Voting with Your Dollars – a Binomial Model of Vegan Consumer Choice

Lucia Schwarz

The talk is online and free to the public. For information on how to attend, please see the SSEA website (https://www.ethicsandanimals.org/events).

Wednesday, March 5, 11AM EST. Please note that because of time zones, the time of the talk in your location may differ than what is listed as the event time above on this page and in the PhilEvents calendar.

Lucia Schwarz (Tulane): "Voting with Your Dollars – a Binomial Model of Vegan Consumer Choice"   Abstract: A simple consequentialist argument for ethical veganism says that we should make vegan consumer choices because doing so leads to a decline in meat production and, therefore, reduces the amount of animal suffering in the world. The reality is a bit more complicated because it would take thousands or millions of consumers to reduce their meat consumption before the meat industry would respond with a decline in production. This means that, most likely, your own vegan consumer choice makes no difference to the amount of animal suffering in the world. However, it also means that you have a very small chance of making the "decisive consumer choice" that pushes aggregate meat consumption below a threshold that triggers a large decline in meat production. In that case, your consumer choice would be enormously beneficial. What exactly is your chance of being the decisive consumer, and is it large enough to justify the costs you incur from foregoing meat? Proponents of ethical veganism have traditionally answered in the affirmative. By contrast, proponents of the so-called inefficacy objection to ethical veganism argue that your chance of being decisive is basically zero, such that there is no expected benefit—just costs—to foregoing meat. Neither proponents of ethical veganism nor their critics, however, have heretofore produced a plausible mathematical model of vegan consumer choice that would allow us to properly estimate the individual consumer's chance of being decisive. To remedy this shortcoming, we develop a binomial model of vegan consumer choice, building on the influential binomial model of voting. Our model yields the result that, even when other consumers are highly unlikely to reduce their meat consumption and when the threshold that would trigger a decline in meat production is very large, the expected utility of vegan consumer choice can still be substantial.