I disagree.
Under the assumption that I am a recluse and have zero capacity to influence anyone else on dietary choices, my ability to affect animal welfare through buying choices is strongly quantized. Purchasing a burger at a busy restaurant in a large city will not affect how many burgers they purchase from their distributor. Assuming they buy by the case (what restaurant wouldn't?), affecting how much they purchase would require either eating there extremely often or being part of a large group of people that eat there, all of which cease buying burgers.
However, despite disagreeing with the specifics of what you posted here, I do agree with the spirit. As a compassionate person who has the capacity to influence others, it is important that I be vigilant with veganism, if for no other reason than that it makes me less persuasive if I appear to be hypocritical. Even if buying the occasional burger does not cause any additional harm in the world by itself, it would lessen my credibility, and my ability to influence others into making more ethical choices would be harmed.
Purchasing a burger at a busy restaurant in a large city will not affect how many burgers they purchase from their distributor.
It will, by exactly 1 burger. More specifically, if their unit of buying is a box of 100 frozen burgers, and they use the surplus from each day to start the next, then in the long run they will have bought exactly 1 more burger than they would if you had not bought yours: one in 100 of the boxes they get through will have been purchased 1 day earlier than it would have been.
This is a common fallacy: saying that if a large change...
Just a thought I had the other day; what do you think that the political ideas of conservatism have to do with cognitive bias? I mean, how much are people willing to change naturally, without arguing any points?
I know very little about all of these things, so forgive me if this is a silly thought.