‘FREE RIDING’: The right response to the ‘causal inefficacy’ objection against ethical veganism
As a group, individuals who abstain from animal products create a morally important good: a large reduction in animal suffering. If one recognizes this much yet consumes animal products, one is free riding on vegans. One is recognizing the value of their goal, recognizing that the group makes a significant difference to achieving it, and yet making an exception of oneself by free riding on, rather than participating in, its production. This is wrong because free riding is wrong.
J. BARRETT & S. RASKOFF: The creation of animal products on factory farms causes animals a tremendous amount of pain and suffering. Learning about the severity and extent of this suffering often leads people to change their dietary choices or at least to feel some moral pressure to do so. Many therefore seem implicitly to accept that when deciding what to purchase and eat, animal suffering makes a significant moral difference. Moral philosophers often make this thought explicit, attempting to ground an obligation to go vegan in the horrifying consequences of factory farming.
It turns out, however, to be surprisingly difficult to explain how animal suffering generates any reasons to alter our dietary choices, much less an obligation to go vegan. The standard argument is that we should go vegan to reduce animal suffering. But this argument faces a challenge: thanks to the size and structure of the animal agriculture industry, any individual’s consumption decisions are overwhelmingly unlikely to make a difference. Producing animal products may be harmful and wrong, but the effects of any individual’s consumption decisions are insignificant. Going vegan, in other words, is causally inefficacious. The reduction of animal suffering cannot ground an obligation to go vegan.
The causal inefficacy objection poses a serious challenge to ethical veganism: the view that we have a moral obligation to refrain from purchasing and consuming animal products. Ethical vegans have carefully outlined the conditions of animals on factory farms, the suffering they experience, and the moral significance of reducing this suffering. But the causal inefficacy objection threatens to cut off the rationale for ethical veganism from animal suffering altogether, rendering irrelevant ethical vegans’ persuasive arguments on these points. And, in this paper, we argue that common replies to the causal inefficacy objection are unsatisfactory. Attempts to show that individual vegans are indeed causally efficacious are unsuccessful or at best inconclusive. And arguments that appeal to factors like complicity not only face substantive difficulties but also fail to accommodate the moral significance of reducing animal suffering. A stronger argument for ethical veganism would acknowledge that the case for going vegan would be weaker if vegans as a group made no difference to reducing animal suffering either. It would tie our obligation to go vegan to the fact that vegans collectively reduce animal suffering, even if no individual vegan makes a difference.
Specifically, we believe that the best response to the causal inefficacy objection relies on the wrongness of free riding. The basic idea is this. As a group, individuals who abstain from animal products create a morally important good: a large reduction in animal suffering. If one recognizes this much yet consumes animal products, one is free riding on vegans. One is recognizing the value of their goal, recognizing that the group makes a significant difference to achieving it, and yet making an exception of oneself by free riding on, rather than participating in, its production. This is wrong because free riding is wrong. And it remains wrong even for those who do not recognize the value of this goal because morality does not let one off the hook so easily: one cannot escape an obligation to go vegan simply by not caring about animal suffering. We are not only obligated to produce morally important goods through our own actions but are also obligated to participate in, rather than free ride on, their collective production. The latter obligation explains why we should go vegan.
We begin by sketching the standard argument for ethical veganism. We then explain the causal inefficacy objection and why we find existing rejoinders inadequate. From here, we develop our anti–free riding argument and consider several objections that lead us to qualify but not abandon our conclusion. The upshot is that even if one settles several controversial issues in ways that make trouble for our argument, there at the very least remain strong reasons for most people to purchase significantly fewer inhumanely raised animal products.
To be clear, our goal is only to examine the connection between animal suffering and our reasons to go vegan or otherwise change our behavior. Parallel considerations apply to other negative consequences of animal agriculture. But nothing we say here bears on the plausibility of grounding reasons to go vegan in something other than the consequences of animal agriculture—for example, in the idea that eating animals is disrespectful. SOURCE… SOURCE…
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