You have just spent this entire conversation trying to discredit the philosophers, the economists, and the logic rather than actually defending your own choices. This debate has reached its end because you aren't arguing to find the truth; you are arguing to protect your habits.
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Again, you've moved the goalposts from 'I have no influence' to 'It’s their fault, not mine.'
You are now arguing that because the industry has the agency to choose to kill, you are absolved of the responsibility for paying them to do it, but that is not how moral agency works.
You are now arguing that because a business owner has agency, that consumer demand magically ceases to be the primary engine of production.
This is a category error. You are confusing the mechanism by which a business fights for survival with the source of its funding.
Whether you find an argument 'compelling' is subjective. Whether an argument is logically consistent is objective, and your position hasn't been.
You’ve spent this entire conversation moving the goalposts, dodging every direct analogy (the vaccines, the construction accidents, the hitman), and denying the basic math of supply chains, all to defend the idea that intentional slaughter is morally identical to accidental death.
When you can no longer refute the logic, dismissing the explanation is a common way to exit the conversation, but it doesn't resolve the contradictions you’ve failed to address.
You are now moving from logical argument to prophecy. Predicting what will happen in the next century is not a rebuttal to the arguments being made today.
Whether or not animal rights will be 'excised' from deontology in 100 years is irrelevant to the question of whether it is morally right to slaughter sentient beings for sensory pleasure right now.
You're using this prediction as a shield to avoid the present-day reality of your actions. It's a convenient coincidence that your 'prediction' perfectly aligns with your personal desire to keep eating meat.
You're confusing 'debating' with 'adopting a school of thought'. I'm using multiple ethical frameworks because you've failed to maintain a consistent position across any of them.
When I point out the Deontological error (that intentional slaughter is not the same as an accidental farming death), you deflect.
When I point out the Consequentialist reality (that meat production causes more 'incidental' crop deaths than plant-based diets), you call it an 'epistemic flaw.'
You are not arguing for a refined, consistent ethical system; you are arguing for moral nihilism. You are using the 'epistemic flaw' argument, the idea that because we can't know everything, we are responsible for nothing, to absolve yourself of all responsibility.
You are describing a static transaction, but the food industry is a continuous cycle. You are pretending the grocery store is a one-time clearance sale, rather than a rolling inventory system.
That is not a moral philosophy; that is the total destruction of morality.
If your logic holds, that knowledge of a potential outcome makes the outcome morally equivalent to intentional harm, then everything is a crime.
If you drive a car to work, you know with statistical certainty that your presence on the road contributes to the probability of a fatal accident. By your definition, you are 'intentionally' killing someone every time you get behind the wheel, regardless of whether you are a safe driver or a reckless one.
If a parent gives birth to a child, they know with 100% certainty that the child will eventually die. By your logic, having a child is a premeditated act of murder.
You are confusing a legal transfer of currency with the economic reality of market incentives.
Yes, technically the money belongs to the grocer once you hand it over. But the grocer is not a charity. They are a capitalist business that operates on data. You didn't just hand them money; you handed them money in exchange for a specific product.
By making that exchange, you sent a clear financial signal that procuring a dead animal was a profitable choice for them, so if they procure another one, their profit will likely increase.
Saying "no, I'm not" isn't an argument; it is just denial. You are arguing against the basic mechanics of retail inventory.
How exactly do you think grocery stores operate? Do you think store managers just randomly guess what to put on the shelves, completely ignoring what customers actually buy?
If you ran a bakery and nobody bought your blueberry muffins on Monday, you would bake fewer of them on Tuesday. The meat industry operates on the exact same principle, just on a massive scale. To claim that consumers refusing to buy meat has zero impact on how many animals the industry breeds and slaughters is to deny the foundational premise of how every business on earth operates.
You are relying on a massive Appeal to Tradition fallacy.
Immanuel Kant lived 200 years ago. He also lived in an era where mainstream philosophical thought routinely excluded women and non-white races from full moral consideration. Does the fact that human rights and feminism "fly in the face of historical 18th-century thought" mean they lack entrenchment? No. It means humanity evolved, our scientific understanding of biology and consciousness evolved, and our ethical frameworks were updated to fix historical blind spots.
Deontology is a logical framework, not a 200-year-old religious dogma where we are forced to worship Kant's 18th-century biological ignorance. Korsgaard and Regan didn’t invent a 'novel' system; they took the core deontological rule (do not use a conscious subject merely as a means to an end) and applied it accurately using modern science.
But more importantly, you are hiding behind a history of philosophy lesson to avoid answering the actual argument.
If you truly believe that knowing an action will incidentally result in some deaths makes it morally identical to premeditated killing, you just criminalised the entire modern world.
By your logic, there is no difference between a doctor knowing a certain percentage of patients will have a fatal allergic reaction to a life-saving vaccine, and a doctor intentionally injecting a patient with poison. You are saying those two things are morally the same.
Moving the goalposts again, you claimed I would be "hard-pressed to find a professional philosopher who agrees", I gave you three prominent ones.
Your claim that their positions are "novel and lack entrenchment" is factually incorrect. Tom Regan’s The Case for Animal Rights is literally a foundational textbook taught in nearly every university applied ethics course in the world. Christine Korsgaard is one of the leading scholars at Harvard.
And your point that they are "directly disputed by their peers" can be said for the whole of philosophy? Kant is disputed. Utilitarianism is disputed. If being "disputed by peers" means an ethical framework is invalid, then literally no ethical framework exists.
Which claim exactly are you attacking then?
Saying "you can't actually predict anything" is a complete abandonment of basic logic and common sense.
If you truly believe we can't predict outcomes, then why do you look both ways before crossing the street? By your logic, since you can't know the future, you can't predict that a speeding car will kill you, so you shouldn't bother looking. Why do you set an alarm clock? Why do you eat when you're hungry? You do all of these things because you are perfectly capable of predicting high-probability outcomes.
You are confusing absolute mystical certainty with empirical probability.
The 'it already happened' defense ignores basic supply and demand. When you buy a piece of meat at the store, you are casting a financial vote to restock that empty space on the shelf. Your money directly funds the breeding and slaughter of the next animal.
If I buy stolen goods, I am funding and incentivising theft, even though someone else already stole them in the past. If I pay a hitman after a job is done, I can't stand in court and say, "I can't be responsible for something somebody else did in the past".
Actually, it's incredibly easy to find professional philosophers who agree with this as it's the entire foundation of modern animal rights philosophy. While Immanuel Kant famously excluded animals from his moral framework in the 1700s, modern deontological philosophers have spent the last forty years correcting that.
Tom Regan: One of the most famous ethicists of the 20th century. His landmark book, The Case for Animal Rights (1983), is the definitive deontological argument for animals. He argues that animals are 'subjects-of-a-life' with inherent value, and intentionally killing them uses them merely as a means to an end, which is a direct rights violation.
Christine Korsgaard: She is currently one of the world's leading Kantian philosophers, based at Harvard. She wrote an entire book (Fellow Creatures) arguing strictly from a Kantian, deontological framework that animals are 'ends in themselves' and that slaughtering them is absolutely a deliberate moral wrong.
Gary Francione: A leading philosopher and legal scholar whose entire 'abolitionist' approach to animal rights is built on deontological principles, arguing that animals have a fundamental negative right not to be used as human property.
So, no, I'm not hard-pressed at all. Deontology actively recognises the inherent rights of conscious beings. But even if you ignore modern philosophy and cling to 18th-century Kant, you still can't escape the Doctrine of Double Effect. Under any version of deontology, there is a structural moral difference between an unintended accident and premeditated killing.
I never claimed that you did, but you joined in on a comment chain in which that was the central argument.
The slaughterhouse is responsible for their actions, but that does not absolve you in any moral or legal framework.