Ms. S. worked an extra shift and sleeps mightily. For breakfast/brunch she gets a waffle; since Clinton at the least and a certain Doonsbury strip we taken “to waffle” as synonymous with “to flip flop”, “to vacillate”; and the waffle is a food that can be easily … flipped. But language friends also tell us that the term may also have an origin in the Scottish “waff”, or gust of wind.
As I’ve reported before and elsewhere, I’m a bit of a conflicted omnivore.
I.
On the health front I prefer a ‘plant-based diet’ (in the parlance of our times), which in broad strokes just means plant-centric, perhaps fruit and vegetable-centric; yet from a health standpoint meat in moderation can be part of a balanced diet. I find the ecological arguments for reduced meat consumption the strongest; but these are relative and contingent, and so not matters of principle but rather of pragmatics and purposes. Years ago I had a winter bus ride with a similarly-named colleague who was in philosophy rather than literature, and we discussed the philosophical and, in particular, ethical arguments for veganism, with both of us largely unconvinced by the orthodox and frequently dogmatic animal rights — or, more weakly, consideration — approach, though both of us were quite sympathetic to the ecological argument.
Animal death does not bother me, and not merely because it is ‘natural’; likewise animal ‘killing’ is not an issue for me. But at the same time I’m unmoved by the counter argument that either we have the built-in biological framework to eat meat (as either carnivores or omnivores), mainly our dentition and intestines as well as by the argument that other animals are carnivores and therefore it’s okay for us to be so. Similarly no “top of the food chain” or “survival of the fittest” ‘argument’ is likely to sway; after all, these are non-arguments but rather misunderstood descriptive cliches masquerading as justifications. I’m a rather strict subscriber to the notion that in general we cannot proceed logically from ‘is’ to ‘ought’, that in principle one cannot derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’, though I’m also quite sympathetic to the argument that at a certain phenomenological level our ontology and epistemology are informed if not determined by low-level instrumentalism (i.e. that perhaps much of how we categorize or conceptualize is not based on a singular ‘given’ but upon options and that frequently the option chosen and codified is one that ‘is useful’ or ‘works best’), meaning that we already derive ‘is’ from ‘ought’ in a sense, but that’s neither here nor there at the moment. Back to the main topic: regardless of what is ‘natural’ or what is ‘given’ or even a factual ‘how things were done in the fast’, the question is how we ought to behave now, and the Kantian in me is uninterested in arguments from nature and mostly relegates utilitarian reasoning to a type of game theory for implementing competing but already ethical means or ends (such as perhaps choosing between two equally allowed alternatives).
II.
The question is then twofold: [1] is our consumption of animals a matter of ethics and [2] if so, is it ethical to do so? There are certain instances that would perhaps preclude this from being a discussion about ethics in a Kantian sense. If one is not free to choose, if other concerns override, such as survival or nutrition, if you are unable to act as a rational agent, this is not a discussion worth having. If one is an obligate carnivore or if the only available food is meat, it’s not a discussion of freedom. This is one reason we really don’t need to discuss the ethics of animals eating animals ‘in nature’ (but killing other animals to feed to kept animals may very well be an issue!); similarly one suspects that if impending starvation or similar is a concern then what to eat is not an ethical consideration. That, however, is a statement about us not being ‘fully human’ as rational agents; in general this should be seen as a tragedy. It’s also mostly a non-concern in “The West”; and when it is a concern we should be concerned. Socio-economic and similar states that removes these choices — e.g. poverty and incarceration — quite radically de-humanize us.
This approach to answering the first question deals with the human actor as a rational and, thus, moral agent responsible for and free to make ethical decisions. This does not completely answer the question, as ethical obligations are to others (sometimes with ‘ourself’ as that ‘other’), and so answering the question also means considering whether that ‘other’ is due ethical consideration. The standard Kantian approach is to answer ‘yes’ if that other is another rational agent. Kant further extend ethical consideration but not ethical duty to some sentient beings that are not rational beings; this considers the ‘nature’ of the other, but an approach I won’t elaborate on now but which might also be fruitful, and so I’ll summarize briefly, deals with the ‘mode’ of the said other.
In short and by way of analogy, Kant points out in the 3rd Critique that a botanist would consider a flower one way, but aesthetically we would approach it differently. The botanist would be interested in it as a scientific object of study and knowledge, and the botanist studies it, too, as a ‘flower’, as a concept. The aesthetic approach — considering, among other things, beauty –, so Kant, does not focus on the concept, and as such — contra Mendelssohn and others –, discounts the notion of ‘perfection’ which presupposes an ideal concept (e.g. a flower) against which the aesthetic object may be judged. When considered scientifically we observe the night sky with regard to celestial mechanics, the relations of stars, wavelengths, the distance light travels, orbits, and the like, but the same object could be treated aesthetically but one would ask different questions. One can imagine likewise treating an object with regard to ethical concerns and concepts rather than natural and scientific. But similarly might not an object of ethical consideration be treated at times as an ‘aesthetic’ object? Such objects would have to be treated non-conceptually, that is, without regard to conceptualization or categorization. We do this all the time, actually, with regard to actions: in entertainment, in representations, we frequently consider the beauty, sublimity, ugliness, or grotesqueness of violence, lies, other crimes, things that ‘as concepts’ we judge unethical. The question is not whether we can treat a usually ethical object aesthetically and thus free of ethical concerns, but whether a ‘noun-object’ can be such, whereas usually our ethical considerations apply to actions, even though our ethical obligations/duties apply to nouns. But this is getting abstract and off-topic.
As a Kantian I grant that some animals are due ethical consideration. Whether Kant’s argument is coherent is a different matter. Furthermore, Kant seems to provide a low bar for animal welfare; because of the limited obligation to sentient animals, utilitarian and relative concerns come into play; vivisection, for example, can be allowed. The main take-away from Kant, though, is not about the actions — about treating animals as objects or tools, as means to ends rather than ends in themselves –, but rather about the how and why of doing so, in particular with regard to ‘respect’ and ‘cruelty’.
This reminds me of an early passage in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals, in which he describes how people may fish and display not just the results of their mutilation but the mutilating itself as a kind of spectacle: “No reader of this book would tolerate someone swinging a pickax at a dog’s face. Nothing could be more obvious or less in need of explanation.” (31) That’s not quite true unless a good deal of question begging is allowed, which we may excuse by way of the opening phrase, “No reader of this book”, granting that the kinds of people who would read this book are already the ones who would accept the premise and conclusion, which makes this passage less of an argument and more of a mere illustration. Assuming the point, why is it that we wouldn’t accept it with regard to a dog? Part of it is the “cute, fuzzy face” position, but that’s also just a starting point. Because of that cute, fuzzy, less than purely alien face, we see something in those eyes or in our experiences with canines so that to behave thusly could only be interpreted as cruelty. Intent is not everything, but intent in a Kantian world is clearly something.
This is among the weakest animal welfare arguments; it still treats all animals as means to ends, but it limits some of our behavior as rational agents. It’s perhaps a starting point, though some might still disagree with its premises. But at the same time starting with Kant has some advantages: he synthesized the various strands of moral reasoning in his century, and while clearly not always ‘right’ he dedicated a good deal of thought to this work. By beginning with Kant we can avoid reinventing the wheel to a great extent, and we can begin with someone — unlike Plato or Aristotle, for example — whose world, while not exactly like ours — was surprisingly modern. We might be led immediately to Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms, who was popularized in Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma and we might contemplate his kind of animal husbandry as more humane than that at ‘factory farms’, but I’m not sure that satisfactorily answers any of our questions.
III.
In a way I’m more interested in why we ought to consider ‘factory farms’ bad. There are non-animal-welfare reasons, as outlined by Pollan and others. Our modern, industrial agriculture promotes monocultures, is heavily subsidized by the government, seems to outsource externalities, and so on. I see the animal welfare argument as separate and progressing along three lines:
- De-humanization
- Explicit animal cruelty
- Surrendering our ethical autonomy and obligations
1. The link between factory farming and de-humanization is to be found in both fact and fiction, though it’s also basically just a corollary of the factory as machine metaphor in which workers become cogs in that machine and are, thus, by definition inhuman. On the one hand I think of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906), which has been treated by generations of school teachers as a treatise on the grossness of slaughterhouse meat and the meatpacking industry, whereas for socialist Sinclair the dehumanization of the workers was paramount. I think, too, of a late season one episode of ‘Millennium’ (“Broken World”), which linked misogyny, animal cruelty, and slaughterhouse work.
2. There are good reasons why agricultural lobbyists have been pushing for laws forbidding the recording of goings on of factory farms: animal treatment at such places is often not just negligent but also intentionally cruel and barbaric. I’m reminded of the video making the rounds last year of workers at a Wyoming pig farm using piglets as ersatz-footballs for their pleasure
- Undercover Investigation Documents Pig Abuse at Tyson Supplier at The Humane Society of the United States
- Piglets twirled, pigs kicked by farm workers, activist video shows
- Nine arrested for animal cruelty at Wyoming pig farm where workers were caught on video brutally punching sows and flipping piglets in the air
See also:
- I was an undercover investigator documenting animal abuse on factory farms (at reddit)
- Mercy For Animals (an ‘animal rights organization promoting a vegetarian diet’)
- Will NY Make Documenting Animal Abuse a Crime? (from 2011); that 2011 Florida bill died; Minnesota tried it, too.
- “Ag gag” bill would classify exposing factor farm abuses as terrorism (2013): “You’d think such a repressive act would gag a legislature, but Iowa, Missouri, and Utah have already passed it, and at least 10 other states are considering it.” Disgusting.
- States seek “ag-gag” laws to silence farm whistleblowers
3. My first two complaints target ‘the system’ and ‘abusers’, who are enabled by such a system, and even protected by it. These are our ‘others’. But what’s perhaps most problematic about factory farming as we know it is how we willingly — worse: willfully — abdicate our own ethical agency by transferring what might otherwise be an ethical concern to a more remote political or economic one.
To be sure, we cannot care equally about everything. We also have — straddling our is-ought divide — good documentation that our ethical world slightly resembles Russian Matryoshka dolls or even an onion, something layered. There’s our family, our immediate friends, perhaps neighbors or coworkers, our civic environment, a state or nation, perhaps a religion or creed along the way, our species, and so on … an expanding circle. Furthermore our agency is limited, not just by our available resources but by our location in time and space. We cannot change the past or entirely determine the future. That which is closest to us we can affect — so we like to believe, at least! — the most; more distant things may require surrogates for our actions.
Some concerns are ethical, others not, and our ethical obligations are limited mainly to other rational agents and, in a more narrow way, to other sentient beings. But might not collective nouns and emergent properties prove problematic? When is a pile of sand grains a dune, when just a collection of grains? Steps vs. a staircase, mountains vs. a mountain range, and so on. We have ethical obligations to people, which seems to mean we would also have them to a group of people, a plural amount, such as the people comprising a small town, but what about to ‘the town’ itself? At some point that town is a legal entity, a legal fiction perhaps, something convenient and in a way abstract, but also concrete insofar as it endures even when the people comprising it change; but in some regards or aspects the town and its inhabitants may be identical. A town may inherit the ethical consideration of its inhabitants, but might we not through negligence or word-lawyering deprive citizens of ethical consideration because we address only ‘the town’?
And furthermore there must be limits to the actions for which we are responsible; entailment must not be absolute. If A is responsible for B and B for C, must A be for C? How many ‘steps’ back must my ethical-moral reasoning go? I must not harm D, but if D is set to harm E and I am also not to harm E, do I not harm E by not harming D? Is that my responsibility? If I do not eat factory-farmed eggs I do not support that level of factory farming and direct cruelty, I have a “plus”. But even if I get my eggs from my neighbor’s backyard chickens am I not supporting second-hand the breeding of female chicks and the destruction of male chicks, who cannot lay eggs? So I avoid all eggs, but what other unintended consequence is waiting for me? Can I only be held responsible for what I can foresee?
Quite knotty and sticky.
But these aspects may be ‘gamed’ in a sense: we must be concerned with our actions vis-a-vis (1) those due moral consideration who (2) are relatively close to us, and (3) for whom our actions have relatively unmediated consequences. If we make the free decision — an ethical matter! — to cognitively restructure those due consideration as those not due consideration, to distance ourselves from them or them from us so as to take them outside our circle, and to add layers of mediation, we may end up with a circumstance for which our ethical reasoning is not required, for which, perhaps, we have no degrees of freedom. But was it not an ethical deception that landed us here?
If someone near us is drowning, we help. If someone further away is drowning, we must judge whether we can get there in time, and we may or may not succeed. We cannot be faulted if this person is outside our range of agency. But what if we know — or merely strongly suspect — that someone will be in the position of drowning, and we move further away so that we will not be confronted with needing to help them?
We do this, do we not, when we build better factory farms? We can eliminate the cruelty by eliminating the people. If run by machines, there are fewer if any humans to be dehumanized. If run by machines the animals will be handled dispassionately, without cruelty, without direct intention. We may build enough layers of mediation such that what happens to the farm animals is not a matter of human action, at least not in any direct sense. We can make this a matter of engineering and of efficiency, of a different kind of applied reasoning outside the moral sphere.
This is not an argument about eating animals or not eating animals. This is not an argument about animal welfare, let alone about animal rights. I do not think there is a slippery slope here to be considered. But when it comes to ethical vegetarianism there’s the untenable extreme of do-not-kill, which, among other things, ignores all the animals killed second-hand in agriculture (tilling fields, etc.), and which never justifies itself except with, perhaps, some ill-conceived romantic notion of ‘life’ as sacred, a notion that could, perhaps, be equally satisfied through celebratory rituals about the circle/cycle of life, and so on. There are various aspects to reducing harm or cruelty; there’s the purely emotive “eat nothing with a face” (or at least a cute, preferably furry face … meow … moo), or eat nothing with demonstrable sentience, or eat nothing with a nervous system (regardless of sentience). We can shift it to “cruelty” from “killing”, but can we not find ways to either rationalize killing by us as non-cruel? and ways to eliminate actual cruelty and really just patting ourselves on the back by removing the responsibility from ourselves … itself an act of ethical decision making?
IV. Conclusion.
And then it’s all about us, not just the witnessing cruelty pains us, that inflicting cruelty demeans us, but that some of our best engineered solutions subject us to a kind of ethical paternalism in which we give up our agency so that we do not have to know, do not have to decide.
Ignorance is bliss.
But then we’re stuck in 2013 looking at the critiques of instrumental reason that philosophy gave us last century. Often very early last century. Or before. So much for Singer’s expanding ethical circles; we’ve just encountered an ethical loop, perhaps an ethical möbius strip … So much for progress!
