This is effectively the rightist libertarian “vote with your wallet” argument though. It is based on the belief that market forces are moved entirely by the magic of supply and demand, and so the idea is that issues in society will simply be fixed by people changing what it is they demand in the market.

The reality does not operate like this. In practice, one of the most common capitalist practices is to invent a problem and then try to sell people the solution. With that practice, it doesn’t matter whether you wanted the product because the point is they’re going to try to find a way to change reality so that you want and/or need the product they want to sell; either change your beliefs about the world so that you’ll buy, or change your actual material realities so that you are more dependent on it. An example of this in practice is cars in the US. Surely a lot of people would love high speed trains across the country, like China has. But they don’t get the option. The car industry and the fossil fuel industry ensures that they don’t have that choice. Robust public transit would easily outcompete the horrible experience that is gridlock traffic and preventable accidents. And as long as the alternative is not an option, people can’t just go, “Fuck cars, I’m going to take the train.” In some areas, there just isn’t an alternative. What little public transit there is, is not feasible without an obscenely long trip, if it’s feasible at all. Alternatives like bikes are not feasible if the distance is too geographically big. If everyone in the US stopped using cars tomorrow, the industry would not stop producing cars. What would happen is society would shut down because a huge amount of it is dependent on cars.

At a glance, this sort of thing can sound like moral excuses, but it is how capitalism works. It forces you to have culpability in one perspective and look like excuses in another. No one is getting out of it with a clean conscience if you want to moralize about it badly enough. But moralizing about it on an individual level has yet to fix the problems and there is no reason to think it will start doing it. I am not exactly an expert on dialectics, but I feel pretty confident in saying that while moral shaming can at times play a part in the component of dialectics where we influence the world, you won’t change the world on that alone. You have to take into account what people’s material realities are and address them.

I think a much more useful thing to do in the face of someone saying, “not eating the meat won’t bring the cow back” is to ask what it is about not eating meat that gives them pause. Do they just really like the taste? Is it hard to change their diet? Are there traditional foods they eat and a sense of culture tied up in it? Rather than focusing purely on the argument as sound or unsound. And perhaps more importantly, what is it going to accomplish getting them to go vegan? Just harm reduction for the time being? What is the broader strategy toward dismantling factory farming as a practice?