On the Threshold Argument against Consumer Meat Purchases - Arti torrent

AUTHOR: Gary Chartier

ABSTRACT:
It is very likely that, in most cases, uncoordinated individual1 consumer meat
purchases2 will not increase the number of animals bred, reared intensively, and
subsequently killed on factory farms.3 However, employing what I term “the
threshold argument,” some consequentialist vegetarians have maintained that
such purchases are still morally impermissible.

The threshold argument’s primary audience is made of people who reason in
broadly consequentialist fashion. But it will be relevant to the moral deliberation
of anyone who thinks consequences are morally significant. It is best understood
as an argument about decision making under conditions of uncertainty. An actor
in possession of perfect information would know, of course, which meat purchases
would and which would not cause harm to actual animals. If she were a
consequentialist, she could use this information to perform the needed utility calculations and decide confidently how to proceed. The threshold argument is
designed, in effect, to persuade someone with very limited information that she
should avoid purchasing meat. The argument focuses on a putatively inverse relationship between the odds that a given purchase will trigger a threshold crossing and the number of animals likely to be affected by such a crossing. It seeks to show that, in light of this relationship, the actor with perfect information, who knows that her meat purchase will result in harm to a single animal, and the actor with very imperfect information, who knows that her purchase might harm many animals or none, are in morally equivalent positions.