I’m Worried About Overfishing. Should I Give Up Fish? (2024)

I think that overfishing is going to result in wild fish’s becoming exceedingly rare — something that our grandchildren won’t get to eat often, if at all. Given this outlook, what do you think about continuing to enjoy fish now while we can? I don’t think that excuses like “everyone is doing it” or “my actions won’t make a difference” apply if an act is inherently immoral. But how about actions that are not inherently wrong but that collectively and cumulatively will lead to harm? — Josh

For around a decade now, about half the world’s seafood has come from aquaculture. There are good and bad ways of doing aquaculture, of course; recently there has been a growth in land-based aquaculture (which may reduce potential harm to other marine creatures) and experiments with plant- or algae-based fishmeal substitutes for feeding carnivorous fish, like salmon, that are especially popular with consumers. While we certainly need to worry about wild marine animals and the condition of the rivers, lakes and oceans that sustain them — and while some people deplore all fisheries and all fishing as cruel — we’re not likely to run out of fish to eat.

But what about our overexploited wild fisheries: Is it wrong to consume creatures you wish were never caught? Setting aside broader debates about the ethics of eating animals, let’s focus on the specific ecological issue you raise about overfishing. Today about a third of global marine stocks are estimated to be overfished, and less than 10 percent could sustain fishing at greater than current levels. Yet governments continue to subsidize fishing. A 2018 study suggested that more than half of high-seas fishing, including much deep-sea bottom trawling, wouldn’t be economical without those subsidies.

If you thought the destruction of a species was morally wrong, I’d say that you would have a moral reason not to participate in it, even though your nonparticipation wouldn’t prevent it from happening. It’s bad to join in a murder whether or not the victim would still have died without your involvement. In a much-discussed thought experiment, the philosopher Derek Parfit imagined that a thousand people were each administering a tiny shock to each of a thousand victims. Though each shock is imperceptible, a thousand shocks is agony, so that, at the end of the exercise, a thousand people have been tortured. An individual’s abstention wouldn’t make a difference to the victims, and yet Parfit, a cunning critic of consequentialism, thought it was no defense for someone to say, “All I did was give a tiny painless shock to a thousand people, and it wouldn’t have mattered if I hadn’t.”

Parfit devised a suggestive scenario. Still, we have to think hard about how to apply its lessons. It’s morally relevant that these harmless torturers are conscious that they’re part of a torturing collective. (That’s why it’s OK to toss a coin to someone who needs it, even though that person would be harmed if thousands of people did so at once.) But once we identify the problem in aggregate terms, we need to think of solutions in aggregate terms too. That’s why, in the real world, the more urgent goal is to take positive collective actions to mitigate negative ones.

Forswearing wild fish is a practice that, if widely adopted, would have a highly desirable effect — saving wild-fish stocks — but that, if taken up by only a few people, would have no effect. In these circ*mstances, you should want to see measures to protect fish stocks given the force of national and international law. So by all means, avoid overfished seafood. But more important than changing your food-eating habits is changing your policy-promoting habits.