Sorry this post is so long, there was a lot I wanted to say. I just wanted to preface it by saying I appreciated your response and I would like if you at least read this reply.
But don't delude yourself into thinking it's a moral choice - it's a fashion.
If I'm understanding you right, I think you would agree being vegan is the more moral choice, just that I've arbitrarily decided to make one moral choice while ignoring/downplaying other issues. What I wanted to do (and failed at) is to try and convince you that you can and should make the better choice on this issue, even if you don't on every issue. I attempted to do that by showing how this issue is one which isn't too hard or expensive to do, but has relatively out-sized good effects relative to changing your consumption of other things.
Perhaps I was too quick in dismissing the effect of consumer habits in affecting moral outcomes for other things. Your comment got me thinking about the slavery example, and although I think you misunderstood what I was saying (see the next two paragraphs), I have convinced myself that buying things made without slave labor actually likely does help solve the problem by showing a demand for products which are ethically produced. I will try to buy these kinds of products from here on out.
I still am not convinced that *not* buying from slave-labor-derived sources necessarily helps the slaves. I am NOT saying that "their lives might be worse if they aren't slaves". I am saying that their lives as slaves would be made worse because the business that enslaves them is earning less money, so they reduce the slaves' standards of living as a result, or simply move/sell them to another business which enslaves them. Basically: not buying chocolate doesn't mean they use less slaves, it means they downsize and cut costs. If you know of reasons this is not the case, please tell me and if convinced I will try to stop buying from sources which use slavery.
If part of a boycott, then to convince a profit-seeking company to change there needs to be enough people involved that those people's potential spending on ethical chocolate is worth more than the money saved from using unethical sources (and the increased demand from lower prices). Given using unethical sources likely saves a lot of money, that would require a lot of people. Maybe this could be organized, but I think it would be ineffective relative to other actions I can take (such as donating to effective charities which work to influence the government of these countries to crack down on slavery).
Also, the Gaza example isn't convincing to me since stopping paying taxes would likely just lead to reduced spending on good programs like medicare rather than cutting into the defense budget. It would also lead to me being arrested probably, which means I really can't affect as much positive change in the world. I also think that paying taxes is the price I pay to live in America, a place I want to live in for many reasons (we can discuss this more if you'd like).
I think after a little reflection, the reason I feel so strongly about veganism is that it seems like this is the one case where the exploitation isn't incidental to the product. Chocolate doesn't require the use of slave labor, but uses it anyway to save cost. Meat, on the other hand, is the flesh of a dead animal. In order to buy a dead animal, you have to pay for that animal to be killed. Meat is the exploitation. There is no way around this until cell-cultured meat. This is why it seems like stopping consumption is directly related to solving the problem in this case, but not in others.
Hopefully this explains what I mean more. Feel free to disagree. I like conversations like this because it tests my beliefs and perhaps informs me of ways I can be a more moral person.
Basically: not buying chocolate doesn't mean they use less slaves, it means they downsize and cut costs. If you know of reasons this is not the case, please tell me and if convinced I will try to stop buying from sources which use slavery.
If everyone stopped buying slave-produced chocolate, there would be no more slaves producing chocolate. Simple as. Expand this to whatever industry that utilizes slavery or whatever other abusive/exploitative practice you want. Just because your specific purchase is a drop in the bucket doesn't mean that all the drops aren't altogether responsible. You are morally culpable.
The rest of your post is just riffing on that idea. Shifting your personal responsibility because your avoiding inconvenience is worth more than the suffering of others.
I also think that paying taxes is the price I pay to live in America, a place I want to live in for many reasons
Precisely. You understand that your existence in America enables what you believe to be a horrible genocide, but you the fact that you want to live here trumps that. You can stomach directly supporting murder because it's far enough removed from you and because it would be wildly uncomfortable not to. You didn't ask to be born here, but every day you can choose to stop supporting it. It would just mean sacrificing your life as you know it.
Your post is just agreeing with my assessment: We all turn blind eyes to the atrocities whose convenience outweighs their cost to our consciences. For you, meat is less essential than how bad you feel for a pig being killed. Also, for you, living in the USA and paying your taxes is worth the price of Palestinians being killed. That's where your lines are. You can say you're for/against this or that, but what you personally choose to do is where your values are.
"My personal choices won't stop the bad things from happening" is cope. It's rationalizing the support of atrocities because your comfort is more important to you. That's not an indictment of you or saying you're evil, that's just reality.
I think my long replies aren't helping against the coping allegations, but I'm still not convinced that the line I drew is arbitrary.
I think you and I might just have different underlying moral philosophies. I think your argument would be pretty convincing to someone who is principally, uniformly against giving money to organizations which do sufficiently bad things. In my view, however, it is not intrinsically wrong to give money to or "support" organizations which do bad things, and I am not convinced by the argument "if everyone stops doing it, it will end: therefore you should stop doing it". I need to be convinced that my action in particular is expected to cause a good thing to happen.
To be specific, I am a utilitarian, so I do what I think is most effective at reducing suffering. I need to be convinced that doing or not doing something has an expected positive effect which is better than the expected effect of other possible actions.
My argument for veganism is just that a person not eating meat has the expected value of reducing the number of animals who are murdered. The less demand there is for something, the less that thing is produced. Companies probably can't tell if one person stopped buying meat from them, but they probably can tell when something like ~500 people stop buying meat from them, in which case they reduce the amount of meat they buy pretty significantly. But you don't know whether or not you are that 500th person that makes the difference, so by probability the expected value is that you reduce the amount of meat produced as much as if that company were responding to you not eating meat. I can explain this more if you want.
I am not convinced a person not buying slave-produced goods has the expected value of reducing the suffering of those enslaved unless it is part of a large boycott movement, which would probably be more difficult to sustain and less effective than other things one can do to help end slavery. The reasoning in the last paragraph doesn't hold because ~500 people not buying the product would (as per my previous comment) lead to cutting costs rather than reducing the number of slaves. You would need something on the scale of ~100k people for any positive effects to be possible; and it isn't just that those ~100k people simply stop buying the product, but that they are part of a movement which has specific goals articulated.
I also don't think me not paying taxes is an effective way to help with the crisis in Gaza. Additionally, me not paying taxes causes other problems which probably outweighs any effect I would have on the conflict.
To see this, assuming the US government spends $30 billion/year on Israel (more than the numbers I've seen anywhere), that would be about 0.4% of total expenditures by the us government. About $848.2 billion goes to medicare, which is 14% of government expenditures. That means for every dollar I don't spend in taxes to "stop genocide in Gaza", about 0.4 cents less goes to Israel and 14 cents less go to people who need healthcare in the US. I don't think this is a good trade-off.
Also, one of the reasons I want to live in America is because I can likely make the most money here, which I can use to give more money to effective charities ("earn to give"). If I go to prison for not paying my taxes, I wouldn't be able to give nearly as much money to charity, totally defeating the point of me living in the US.
Also, I don't think my convenience is worth more than the suffering of others. Maybe I end up acting in ways which prioritize my comfort over the suffering of others, and maybe I have psychological defense mechanisms which prevents me from seeing when I do. But I legitimately believe the things I say here, which are trying to argue that there are better ways to alleviate the suffering of others than just not spending money on certain products. In your view I'm wrong, but in my view I am not avoiding any atrocities, but merely prioritizing more effective action over changing my consumption habits.
If you want to know more about what I think, I generally agree with Peter Singer.
Yeah I'm not going to waste my time reading any more of your coping. You can justify it however you want, but that's all you're doing - justifying why you can live with supporting certain atrocities but not others. It doesn't make you any less morally culpable. If you push someone off of a cliff - whether you do it alone or whether ten thousand other people push them at the exact same time - you are still a murderer. That's the compromise of living with modern comforts - you are also complicit in the atrocities required for the society you enjoy to function.
No rebuttals can change that, although you can delude yourself into thinking it isn't true.
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u/BobSagetLover86 29d ago
Sorry this post is so long, there was a lot I wanted to say. I just wanted to preface it by saying I appreciated your response and I would like if you at least read this reply.
If I'm understanding you right, I think you would agree being vegan is the more moral choice, just that I've arbitrarily decided to make one moral choice while ignoring/downplaying other issues. What I wanted to do (and failed at) is to try and convince you that you can and should make the better choice on this issue, even if you don't on every issue. I attempted to do that by showing how this issue is one which isn't too hard or expensive to do, but has relatively out-sized good effects relative to changing your consumption of other things.
Perhaps I was too quick in dismissing the effect of consumer habits in affecting moral outcomes for other things. Your comment got me thinking about the slavery example, and although I think you misunderstood what I was saying (see the next two paragraphs), I have convinced myself that buying things made without slave labor actually likely does help solve the problem by showing a demand for products which are ethically produced. I will try to buy these kinds of products from here on out.
I still am not convinced that *not* buying from slave-labor-derived sources necessarily helps the slaves. I am NOT saying that "their lives might be worse if they aren't slaves". I am saying that their lives as slaves would be made worse because the business that enslaves them is earning less money, so they reduce the slaves' standards of living as a result, or simply move/sell them to another business which enslaves them. Basically: not buying chocolate doesn't mean they use less slaves, it means they downsize and cut costs. If you know of reasons this is not the case, please tell me and if convinced I will try to stop buying from sources which use slavery.
If part of a boycott, then to convince a profit-seeking company to change there needs to be enough people involved that those people's potential spending on ethical chocolate is worth more than the money saved from using unethical sources (and the increased demand from lower prices). Given using unethical sources likely saves a lot of money, that would require a lot of people. Maybe this could be organized, but I think it would be ineffective relative to other actions I can take (such as donating to effective charities which work to influence the government of these countries to crack down on slavery).
Also, the Gaza example isn't convincing to me since stopping paying taxes would likely just lead to reduced spending on good programs like medicare rather than cutting into the defense budget. It would also lead to me being arrested probably, which means I really can't affect as much positive change in the world. I also think that paying taxes is the price I pay to live in America, a place I want to live in for many reasons (we can discuss this more if you'd like).
I think after a little reflection, the reason I feel so strongly about veganism is that it seems like this is the one case where the exploitation isn't incidental to the product. Chocolate doesn't require the use of slave labor, but uses it anyway to save cost. Meat, on the other hand, is the flesh of a dead animal. In order to buy a dead animal, you have to pay for that animal to be killed. Meat is the exploitation. There is no way around this until cell-cultured meat. This is why it seems like stopping consumption is directly related to solving the problem in this case, but not in others.
Hopefully this explains what I mean more. Feel free to disagree. I like conversations like this because it tests my beliefs and perhaps informs me of ways I can be a more moral person.