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Describe a way to eat meat that doesn't require prior suffering then.
- an event in the future cannot cause an event in the past. eating the meat doesn't cause it to have been produced.
  
  That is true, so the pieces of meat which were placed on earth by god 6k years ago can be eaten guilt-free. However, all other pieces of meat require harvesting from an animal first, incurring the aforementioned downsides. Just as purchasing an item encourages its production, eating meat encourages its purchase.
  Here are two simple scenarios where eating the meat does indeed cause meat to be produced:
  your eating it means that another person doesn't eat it, so another piece of meat must be purchased for that other person;
  your eating the meat signals to whoever got the meat for you (perhaps yourself) that you are willing to eat meat and hence they pick up a propensity to get meat for you again in the future.
  Isn't this simple common sense though? Were you really not aware this is how the world works?
  
  none of that is causal.
  
  I used "so" and "hence" in both of those examples, indicating what I perceive as causality. How am I wrong?
  
  people have free will. their actions can only be said to be caused by their own will.
  
  A simple test of causality, X => Y: go back in time and change X to ¬X. If ¬Y as a result, it would appear X => Y can be inferred.
  You can say your eating meat is your free will, but if the meat were counterfactually not produced, you would not eat it. Similarly, your eating meat causes other people to produce more meat. They may have free will, if you believe in that -- but you can't deny that if you hadn't done X, they wouldn't have done Y.
  
  meat producers are responsible for their own actions. no one else causes them.
  
  I understand where you're coming from, but there's a problem with your philosophy.
  it's well-understood by economists that the market behaves according to mathematical rules. The exact rules in question may be debated, but regardless it's clear from observation that markets are very effective in some scenarios at deriving optimal response to their environments (at least in some scenarios). Remove one meat producer from the market, it will inevitably be replaced by another one that's just as good, or so the theory goes. As a result, it's rather useless to say that meat producers are responsible for their own actions and that no one else causes them -- because in fact, the actions are caused by the market's environment. You can say it, sure, but that doesn't change the fact that you, the consumer, exercise control over the market.
  If the production of meat is immoral, and the producers don't meaningfully affect the quantity of meat produced, then it is actually the fault of the consumer (who will not be replaced simply because they stop eating meat) that the meat is produced.
  (IMO, most political ideologues who are steeped in theory agree that markets behave like this, but disagree on how or whether to stop them.)
  
  this is storytelling, not evidence. if we can't agree that meat producers have free will, and i am only responsible for my own actions, we have a fundamental disagreement that won't be resolved on lemmy. but ask yourself: at what point do meat producers become responsible for tehir own actions?
  
  they become responsible for their own actions when quitting the industry would reduce the harm done to animals.
  
  I am not interested in discussing meta-physics. For you to eat meat, an animal suffered. That is the point.
  
  eating meat doesn't cause an animal to have suffered.

494 comments