On the Threshold Argument against Consumer Meat Purchases - Arti

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.

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