If you ran a bakery and nobody bought your blueberry muffins on Monday, you would bake fewer of them on Tuesday. The meat industry operates on the exact same principle, just on a massive scale. To claim that consumers refusing to buy meat has zero impact on how many animals the industry breeds and slaughters is to deny the foundational premise of how every business on earth operates.
If you ran a bakery and nobody bought your blueberry muffins on Monday, you would bake fewer of them on Tuesday.
i might. but if i knew national blueberry day was tuesday, i might bake more. or i might increase advertising. or i might lobby to mandate blueberry muffins in school, prison, and military foods. or i could choose a thousand other courses of action. and someone’s choice to buy my muffins, or not, cannot be said to decide for me. i get to make my own decisions.
To claim that consumers refusing to buy meat has zero impact on how many animals the industry breeds and slaughters is to deny the foundational premise of how every business on earth operates.
the people running the industry can make any rationalization they want for their actions: they still hold responsibility for them.
Again, you’ve moved the goalposts from ‘I have no influence’ to ‘It’s their fault, not mine.’
You are now arguing that because the industry has the agency to choose to kill, you are absolved of the responsibility for paying them to do it, but that is not how moral agency works.
If you ran a bakery and nobody bought your blueberry muffins on Monday, you would bake fewer of them on Tuesday. The meat industry operates on the exact same principle, just on a massive scale. To claim that consumers refusing to buy meat has zero impact on how many animals the industry breeds and slaughters is to deny the foundational premise of how every business on earth operates.
i might. but if i knew national blueberry day was tuesday, i might bake more. or i might increase advertising. or i might lobby to mandate blueberry muffins in school, prison, and military foods. or i could choose a thousand other courses of action. and someone’s choice to buy my muffins, or not, cannot be said to decide for me. i get to make my own decisions.
You are now arguing that because a business owner has agency, that consumer demand magically ceases to be the primary engine of production.
This is a category error. You are confusing the mechanism by which a business fights for survival with the source of its funding.
not magically, and not ceases. because a business owner has agency, no other agent can be said to cause them to act.
the people running the industry can make any rationalization they want for their actions: they still hold responsibility for them.
Again, you’ve moved the goalposts from ‘I have no influence’ to ‘It’s their fault, not mine.’
You are now arguing that because the industry has the agency to choose to kill, you are absolved of the responsibility for paying them to do it, but that is not how moral agency works.
i didn’t say i have no influence, so this is a strawman.
i’ve never paid for them to do it, so i can’t possibly be responsible for that