Abstract

Given the moral harms of factory farming, we should find pragmatic ways to convince consumers to reduce their meat consumption. Philosophers often recommend using ethical argumentation to convince people that eating meat causes unnecessary and severe suffering to factory farm animals. The problem is that consumers perceive such arguments as challenges to their autonomy and identity thereby causing resistance. This makes such efforts unpragmatic, meaning they are unlikely to successfully convince consumers to reduce their meat consumption. In this paper, I propose schema replacement as an alternative. This tactic seeks to replace categorizing factory farm animals as food in a way that is sensitive to consumers’ autonomy and identity, making it pragmatic and effective. This makes schema replacement a responsible way to convince consumers to reduce their meat consumption and combat the moral harms of factory farming.