On Fri, 28 Jan 2005 16:09:08 GMT, Rudy Canoza > wrote:

>Matheny has another article: Expected Utility,
>Contributory Causation, and Vegetarianism. It's in the
>Journal of Applied Philosophy, and is available in PDF
>at http://www.veganoutreach.org/spam/thresholds.pdf
>(requires the Adobe Acrobat reader).
>
>The task he has set himself is to take apart the
>occasionally encountered omnivore's argument that a) he
>doesn't personally kill the animals he eats, and b) his
>meat consumption doesn't bring about the whole meat
>industry, so "he" cannot be held accountable. Matheny
>attempts to show that all meat eaters together are in
>fact accountable for all the deaths of animals they
>eat, based on expected utility considerations.
>
>His analysis is fair enough, and I don't have a problem
>with it as far as it goes. What is curious, however,
>is that it also links vegetarians to the collateral
>deaths caused by the production of the crops they eat.

No, it does not. The paper sets out to prove that, while
some argue that act-utilitarianism cannot provide an
adequate critique of buying meat, on the basis that a
single meat purchase will not actually cause more farm
animals to be raised or slaughtered, act-utilitarians
cannot use actual utility as a decision procedure and
must instead use expected utility to prescribe actions.

There's no mention in his paper that such a mechanism
links vegetarians to the collateral deaths associated in
crop production. You've merely asserted there is and
fail to show where. Throw again.
[..]