The X-Schema X1) Emm is (or has) X
8. The No Impact Objection
HIRED HELP
Too squeamish to mutilate and slaughter the dogs himself, Fred hires Nysha to do it for him. She buys twenty dogs, mutilates them, keeps them confined in small cages, slaughters them, and provides Fred with one vial of cocoamone each month. He pays her for her services.
Now, Fred is not directly harming the puppies. But his hands are not clean; it is immoral for him to hire Nysha to set up a cocoamone farm. So FP2 remains true even when we revise the story to incorporate something more analogous to the indirect harm of buying meat. The putative morally relevant difference between the cases disappears and can no longer serve as an objection to FP3.
This does look like it has what it takes to be a morally relevant difference. If one action actually has an impact on the amount of suffering in the world, and another has no impact whatsoever, then that very plausibly makes for a moral difference between the two actions.
That said, this ultimately is not a convincing objection to FP3.
For once again, we can revise the case to make the difference disappear:
SECOND DESSERT
Fred decides not to start his own cocoamone farm, and has now gone months without tasting chocolate. Out to dinner, for old times’ sake, he orders a chocolate mousse for dessert.
To his surprise, he is able to taste the chocolate. Elated, he calls the waiter over to order a second mousse and asks if there’s something special about it. The waiter explains that, yes, the mousse is infused with cocoamone from the brains of slaughtered, mutilated puppies that they keep caged up in the back. They go through twenty puppies a day, he says. Fred is horrified. But he does not cancel his order, and he enjoys a second cocoamone-infused mousse.
It’s wrong for Fred to order a second mousse, now that he knows about the puppy suffering involved in making it. And yet canceling the order would have had no impact on the amount of puppy suffering. They slaughter all the puppies before dinner service even begins, and they’ll slaughter twenty more tomorrow even if they end up with some leftover mousse tonight. So there is no morally relevant difference between what Fred does in SECOND DESSERT and what you do when buying and eating meat.
The objection to FP3 has been defused.
How, though, can Fred’s actions in SECOND DESSERT be immoral if they have no impact? The obvious answer is that he is part of a group whose actions collectively do make an impact, namely the restaurant’s customers. The restaurant keeps slaughtering the puppies only because customers keep ordering the mousse. The customers are doing something immoral, and Fred’s actions are immoral by virtue of contributing to the impact that the group as a whole has on puppy suffering. This is the same
reason why it’s wrong to throw your plastic bottles in the garbage rather than recycling them, even though the results will almost certainly be the same even without your small contribution. And this is the same reason why it’s wrong to buy meat, even if your personal meat consumption doesn’t by itself make a difference.
(Of course, the meat that you and others purchase today is from animals that are already dead, so you’re not contributing to the suffering of those animals. But you and others are affecting the next generation of farm animals, by incentivizing farmers to continue raising and mistreating them.)
I’ll close by considering a variation on the no-impact objection. It is sometimes objected that even if everyone switched to a vegetarian diet, that wouldn’t make any difference to the amount of animal suffering. After all, farming crops results in the deaths of countless mice and other field animals that get caught up in farm machinery. Cutting out meat would lead to less killing of livestock, but this would just be replaced with more crop farming and thus more mouse killing. Since we have to eat something, the idea goes, and since animals are going to be dying either way, we may as well eat meat.
I find this unconvincing for several reasons. First, one must take into account not just the quantity of the deaths but also the quality of the lives. The mice killed in crop farming live normal lives up until they are killed by the farming equipment, whereas livestock in CAFOs are subjected to a lifetime of confinement with mutilated bodies. Second, it’s far from obvious that a worldwide switch to vegetarianism would result in any increase in the number of field animals killed. In the U.S., only about a quarter of farmed crops are directly consumed by humans, and more than half are grown and farmed to serve as animal feed. Replacing the latter with crops meant for human consumption would likely lead to an overall decrease in crop farming and mouse killings, as well as reducing the number of mice killed in laboratories while developing and testing antibiotics for farm animals. Third, there are feasible, nonlethal methods of driving mice from the fields before farming them, whereas there are no nonlethal methods of slaughtering animals for their meat.