Derek wrote:

> 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.

Yes, it does.

> 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.

Next time READ THE WHOLE PAPER, Dog-beater. All you
did was cut-and-paste from the abstract.

>
> There's no mention in his paper

You didn't read the paper; you only read the abstract,
and cut-and-pasted two sentences from it.

> that such a mechanism
> links vegetarians to the collateral deaths associated in
> crop production.

Irrelevant. The mechanism applies perfectly well to
vegetarians. The EXPECTED utility to animals of the
field due to the act of buying commercially produced
vegetables is diminished in EXACTLY the same way the
expected utility to meat animals is diminished by all
meat eaters. The mechanism is the same.

Once again, you lose. You may now move on to another
form of time wastage.