ABSTRACT
In the recent animal ethics literature, philosophers have focused intensely on the economic hypothesis that consumers are causally impotent. According to this hypothesis, the market for animal products is so large and so complex that any given consumer’s choices make no appreciable difference to producers’ behavior. If this hypothesis were true, then any given consumer’s purchasing decisions would have no consequences for animals: the same number of animals would be brought into existence by farmers and killed in slaughterhouses regardless of what the consumer chooses to do. Some philosophers have argued that if consumers are causally impotent in that way, then there is nothing wrong with consuming animal products even given the assumption that routine treatment of animals on farms is abhorrent and deeply immoral. This is what is known as the causal impotence problem. This chapter provides an overview and critical discussion of a few of the ways in which philosophers have dealt with this problem. The chapter also discusses implications of this problem for the ethics of veganism.
