1. The focus is on individual choices because individualism is a characteristic feature of act-consequentialism, to which proponents of the threshold argument have often adhered. Act-consequentialists have tended to endorse an individualistic ontology and the act-consequentialist focus on particular acts tends to make an individualistic pattern of analysis and judgment unavoidable. An ontological individualist who argued along rule-consequentialist lines might well reach different conclusions about the aptness of purchasing meat.
2. I am concerned withinitiating the purchaseof meat rather than withconsumingmeat because the typical consequentialist approach will view the person who initiates a meat purchase as sendingmarket signalsto producers that will lead to the breeding and killing of more animals. Consumption,per se, will not affect the market.
3. Someindividual decisions might, of course, affect this number. If someone who regularly orders, say, one million pounds of meat decides not to do so, her decision would surely make a significant difference in the market. Thanks to Nathan Nobis for helping me see this point.
4. Though consequentialist defenses of vegetarianism may not be especially strong, arguments by consequentialists for the moral considerability of animals are, I think, on relatively firm ground. The best known of these is Peter Singer,Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals, 2nd ed. (London: Cape, 1990); cf. Singer'sPractical Ethics, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 55-63. Richard Hare offers a more complex and qualified statement in "Why I Am Only a Demi-Vegetarian,"Essays on Bioethics(Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), 219-35; cf. Gary Varner,In Nature's Interests? Interests, Animal Rights, and Environmental Ethics(New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). Plausible non-consequentialist arguments for the view that animals deserve serious moral consideration, and certainly should not be killed for food (at any rate under ordinary circumstances), are found in Stephen R. L. Clark,The Moral Status of Animals, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984); Stephen R. L. Clark,Animals and Their Moral Standing(London: Routledge, 1998); Mark Rowlands,Animals Like Us(Practical Ethics 3) (London: Verso, 2003); Stephen F. Sapontzis,Morals, Reasons, and Animals(Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1987); Tom Regan,The Case for Animal Rights, 2nd ed. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004).
5. See Raymond G. Frey, "Utilitarianism and Moral Vegetarianism Again: Protest or Effectiveness," Sapontzis,Food, 120; Frey,Rights, 208-10. On the number of vegetarians, see, http://www.colba.net/~ajstrong/About.htm#howmany (retrieved March 5, 2005). On the size of the global market, see "Meat Consumption: Total," retrieved March 3, 2005, from http://earthtrends.wri.org/searchable_db/index.cfm?theme=8variable_ID=192action=select_countries.