″...seems morally okay as long as the clothes allow you to have more positive impact with your career.”
Utilitarian calculations need to be justified beyond just piling up more things in the “positive” bin than the “negative” bin. An often used thought experiment is asking if it is ok if a doctor kills a healthy patient in a hospital to donate their organs to five other needy patients so that they may live. While utilitarians may justify this in the way you did, this justification looks unfounded if there is a recently deceased organ-donor in the morgue at a nearby hospital who could provide all those same organs. How is killing the healthy patient justified then? Would we see the utilitarian doctor as still justified if they said “It’s annoying to have to drive over to the other hospital, fill out paperwork, get the organs, then drive back. It is still a net positive to kill the healthy patient here, and it’s easier for me, so I’ll just do that.”?
Considering your analogy, it is easy to buy clothes that didn’t require slave labor, and even if not, it is tenuous to see how a specific set of slave-produced clothes would have an overall positive benefit to your career greater than the suffering they incurred.
Bringing it back to animals, the equation isn’t the negative of animal suffering against the positive of your career, it’s the negative of animal suffering against the marginal career cost, if any, of switching to a vegetarian or vegan diet, which is much lower. You can understand why many would see the claim that the animal suffering is worth it in comparison to marginal personal inconvenience it saves as dubious and particularly self-serving.
Considering your analogy, it is easy to buy clothes that didn’t require slave labor
Is this true? I have heard the claim ‘there is more slavery going on than at any point in history’, but know very little about this and how it’s defined. I would guess it’s hard for me to avoid this if I’m going to a normal clothing store.
″...seems morally okay as long as the clothes allow you to have more positive impact with your career.”
Utilitarian calculations need to be justified beyond just piling up more things in the “positive” bin than the “negative” bin. An often used thought experiment is asking if it is ok if a doctor kills a healthy patient in a hospital to donate their organs to five other needy patients so that they may live. While utilitarians may justify this in the way you did, this justification looks unfounded if there is a recently deceased organ-donor in the morgue at a nearby hospital who could provide all those same organs. How is killing the healthy patient justified then? Would we see the utilitarian doctor as still justified if they said “It’s annoying to have to drive over to the other hospital, fill out paperwork, get the organs, then drive back. It is still a net positive to kill the healthy patient here, and it’s easier for me, so I’ll just do that.”?
Considering your analogy, it is easy to buy clothes that didn’t require slave labor, and even if not, it is tenuous to see how a specific set of slave-produced clothes would have an overall positive benefit to your career greater than the suffering they incurred.
Bringing it back to animals, the equation isn’t the negative of animal suffering against the positive of your career, it’s the negative of animal suffering against the marginal career cost, if any, of switching to a vegetarian or vegan diet, which is much lower. You can understand why many would see the claim that the animal suffering is worth it in comparison to marginal personal inconvenience it saves as dubious and particularly self-serving.
Is this true? I have heard the claim ‘there is more slavery going on than at any point in history’, but know very little about this and how it’s defined. I would guess it’s hard for me to avoid this if I’m going to a normal clothing store.