Legislation and enforcement only played a partial role in reducing the rate of driving while intoxicated. DWI was still normal and socially acceptable for decades after we started banning it. We changed our attitudes, we stigmatized the behaviour, we created new norms, we invented the concept of the "designated driver". Millions of people had to be the first person in their bar to say "just a club soda, I'm driving", the first to say "don't you think you've had enough?", the first to take the keys out of their friend's pocket and call them a taxi.
It's absurd to think that we can solve the problem of antibiotic resistance just by personally giving up meat, but it's equally absurd to think that our own choices are irrelevant. Collective problems are just individual problems at scale; the solutions are also the aggregate of lots of small individual actions. Eat less meat, buy better meat, lobby grocers and restaurant chains to sell antibiotic-free meat, write to your representatives, inform your friends and family about the issue - it all helps to move us in the right direction.
My point is that some types of problems are more amenable to personal activism (participation in wars come to mind) while other types of problems (shared-resources/commons) have different effective solutions (taxes, legislation, democracy et. al.)
Back in the 70s getting pulled over drunk was punished like running a red light (i.e. a nominal fine). The punishments were ratcheted up to now where a DUI results in a 10k fine in some states and an immediate license suspension. With life altering punishments for getting caught, drunk driving reduced significantly and the culture of determining a DD emerged so people could continue to get hammered.
In the UK, the standard penalty for drink-driving has been the same since the early 70s - a 12 month driving ban and a modest fine for the first offence, a three year ban for a second offence and a possible prison sentence of up to 6 months for further repeat offences.
The penalties haven't changed in years, but the rate of drink driving has fallen drastically. What has changed is the culture. Persistent campaigning from both government and grassroots organisations has made drink driving completely unacceptable. Today, it would be considered perfectly reasonable - perhaps even admirable - to call the police on your own friend if you know that they're drink driving. There's now far less proactive enforcement of drink driving laws, because it's not a common enough offence to warrant random testing and the police expect to get tip-offs from the public. It's seen as a foolish and selfish thing to do, a marker of personal weakness, a sign that you're some kind of alcoholic.
It still wouldn't be considered honorable here to turn in a friend for drunk driving (unless it was obscenely over the limit). It would be mainly considered a failure of friendship that you didn't confront them and instead called it in.
Even in rural Ireland there was a relatively recent backlash because they could keep driving home drunk down the side of the road with the hazard lights on.
Also, with a 12-month ban in the UK, they must not have been enforcing it much because it wouldn't take long to have most of the drunk drivers banned. So my suspicion is that enforcement increased as well. People rarely fall for propaganda alone when there is nothing that makes it concrete.
Antibiotics is actually a fairly minor benefit to the meat industry, so it's a winning strategy assuming significant popular support.
I thought it was universally acknowledged that boycotts, generally, don't work, because you can almost never find and coordinate enough people that care.
Can you be a conscious consumer on all aspects of your consumption, can anyone?
overall it makes sense to reduce meat consumption, because if you look deeper in reasons for antibiotics use in meat industry, mainly it is used as a consequence of high demand for meat, to reduce risk of diseases in overpopulated farms, while feeding animals growth hormones and stuffing as much food as possible to ensure quick growth, so yeah, if people would reduce consumption, then supply would adjust accordingly, and then even organic meat producers would become viable option to meet demands.
Everybody agrees we should drive carefully, and everybody agrees we should not revert to pre-antibiotic treatment of infections. How did we address the former? Through moral admonition and personal prudence? (That was a rhetorical question)
Or people just ignore stupid, unenforceable laws and net respect for the law as an absolute is decreased.
10 points for griffindor.
It feels like solving traffic mortality by pasting a "drive carefully"-sticker inside the windshield
There's a demand for meat, hence an industry working to supply (and profit-off-of) it. Encouraging people to eat less meat is making a difference.
These kinds of problems need results, not feel-good activist sentiment woo. People are dying.
I say that anything less than that is worse than useless, because we're spending wasted effort (mindshare, attention) when time is, to the best of our knowledge, running out.
Now i don't know that personal activism and moral campaigning will be insufficient in this case, it just smells that way to me. It also has a certain fragrance of moral superiority and virtue signalling about it, which i guess triggers me, or something.
The problem, as I see it, is one of a questionable food supply or at least a contamination issue, in which case, each person should decide what matters to them, and is how this particular problem is solved in the micro, which in aggregate, does lessen the macro aspect. I'm thinking of cases like cigarettes and alcohol.
However, where this falls apart is that consumers don't always have that info, and even if we slap warnings on things, it doesn't usually help unless there is a very clear line of causality and effect.
For instance, the prop 65 warnings[0], which are essentially useless.
Either way, I do think that individual choice is the first line of defense for issues like this.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_65_(1...
The shared resources is the limited amount we can use an antibiotic before it becomes useless.
The logic of this being that you as an individual might have a small probability of affecting change but if you do that impact is rather big. So the first person not buying an egg doesn’t change the situation but the 50th person does lead to one pallet less being bought (and so on). If you attribute the effect across individuals you arrive at a reasonably high impact each individual choice has. The same argument goes for voting!
Are you saying that no one should do anything good, or encourage others to do anything good, unless it fully solves a problem? I suspect that's not the point you were trying to make, but it sure sounds like that if you read your words.
It's far more effective to lobby for regulation than rely on individual action to solve collective action problems.
Your economic argument is naive and pretty wrong, but I'm not going to debate it here because it's not relevant to this sub-thread.
Of course people should do good things, but in some cases this can lead to a false sense of security ("I'm doing the Right Thing and spreading the good word. Next issue, please!")
Where I live, we used to have signs inside the buses that read "Wait until the buss has left the station to cross the road". This was an effort to prevent accidents, but had no measurable effect other than to take the problem of the agenda for public transport officials.
With shared resource-problems, voluntary action can lead to a prisoners dilemma, where you can get ahead by _not_ doing the right thing, even though everyone is individually better off by doing the right thing.
And yes, a person who eats less meat eats less meat, which is another way to say that you're introducing a non-sequitur about something which is nothing like your bus example.
I'm confused about the person who eats less meat non-sequitur. It feels like you're shoving me around a bit there.
As for the bus thing, the people responsible for reducing deaths around buses are responsible for actually solving the problem. So I agree that they should not do ineffective things like they did in your story. Meanwhile, a person eating less meat is not responsible for making sure that overall meat consumption falls.
So there's no relationship between the two situations, and that's the non-sequitur. Sorry that I didn't get this point across effectively.
And yes, I used his proposal of individual virtue as an "excuse" to raise a point about the role and reason of individual virtue in the topic at hand, it's called "having a discussion." Why should I leave virtuous people alone on the internet? Is he some kind of unassailable saint of meat-moderation who must be protected from non-sequiturs and sequiturs alike?
Whose toes are sore here?