this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2024
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The premise is what matters, which is that you like to eat meat. Because of this, let's say a chicken company has decided they will kill a chicken so that you can buy it. Your actions cause an incentive to kill animals, and so someone does and sells it to you.
You could kill it yourself, but like you said, you are no murderer, so you pay a company to do it for you and then you get to feel like you aren't a murderer. What a deal!
People dont eat meat because companies produce it, companies produce it because people eat it. Therefore the blame lies with those that eat it, which also means the best way to reduce animal deaths is to stop eating meat so that companies will produce less of it.
Eventually, they might stop producing it at any meaningful scale altogether, once enough people reduce or stop their consumption of meat.
i have never done that.
I'm sort of confused what you think buying a product from a company means? The price they charge is to cover all of the costs they spent to produce it plus a profit. You are paying a company to make whatever good you buy from them by purchasing the item, they've just premade it for convenience. They do take a risk that they assumed wrong and the people they thought would buy it don't. When that happens they reduce supply or make something else that those people do want.
Its a relationship essentially and I dont think its possible to assign responsibility to a single side of the relationship. Ultimately its both the companies fault for offering to supply it, and the customers fault for offering to buy it.
Its very similar to why its so hard to decide who to blame when looking at a drug dealer selling to a drug addict. The answer is they are two sides of the same coin, and neither would exist without the other.
I understand you want proof but I think all I can offer is philosophy or whatever we want to call it. This whole concept is important to how I make decisions and I will stand by it until someone can reason me out of it.
Unfortunately I'm having a lot of trouble following the logic of your position. For me it falls apart as soon as I try to think a few steps past the immediate action of buying pre packaged meet in a store, and what those actions lead to.
they can choose to reduce their supply for any number of reasons. i'm not responsible for their decision.
If you were to go to your grocery store every week and buy 100 chickens, they would increase production specifically for you. If they then sent out a notice to your grocery store that said "due to Commie buying so many chickens we have increased our crop of chickens to accommodate, all hail Commie the chicken slayer".
Would you consider yourself responsible at all or thats still the companies choice to produce the chickens for you or not. Should I be mad that they would increase their production for you rather than I should be mad that you are buying so many chickens?
It seems like you are sort of hiding behind the small scale of it all. Like you are so small and minor on the whole system you can't possibly matter, so you dont. Is that accurate?
no. they make their own choices.
this is true, but it's not what i'm saying. what i'm saying is that i don't decide whether or how many chickens are killed. someone else does, and they are responsible for their own decisions.
no. i'm paying them for the good. when you stopped buying meat, did the companies you bought it from stop selling it?
No but that wasnt my goal. The goal is to get people to reduce meat consumption at least to some level of healthy as right now its a major cause of a bunch of illnesses and diseases. If you are responsible for someone else's diet its sort of crazy to not have them eat whatever will make them feel best, which is usually whole food and plant based.
Not everyone is able to do that of course. I personally dont think its possible to get to a point where animals aren't ever killed for food, but I would like to see a point where factory farms do not exist.
Not every vegan is black and white with it.
everyone is responsible for their own actions
Only if you dont ever interact with another person directly or indirectly. I will accept you could live this way but I wouldnt be able to apply that type of moral system to one where I need to consider those around me as well as myself.
i feel no responsibility for what the animal agriculture industry does, and if i did, to stop it, i wouldn't go vegan. i'd buy bolt cutters.
Isnt that just as futile as going vegan? Or do you mean like taking the animals and raising them yourself? Or letting them free in the wild I guess?
Either way any actions you take with a bolt cutter, that line on the graph you showed me will keep going up.
Maybe you mean you'd personally save the animals you felt responsible for?
no. direct action gets the goods. if you want to save animals, you need to go where the animals are and save them.
impossible. if the animals are not in the pen to be slaughtered, they cannot be counted toward meat production.
i don't know how you would go about trying to disprove this claim.
have you tried that?
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/meat-production-tonnes?tab=chart&country=~OWID_WRL
Yes I also understand not every country is in a position to be plant based, its a transition that takes time. The numbers I'm most interested in seeing is percentage of the population that is vegan and whether that percentage goes up or not.
people's actions are not caused by incentives. they are caused by our will. i don't decide for others whether to kill chickens. tehy decide for themselves.
Peoples actions are caused by rewards. When you do something and are rewarded either externally (other people, nature, etc.) or internally (self-reward) which then causes you to want to repeat the actions. Its cyclical, and you can't have the action without the reward or the system breaks and the action stops being rewarded. If you do this cycle long enough, you will learn a habit that no longer requires the type of reward to sustain.
You buy meat, reward company with money, company is happy and decides to do it again, rinse and repeat. You can't have one without the other so the company is just as responsible for selling as you are for buying. Either of you could break the cycle but neither wants to.
Thats why vegans try to show a good example and share their reasoning and discuss things, because this is what breaks harmful cycles and habits.
the company is paid long before i walk into the grocery store.
no. tehy are caused by the will of the person. they can choose to do otherwise. i do not make their choice for them.