmental economics, welfare economics, and policy with the literature on environmental values and philosophy. The emphasis on environmental policy is motivated by the fact that it is arguably the most philosophically interesting and challenging application of consequentialism to policy, as it includes all the challenges of (...)
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  • How to Help when it Hurts: ACT Individually (and in Groups).C. E. Abbate - 2020 - Animal Studies Journal 9 (1):170-200.
    In a recent article, Corey Wrenn argues that in order to adequately address injustices done to animals, we ought to think systemically. Her argument stems from a critique of the individualist approach I employ to resolve a moral dilemma faced by animal sanctuaries, who sometimes must harm some animals to help others. But must systemic critiques of injustice be at odds with individualist approaches? In this paper, I respond to Wrenn by showing how individualist approaches that take seriously the notion (...)
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  • Veganism, Animal Welfare, and Causal Impotence.Samuel Kahn - 2020 - Journal of Animal Ethics 10 (2):161-176.
    Proponents of the utilitarian animal welfare argument (AWA) for veganism maintain that it is reasonable to expect that adopting a vegan diet will decrease animal suffering. In this paper I argue otherwise. I maintain that (i) there are plausible scenarios in which refraining from meat-consumption will not decrease animal suffering; (ii) the utilitarian AWA rests on a false dilemma; and (iii) there are no reasonable grounds for the expectation that adopting a vegan diet will decrease animal suffering. The paper is (...)
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  • The psychological basis of collective action.James Fanciullo - 2021 - Philosophical Studies 178 (2):427-444.
    Sometimes, a group of people can produce a morally bad outcome despite each person’s individual act making no difference to whether the outcome is produced. Since each person’s act makes no difference, it seems the effects of the act cannot provide a reason not to perform it. This is problematic, because if each person acts in accordance with their reasons, each will presumably perform the act—and thus, the bad outcome will be brought about. I suggest that the key to solving (...)
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  • Against Inefficacy Objections: the Real Economic Impact of Individual Consumer Choices on Animal Agriculture.Matthew C. Halteman & Steven McMullen - 2019 - Food Ethics 2 (2-3):93-110.
    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 (...)
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  • Should Moral Vegetarians Avoid Eating Vegetables?Christopher Bobier - 2019 - Food Ethics 5 (1-2).
    David DeGrazia (2009) and Stuart Rachels (2011), among others, offer moral arguments in favor of adopting a vegetarian diet that have, they claim, broad appeal. Rather than relying on an account of animal rights or a particular ethical theory, these arguments rely on the moral principle that an extensive amount of pain requires moral justification. Since people do not need to eat meat in order to survive, the arguments conclude that the pain that animals experience in factory farming is unjustified. (...)
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  • Factory Farming and Ethical Veganism.Eugene Mills - 2019 - Acta Analytica 34 (4):385-406.
    The most compelling arguments for ethical veganism hinge on premise-pairs linking the serious wrongness of factory farming to that of buying its products: one premise claiming that buying those products stands in a certain relation to factory farming itself, and one claiming that entering into that relation with a seriously wrong practice is itself wrong. I argue that all such “linkage arguments” on offer fail, granting the serious wrongness of factory farming. Each relevant relation is such that if it holds (...)
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  • Collective harm and the inefficacy problem.Julia Nefsky - 2019 - Philosophy Compass 14 (4):e12587.
    This paper discusses the inefficacy problem that arises in contexts of “collective harm.‘ These are contexts in which by acting in a certain sort of way, people collectively cause harm, or fail to prevent it, but no individual act of the relevant sort seems to itself make a difference. The inefficacy problem is that if acting in the relevant way won’t make a difference, it’s unclear why it would be wrong. Each individual can argue, “things will be just as bad (...)
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  • Moral vegetarianism.Tyler Doggett - 2018 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  • What is the point of helping?James Fanciullo - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 177 (6):1487-1500.
    In some cases, a group of people can bring about a morally bad outcome despite each person’s individual act making no difference with respect to bringing that outcome about. Since each person’s act makes no difference, it seems the effects of the act cannot provide a reason not to perform it. This is problematic, because if each person acts in accordance with their reasons, each will presumably perform the act—and thus, the bad outcome will be brought about. Recently, Julia Nefsky (...)
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  • The Diner’s Defence: Producers, Consumers, and the Benefits of Existence.Abelard Podgorski - 2020 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 98 (1):64-77.
    One popular defence of moral omnivorism appeals to facts about the indirectness of the diner’s causal relationship to the suffering of farmed animals. Another appeals to the claim that farmed animals would not exist but for our farming practices. The import of these claims, I argue, has been misunderstood, and the standard arguments grounded in them fail. In this paper, I develop a better argument in defence of eating meat which combines resources from both of these strategies, together with principles (...)
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  • Against Inefficacy Objections: The Real Economic Impact of Individual Consumer Choices on Animal Agriculture.Steven McMullen & Matthew C. Halteman - 2018 - Food Ethics 1 (4):online first.
    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 (...)
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  • Gun Violence as Industrial Pollution.Thomas Metcalf - 2018 - Public Affairs Quarterly 32 (2).
    I offer a new proposal to prevent some of the harms of gun violence in the United States. First, I argue that gun violence is a negative externality of gun production, on an analogy with industrial pollution. Second, I outline a law that the United States might use to internalize the violent costs of gun production. This law would provide a financial incentive for gun manufacturers to reduce gun violence in whatever legally permissible way they can, not necessarily by reducing (...)
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  • Consumer Choice and Collective Impact.Julia Nefsky - 2018 - In Anne Barnhill, Mark Budolfson & Tyler Doggett (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Food Ethics. Oxford University Press. pp. 267-286.
    Taken collectively, consumer food choices have a major impact on animal lives, human lives, and the environment. But it is far from clear how to move from facts about the power of collective consumer demand to conclusions about what one ought to do as an individual consumer. In particular, even if a large-scale shift in demand away from a certain product (e.g., factory-farmed meat) would prevent grave harms or injustices, it typically does not seem that it will make a difference (...)
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