One objection you sometimes get to vegetarianism is that there’s no point in bothering because a single person giving up meat isn’t going to make a dent in the meat industry and, in all likelihood, isn’t going to save any animals.

While this question might rest on some dubious premises (are we sure that no animals are saved by your going veggie?), it’s enough of a puzzle to cause me some consternation.

So, I was interested to come across this paper by philosopher Tzachi Zamir called “Killing for Pleasure.” Zamir concedes that eating animal flesh is not “causally connected” to animals’ deaths, but argues that there are alternative ways of understanding the act which show why refraining from it is a good thing.

Zamir argues that we should see killing the animal and eating its flesh (when the animal was killed in order to produce the meat) as two parts of the same action. Thus, the eating is the completion of the action:

the consumption is a completion of the initial action. By “completion” I refer to a temporally extended action, in which the part of the action done in the past, foresaw and was predicated on an unspecified individual who will function in a particular way. By becoming that individual, one completes the action, making it whole (another way of articulating this thought, suggested to me by Stan Godlovitch, is that by consumption one is commissioning the killing).

Consumption, Zamir says, is not “distinct from the initial wrong, but […] a carrying out of it.”

A second way of thinking about the act of meat eating that Zamir identifies is “participating in a wrong practice, even when one’s consumption does not increase suffering.” In other words, the entire nexus of raising and killing of animals for food is something one does well to extricate oneself from as much as possible.

Clearly, this argument rests on the premise that it is, in fact, wrong to kill animals for food, something that most people – even many who abhor factory farming – won’t concede (though Zamir goes on to argue that it is).

But it also helps to show why avoiding the products of factory farming can be a good thing even if one doesn’t expect thereby to meaningfully reduce the total amount of animal suffering. And, for that matter, it might help illuminate other moral dilemmas where we sense that we ought to refrain from participating in a particular activity even if we don’t expect our abstention to have a practical effect.