Round at Bad Conscience Paul, who used to be a vegetarian but no longer is, sets out arguments to justify his non-vegetarianism. Like Paul, I am also a lapsed vegetarian. I don't remember exactly how long it was that I abstained from eating meat - maybe seven years. But anyway I started eating it again when I was in Australia in late 2006. For my part, though, I don't feel morally at ease about it.
That's all just by way of background to going on to question one of the arguments - the first - that Paul puts forward. It is that opting to become a vegetarian doesn't spare animal lives or reduce animal suffering. As Paul elaborates the point:
It is a brute fact that the vegetarianism of any individual neither saves any animal lives, nor stops any animal suffering. This is because - given the scales of production involved in modern meat-rearing and processing - the decisions of any single consumer have no appreciable impact on market demand. This demand is so large, being constituted by so many thousands of individual consumers, that the removal of one specific consumer has no appreciable reduction for the net demand for meat, and thus no consequent reduction in supply will follow.
I don't find this argument persuasive. Even if its direct claim is true, it is an argument about the consequences of a single person's actions, and it is therefore not clear to me why Paul should focus things so narrowly - with such immediacy as regards time span. Where social and moral change is concerned, are there not small incremental influences that an individual's actions may have, which, when combined with the actions of others, eventually mount up to effect a major change for the good? Surely, in weighing one's own moral decisions, one should take account of, rather than discounting, this sort of longer-range possibility. Of course, even then one cannot know for certain that one's individual decisions will make a difference for the better. But in the case under discussion it is unlikely to make matters worse.
