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Ethical Consumer Action

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Animals and the Economy

Part of the book series: The Palgrave Macmillan Animal Ethics Series ((PMAES))

Abstract

Creating space for humane consumer action is difficult in an economy where the culture and institutions are so strongly oriented toward human consumption of other animals. Nevertheless, consumers play an important role in the market, and have real power to affect change, even if such actions are difficult and imperfect. Ethical consumer choices can be augmented, encouraged, and made more efficient, however, by complementary changes in the institutions that define the economy. Before examining institutional changes, it is worth considering in more depth, the options that consumers face.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Michael Martin, “A Critique of Moral Vegetarianism,” Reason Papers 3 (1976): 27.

  2. 2.

    Mark Bryant Budolfson, “The Inefficacy Objection to Consequentialism and the Problem with the Expected Consequences Response,” Philosophical Studies, forthcoming; Ted A. Warfield, “Eating Dead Animals: Meat Eating, Meat Purchasing, and Proving Too Much,” in Philosophy Comes to Dinner: Arguments About the Ethics of Eating, eds. Andrew Chignell, Terence Cuneo, and Matthew C. Halteman (New York: Routledge, 2015), 151–62.

  3. 3.

    A more thorough description of the producer side of animal industries is available in the next chapter. For now this brief detail will suffice.

  4. 4.

    Shelly Kagan, “Do I Make a Difference?,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 39, no. 2 (March 1, 2011): 105–41, doi:10.1111/j.1088-4963.2011.01203.x.

  5. 5.

    Harish, “The Forgotten Mothers of the Chickens We Eat,” Counting Animals: A Place for People Who Love Animals and Numbers, April 30, 2014, http://www.CountingAnimals.com/the-forgotten-mothers-of-chickens-we-eat/.

  6. 6.

    Harish, “How Many Animals Does a Vegetarian Save?,” Counting Animals: A Place for People Who Love Animals and Numbers, February 6, 2012, http://www.CountingAnimals.com/how-many-animals-does-a-vegetarian-save/. These calculations used population averages for the USA to estimate “normal” animal consumption. He includes the animals killed for domestic consumption, the animals that die without being consumed in animal agriculture, the animals used to feed other animals. Most of these animals are fish and shellfish, since fish are fed large numbers of other fish in standard fish farming practices.

  7. 7.

    Steven McMullen, “Is Capitalism to Blame? Animal Lives in the Marketplace,” Journal of Animal Ethics, Forthcoming.

  8. 8.

    Steven L. Hopp and Joan Dye Gussow, “Comment on ‘Food-Miles and the Relative Climate Impacts of Food Choices in the United States,’” Environmental Science & Technology 43, no. 10 (May 15, 2009): 3982–83, doi:10.1021/es900749q.

  9. 9.

    Robert Paarlberg, Food Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 149.

  10. 10.

    Paarlberg, Food Politics.

  11. 11.

    Christopher L. Weber and H. Scott Matthews, “Food-Miles and the Relative Climate Impacts of Food Choices in the United States,” Environmental Science & Technology 42, no. 10 (May 1, 2008): 3508–13, doi:10.1021/es702969f; David A. Cleveland et al., “Effect of Localizing Fruit and Vegetable Consumption on Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Nutrition, Santa Barbara County,” Environmental Science & Technology 45, no. 10 (May 15, 2011): 4555–62, doi:10.1021/es1040317.

  12. 12.

    Hopp and Gussow, “Comment on ‘Food-Miles and the Relative Climate Impacts of Food Choices in the United States.’”

  13. 13.

    Wendell Berry, “The Idea of a Local Economy,” Orion Magazine, 2001, https://orionmagazine.org/article/the-idea-of-a-local-economy/.

  14. 14.

    Michael Pollan, “Eat Your View,” New York Times “On the Table,” May 17, 2006, http://michaelpollan.com/articles-archive/eat-your-view/.

  15. 15.

    Harish, “Do You Know Someone Who Buys Meat Only from a Small Local Farm?,” Counting Animals: A Place for People Who Love Animals and Numbers, June 23, 2014, http://www.CountingAnimals.com/do-you-know-someone-who-buys-meat-only-from-a-small-local-farm/.

  16. 16.

    Jeff Leslie and Cass Sunstein, “Animal Rights Without Controversy,” Law and Contemporary Problems 70, no. 1 (January 1, 2007): 117–38.

  17. 17.

    F. Bailey Norwood and Jayson L. Lusk, Compassion, by the Pound: The Economics of Farm Animal Welfare (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

  18. 18.

    Leslie and Sunstein, “Animal Rights Without Controversy.”

  19. 19.

    Steven McMullen, “An Ethical Consumer Capitalism,” in Future of Meat Without Animals Track (10th International Whitehead Conference, Pomona College, 2015).

  20. 20.

    Animal Welfare Approved, “Animal Welfare Approved Standards,” accessed March 10, 2015, http://animalwelfareapproved.org/standards/.

  21. 21.

    Humane Farm Animal Care, “Certified Humane,” Certified Humane, accessed March 10, 2015, http://certifiedhumane.org/.

  22. 22.

    Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, “Freedom Food,” Freedom Food, accessed March 10, 2015, http://www.freedomfood.co.uk/.

  23. 23.

    United Egg Producers, “Animal Welfare,” accessed March 17, 2015, http://www.unitedegg.org/AnimalWelfare/.

  24. 24.

    National Pork Board, “Factsheets—Animal Well-Being,” Pork Checkoff, accessed March 17, 2015, https://www.pork.org/fact-sheets-brochures/factsheets/.

  25. 25.

    North American Meat Institute, “Guidelines/Auditing,” Animalhandling.org, accessed March 17, 2015, http://www.animalhandling.org/ht/d/sp/i/26752/pid/26752.

  26. 26.

    Mary Graham, Democracy by Disclosure: The Rise of Technopopulism (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2002).

  27. 27.

    Omri Ben-Shahar and Carl E. Schneider, More Than You Wanted to Know: The Failure of Mandated Disclosure (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014).

  28. 28.

    Norwood and Lusk, Compassion, by the Pound.

  29. 29.

    John Webster, Animal Husbandry Regained: The Place of Farm Animals in Sustainable Agriculture (London: Routledge, 2013); Thomas Campbell and T. Colin Campbell, The China Study (Dallas, Tex.: BenBella Books, 2006); Marion Nestle, Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health (Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, 2013). There is a significant amount of disagreement about nutrition and the health impacts of meat and dairy consumption. Adjudicating the methodological and scientific disagreements is well beyond the scope of this book, which focuses instead on animal ethics. There is some consensus among nutrition experts, however, that, on average, affluent western consumers eat more animal products than is healthy.

  30. 30.

    David Robinson Simon, Meatonomics: How the Rigged Economics of Meat and Dairy Make You Consume Too Much—and How to Eat Better, Live Longer, and Spend Smarter (Newburyport, MA: Conari Press, 2013). Some of these costs are private costs, born by the individual, not by others. If this were true for all health care costs, this would not be a pigouvian tax, but a paternalistic one. However, because most expenses are either paid by state insurance or private insurance companies, as is the case even in the USA, these health care expenses are often shared widely.

  31. 31.

    Cees de Haan, Henning Steinfeld, and Harvey Blackburn, “Livestock & the Environment: Finding a Balance,” Study by the Commission of the European Communities (Food and Agriculture Organization, USAID, and the World Bank, 1997), http://www.fao.org/docrep/x5303e/x5303e00.htm#Contents; Henning Steinfeld et al., “Livestock’s Long Shadow” (Rome, Italy: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 2006), http://www.fao.org/docrep/010/a0701e/a0701e00.HTM; Webster, Animal Husbandry Regained.

  32. 32.

    Simon, Meatonomics.

  33. 33.

    Steven McMullen and Daniel Molling, “Environmental Ethics, Economics, and Property Law,” in Law and Social Economics: Essays in Ethical Values for Theory, Practice, and Policy, ed. Mark D. White (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

  34. 34.

    Simon, Meatonomics.

  35. 35.

    Glenn Boyle, “The Dog That Doesn’t Bark: Animal Interests In Economics” (unpublished manuscript, NZ Institute for the Study of Competition and Regulation, November 3, 2008), http://ir.canterbury.ac.nz/handle/10092/2399.

  36. 36.

    Peter Singer and Jim Mason, The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter (Emmaus, PA: Rodale Books, 2006).

  37. 37.

    “Mercy For Animals—Inspiring Compassion,” Mercy For Animals, December 17, 2014, http://www.mercyforanimals.org.

  38. 38.

    Siobhan O’Sullivan, Animals, Equality and Democracy (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 48–51.

  39. 39.

    Ibid., 49.

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McMullen, S. (2016). Ethical Consumer Action. In: Animals and the Economy. The Palgrave Macmillan Animal Ethics Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-43474-6_5

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