Ryota Ishihara

Beka Jalagania has recently argued that benefiting from wild animals generates special duties to assist them. To show this, Jalagania offers an argument that focuses on their contribution to the production of the benefits we receive, which he calls the contribution argument. In this paper I aim to show that this argument fails. One of the premises on which the contribution argument rests is that we ought to share the benefits we receive with whoever contributed to their production. However, the idea of contribution in this premise is somewhat ambiguous as it stands and can be further clarified in at least two ways: a counterfactual way and a causal way. I examine these two interpretations of contribution in turn, focusing mainly on their counterintuitive implications, and argue that under both interpretations, the contribution argument faces some difficulties. Therefore, unless a plausible interpretation of contribution is offered, we should conclude that this argument fails.

David DeGrazia and Tristram McPherson present different arguments for moral vegetarianism. Roughly speaking, DeGrazia argues that the consumption of animal products is morally impermissible because it involves financial support for factory farming, while McPherson argues that it is morally impermissible because it involves benefiting from wrongdoing. These arguments share a common structural feature, in identifying a very thin connection between the consumption and production of animal products, which is then taken to be morally impermissible. At first sight, these arguments seem appealing. However, they face similar problems. In other words, they condemn too many actions mostly because of their common structural feature. In this paper, I aim to present a new argument that doesn’t (at least so clearly) face these problems, which I call the “argument from responsibility.” Rather than attempting to argue from a very thin connection between the consumption and production, this argument focuses on what would happen if sufficiently many people refrained from consuming animal products. Partly due to this difference, this argument doesn’t (at least so clearly) have some of the problems in DeGrazia’s and McPherson’s accounts.