"Nobis argues that Singer's consequentialist approach is inadequate for defending the moral obligation to become a vegetarian or vegan. The consequentialist case rests on the idea that being a vegetarian or vegan maximizes utility -- the fewer animals that are raised and killed for food, the less suffering. Nobis argues that this argument does not work on an individual level -- my becoming a vegetarian makes no difference to the overall utility of reducing animal suffering in a context of a (...) huge industry and market unaffected by my actions. Nobis merges the insights of virtue ethics with consequentialism to argue that individuals can bring about more goodness if they have the virtues of compassion, care, and sensitivity to unnecessary cruelty and suffering. If one ought to be compassionate, sensitive to cruelty, resist injustice, and be morally integrated, then, Nobis argues, one ought to be a vegetarian or vegan.". (shrink)

This paper is a response to a certain sort of argument defending the rights of animals. Part I is a brief explanation of the background and of the sort of argument I want to reject; Part II is an attempt to characterize those arguments: they contain fundamental confusions about moral relations between people and people and between people and animals. And Part III is an indication of what I think can still be said on—as it were–the animals' side.

Several authors have argued that act–utilitarianism cannot provide an adequate critique of buying meat because a single meat purchase will not actually cause more farm animals to be raised or slaughtered. Thus, regardless of whether or not the production of meat is inhumane to animals, someone who buys meat is doing nothing wrong. This argument fails to show that meat purchases are morally permissible, however, because it assumes that act–utilitarians would use actual utility in their decision to buy or not (...) to buy meat. I show that act–utilitarians cannot use actual utility as a decision procedure and must instead use expected utility to prescribe or proscribe actions. I then demonstrate how expected utility can be applied to cases of contributory causation, where many people seem morally responsible for causing something to happen. Buying meat is one case of contributory causation where the probability of any single individual's affecting meat production is slight, but the expected disutility of affecting that production is substantial. Thus, in its expected utility form, act–utilitarianism defeats the ‘causal inefficacy’ defence of buying meat [1]. (shrink)

Some carnivores defend the position that the opportunistic consumption of meat is morally permissible even under the assumption that it is morally wrong to act in ways that ause unnecessary suffering to sentient beings. Ordering and consuming chicken once a week, they argue, will not increase the numbers of chickens suffering or slaughtered, since the system of purchasing and farming chickens is not sufficiently fine‐tuned to register differences at margin. We argue that, insensitivity of the market notwithstanding, consistent consequentialists are (...) morally prohibited from each additional purchase and consumption of meat. (shrink)