Obviously this question is only for people who eat beef regularly.
But I just was wondering, what IQ/ability would make you swear off beef? If they could speak like an 8 y.o, would that be enough to cut off beef? If they got an IQ of 80, would that do it?
That’s absurd. So if I hire an assassin to kill you, I have absolutely no responsibility if you’re killed by an assassin?
Companies won’t kill animals to produce meat unless there’s demand. If you buy meat, you’re creating demand. There is a causal link between your consumption and what happens to the animals. Therefore, you have at least a share of the responsibility.
Being anti-capitalist doesn’t mean one is incapable of understanding how capitalism works. There are rules that govern it, and those exist whether you’re in favor of it as a system or not.
I would blame the assassin. They pulled the trigger. Anyone could do anything between “enjoy” the outcome to “want” it to ask for it, and that’s a spectrum, but then there’s the person who does the deed. And even then, there’s coordination between you and the assassin. There’s nothing saying there’s absolutely going to be any coordination between the meat being brought to the store and the meat being brought home.
But that’s crazy! The assassin didn’t kill anyone, all they did was point the gun at the victim and pull the trigger. Maybe we should lay the blame on the gunpowder or the bullet. Actually, that doesn’t work either. We can’t blame the bullet, it wasn’t what killed the victim. The real problem was the massive blood loss. Or maybe the victim survives a bit and dies in the hospital due to an infection from their injury. Now we can’t blame the assassin, the bullet, the gunpowder, the gun or the injury caused by the bullet. Right? Those are not what actually caused the victim to die, it was the bacteria!
Thinking that way is obviously ridiculous. Of course, it’s easy to understand why you’d want to: it’s incredibly self-serving. The bar is set so high for you to be responsible for anything that you basically will never have to consider yourself responsible whatever you do.
The reality is if we can say “but for my actions this wouldn’t have happened”, then I’m responsible. But for consumers creating demand, there’d be no meat in the grocery store. Therefore the consumer has a share of the responsibility. You have a responsibility if you eat meat, hire an assassin, whatever. Refusing to recognize it doesn’t make it go away.
That’s called a kill. That’s like saying if I hunt on someone’s behalf, even though I struck down the venison, I’m not the murderer, just the contractor is. Which brings us back here.
If someone is driving down a wildlife-heavy road thinking “ah well, if I hit anything, the vultures will clean it up”, and a day later, a vulture finds a dead squirrel in the road that was hit, is the vulture to blame for the squirrel’s death by virtue of being a beneficiary of the squirrel’s death? Because that’s analogous to the situation.
That’s not analogous to the situation of the vulture going to the store and buying squirrel meat.
The problem isn’t benefiting from the squirrels death, the problem is doing something that increases the probability that the squirrel gets killed. If the vulture finds and eats a dead squirrel at the side of the road, that has no effect on the how likely that squirrel (or future squirrels) are to die.
On the other hand, if the edit: vulture goes to the store and exchanges value for some squirrel meat, the vulture is giving others an incentive to kill squirrels to acquire their meat.
If you were the squirrel, would you rather live in an environment where no one benefits from killing you or one where there’s a massive bounty on squirrel meat?
And you’re saying it’s absolutely impossible to exchange meat in such a way as to not increase the incentive of meat being killed to be consumed in the future? I’m careful when it comes to that stuff, if my case-by-case circumstances knowingly put me in such a situation as is implied, I pull out, whether it be corporative or local (which should be treated differently anyways). My answer to the last question depends on if they’re a strict dichotomy or not; my point would be that it isn’t.
What do you mean by “exchange meat”? I assume you mean exchange value (i.e. money) for meat?
No, it’s not impossible to do this without increasing the chance that an animal gets killed to provide the meat. For example, if someone promised they’re only selling roadkill and will never kill the animals or do anything to increase the chances the animals get killed then you could buy meat from that person without increasing the probability that animals get killed. Obviously it would have to be reasonable to trust that person to keep their word.
That’s a very unlikely exception though. If you go to the grocery store and buy some meat, there is no basis or evidence to believe they’re only collecting roadkill. When you buy meat from a grocery store, it’s virtually certain that this is increasing the chances of animals being killed (very often after being subjected to extreme suffering). And you will have a share in the responsibility for those effects, because there’s a causal link between your choice to buy the product and the things that are done to make it available.