Planting seeds

One day at lunch I accidentally got into a discussion with a colleague about vegetarianism, PETA, and ethics.

He ordered vegetarian food at lunch. When I asked him whether he believed people should eat less meat, he stated an ideal (yes, we should eat less meat) and then right away claimed he was unable to act on his ideal because most of the time he doesn't care enough. In response, I said, why not select achievable ideals and then actually achieve them?

Religions give practitioners unachievable rules that set them up for failure. If you give up religion, you are free to give up the idea that ethics are inherently impractical.

I tried to encourage him to be skeptical about people (and organizations like PETA) who pull offensive stunts and manipulate emotions seemingly for the sheer hell of it. I told him I'd read that PETA members once staged a demonstration in which they threw paint at women who were walking down the street in fur coats. No motive justifies destruction of another person's property.

I also said I respect companies more than non-profits because companies are ultimately responsible to customers and industry standards. He seemed to think that because companies sell things for that abominable stuff called money, they obviously have an incentive to cut corners and cheat people, whereas because non-profits like PETA are just trying look out for the underdog, their motives are always pure.

However, it's really the money that motivates companies to behave. If I give a company my money, they give me something in return. They have to give me something that meets my expectations, or they don't get my money and they don't survive. The proof is in the pudding.

If I give PETA my money... well, why would I do that? Only if I felt I should. To ease my conscience or impress others. To survive, PETA's got to make me feel horrified about, say, how cows are slaughtered, even if they have to lie. PETA doesn't care about proof; people who feel sufficiently horrified don't care much about proof either.

Industry associations (none of which has ever tried to trick me out of my money, the Copeland beef commercial notwithstanding) have an incentive to uphold quality and ethical standards in their industries and hold members to account. If people don't trust the meat industry, there will be bad financial implications. Money is an incentive not to cut corners.

I don't claim that businesses never cut corners; people obviously do chase short-term gains by cutting corners sometimes. They're shooting themselves in the foot. I'm claiming that the long-term self-interest of a business is aligned to the interest of the consumer even if the short-term interest of a business seems not to be. People should and often do care about the long term. People who shoot themselves in the foot too many times wind up crippled.

He seemed to listen. At any rate, he didn't do what some people would do, which is get up on a high horse and spew regurgitated ideas. (Whether or not they know it, those people are relying on the dopeler effect: the tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.)

He seemed to say that he went to Canada for school because the contrarian thrill of being a liberal in conservative Texas wears off after a while. On the theory that this colleague is a victim, rather than a perpetrator, of the dopeler effect, I pointed out that being different for the sake of being different is just as bad as being the same for the sake of being the same. Those are two sides of the same coin, and you don't want your opinions to be determined by the flip of a coin. The goal is not to be contrarian or conformist, but to be independent. If being a liberal is the result of rebellion rather than careful consideration, maybe he'll ditch the group identity, or give up (or at least re-examine) some of the sillier ideas of the liberal crowd.

The kind people at a coffee stall we visited were baffled by his request that they reuse the disposable styrofoam coffee cup he'd gotten from them earlier for his second coffee of the day. He actually started exclaiming, explaining to them how many years the stuff takes to degrade.

Maybe he does know a little about how not to back down from things he believes.