So hypothetically - if everyone in the world stopped buying and eating meat tomorrow you are of the opinion that the animal ag industry will continue killing animals well into the future without any income or incentive to do so?
An event in the present (purchasing animal products) will financially support and incentivise people to kill animals in the future.
my understanding of linear time, causation, and human behavior has led me to my current position. if you think you know something i don't, i'd love to hear it.
That's not how hypotheticals work. It's just meant to expose the flaw in your logic. In this case you're arguing that demand for a product is not related to supply. That when dvds came out and nobody wanted a vhs player anymore everyone kept making vhs players anyway because 'that's not causal'.
i also explained that free agent's actions can only be said to be caused by their own will. that means that "demand" can never cause "supply" (nor, truly, the other way around), since both those terms actually reflect the willful actions of free agents.
Ok, I get you now. That's just obtuse pedantry. If the demand for animal products goes down, so will supply. This gives an individual the power to lower supply, to choose not to has the same overall effect as killing a few animals. The distinction doesn't matter. Your actions have consequences whether you like it or not. Animal ag cannot survive without money and whenever you buy animal products you are giving it to them.
if everyone in the world stopped buying and eating meat tomorrow you are of the opinion that the animal ag industry will continue killing animals well into the future without any income or incentive to do so
that's a strawman. it is not what i said at all. i'm talking about causation and linear time.
But people wanting to consume animal products is what causes people to kill them. It doesn't matter if your present want didn't cause the death of whatever animal you're eating, it will cause the death of the next one.
But people wanting to consume animal products is what causes people to kill them.
no, it's not. the only thing that can be said to cause the actions of a free agent is their own will. you are denying the free will of the people in the industry, but insisting that i be responsible for their actions. if they don't have free will, then what makes you think i do?
Things are more complex than that, though. Imagine if I need some wood and I come across someone who has an axe. The man has no incentive to cut a tree down. I say to him I will give him three ponies to cut the tree down for me and he agrees. Who has caused the tree to be cut down? Everyone has free will in this situation and I would argue both parties are responsible and share the blame. If either party were removed from the equation the tree would stay standing.
this just isn't analogous to how the system works, anyway. the financiers are operating with (calculated) risk, and willing to pay for meat from suppliers without a contract in place to sell it. to make this fit your analogy, the woodsman would need to just chop up trees and hope you come buy some wood.
It's not irrelevant because it has nothing to do with food systems. You said that if you were responsible for a dead animal then an abattoir worker has no free will. I was exclusively explaining the concept of shared responsibility, wherein two parties can be responsible for something while maintaining free will.
but because of how disanalogous your explanation is to the facts on the ground, your explanation is moot. you might as well have explained the housing market. one has nothing to do with the other.