That’s a very strong explanation. I like it.
It seems to me that most folks in the thread is tripping over what the word “cause” means. In common parlance, “cause” includes very indirect and merely statistical causes. In strict formal logic, “cause” has a very specific narrow meaning.
Whether any one individual American eats beef daily or never will not affect the total kill of cows in the US. That person’s contribution to demand, or lack of contribution to demand, is totally lost in the noise of mass-scale industrial production, distribution, and consumption as well as the inevitable fractional frictional losses of waste at each stage along the way.
So in that sense, that one person’s action, either way, is not casual to cows being bred, raised, or slaughtered. Or not being so. It doesn’t affect all the cows and it certainly doesn’t affect any specific individual cow.
But if everybody did it, there’d be a huge change one way or the other in total breeding, raising, and slaughtering.
So how can everyone cause something when no one individual causes anything? Because in one case we’re talking statistical causation and in the other we’re talking strict causation.
Frylock’s right in the strict formal logical sense that no one act of consumption retroactively *directly *causes the lifecycle of the particular cow that went into that particular meal.
Everybody else is right in thinking that applying strict causation to this problem is silly sophistry with no connection to real-world practicalities.
While I cannot say that Frylock’s burger was a direct causation of the death of a specific cow in the past, I can say that he was a willing and active participant in a system that has caused, is causing, and will continue to cause mass bovine death.
He also is equally complicit in causing mass bovine birth. And like any other baby animal, baby cows are cute. So he’s also adding tons and tons of cuteness to an otherwise plain world.
It’s a shame Frylock’s OP was about the death of the cows, because that just brought in a lot of distracting noise about morality. Note to future posters: don’t pose symbolic logic problems framed within a big latent moral dilemma.
