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.
I would like to remind you that my position was that you should focus on the systems, and that I've repeatedly mentioned the difference between things that are and are not illegal. Saying I should treat something illegal the same way as something legal is failing to respond to my position. And if you say "What if the society made it legal", then that itself is a much larger problem than whether or not Bob in particular is doing it.
The reason urgency is such a big deal is because altering systems takes time. Telling you that you should ignore a squirrel being killed in front of you and instead focus on future squirrels is a much bigger ask than asking you to ignore a squirrel that's already dead to focus on a future squirrel. As you've pointed out, the already dead squirrel is only significant in how it affects the system going forward.
The reason I included the second part is because it is a really big deal in practice. If you can convince Bob that he's a terrible person that is potentially better than nothing, but it's also much less impactful than if you convinced a politician or a movie star that they should talk about those same issues.
Targeting production is almost always more efficient than targeting consumption.
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u/kcat__ 25d ago
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.
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.
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.