Comment on Essay-Question Poll: Dietary Choices

Mon, 04 May 2009 20:35:39 GMT

Someone who has different values, and behaves in a way that's broadly consistent with these values, is on the consequentialist side.

This seems like a highly non-standard use of the word consequentialist. Deontologists and virtue types (what are they called anyway? "virtue ethicists" seems too cerebral/theoretical... aretaics? aretaists?) seem generally capable or acting in accordance with their values.

If this is what you're trying to capture, then "value-consistent" and "non-value consistent" would possibly be more accurate. (More simply: consistent, and hypocritical, though I'd personally avoid the latter.)

I've never seen anybody who was vegetarian because of value disagreements, and was behaving consistently with their alleged values.

I assume you don't mean this in the trivial sense that none of us act in absolute concordance with our alleged values. Given that, all I can say is that you must be particularly unfortunate in the subset of vegetarians you've "seen", and that you might want to be wary of generalizing from one example.*

For example if you claim to prefer non-existence of animals to them being used as food, then you clearly must support destruction of all nature reserves, as that's exactly the same choice.

I'm afraid this example is anything but clear to me. Could you perhaps explain why you think this in more detail?

And if you're against animal suffering, you'd be totally happy to eat cows genetically modified not to have pain receptors. And so on. All positions never taken by any vegetarians.

Depends how you define suffering. In any event, I would have thought that the general willingness of vegetarians on this thread to eat vat-grown meat would serve as a pretty clear counter-example to the sort of claim that you're making here.

* I guess you could think that they're behaving inconsistently with their stated values because they hold factual beliefs with which you disagree. However you examples suggest that this isn't the source of the conflict. And calling them non-consequentialist for that reason would certainly be misleading.

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