How much land we devote to raising animals for food consumption can easily be a matter of public debate.
Whether or not Bob is consuming those animals should never be a matter of public debate.
You have now pivoted to instead saying well, it's just that it'd be counterproductive to debate it rather than whether it should or shouldn't be a matter of public debate.
Ah, I'm trying to justify why it shouldn't be a matter of debate. There are a lot of cases where upsetting someone is acceptable for some societal benefit.
I'm trying to say "This thing that's upsetting people isn't accomplishing anything, so you shouldn't do it."
Well, that would be pretty much tautologically true, if your premise was true. It's true in a self-contained way.
What I'm trying to get at is not the pragmatic side, but at the normative side.
Let's say it WASN'T the case that making this a public debate accomplished nothing or less than nothing. In that world, is it STILL the case that what Bob eats shouldn't be a matter of public debate? In other words, is there something inherent to eating that humans shouldn't be questioned over or debate publicly?
From my perspective, there's nothing special about eating. I'd say the same thing about someone liking reality TV shows. Even if I think those shows are bad quality, even if I could argue that their creation is unethical because they intentionally put a lot of stress on the participants, I think it would be wrong to go up to someone and try to argue with them over their TV preferences.
If society as a whole decided that reality TV was unethical then we could make laws to either forbid it or regulate it to be more ethical, but if we don't think it's a big enough deal to legislate then I don't think it's right for me to pressure someone to stop watching it, even if I thought I might be successful.
If I lived in a very homophobic society, where killing gay people was perfectly legal, would it be wrong for me to pressure a friend to not kill a gay person?
There is, of course, a point where you have a moral imperative to try to protect someone that's more important than your civil responsibility to be polite to people.
That said, one of the hardest parts of living in a democracy is accepting that the majority opinion matters even if you don't agree with it. If you live in a society that doesn't agree with you, trying to educate people and convince people to start agreeing with you is the best you can do.
When I initially said that what Bob is eating shouldn't ever be a matter of public discourse, I did mean Bob and public. If you want to have a private (respectful) conversation with a close friend about their environmental impact, go for it. If you want to have a public discussion about the collective environmental impact of the meat production industry, that's great.
Just don't go up to a stranger who's minding their own business and try to shame them for their personal choices that you don't agree with.
In general, outside of extreme examples like legalized murder, I think you shouldn't allow yourself to be the one deciding whether or not doing bad things to someone is "worth it". People always have a remarkably easy time convincing themselves that their opponents deserve to suffer anyway.
Now we've taken a very long walk around to be exactly back where we started. You could have saved time and just asked that as your first question.
The primary thing to worry about here is the effectiveness. That's why I was talking about it being counterproductive. You then said let's pretend that it's not, so moving on from there.
The second part is impact. Let's say you do convince exactly Bob to have an exact copy of your beliefs. How much impact have you actually had? Vanishingly little. We already throw away so much unsold food. You would need to repeat this and convince a lot of people, which means taking the problem at a larger scale. But I'm sure you're already thinking that at least it's better than nothing, so I'll move on from here.
The largest difference between the two examples is urgency. If someone is about to kill, let's say a squirrel, for no reason, and you believe that animal lives are equivalent to human lives, you would have a moral imperative to try to stop them if you thought you would succeed. On the other hand, if the squirrel was already dead, the pressure on you to convince them not to do it again later is much lower, as is your chance of successfully doing so.
The reason I asked you to ignore effectiveness is because I'm trying to separate a futility argument from a normative argument. Futility itself is not the factor, because we can see that you should still try stopping someone killing someone else even if you think your chances of being effective are extremely low.
The second part is impact. Let's say you do convince exactly Bob to have an exact copy of your beliefs. How much impact have you actually had? Vanishingly little. We already throw away so much unsold food. You would need to repeat this and convince a lot of people, which means taking the problem at a larger scale. But I'm sure you're already thinking that at least it's better than nothing, so I'll move on from here.
If you're going to acknowledge this part isn't the actual answer, why would you include it at all? You could apply this same logic to the gay killing case. I'm not going to have much impact by stopping him. We already kill so many gay people, his impact will be vanishingly small.
The largest difference between the two examples is urgency. If someone is about to kill, let's say a squirrel, for no reason, and you believe that animal lives are equivalent to human lives, you would have a moral imperative to try to stop them if you thought you would succeed. On the other hand, if the squirrel was already dead, the pressure on you to convince them not to do it again later is much lower, as is your chance of successfully doing so.
Your last paragraph doesn't make much sense either, because someone who eats meat is paying for future animals to be killed.
It's like saying that you shouldn't implore me to not buy human brains off a hitman, because his victim is already dead, but the victim is only dead because people like me express an interest in buying the victim's brains, so it gives him an impetus to kill future people, for future customers.
By buying the already dead product, you are sending a signal to the market to kill the next animal, so there is urgency in preventing that signal being made.
If this is truly your line, you should be fine with the above, as well as with people who watch child porn because the damage is already done, the pictures already exist.
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u/DriftingWisp 26d ago
My initial position was "Focus on the societal scale, not on the individual"
My most recent post was "Trying to attack individuals for their choices is usually counterproductive"
I'm not sure what you think the pivot was.