Suppose that a supermarket currently purchases three big cases per week of factory-farmed chickens, with each case containing 25 birds. The store does not purchase fractions of cases, so even if several surplus chickens remain each week, the supermarket will continue to buy three cases. This is what the anti-vegetarian means by “subsisting off of surplus animal products that would otherwise go to waste”: the three cases are purchased anyway, so consuming one or two more chickens simply attenuates the surplus.
What would happen, though, if 25 customers decided to buy tempeh or beans instead of chickens? The purchasing agent who orders weekly cases of chickens would probably buy two cases instead of three. But any given consumer can’t tell how far the store is from that cutoff point between three vs. two cases. The probability that any given chicken is the chicken that causes two cases instead of three to be purchased is 1⁄25. If you do avoid the chicken at the cutoff point, you prevent a whole case -- 25 chickens—from being ordered next week. Thus, the expected value of any given chicken is (1/25) * 25 = 1 chicken, just like common sense would suggest.
I wonder if the cutoff point is more like 25,000 though, the number of broiler chickens raised in a shed. It’s unclear to me whether producers respond to small changes in demand by adjusting the numbers of broilers in a shed or only by adjusting the number of sheds in use.
If the cutoff point is more like 25,000, then this would imply that most veg*ns go their entire lives without preventing the existence of a single broiler through their consumption changes, while a minority prevent the existence of a huge number.
For what it’s worth, it seems likely that donations to AMF are similar since their distributions typically cover hundreds of thousands or millions of people.
Whether the cutoff point is 25 or 25,000 the expected value of avoiding eating meat remains the same. So, it shouldn’t affect one’s motivation to reduce their meat intake.
I think it’s sort of bizarre to suggest that out of 25,000 vegetarians, one is responsible for the shed being closed, and the others did nothing at all. Why privilege the “last” decision to not purchase a chicken? It makes more sense to me that you’d allocate the “credit” equally to everyone who chose not to eat meat.
The first 24,999 needed to not buy a chicken in order for the last one to be in a position for their choice to make a difference.
Another useful, well-writtten statement of this argument is in Brian Tomasik’s “Does Vegetarianism Make a Difference?”:
I wonder if the cutoff point is more like 25,000 though, the number of broiler chickens raised in a shed. It’s unclear to me whether producers respond to small changes in demand by adjusting the numbers of broilers in a shed or only by adjusting the number of sheds in use.
If the cutoff point is more like 25,000, then this would imply that most veg*ns go their entire lives without preventing the existence of a single broiler through their consumption changes, while a minority prevent the existence of a huge number.
For what it’s worth, it seems likely that donations to AMF are similar since their distributions typically cover hundreds of thousands or millions of people.
Whether the cutoff point is 25 or 25,000 the expected value of avoiding eating meat remains the same. So, it shouldn’t affect one’s motivation to reduce their meat intake.
I think it’s sort of bizarre to suggest that out of 25,000 vegetarians, one is responsible for the shed being closed, and the others did nothing at all. Why privilege the “last” decision to not purchase a chicken? It makes more sense to me that you’d allocate the “credit” equally to everyone who chose not to eat meat.
The first 24,999 needed to not buy a chicken in order for the last one to be in a position for their choice to make a difference.