Thank you for responding to my comment, @Deni555! Your perspective makes a lot of sense: You wish the entire meat industry would end. If you got to choose between a reformed meat industry that treats animals better and no meat industry at all, you’d choose no meat industry at all. Because then there’d be zero farmed animal suffering. And zero suffering is better than some suffering. I get that.
I’m asking a different question than what you should choose if you were omnipotent and got to choose something like that.
I’m writing from a purely consequentialist point of view. I’m trying to analyze the consequences of communicating different messages.
And I’m asking which approach is more likely to result in better consequences for animals: (A) the approach of telling the industry to shut down, or (B) the approach of telling the industry to treat animals better?
Even if you genuinely wish the industry would shut down, saying that out loud probably won’t have the affect of shutting the industry down. But it may have the effect of hardening certain people in the industry against the idea of reform.
Perhaps an analogy is abstinence education. A lot of adults wish teens just wouldn’t have sex at all. So they tell teens just not to have sex at all. The teens ignore these well-meaning adults, have unprotected sex, spread STDs, and accidentally impregnate one another. Other adults tell teens to choose “safer sex” by using protection like condoms. Teens actually listen to this advice sometimes, use condoms sometimes, and have fewer pregnancies and STDs as a result. Perhaps some of the adults in this second group really wish kids just wouldn’t have sex at all because zero sex is the most sure-fire way to eliminate all pregnancy and STD risk, and also because they just plain think teen sex is immoral and gross. But these adults know that saying “I don’t want any teens to ever have any sex” won’t get these adults their wish. It’ll only alienate the teens and cause more pregnancies and STDs.
So the question is: If we want to influence a group of people, should we tell the group of epople to completely stop doing an activity they very much want to do? Or should we tell them to make minor changes to that activity so that the activity will cause less harm? I think we should tell them to make the minor changes to reduce the harm.
Thank you for responding to my comment, @Deni555! Your perspective makes a lot of sense: You wish the entire meat industry would end. If you got to choose between a reformed meat industry that treats animals better and no meat industry at all, you’d choose no meat industry at all. Because then there’d be zero farmed animal suffering. And zero suffering is better than some suffering. I get that.
I’m asking a different question than what you should choose if you were omnipotent and got to choose something like that.
I’m writing from a purely consequentialist point of view. I’m trying to analyze the consequences of communicating different messages.
And I’m asking which approach is more likely to result in better consequences for animals: (A) the approach of telling the industry to shut down, or (B) the approach of telling the industry to treat animals better?
Even if you genuinely wish the industry would shut down, saying that out loud probably won’t have the affect of shutting the industry down. But it may have the effect of hardening certain people in the industry against the idea of reform.
Perhaps an analogy is abstinence education. A lot of adults wish teens just wouldn’t have sex at all. So they tell teens just not to have sex at all. The teens ignore these well-meaning adults, have unprotected sex, spread STDs, and accidentally impregnate one another. Other adults tell teens to choose “safer sex” by using protection like condoms. Teens actually listen to this advice sometimes, use condoms sometimes, and have fewer pregnancies and STDs as a result. Perhaps some of the adults in this second group really wish kids just wouldn’t have sex at all because zero sex is the most sure-fire way to eliminate all pregnancy and STD risk, and also because they just plain think teen sex is immoral and gross. But these adults know that saying “I don’t want any teens to ever have any sex” won’t get these adults their wish. It’ll only alienate the teens and cause more pregnancies and STDs.
So the question is: If we want to influence a group of people, should we tell the group of epople to completely stop doing an activity they very much want to do? Or should we tell them to make minor changes to that activity so that the activity will cause less harm? I think we should tell them to make the minor changes to reduce the harm.
Ack sorry, that was by me!