The most common argument against file sharing is that artists lose money when people download rather than purchase music, films, etc. Now, for a variety of reasons this is actually not a very compelling argument to anybody who really thinks about it. It’s full of holes. Chances are very good that piracy actually makes artists more money – but that’s not the subject of this post. For the purposes of this post, all that really matters is that this bad argument at least has some sort of superficial, surface plausibility. It’s not completely outlandish. When it comes to most music and films – and certainly to anything remotely popular – the option exists of going into a physical store and buying a physical plastic disc for money. Through the long chain of middlemen, at least some of that money makes its way into the pocket of the people who worked hard to produce that piece of work. When you don’t buy the work this way, but download it from a file sharing network, then this chain of events doesn’t happen, and so in some loose sense, the artists “lose” money. You can see why people might be sympathetic to this point of view the first time they think about it.

Even if this argument was absolutely bulletproof, it’s interesting to note that it absolutely does not apply for video games beyond a certain age, because the video game market works very differently to the music and film market, in that
products age extremely rapidly. If I felt like buying some music or films which were produced in the 70s or 80s, I could easily do that. There’s still a big market for those products, and so people keep producing them to keep up
with demand, and they get released on new forms of media when they come out. However, if I wanted to play a video game produced even in the 90s, I’m probably out of luck. It’s just not possible to buy a game that old off the
shelf. No store on Earth stocks them.

I’d really like to play Final Fantasy VII some day, since it is widely regarded as a classic of its genre, and not having played it makes me feel like I’m missing out on an important part of being a geek, kind of like a fantasy fiction fan who’s never read Lord of the Rings. I have two options for acquiring FFVII. I could buy a second hand copy from someone, which is the perfectly legitimate, law-abiding citizen option, or I could download it from a file sharing network, which would be illegal, and make me a “pirate”.

The thing is, there’s no solid ethical argument for why anyone should buy a second hand copy. If you do so, none of the money you spend (and this might be a lot of money – because the game is so famous and people are reluctant to part with it, copies can sometimes go for over $100 on eBay, more than the cost of a brand new modern game) goes to the people who helped to make that game, to compensate them for their time and creativity. Every last cent of it goes to the person you’re buying it from, to compensate them for giving up a physical possession. By downloading the game illegally, no money changes hands at all, but then nobody is giving up any physical possessions either. There’s
absolutely no difference between the two options from the point of view of the artists. They certainly don’t lose money when you download it. There’s simply no option today by which you can acquire the game and compensate the creators. The nearest you could come is to pirate the game and then send a cheque for a tiny amount to every writer, programmer, animator, composer, etc. who worked on the game, which is obviously not feasible for a bunch of reasons. Unless you’re a devoted collector who actually wants the physical product to put on a shelf, the most sensible thing to do is to just download it and not feel one iota of guilt.

This is a good example of where copyright law does far less to protect artists than it does to hurt consumers, by making the difficulty of legally acquiring a game directly proportional to how popular it is. Imagine how much less popular the Beatles would be amongst young people today if the only legal way to get one of their albums was to buy it second hand for $100!

The more thought I give the issue of vegetarianism, the more I am struck by the irrationality of the all-or-nothing stance that society takes on this issue. With few exceptions, one is either a vegetarian, eating no meat products, or one is not, eating any and all meat products. Of course there are people who do not count themselves as vegetarian who may avoid particular meat products as a simple matter of taste, but from a moral perspective it seems that a middle ground is unheard of. Someone who self-identifies as a vegetarian, but only avoids certain meat products, is likely to be viewed unfavourably by the vegetarian mainstream as “hypocritical” or “uncommitted”. I question whether or not this extreme dichotomy follows logically from any of the common arguments for vegeterianism.

If we are going to be entirely rational about eating ethically, the only acceptable procedure is one logically equivalent to the following: we define a criteria for whether or not a particular animal is ethical to eat, on the basis our particular concerns (which may be about animal cruelty, environmental impact, human health or any or all of the above). We then apply this criteria to each individual animal independently and decide whether or not we are happy to eat it. To be mathematical about it, we need to define a function which maps every animal on Earth to either the concept of “can eat” or that of “cannot eat”. This function then partitions the set of animals into ethically edible and ethically inedile, and we are bound by our concerns to eat only animals in one set of this partition. To decide which animals we eat by any other means would be irrational, which is what we are trying to avoid.

Thus we have to ask: what criteria could possibly map every single animal to “cannot eat”? If we are concerned about animal cruelty – how “happy” a life an animal leads before it is slaughtered, how much it suffers during slaughtering, etc., which seems to be the most prevalent concern leading the vegetarianism – we have to ask: does it make sense to treat chimpanzees and dolphins as equivalent to invertebrate prawns and beetles? This seems sketchy at best, and possibly absurd, considering the huge differences in the amount of intelligence and perceptual ability that we can reasonably assume (based on differences in their nervous system structure) each of these animals possesses – yet treating them equivalently is exactly what the present all-or-nothing nature of vegetarianism requires of a rational eater.

A possible loop-hole in our rationalist scheme arises if we consider that we may choose a criteria for ethical edibility which is not readily mesaurable. If our reluctance to eat some animals is driven by concerns about animal cruelty, our criteria may (in fact, probably does) involve the internal mental state of animals in someway. This is not directly measurable, and so we must adopt a stance of “default edibility” or “default inedibility” to guide us in these cases where our criteria cannot be properly applied. A difficult or impossible to apply criteria combined with a stance of default inedibility might lead to the current all-or-nothing nature of vegetarianism. But we should question the sensibility of this combination. The benefit the default inedibility stance presumably arises from a “better safe than sorry” perspective. Yet if our criteria is so very hard to apply in practice, how strong a conviction can we really have about the possibility of ever being “sorry”?

I am becomming increasingly convinced that a truly rational ethical eater would bear little resemblence to most present day vegetarians. Their animal cruelty concerns would cause them to avoid eating dolphins but happily eat prawns. Their environmental sustainability concerns would enable them to happily eat animals grown in small “old fashioned” and sustainable farms instead of huge industrial meat facilities, and when meat pepared in this way was not available it would seem entirely forgivable simply to distribute one’s meat consumption over the range of available meats in proportion to environmental impact. I think it a shame that apparently no such “rational eating” movement seems to exist – it certainly should.