How the
Necessary Negligibility of Individual Consumption Decisions and the Collective
Action Problems of our Complex World Imperil the Attempt to Make One's Eating
Habits Fully Rational; and Why, Partly as a Consequence of This, You Should Ideally
be a Fully Committed, Activist Vegetarian or Vegan, Not a Mere “Ethical Eater”
(or “Flim-flam-tarian”)
I recently became a "vegetarian". Roughly
speaking, I don't eat any meat. Definitely speaking, I haven't eaten any meat
for several weeks, and I have only consumed small quantities of meat on a few
occasions in the two or three months before that. Definitely speaking, I am
planning never to eat any meat again (and I am fairly confident that I will be
able to do this, since this self-denial jibes well with my Stoical life
philosophy). The reason that I consumed small quantities of meat several times after
my decision to call myself a vegetarian (and commit to vegetarianism) is not
moral weakness or turpitude; instead, it is that, with some reason, I believed
that it was "rational" to do so in the particular contexts in which the
meat option was available to me. I have now decided that the idea of
rationality on which these decisions were based was, in an important sense,
silly. This essay is in large part an attempt to explain why I think this
(though, first, I have to explain what I'm actually talking about).
The contexts in which I ‘resiled’ from my vegetarian
commitments were all contexts in which the meat products had already been
purchased by my parents (or, in the first case, me buying Indian takeaway for
the household), and prepared either by one of my parents or a chef in a
restaurant/cafe. It was because the meat had already been purchased and
prepared that I had decided, on each of these occasions (one of which took
place at a cafe, when my dad had a bit of leftover bacon on his plate), that it
was completely morally permissible for me to eat the meat product in question.
In
the case of the Indian takeaway, I had realised that I had bought too much meat
(not helped by the fact that one of the vegetarian curries I had ordered turned
up with chunks of meat in it), and that if I didn’t eat some of it myself, it
would just go to waste. How, I thought, could that be at all immoral?
I have come across the arguments
of several utilitarian ‘ethical eaters’ along just these lines: that this kind
of attitude towards purchased and prepared meat is completely morally
permissible, because it is a simple matter of rationality to see that you literally can’t make any difference to
the meat industry by eating meat of this kind. It seems obvious: if eating meat
in such a situation could not possibly have an effect on the meat industry in
any way, and you enjoy the taste of meat, it makes no sense not to have some.
A bit over a month ago, I
realised that this line of argument is somewhat problematic and naïve. The biggest
flaw, I think, is that it ignores two related problems: the necessary
negligibility of individual consumption decisions and the collective action
problems of our complex world (both well-known problems for individual utility calculations
in general). On the basis of these problems, as well as some other
considerations, I ultimately believe that it actually makes slightly more sense
– is more rational, if you like – to be fully committed to
vegetarianism/veganism, no matter the context where meat is available. Here
follows my (rather complicated and long) argument.
As an individual vegetarian or vegan, your eating habits
can, at best, have a trivial or tiny effect on the world.
The dent an individual vegetarian or vegan makes in the meat industry, even
over the course of many years or decades refusing to buy meat products, will be
necessarily trivial. The dent an individual vegetarian or vegan makes in the
meat industry in a single act of refusing meat will be necessarily
negligible. Moreover, because of the
difficulty of solving collective action problems in the incredibly complex
societies in which we live, it is often the case that individual consumption
decisions that appear more ‘altruistic’ are actually negligibly bad for overall
utility, rather than negligibly good.
Indeed, it's more profound than that: when you’re one person in a big,
complex society, surrounded by thousands, hundreds of thousands or millions of
other agents, and you weigh up whether to be selfish or to be altruistic in a
given situation, the utilitarian calculus typically (I believe) suggests that
the selfish option is either no worse than the supposedly altruistic option, or
better. Why? Because, your own seemingly ‘altruistic’ decisions in life – your
decision to vote in the election for this good candidate over that bad
candidate, your decision to purchase this ethically produced shirt or brand of
coffee over the ones made from exploited labour, your decision to attend a
climate-change protest rather than stay at home – are simultaneously: 1.) almost totally
inconsequential, and 2.) plagued by collective-action dilemmas. In fact, in most of
the cases one readily thinks of, it seems likely that the selfish option, taken
strictly on its own, will produce fractionally more utility overall (because it’s less demanding for you and/or more
immediately gratifying for you and/or is the better decision for other people
unless huge numbers of people start
co-ordinating in making the ‘altruistic’ decision).
To make this claim (or set of
claims) concrete, let’s take an example directly related to ethical eating: the
scenario of choosing between meat and vegetarian dishes at a restaurant. Let’s
say you’re at a fairly good restaurant, and, between the choice of some kind of
salad or a delicious, rich, flavoursome meat dish, you take the latter (we can
suppose that salads are the only vegetarian option the restaurant has on the
menu). What will be the result? Assuming you are not racked by guilt, eating
the tasty meat dish will produce more utility for you, because it will be more
satisfying and tasty than the gustatorily austere salad (and you won’t risk
being mocked for your “self-righteousness” (as is common for vegetarians and
vegans)). Moreover, the decision to take the meat dish will also likely produce
slightly more utility for the people around you, because you will probably
generate slightly more group cohesion (a pathetically large number of
meat-eaters become irritable or uncomfortable around vegetarians and vegans). And
even if a decision to take the meat dish doesn’t have these (admittedly,
relatively trivial) positive effects, that definitely won’t make the decision
to choose the vegetarian dish
more morally
rational according to a utilitarian calculus. After all, the amount of meat a
restaurant chooses to order every week (or day, or fortnight, or whatever)
isn’t going to be affected by one choice made by one person on one night (in
the best case scenario, your decision will be the tipping point for a
nontrivial reduction in the restaurant’s meat orders – but that’s very
improbable in any case).
So
it turns out that, in this perfectly standard scenario – which isn’t one of the
scenarios that utilitarians typically regard as an exception (a situation where
the meat has already been purchased and prepared) – it is most reasonable to
believe that the utilitarian calculus is either indeterminate between the two
options, or (more probably) in favour of the latter.
One can actually think of even
more disconcerting examples than this. Take the decision (not directly related to ethical eating) between purchasing a
garment made from exploited labour in the Third World, and purchasing a more
expensive garment made from non-exploited labour in the First World.
Now,
it’s obviously true that if a massive number of people boycott products made
from exploited labour (and do it consistently, across multiple companies), then
that will put immense pressure on the culpable corporations to improve labour
conditions: the extra money the companies have to spend on paying workers and
improving facilities will be outweighed by a return to higher profits once they
inform their customers know that the exploitation has reduced.
But if you consider the case of
one
person having to make a decision between two garments in a shop, the
morally rational decision seems to be reversed (again, both decisions are
negligible, but in this case, the seemingly selfish decision seems almost
certainly the fractionally better one for the world).
Imagine a young woman who has the
choice between buying an expensive t-shirt produced by a major brand from a
Western country, and a much cheaper t-shirt made from exploited, sweatshop
labour in Sri Lanka. Since she reasons along standard utilitarian lines, she
ends up thinking that buying the second one would be immoral because she would
be ‘condoning exploitation’ of poor, powerless Sri Lankan peasants working in
infernal conditions. She decides instead that she better just bite the bullet, and
she nobly forks out the extra money necessary to buy the shirt produced by
non-exploited labour.
This sounds like sound reasoning,
but it’s actually quite dodgy. The reason is that, if she buys the cheaper
shirt made from exploited Sri Lankan labour, she will both reduce the financial
burden on herself, and (in an admittedly very small way) be partly supporting the poor Sri Lankan
labourers – even if she’s mainly supporting the multinational corporation who
exploits these people. By contrast, if she buys the expensive designer shirt,
she will be placing a large financial burden on herself, and (in an admittedly
very small way) be partly supporting workers
who probably have stable incomes and good job security, and mainly supporting the multinational
corporation that employs these
people. And which one, of those two decisions, is the (fractionally) more
morally rational decision for this individual person to take? I reckon it’s
almost certainly the former. Unless things radically change for them, the
exploited Sri Lankan sweatshop workers would
want people to buy the products they make; below a certain threshold,
boycotts will be straightforwardly bad for them, because they will result in
reduced profits for the company for which they work, and certainly won’t
improve their working conditions (indeed, reduced profits will likely lead to
worse working conditions, worse wages, or dismissals). And yes, it is true that
the boycotts can’t get sufficiently
big and powerful to force changes in the conditions of exploited labourers
unless individual people decide to make boycotting decisions – but that still
doesn’t make the individual decision morally rational.
Some might regard this line of argument as condoning moral
nihilism about decisions where the problem of individual-decision-negligibility
and/or the problems of collective action rear their ugly heads (as opposed to
decisions about whether or not to rob, beat or murder someone, which will
obviously have a direct, nontrivial impact on another human). Of course, there’s
a strong tradition in moral philosophy of arguing that myopic self-interest is
simply more rational in general than open co-operativeness (even if it is not more
moral), because just focussing on your own desires is liable to produce more
utility for you (and perhaps your family)
directly, and raise you above other people permanently, even if collective
community co-operation on a given problem (say, preserving the environmental
health of an eco-system) will, in the long-run, leave everyone better off (=
Hobbes’ dilemma in “state of nature” = The Tragedy of the Commons = (most
generally) a Prisoner’s Dilemma). Given
all this, you might be tempted to simply throw your hands in the air and say,
“What’s the point of being a vegetarian at all? If I can’t actually have any
relevantly good effect on the world, and I enjoy the taste of meat, I
should eat meat!”
One possible reply to this kind
of nihilism is put forward by the most original and unusual moral philosopher
alive today, Derek Parfit. Fairly early on in his 1984 masterwork of moral
reasoning, Reasons and Persons (not
actually a book I would highly recommend),
Derek Parfit imagines a scenario involving a large number of men dying of
thirst in the desert, in an attempt to show that one can be rationally required
to carry out actions that have imperceptibly positive effects (and by this, he
hopes to refute the “Argument from Inconsequentialism”). The outline of the thought
experiment is as follows: you have just encountered this mass of desperately
thirsty men in the middle of the searing desert, and you have a choice either to
add all of your waterbottle to a trough of water that’s being filled for them
to drink, or some other amount (including none of it). After a lot of
painstaking deliberation and meticulous tinkering with details (as is Parfit’s
signature), Parfit ends up claiming that, even if the result of adding all of the
water is indiscernible from any other choice to the men (because it only adds,
say, one drop to the amount each man gets to drink), this action is still
morally/rationally required (for Parfit, morality and rationality are strongly
interwoven).
But, of course, even if, after
reviewing his argument, you think that Parfit is “correct” on this (and you
will only really believe that strongly if you share his meta-ethical assumptions),
this kind of scenario is too simple to apply to most real-world situations. I
already argued that there are many common situations where either it’s completely
unclear which action would produce the infinitesimally better overall utility,
or the apparently selfish action would seem to be the one with the
infinitesimally better overall utility, considered strictly on its own.
Fortunately, there is another,
less academic reply to this kind of largeness-and-complexity-of-world-based
moral nihilism. It goes as follows: But
don’t you vote?
A single vote among millions of
others is necessarily negligible, and is possibly completely inconsequential,
no matter the electoral system in place (Majority rule, Plurality or “Instant
run-off”). But if this is the case, why would
you vote? Obviously, some people think the answer to that question is, “There
is no answer and you shouldn’t vote” – but the vast majority of people do not
think that. So is it rational to vote?
Well, in a very important sense, yes – and that brings us to the last, most
intricate phase of my argument.
As I suggested many paragraphs ago, I believe that, if you are
convinced of the moral imperative either to reduce animal suffering or to
reduce ecological damage and carbon emissions caused by the meat industry (or
both),
you should be a
fully committed
vegetarian or vegan, not a superficially ‘rational’ flim-flam person. Despite how
it may seem, I really don’t think it does become perfectly morally rational to
eat meat on occasions when it’s already been purchased and prepared. In my
view, being a vegetarian or vegan should, ideally, be more than just a
lifestyle choice; it should be a form of activism (fortunately, I will soon
argue for this). If you’re an ethical eater purely on the basis of utilitarian
arguments that ignore the problems of individual-action-negligibility and
collective action (i.e. bad utilitarian arguments), then you might think it
rational just to be some kind of quiet, humble “ethical eater” (or, as ethical
eaters shall be henceforth known, a “flim-flam-tarian”). But I think that this
is both a shirking of moral duty, and just a bad idea on logical grounds – one
that is quite likely to guarantee that you won’t have
any positive effect on the world. There are three reasons why.
The first, and most quotidian,
reason why being a flim-flam-tarian is bad is this:
If you often accept leftover meat
products and leftover cooked meat made by your housemates, partner or parents (whoever
you live with), you will most likely encourage these people to keep buying
slightly excessive quantities of food, in the knowledge that the leftovers will
certainly be eaten. Of course, you could sternly tell the food purchasers and
preparers that they should only purchase meat for themselves, but it would be
far less likely to cause trouble and confusion if you just never ate meat at
all.
The second reason why being a
flim-flam-tarian is a bad idea is that it is surely psychologically far easier for
you, as an ethical eater, to completely avoid a given category of ‘bad’ food,
rather than psychologically complicate things by sporadically eating this category
of food when the circumstances (morally) permit. While this kind of consideration may seem to
give too little credit to human frontal lobes, it’s certainly true that by sporadically
eating meat, one sporadically reminds oneself of the taste of meat (the thing one
is missing out on whenever there isn’t leftover purchased and prepared meat). Moreover,
the value of “purity” is an important element of our moral faculty, and there’s
manifestly something much more rewarding and enriching about feeling like one
has a strong, clear, pure ethical
commitment, as opposed to a muddy, ambiguous one. And though I don’t have any hard
evidence of this (it’s too obscure a phenomenon to have been studied), it seems
to me that someone who still permits herself to eat meat when she deems it
“rational” is significantly more likely to lapse into non-ethical eating than
someone who has completely renounced meat. It’s certainly true that, to be a
really successful vegetarian or vegan, it is of big assistance to make meat a
taboo.
The last and most important
reason why you shouldn’t be a flim-flam-tarian – why you should be a fully
committed, activist vegetarian or
vegan instead – is that a quiet, humble “ethical eater” is obviously going to
have much less of an impact upon the world than someone who is strongly and
passionately committed to a noble,
self-denying, ascetic life choice, which everyone can understand and many
will seek to emulate (as long as you’re not too sanctimonious about displaying
and discussing this noble life). As I argued several pages back, a single
person’s ethical consumption habits, even if they are a strict vegan, are going
to be trivial in the grand scheme of things (this was the fundamental basis for
the apparently nihilistic argument I spent so long laying out). But even though
I suggested, using the example of voting, that this problem of
individual-action-negligibility may not be quite as straightforwardly tragic as
it seems (and I’ll get to that), it’s certainly the case that there is one way
a vegetarian or vegan can guarantee that they will have a nontrivial effect on
the world: convincing other people to join them in their moral commitment. If
you’re a quiet, semi-vegetarian or semi-vegan, you are probably not performing
your activist role at all. Even leaving aside the “quiet” part (you might be a
flim-flam-tarian who does engage in some non-sanctimonious proselytising for
flim-flam-tarianism), it is, as I suggested, much more morally noble and
admirable to seem pure, self-denying and monastic (/ascetic) than to just be
some guy who mostly doesn’t eat meat (and sometimes does). On a more basic
level, it’s obviously easier to spread a simple, straightforward moral dogma
(“don’t eat meat”/ “don’t eat animal products”) than some subtle version of
ethical eating, whose occasional meat-eating permissions most won’t understand.
At this point, I imagine that a reader might be slightly confused
by the structure of the overall argument, even if they have been agreeing with
many or all of the sub-arguments I’ve been making along the way. There is
something rather confusing about what I’ve done: I first used the problem of
the necessary negligibility of individual consumption decisions and the problems of collective
action in a big, complex society to argue that it is silly to even try to work
out the ‘rationality’ of eating meat on each individual occasion it is
available, but then I suggested that maybe the necessary negligibility of individual consumption decisions and the problems of collective action aren't huge problems for rationality after
all (suggesting that voting is still rational even if the individual vote is negligible), and then I started arguing that being a fully committed, activist
vegetarian or vegan is almost certainly decisively
better in terms of utility-maximisation (and for other reasons) than being
a quiet, humble flim-flam-tarian. Aren’t these three strands kind of
in conflict?
In order to respond to this
question, I should begin by trying to explain why I said voting could still be rational, even if there was a guarantee of
negligibility for your individual ballot paper. The answer in that case is that
we overcome moral nihilism simply by recognising that we have a moral duty to vote. It is a Kantian circumvention:
we cognise that if a nihilistic psychology were to spread widely, it would be
extremely costly, and we follow the categorical imperative to carry out the
action whose universal repudiation would result in such a disaster. Does the
fact that our motivation is not rationally grounded according to utilitarian
considerations make voting irrational?
No, not at all; according to the way I understand rationality of behaviour
(probably a pretty commonsense conception), it would still fit well within the
bounds (a Kantian person is a perfectly rational person).
I think the way we
non-irrationally avoid moral nihilism about vegetarianism and veganism is very
similar: we think to ourselves, ‘If I stop eating meat, that will have a
negligible impact on the world, but I know that other people might have that
thought also, and it would be a disaster if everyone took this consideration
too seriously, so I won’t take it too seriously’. Unlike the case of voting,
however, one can definitely use utilitarian considerations to defend a general
vegetarian or vegan lifestyle, even
if using utilitarian considerations to justify a particular decision to refuse
meat is pretty difficult. I say this
because we can be pretty confident that spending several years refusing to eat any meat products does have a supernegligible (albeit still trivial) and clearly positive impact on the world.
And, of course, having a
vegetarian or vegan lifestyle which also involves a degree of activism – an
attempt to convert other people to the noble, moral cause – may even allow you
to raise your overall positive impact on the world above the trivial.
Anyhow, to finish up, it should now be clear that the necessary negligibility of individual
consumption decisions and the collective action problems of our complex world do indeed imperil
the attempt to make one's eating habits fully rational; and that, partly as a consequence
of this, you should ideally be a fully committed, activist vegetarian or vegan,
not a mere “ethical eater” (or “Flim-flam-tarian”).
