Gunned down at church, for being an abortion provider. Yes, it isn't pretty, it isn't easy, but millions of women would find their lives blown completely off course, if they couldn't end unwanted pregnancies. Morality would preclude abortion if a fetus really were morally like a baby, but I don't think so, and millions of women don't think so, and Dr. Tiller didn't think so.
Apparently he was particularly controversial because he performed late-term abortions, but we shouldn't give abortion opponents control of what that looks like. A friend of mine had such terrible hyperemesis (vomiting during pregnancy) that she nearly had to end the pregnancy in the last trimester, to save her own life. That's at least one sort of case that should come to mind when we talk about "late-term abortion."
Dr. Tiller could have been a safe and respectable ob-gyn, but chose a hard calling. I bet there are thousands of women today who feel indebted to him, thankful, and bereaved. Symbolically, anyway, I am one of them.
6/1/09
Mango Power
This is just a public service announcement. Did you know that the skin of a mango contains urushiol, the ingredient that makes poison ivy poisonous? If you are highly allergic to poison ivy, don't peel a mango with your bare hands. I'm serious. Really. Don't.
(Right, I did, even though I knew better.)
(Right, I did, even though I knew better.)
5/27/09
What Happened to the Frogs?
Apparently many species of frogs are dying out, not only in the wild, but in zoos. What's causing the problem? Elizabeth Kolbert talks about an astonishing theory in the May 25th issue of The New Yorker.
The African clawed frog was collected in the 1930s and discovered to have a medical use. Apparently the hormones of a pregnant woman will cause this frog to lay eggs. So they were kept in tanks in European and American obstetrician's offices in the 50s and 60s, for use as live pregnancy tests. The theory is that these frogs got infected with a fungus common in doctors' offices, and then spread the fungus when they were released locally. (As in: "Whoa, we've got too many frogs. Let's let 'em go.") This doctor-office fungus is found on the bodies of frogs in Central America and in other places where frogs are becoming scarce.
If this is the truth about why frogs are disappearing, it ought to be a warning against seeing endangered species as worth protecting so they can serve our purposes. It seems that when we use a species, we can be unwittingly triggering its demise.
5/22/09
The Taste of a Place
Here's the bad thing about being a vegetarian: if you don't consume animal products, you miss out on some of the experience of "place." If you are in Alaska and won't eat the salmon, you miss out on a certain amount of Alaska-ness. In fact, I think seafood is the hardest type of meat to give up, because there are so many varieties, and they are so powerfully evocative. Lobster takes you back to Bar Harbor, Maine. Raw oysters make you feel like you're out in the middle of the ocean. Eating a hamburger takes you exactly nowhere, but eating things from the sea can take you to the sea. (Well, a hotdog will take you to a ballpark--but a tofu dog smothered in onions and mustard works pretty well.)When I'm in Hawaii this summer, there's going to be all sorts of seafood to resist. Of course, all kinds of food evokes place. We will be staying at an organic vegetable and fruit farm on Kauai for a couple of days, a place that brags about growing pinapple and banana trees, avocados, kale, seven kinds of lettuce, etc. etc. But the more taste, the more place. I still remember a salmon plus lychee concoction I had in Kauai 15 years ago, back when I first gave up meat, but hadn't started worrying about fish yet. Now I'm worried. In fact, I'm particularly worried about salmon.
Wait, is salmon actually local to Hawaii? Hmm.
I wish animal authors wouldn't trivialize taste issues so much. They make themselves look like puritans, or like they suffer from some sensory deprivation syndrome. Of course there's something significant lost if you give up whole categories of food, and of course you can't fabricate perfect duplicates out of soy products. I like a veggie burger now and again, but what a veggie burger evokes is a food laboratory. Alaskan salmon really grabs you and takes you somewhere.
Of course, if the seafood experience is really great, there's still the question of costs. If very bad things have to happen to salmon for me to get that food high, then I might have to give it up. But why pretend there's nothing to be given up? It's not "mere taste" that's at stake, but taste in a big sense--the taste of a place.
5/14/09
Respecting Animals
Postcard from the deep, deep interior of Jeff McMahan's book, The Ethics of Killing ...I'm surprised he's so uncritical of Kantian notions about respect. I can't bring myself to believe even for a minute that respect is owed to others solely on the basis of moral autonomy.
Say we discover there are aliens somewhere else in the universe. At first, all that we know is that they've also discovered us. In fact, they're about to embark on a journey to Earth. We're a little worried about whether this is going to be a joyful encounter, or they're coming to enslave us or use us for food. Gradually, we gain more information about them, and on that basis we must decide how to proceed.
The Kantian thinks that if we discover the aliens have the ability to make their own choices in light of their own sense of good and bad, right and wrong, then we must respect them. In fact, discovering this about them will reveal them to be our equals. If we found out they were both morally autonomous and superb artists, they wouldn't be worthy of any more respect than if we found out they were just morally autonomous. Plus, their moral autonomy would have to earn our respect, no matter how it played out. They would deserve the same respect whether their civilization resembled contemporary Sweden or Germany during the third Reich.
I don't think respect, thus keyed just to moral autonomy, has any psychological reality. In other words, this isn't how respect really works. In reality, respect is a response to many different assets, and it allows of "less" and "more." The Kantian notion of respect shows all signs of being a contrivance. It's not inherently credible, but an attempt to solve a problem--the problem of explaining why humans are equal and special, and why animals completely lack moral status.
Starting with a more psychologically realistic and reasonable understanding of respect, I'm afraid we don't get the results that Kant wants. Animals are not completely lacking in moral status because there are many things about them that elicit respect. If you read books about animals and watch nature videos, you can even observe your own respect for a species increasing (or decreasing) as you learn more about the animal's capacities. Unless you've been to a Kantian reeducation camp, you'll agree that it's respect that you're feeling when you find out about the intelligence of crows, the creativity of bower birds, the emotional complexity of chimpanzees. Respect is a response to a multitude of merits, and comes in degrees.
McMahan says the "morality of respect" applies only to human beings, and a "morality of interests" applies to animals ("Kant for people, Utilitarianism for animals," in the words of Robert Nozick) but I think that's wishful thinking. Respect, as we really feel and understand it, isn't limited to humans.
5/13/09
Where the Boys Are
The good people at Feminist Philosophers have lately been keeping track of "men's conferences"--philosophy conferences that happen to feature an all-male line up of featured speakers. This public shaming, in combination with email to conference organizers, is intended to increase female representation at these events. All of which gets me thinking...
The pool of possible speakers for conferences varies by topic. An ethics conference without any women would be disgraceful, because there are plenty of women to choose from. One of the all-male conferences recently shamed at FP is called "The New Ontology of the Mental Causation Debate." The pool of possible speakers consists of philosophers who work in philosophy of mind, on mental causation, with a focus on ontology. And there might be some geographical requirements as well, depending on the way the event is being funded. It's not so obvious there are lots of women to choose from.
If there aren't, it may be just a tiny, tiny, tiny bit the fault of people like me. Which means--people who used to work in that area, but switched to an area of philosophy that already had good female representation. I see this all the time. Women start in fields that are more abstract, technical, and male-dominated, and later move into fields with more "human" content, and more women.
That's the pattern when women stop concentrating entirely on...whatever they were doing, and start doing feminist philosophy. Or they get out of metaphysics and into ethics. I see this also in other academic fields. A relative of mine started out in a male-dominated hard science, and later moved into female-dominated science-ed. Every time a woman makes this sort of move, somewhere down the line someone's going to have a harder time putting together a conference with gender parity.
Why don't women choose to be "where the boys are"? That's ultimately what really needs to be asked, not (for the most part) why specific conferences today feature a lot of men. Does it have anything to do with inhospitability to women in the more abstract areas of research? In the cases I know best (my own and my relative's), I think not. But that's two people. I'd love to know more about the thought and emotion behind these shifts.
The pool of possible speakers for conferences varies by topic. An ethics conference without any women would be disgraceful, because there are plenty of women to choose from. One of the all-male conferences recently shamed at FP is called "The New Ontology of the Mental Causation Debate." The pool of possible speakers consists of philosophers who work in philosophy of mind, on mental causation, with a focus on ontology. And there might be some geographical requirements as well, depending on the way the event is being funded. It's not so obvious there are lots of women to choose from.
If there aren't, it may be just a tiny, tiny, tiny bit the fault of people like me. Which means--people who used to work in that area, but switched to an area of philosophy that already had good female representation. I see this all the time. Women start in fields that are more abstract, technical, and male-dominated, and later move into fields with more "human" content, and more women.
That's the pattern when women stop concentrating entirely on...whatever they were doing, and start doing feminist philosophy. Or they get out of metaphysics and into ethics. I see this also in other academic fields. A relative of mine started out in a male-dominated hard science, and later moved into female-dominated science-ed. Every time a woman makes this sort of move, somewhere down the line someone's going to have a harder time putting together a conference with gender parity.
Why don't women choose to be "where the boys are"? That's ultimately what really needs to be asked, not (for the most part) why specific conferences today feature a lot of men. Does it have anything to do with inhospitability to women in the more abstract areas of research? In the cases I know best (my own and my relative's), I think not. But that's two people. I'd love to know more about the thought and emotion behind these shifts.
5/12/09
The Passage of Time
The semester's over, it's grey and rainy out. I'm reading a long book about death and killing. It's the perfect time for an existential crisis!Having just taught my course on the meaning of life, I've been reading good writing on life and death by the best philosophers around, past and present, people like Peter Singer, Thomas Nagel, Robert Nozick, Aristotle, Nietzsche, Sartre, Richard Taylor, Victor Frankl, and my favorite despairing novelist, Leo Tolstoy. Oh yes, and I wrote a book that grapples with such things. With all that to draw on, I really ought to have contempt for a one sentence lyric from singer/songwriter James Taylor, he of the pretty songs, right? But here it is--the cure for what ails us, all in one sentence:
The secret of life is enjoying the passage of time.
Many of the above heavyweight thinkers worry a great deal about things coming to an end, like a semester, a holiday, a stage of life, the whole of a life. The problem is really time and it's awful tendency to ship things off to the past. Can't we just stop the whole thing for a moment? Sorry, but no. Or latch on to things that last for an eternity, like God and heaven? A nice thought, but I suspect there isn't anything like that. The solution is surely enjoying the passage of time.
What exactly would that be like? What is it to enjoy not just moments, or a bunch of moments (an hour, a weekend), but the passage of time? Whether James Taylor said it or a philosophical luminary, I'm going to have to think about it!
****
Truth in posting. This is a slightly revised rebroadcast, but I was thinking about that sentence again. As my kids get ready to graduate from elementary school in a few weeks, it keeps coming to mind. Funny--I first ran into it in the front office of their school, where it was attractively inscribed on a bench. Maybe the people in charge over there know a thing or two about parental emotions.
5/10/09
Mother's Day
Thought for the day--" Dr. Laura's" new book In Praise of Mothers has been rattling around in my head for a couple of weeks--the title, that is. No, I'm not going to read her ravings about how everyone ought to be a stay-at-home mother. The title gets me thinking about how tricky it is to praise a person who does X without implictly insulting a person who doesn't do X.
With all the paeans to mothers we'll be hearing this weekend, I imagine there have to be some non-mothers who think "what about me?" There's that cliche that says being a mother is the hardest job in the world. There must be a few non-mothers out there--brain surgeons, district attorneys, members of the armed forces--who are thinking mothers are getting more than their fair share of the credit. I mean really: the hardest job in the world?
Saying that mothers do the hardest job in the world is not the way to go, if you want to praise mothers without insulting anyone. It's overtly comparative--and so not good. First rule of non-invidious praising: make no comparisons. Note that mothers work hard, not that they work harder than anyone else.
Once you've mastered the art of praising mothers, then you can get into truly delicate territory: praising stay-at-home mothers without insulting working mothers, and vice versa. That really is tricky. Somehow you have to get yourself to recognize opposing virtues. It really is a virtue to stay dedicated to a career and maintain "work-family balance," as the expression goes. It's an opposite and incompatible virtue--but still a virtue--to give 100% to children, especially when they're young and can benefit from that much attention.
Praising mothers is a delicate business. Today I'm frankly not looking for any praise (um, the laundry is in pretty bad shape). I'll settle for blind adoration...cards from both kids and my daughter's carrot cake. And now I must go call my mother.
5/7/09
Animal Projects
There's a picture of an animal's life that's just about standard, and even favored by many animal advocates: an animal's life is all choppy. Your dog lives moment to moment, without the moments being connected together into "wholes." By contrast, there is lots of connection in the life of a human being. This diffierence (people assume) has relevance to the value of animal lives, the badness of animal deaths, and the ethics of killing.
To wit: this sort of contrast is made especially starkly in Jeff McMahan's book The Ethics of Killing. He has a rich notion of the "wholes" that matter in the lives of people. For one, there's the whole formed when you anticipate a later time and wish it to be a certain way--you want to lie on the beach in Hawaii in three months. All signs are that animals don't have thoughts like that. But that's not the only sort of continuity that counts.
McMahan attaches importance to the "complex narrative unity" of a life (or parts of a life). That can be tragically ruined by death. The bride dies right before the wedding, the student is killed in a car accident on the way to graduation, the author doesn't get to see her book posthumously published. He writes--
As an animal continues to live, goods may continue to accumulate in sequence, but the effect is merely additive. There is no scope for tragedy--for hopes passing unrealized, projects unwillingly aborted, mistakes or misunderstandings left uncorrected, or apologies left unmade.But surely the lives of animals are full of premature endings. For example, a year ago Eight Belles collapsed moments after coming in second at the Kentucky Derby, because of two broken ankles. That broke off a story before it was over. Are we really to think that a horse that races madly to a finish line is not engaged in a "project," that no project has been "aborted" if the horse falls to the ground?
I have the feeling we spend too much time around denatured pets and farm animals to realize that animal lives don't just consist of a series of moments. Beavers work for months to build dams. Rutting season doesn't end as it's supposed to if the animals are shot by hunters before there's any mating. Emperor penguins spend weeks trudging back from the sea to feed their young--an effort that ends badly if the chicks have died in the meantime.
I know what some people are going to say. The animals don't think about the future--Eight Belles wasn't looking forward to her victory lap; the deer aren't thinking about copulating; the penguins don't desire a reunion with their young. But narrative unity is supposed to be a further factor affecting the significance of a death, one that goes beyond the issue whether death prevents desires from being fulfilled. In the human case, it does not seem true that an incomplete project is only tragic to the extent that the agent had a particular set of desires and thoughts. All that adds to the tragedy, but isn't all there is to it.
Thinking of an animal's life as a series of discrete moments makes its death matter less, and so makes it easier for us to kill with a clear conscience. We need to think about the lives of animals without so much eagerness to find the sharpest possible differences.
5/6/09
How Am I Doing?
Through the wonders of technology, I'm able to see what search terms bring people to this blog, and here's a pattern I've noticed lately. People seem to be coming here for assistance in writing end-of-semester essays. What other explanation could there be for search terms like "essay on existentialism is a humanism" and "never let me go essay"?
I can only say that I think there's a special place in hell for people who take credit for other people's writing. I can only say it, because unfortunately I don't believe it. The most I can really hope is that plagiarists will find their guilt gnawing away at them for years, and at the most inopportune moments.
Hey, you would-be copyists, stop now, before it's too late! You know it's wrong. Just don't do it. But if you do, despite my admonitions and the academic honesty policies at your academic institutions, do let me know how I'm doing when you get back "your" papers. Am I getting As, Bs, Cs....? My pride and ego notwithstanding, I have to say: I hope not well.
I can only say that I think there's a special place in hell for people who take credit for other people's writing. I can only say it, because unfortunately I don't believe it. The most I can really hope is that plagiarists will find their guilt gnawing away at them for years, and at the most inopportune moments.
Hey, you would-be copyists, stop now, before it's too late! You know it's wrong. Just don't do it. But if you do, despite my admonitions and the academic honesty policies at your academic institutions, do let me know how I'm doing when you get back "your" papers. Am I getting As, Bs, Cs....? My pride and ego notwithstanding, I have to say: I hope not well.
5/4/09
Death Penalty for Pregnant Woman
Horrific story...and a challenge to anyone who thinks that a fetus, early on, has no moral importance whatever.
It seems to me there's an awfulness here, beyond the basic awfulness of the death penalty. But it's tricky. How can it be wrong for a third-party to kill a fetus, as a side effect of killing the mother, yet permissible for the mother to kill it herself? I do think it's permissible; I'm adamantly pro-choice. However the explanation might go, I have the strongest intuition that executing a pregnant woman is appalling.A pregnant British woman who faces death by firing squad if she is convicted of drug smuggling could go on trial in Laos as early as Monday, a human rights group said Sunday.
Samantha Orobator, 23, has been in jail in Laos since August, when she was accused of trying to smuggle just over half a kilogram (1.1 pounds) of heroin in her luggage.
5/1/09
Pigs, Converts, Buddhists
This post is also here.All 300,000 pigs in Egypt are in the process of being slaughtered today—an awfully peculiar strategy for preventing swine flu. Apart from the sheer irrationality of it all, it makes you think about killing animals. Is each and every pig being wronged—to be precise, having its (his, her) interest in going on living violated? Do animals have an interest in going on living?
I write about this in my forthcoming book, but there’s never time to read everything, and now that I’m done, I’m doing some remedial reading—to wit, I’m reading Jeff McMahan’s very thick and detailed book The Ethics of Killing. I’m only part way through, so can’t say yet how the story is going to turn out, but here are some gleanings from part one.
The interest in going on living that you have at a particular point in your life (your “time relative interest” in going on living) depends—says McMahan—on the “prudential unity relations” between you at that time of your life and you* or you** at later times. He says it’s a question of degree—the more continuities (of the right sort) between you and you* (etc) the stronger your interest in going on living. But animals, he says, are connected to their later selves by only a fraction of these required continuities.
The continuities that make you (now) have a stake in the welfare of you* (later) are all “mental," says McMahan. You have certain beliefs, and they persist in you*. You have certain desires about your future, and they get satisfied by you*. You are searching for something, and you* completes the search. The more continuities there would have been between you, you*, you** etc., the worse it is for you if something bad happens, and you die before you get to be you* or you**. The argument about animals, then, is that their past and future selves are united more loosely; there are fewer of these continuities. So they have a weaker stake in going on living.
I’m going to save the issue of animals for a later post, but there’s something puzzling about this view of the interest in living. It implies that certain kinds of people have a weaker interest in going on living than the rest of us. To wit--
The convert. If you lose your religion, going from belief to disbelief, or the other way around, then there’s less continuity between your present self and your future selves.
The Buddhist. You’ve taken heed of Buddhist wisdom that desire is the root of all suffering, so you “live in the present” and limit your desires about the future as much as possible. Again, this is going to make for weaker "prudential unity relations."
The "flow"er (to use the language of the psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi). This is someone who frequently loses herself in intense activity, losing awareness of the past and the future. Bear in mind--this is supposed to be a desirable psychological state. Once again, this person's past and future selves are going to more weakly united, compared to a person who constantly obsesses about the future.
It would be awfully odd to think these three types of people had a weaker stake in going on living, considering that there's nothing undesirable about the states of mind they're in (perhaps just the opposite). Should we really take it on board that mental continuities are the basis for having a stake in going on living?
-----
A few footnotes: (1) There’s a lot of hairy stuff in this book about identity. For you (now) to have an interest in the welfare of you* (later), must you (now) be identical to you* (later)? Let’s ignore that question. I’m not taking a stand on it by multiplying names (“you”, “you*” etc.) ike this—they’re just a convenient shorthand. (2) Don't jump to the conclusion that McMahan thinks it's not so bad to kill these three types of people. The issue (so far) is just about the level of their interest in going on living, not about the ethics of killing them. (3) McMahan does have things to say about some of these cases--pages 81-82--but in the interest of spurring discussion, I'm not revealing his "solution."
4/29/09
More Collateral Damage
The ethical issue about meat-eating concerns the treatment of animals--especially in our new-fangled, intensely bizarre factory farms-- but it's amazing how much new evidence keeps coming in that, in harming animals, we also harm ourselves. Here's Jane Brody in today's New York Times--
There was a time when red meat was a luxury for ordinary Americans, or was at least something special: cooking a roast for Sunday dinner, ordering a steak at a restaurant. Not anymore. Meat consumption has more than doubled in the United States in the last 50 years.Now a new study of more than 500,000 Americans has provided the best evidence yet that our affinity for red meat has exacted a hefty price on our health and limited our longevity.
The study found that, other things being equal, the men and women who consumed the most red and processed meat were likely to die sooner, especially from one of our two leading killers, heart disease and cancer, than people who consumed much smaller amounts of these foods.
More here.
4/28/09
Swine Flu
Is factory farming a factor? David Kirby at HuffPo writes--
Officials from the CDC and USDA will likely arrive in Mexico soon to help investigate the deadly new influenza virus that managed to jump from pigs to people in a previously unseen mutated form that can readily spread among humans.
One of the first things they will want to look at are the hundreds of industrial-scale hog facilities that have sprung up around Mexico in recent years, and the thousands of people employed inside the crowded, pathogen-filled confinement buildings and processing plants.
I don't know if it's a factor, but I sure hope someone's looking into it. If so, this is an example of the collateral damage done by factory farming. The essential harm is done to animals, but in the process we accidentally harm ourselves.
Read more here.
Animalkind
Finally, a title!
Animalkind: What We Owe to Animals.
Coming out around January 2010, from Wiley-Blackwell. Illustrated with six pictures by Ruth Kazez, including the one above.
This blog's going to be a mostly-animal-ethics blog in the coming months, starting with some posts about Jeff McMahan's very deep (and long!) book The Ethics of Killing. But I'm also planning on writing about down to earth, everyday stuff, like growing vegetarian kids.
4/20/09
Gays and Pedophiles
Right, they're not at all alike. But you need to make this analogy to understand the defense of Christian colleges that's been put forth by David Hoekema and Mark Murphy.
Think about it. How should pedophile philosophers be protected from discrimination? Very, very weakly. Being a pedophile isn't disqualifying. But doing pedophile stuff surely is. Only the orientation deserves protection, not the behavior.
The defenders say this very, very weak level of protection is all that the APA ever meant to extend to homosexuals, when it passed a provision against discrimination "on the basis of homosexual orientation" in 1989. No protection for the behavior, just for the orientation.
On this interpretation, the APA never meant to weigh in on a philosophy department that's about to hire John Doe, finds out that he has a gay partner, and so withdraws the offer. They didn't mean to take a stand against that kind of thing. Nor did they want to weigh in on a case where Jane Doe is about to get tenure, but her colleagues find out she's living with another woman, and turn her down.
No, the APA didn't care about gays being turned down for jobs and tenure on grounds of their living gayly. What they cared about was gays being turned down on grounds of sheer gayness. In other words, the man or woman who's gay, but does nothing gay, had to be protected.
But why would they have looked at the issues this way? There's more to the story of the APA's thinking, as the defenders of the Christian colleges see it. The APA members themselves didn't necessarily think gays were like pedophiles, or that they deserved only the protection from discrimination that pedophiles are entitled to, but they realized this was the view of people at a handful of extremely conservative Christian colleges.
They were terribly concerned to protect the freedom of these Christians to think that way, so they framed their own discrimination code to accommodate them. They gave gays minimal protection throughout the US, so that the 4-5 colleges that actually prohibit gay behavior would be free and clear.
Ahem. If that's what the APA board members were thinking, how extraordinarily stupid of them. Surely the level of protection from discrimination gays receive in "APA-approved" philosophy departments across the US ought to be based on the view of homosexuality that prevails in the APA. That's not the view that being gay is like being a pedophile.
But what about religious freedom at the 4-5 Christian colleges? If it concerned the APA, it would have been absurd to water down anti-discrimination statutes nationally, just to give these colleges greater freedom. The reasonable course of action would have been to exempt them from the anti-discrimination rule.
I can't imagine the APA board members really had the set of thoughts being attributed to them. Using a principle of charity, I've got to think they had a reasonable set of thoughts. When they passed a rule prohibiting discrimination based on homosexual orientation, they were saying that gay people can't be excluded from jobs, tenure, etc., on grounds of being or acting gay. They didn't make a handful of Christian colleges the arbiter of what should count as discrimination across the land.
As to whether they meant to exempt Christian colleges from the robust policy they had passed, it appears not, if you read the APA policy carefully. But to think they passed an extremely weak provision, giving gays almost no protection nationwide, out of deference to 4-5 Christian colleges, really is an insult to these presumably reasonable people. Surely not. It just can't be so.
Think about it. How should pedophile philosophers be protected from discrimination? Very, very weakly. Being a pedophile isn't disqualifying. But doing pedophile stuff surely is. Only the orientation deserves protection, not the behavior.
The defenders say this very, very weak level of protection is all that the APA ever meant to extend to homosexuals, when it passed a provision against discrimination "on the basis of homosexual orientation" in 1989. No protection for the behavior, just for the orientation.
On this interpretation, the APA never meant to weigh in on a philosophy department that's about to hire John Doe, finds out that he has a gay partner, and so withdraws the offer. They didn't mean to take a stand against that kind of thing. Nor did they want to weigh in on a case where Jane Doe is about to get tenure, but her colleagues find out she's living with another woman, and turn her down.
No, the APA didn't care about gays being turned down for jobs and tenure on grounds of their living gayly. What they cared about was gays being turned down on grounds of sheer gayness. In other words, the man or woman who's gay, but does nothing gay, had to be protected.
But why would they have looked at the issues this way? There's more to the story of the APA's thinking, as the defenders of the Christian colleges see it. The APA members themselves didn't necessarily think gays were like pedophiles, or that they deserved only the protection from discrimination that pedophiles are entitled to, but they realized this was the view of people at a handful of extremely conservative Christian colleges.
They were terribly concerned to protect the freedom of these Christians to think that way, so they framed their own discrimination code to accommodate them. They gave gays minimal protection throughout the US, so that the 4-5 colleges that actually prohibit gay behavior would be free and clear.
Ahem. If that's what the APA board members were thinking, how extraordinarily stupid of them. Surely the level of protection from discrimination gays receive in "APA-approved" philosophy departments across the US ought to be based on the view of homosexuality that prevails in the APA. That's not the view that being gay is like being a pedophile.
But what about religious freedom at the 4-5 Christian colleges? If it concerned the APA, it would have been absurd to water down anti-discrimination statutes nationally, just to give these colleges greater freedom. The reasonable course of action would have been to exempt them from the anti-discrimination rule.
I can't imagine the APA board members really had the set of thoughts being attributed to them. Using a principle of charity, I've got to think they had a reasonable set of thoughts. When they passed a rule prohibiting discrimination based on homosexual orientation, they were saying that gay people can't be excluded from jobs, tenure, etc., on grounds of being or acting gay. They didn't make a handful of Christian colleges the arbiter of what should count as discrimination across the land.
As to whether they meant to exempt Christian colleges from the robust policy they had passed, it appears not, if you read the APA policy carefully. But to think they passed an extremely weak provision, giving gays almost no protection nationwide, out of deference to 4-5 Christian colleges, really is an insult to these presumably reasonable people. Surely not. It just can't be so.
4/18/09
4/11/09
Philosophy Ends Monday, Back in Business Thursday!
David Brooks' column in the New York Times on Monday had me worried. "The end of philosophy," said the headline. Not good, for those of us who do it for a living.
Surely the headline-writer should have read more carefully. What Brooks heralds is the end of moral philosophy, not the end of philosophy in general. That's the lesson he draws from Jonathan Haidt, who has done some very interesting work to suggest that moral philosophy is in trouble. The trouble is that philosophers take their intuitions extremely seriously, and then try to construct arguments that mesh with them and support them. But Haidt's model of moral psychology suggests that the reasoning is just "confabulation." The intuitions aren't glimpses of the truth, but gut feelings with roots in emotion and culture. The reasoning we do to shore them up is mere rationalization. (See "The Emotional Dog and its Rational Tail" at Haidt's website.)
I think Jonathan Haidt's work poses a genunine challenge, and it's for good reason that it's getting attention within metaethics, the area of ethics that delves into the nature of moral truth and moral knowledge. But the significance of it shouldn't be exaggerated. One bit of exaggeration is to be found in Brooks' editorial. He's one of these people who's always looking for a weapon to use against the so-called new atheists. It's hard to see how this could make any sense, but he thinks Haidt has somehow demolished reason, giving supremacy to faith.
What? Just curious-- With reason demolished, what approach should we take to building bridges and keeping airplanes aloft? Right. We should still use reason. If we're sometimes fooling ourselves when we think we're using reason, and we're really just rationalizing, it doesn't mean that that's what's always going on. And nothing about Haidt's research suggests that's what's going on any time but in the aftermath of having a strong moral intuition. You think there must be something very wrong with eating dinner off a toilet seat (Haidt's example), so you cast about for the reason why. You have the gut feeling that gay marriage is bad, so you labor for hours to find an explanation. In these post-gut-feeling moments, you're not using reason as much as you think you are. That's Haidt's argument. He's not making a general attack on reason.
As I said, Haidt raises great questions for metaethics. We don't need to cast aside reason because of his research. The new atheists use of reason is not being called into question (and by the way, Haidt is an atheist!). But what's more, we don't need to cast aside moral reasoning either. The thing is, we have lots of moral problems we urgently need to solve, and we've got no way to solve them besides thinking them through.
Thank God for Nicholas Kristof. He resuscitated philosophy--moral philosophy, that is--in his Thursday New York Times column, "Humanity even for animals." We've got a huge problem with the way animals are treated in the contemporary world, and he credits moral philosopher Peter Singer with getting more and more people to see the problem. Singer didn't accomplish that just with photos of forlorn veal calves and unimaginably crowded chicken barns, but with arguments. The arguments are in tension with pre-existing gut feelings ("they're just animals!"), not rationalizations of them. But they make sense, so they convince many people.
While metaethicists and psychologists do the needed work to think through the nature of moral truth and moral knowledge, somebody needs to figure out what we should do about animals, global warming, and extreme poverty. These aren't just factual issues, they're issues about value and responsibility and our obligations. While it makes sense to reflect on what we're doing, when we work on ethical problems, it makes no sense to stop doing it.
Surely the headline-writer should have read more carefully. What Brooks heralds is the end of moral philosophy, not the end of philosophy in general. That's the lesson he draws from Jonathan Haidt, who has done some very interesting work to suggest that moral philosophy is in trouble. The trouble is that philosophers take their intuitions extremely seriously, and then try to construct arguments that mesh with them and support them. But Haidt's model of moral psychology suggests that the reasoning is just "confabulation." The intuitions aren't glimpses of the truth, but gut feelings with roots in emotion and culture. The reasoning we do to shore them up is mere rationalization. (See "The Emotional Dog and its Rational Tail" at Haidt's website.)
I think Jonathan Haidt's work poses a genunine challenge, and it's for good reason that it's getting attention within metaethics, the area of ethics that delves into the nature of moral truth and moral knowledge. But the significance of it shouldn't be exaggerated. One bit of exaggeration is to be found in Brooks' editorial. He's one of these people who's always looking for a weapon to use against the so-called new atheists. It's hard to see how this could make any sense, but he thinks Haidt has somehow demolished reason, giving supremacy to faith.
What? Just curious-- With reason demolished, what approach should we take to building bridges and keeping airplanes aloft? Right. We should still use reason. If we're sometimes fooling ourselves when we think we're using reason, and we're really just rationalizing, it doesn't mean that that's what's always going on. And nothing about Haidt's research suggests that's what's going on any time but in the aftermath of having a strong moral intuition. You think there must be something very wrong with eating dinner off a toilet seat (Haidt's example), so you cast about for the reason why. You have the gut feeling that gay marriage is bad, so you labor for hours to find an explanation. In these post-gut-feeling moments, you're not using reason as much as you think you are. That's Haidt's argument. He's not making a general attack on reason.
As I said, Haidt raises great questions for metaethics. We don't need to cast aside reason because of his research. The new atheists use of reason is not being called into question (and by the way, Haidt is an atheist!). But what's more, we don't need to cast aside moral reasoning either. The thing is, we have lots of moral problems we urgently need to solve, and we've got no way to solve them besides thinking them through.
Thank God for Nicholas Kristof. He resuscitated philosophy--moral philosophy, that is--in his Thursday New York Times column, "Humanity even for animals." We've got a huge problem with the way animals are treated in the contemporary world, and he credits moral philosopher Peter Singer with getting more and more people to see the problem. Singer didn't accomplish that just with photos of forlorn veal calves and unimaginably crowded chicken barns, but with arguments. The arguments are in tension with pre-existing gut feelings ("they're just animals!"), not rationalizations of them. But they make sense, so they convince many people.
While metaethicists and psychologists do the needed work to think through the nature of moral truth and moral knowledge, somebody needs to figure out what we should do about animals, global warming, and extreme poverty. These aren't just factual issues, they're issues about value and responsibility and our obligations. While it makes sense to reflect on what we're doing, when we work on ethical problems, it makes no sense to stop doing it.
3/12/09
The Discrimination Debate
A friend of mine who works at the EEOC sent me this very interesting statistic-- "53 percent of the U.S. population now lives in a jurisdiction with a law prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity." 20 states have laws prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in both public and private employment; another 12 just in public employment. There are 170 municipalities that provide protection at the local level, even though it's lacking at the state level. Plus, most major corporations have policies prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.
Indeed, the American Philosophical Association (APA) has a policy prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, and it's been the subject of a huge debate on the blogosphere (fully tracked here). The question being discussed is whether ithe policy is consistent with a practice at a handful of Christian colleges. The colleges expect all faculty to live a "Christian life," which they see as excluding sex outside of marriage. Gay people aren't directly excluded from employment, but are expected to live as if they weren't gay.
These colleges raise (at least) two questions--(1) What does is it mean to prohibit discrimination "on the basis of sexual orientation"? Can a college comply with such a policy, yet prohibit a gay way of life? And (2) is there some sort of exemption from the anti-discrimination policy for religious institutions? The APA's policies are fairly clear on (2) (no exemption) but could be clearer.
But as to (1). Acres and acres of cyberspace have been taken up with scholastic debates about the distinction between sexual orientation and behavior, betweein being gay and living as gay. If the pious Christians at these colleges want to invite the sinner into their midst, but prohibit the sin, are they being discriminatory?
Given the statistics my friend sent me, it occurs to me that this debate shouldn't proceed in such an insular way. Whatever interpretation you give to the APA's policy, it's the interpretation you've got to give to the myriad policies out there. "No discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation" can't mean one thing here, another thing there. A very wide range of cases ought to be coming into play.
Here in Dallas, Texas, we have a lot of Christian businesses. You can get a plumber out to fix your toilet, and discover on the side of his truck that he runs a Christian plumbing company. If we had a law against orientation-based discrimination in Texas (as if!), would the company be able to hire gay plumbers, but stop them from bringing their partners to company events? If the law pertained to housing, could a landlord with Christian apartment complex be required to rent to gays and lesbians, but allowed to prohibit gay behavior on the premises?
The insular philosophy debate can't help but be about the whole picture, since the policy reads like all the other policies. Whatever position the APA takes on the meaning of its anti-discrimination policy, it's effectively taking a position on a whole body of anti-discrimination law.
Then again, does the APA actually need to come forth with its own interpretation? These policies are already on the books in all those states, municipalities, and corporations. What do they already mean? Wouldn't it be important to find out?
The issue the APA does need to address is (2). Does its anti-discrimination policy apply in just the same way to religious and non-religious schools, or should there be an exemption for religious schools, or some modification of the policy? In the US, religious institutions are permitted to discriminate. A church can refuse to hire a Jewish choir director. Of course, the APA is not the federal government. There's no "separation of church and APA" like there's a separation of church and state. But the APA could still want to give extra freedom to colleges that have some principled reason for preferring faculty of some stripe (even if the principle is implausible).
But a policy that says "no discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation" already has a meaning. The good people at the APA just need to look around and find out what it is.
Indeed, the American Philosophical Association (APA) has a policy prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, and it's been the subject of a huge debate on the blogosphere (fully tracked here). The question being discussed is whether ithe policy is consistent with a practice at a handful of Christian colleges. The colleges expect all faculty to live a "Christian life," which they see as excluding sex outside of marriage. Gay people aren't directly excluded from employment, but are expected to live as if they weren't gay.
These colleges raise (at least) two questions--(1) What does is it mean to prohibit discrimination "on the basis of sexual orientation"? Can a college comply with such a policy, yet prohibit a gay way of life? And (2) is there some sort of exemption from the anti-discrimination policy for religious institutions? The APA's policies are fairly clear on (2) (no exemption) but could be clearer.
But as to (1). Acres and acres of cyberspace have been taken up with scholastic debates about the distinction between sexual orientation and behavior, betweein being gay and living as gay. If the pious Christians at these colleges want to invite the sinner into their midst, but prohibit the sin, are they being discriminatory?
Given the statistics my friend sent me, it occurs to me that this debate shouldn't proceed in such an insular way. Whatever interpretation you give to the APA's policy, it's the interpretation you've got to give to the myriad policies out there. "No discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation" can't mean one thing here, another thing there. A very wide range of cases ought to be coming into play.
Here in Dallas, Texas, we have a lot of Christian businesses. You can get a plumber out to fix your toilet, and discover on the side of his truck that he runs a Christian plumbing company. If we had a law against orientation-based discrimination in Texas (as if!), would the company be able to hire gay plumbers, but stop them from bringing their partners to company events? If the law pertained to housing, could a landlord with Christian apartment complex be required to rent to gays and lesbians, but allowed to prohibit gay behavior on the premises?
The insular philosophy debate can't help but be about the whole picture, since the policy reads like all the other policies. Whatever position the APA takes on the meaning of its anti-discrimination policy, it's effectively taking a position on a whole body of anti-discrimination law.
Then again, does the APA actually need to come forth with its own interpretation? These policies are already on the books in all those states, municipalities, and corporations. What do they already mean? Wouldn't it be important to find out?
The issue the APA does need to address is (2). Does its anti-discrimination policy apply in just the same way to religious and non-religious schools, or should there be an exemption for religious schools, or some modification of the policy? In the US, religious institutions are permitted to discriminate. A church can refuse to hire a Jewish choir director. Of course, the APA is not the federal government. There's no "separation of church and APA" like there's a separation of church and state. But the APA could still want to give extra freedom to colleges that have some principled reason for preferring faculty of some stripe (even if the principle is implausible).
But a policy that says "no discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation" already has a meaning. The good people at the APA just need to look around and find out what it is.
2/13/09
Fiction and Philosophy
I so thoroughly enjoyed the last novel I read--Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris, that I got to thinking about what makes fiction so enjoyable. Or more precisely, I got to thinking what makes it so appealing compared to philosophy.
Ferris's novel is about a seemingly shallow gang of workers at an ad agency. Their shallowness is amply demonstrated by anecdotes that fill up many pages of the book. After they play a shocking prank on a coworker whose 9-year-old daughter was murdered, you especially wonder if they're really all just rotten, or there's more to them. The answer gradually comes into view, but it's shown, not stated. The reader thus gets the pleasure of gathering clues and gradually "getting it."
In philosophy, on the other hand, there's no oblique showing, there's just saying. Any thought you hope to transmit to a reader is supposed to be written down as clearly as possible. This explicitness is taken to the furthest extreme in academic journals. Not only are you to make every point explicitly, but you are to do so in the first couple of paragraphs: "In this paper, I will show x, y, and z." Thus, for the reader there is no gradual pleasure of "getting it." There's no unfolding, no journey to some unexpected place. You know where you're going from the very beginning.
The philosopher who means that p says that p. In fact, in novels there's often no real p. If you read Ferris's book (and you should!) and then try to write down what he "said" in it, you'll find that a hopeless task. What did he say? That the group mentality in a work place has plusses and minusses. That the trivial concerns of daily life are intermingled with the most serious life and death concerns. Anybody who reads the book will find these attempts at "p" pretty pitiful. The truth is, I think, that there is no "p." Ferris talks about group mentality, and the way trviliaties mingle with serious issues. He explores ideas about these things, but he doesn't make claims you could really write down.
In philosophy, on the other hand, there is always an expectation of a clearcut "p." Well, sure. If you're going to write philosophy, you need to have something to say. You're expected to not only say "p" but make an argument for it. The problem is that there are times when a topic is really better explored than resolved. For example, a terribly important issue in ethics is whether morality must always be our first priority. Must we go through life always taking the morally better path at every fork in the road? To really think deeply about this, you really might be better off just exploring it , and not trying to make an explicit, clear-cut claim. This dawned on me when I was trying to write the 8th chapter of my book on the good life, which is about exactly this question. As I was writing it, I was reading Nick Hornby's novel How to be Good. Hornby's main character is a middle aged man who suddenly decides to be as good as can be, with intriguing consquences for everyone around him. So what's the answer: should we do that? Should we not do that? The book explores these questions--fruitfully, deeply, and not without making some progress on them--but says nothing that can reduced to...p.
Truth is, I'm not cut out to write fiction myself. Not only do I lack the skills, but I feel at home with straightforward debate, problem-solving, claim-making, and figuring things out. How appealing, though, to show and not say, to talk about something, without always having to make an explicit claim that's immediately up for debate. To let a reader take a journey into the unknown, and figure something out! I do think there's such a thing as writing philosophy with a bit of the appeal of fiction, but it's tough. There's always the pressure to be more clear, more explicit, more argumentative.
A really good philosophy book with the feel of fiction is The Philosopher and the Wolf, by Mark Rowlands. It is evocative and allusive in a very lovely way. There are also some interesting claims in there--some "ps" to be batted around. Let's hear it for philosophy that's written just a bit in the key of fiction.
Ferris's novel is about a seemingly shallow gang of workers at an ad agency. Their shallowness is amply demonstrated by anecdotes that fill up many pages of the book. After they play a shocking prank on a coworker whose 9-year-old daughter was murdered, you especially wonder if they're really all just rotten, or there's more to them. The answer gradually comes into view, but it's shown, not stated. The reader thus gets the pleasure of gathering clues and gradually "getting it."
In philosophy, on the other hand, there's no oblique showing, there's just saying. Any thought you hope to transmit to a reader is supposed to be written down as clearly as possible. This explicitness is taken to the furthest extreme in academic journals. Not only are you to make every point explicitly, but you are to do so in the first couple of paragraphs: "In this paper, I will show x, y, and z." Thus, for the reader there is no gradual pleasure of "getting it." There's no unfolding, no journey to some unexpected place. You know where you're going from the very beginning.
The philosopher who means that p says that p. In fact, in novels there's often no real p. If you read Ferris's book (and you should!) and then try to write down what he "said" in it, you'll find that a hopeless task. What did he say? That the group mentality in a work place has plusses and minusses. That the trivial concerns of daily life are intermingled with the most serious life and death concerns. Anybody who reads the book will find these attempts at "p" pretty pitiful. The truth is, I think, that there is no "p." Ferris talks about group mentality, and the way trviliaties mingle with serious issues. He explores ideas about these things, but he doesn't make claims you could really write down.
In philosophy, on the other hand, there is always an expectation of a clearcut "p." Well, sure. If you're going to write philosophy, you need to have something to say. You're expected to not only say "p" but make an argument for it. The problem is that there are times when a topic is really better explored than resolved. For example, a terribly important issue in ethics is whether morality must always be our first priority. Must we go through life always taking the morally better path at every fork in the road? To really think deeply about this, you really might be better off just exploring it , and not trying to make an explicit, clear-cut claim. This dawned on me when I was trying to write the 8th chapter of my book on the good life, which is about exactly this question. As I was writing it, I was reading Nick Hornby's novel How to be Good. Hornby's main character is a middle aged man who suddenly decides to be as good as can be, with intriguing consquences for everyone around him. So what's the answer: should we do that? Should we not do that? The book explores these questions--fruitfully, deeply, and not without making some progress on them--but says nothing that can reduced to...p.
Truth is, I'm not cut out to write fiction myself. Not only do I lack the skills, but I feel at home with straightforward debate, problem-solving, claim-making, and figuring things out. How appealing, though, to show and not say, to talk about something, without always having to make an explicit claim that's immediately up for debate. To let a reader take a journey into the unknown, and figure something out! I do think there's such a thing as writing philosophy with a bit of the appeal of fiction, but it's tough. There's always the pressure to be more clear, more explicit, more argumentative.
A really good philosophy book with the feel of fiction is The Philosopher and the Wolf, by Mark Rowlands. It is evocative and allusive in a very lovely way. There are also some interesting claims in there--some "ps" to be batted around. Let's hear it for philosophy that's written just a bit in the key of fiction.
1/8/09
Lost in Translation?
Now this is fun. Here's the cover of my book,The Weight of Things: Philosophy and the Good Life, translated into Korean, and with a new English title: Think of Life on a Philosophic Bench. Hmm! Interesting how the author has no role in this. They could have called my book Life Sucks, and I couldn't have complained.The cover looks really nice, but would it be inappropriate to point out a difference from the Blackwell cover, to the right? That cover features a painting by the artist Caroline Jennings--to wit, a colorful panorama of life. Indeed, the book is full of colorful people, and contains only a smidgen of lonely-bench style existential angst.
Something does seem to have been lost in translation on a Korean book website. First you've got the book being translated from English to Korean. Then the Korean on the website is translated, courtesy of Google, back into English. Here's the resulting author description:
Kajejeu drink (Jean Kazez) - Arizona State University and obtained a doctorate in the philosophy of the Amnesty International Organization (emneseuti International) in the human rights movement pyeolchimyeo had a deep interest in the world of philosophical values. Philosophy at the University of Southern destroyer in the U.S. mail, and active teaching and writing and speech.
I don't mean to be picky, but...University of Southern destroyer in the U. S. mail? As for the rest...well, it really would be picky to say I went to University of Arizona, and did not study the philosophy of Amnesty International.
Truth is, I feel honored, and I appreciate the work of the book translator.
1/3/09
Ants for the New Year
What better way to begin the new year than by reading about ants? I spent New Year's Eve parked in front of the fireplace with The Superorganism, by Bert Holldobler and E. O. Wilson, while my husband and kids and some of their friends played tennis, courtesy of our new Nintendo Wii. Though a little technical, the book is wonderfully thought-provoking.
Lately I've been pondering what you might call "the paradox of animal rights"--if you were in a pretentious mood. You start out wanting to think and act morally toward animals. You want to give them no less than the status they deserve. This ethical starting point leads you to start doubting the way we have traditionally drawn lines between humans and other animals. You start seeing similarities, where before you only saw differences. This elevates animals in your eyes.
Soon, though, you start wondering about human morality and its animal analogues and precursors. Morality starts seeming less like a fixed part of reality, and more just a feature of "the way we are" as one particular species. But then fairness, respect, compassion, individual rights, and their ilk, start seeming less necessary, more contingent. They are elements of our phenotype, like upright posture, and possibly not suitable for our dealings with other species. This line of thought threatens to lower animals in our eyes.
As for ants. If Holldobler and Wilson are correct, an ant society is a superorganism, with individual ants related to the whole in the way that the organs of our bodies are related to our whole bodies. Worker ants know their place. They have various functions in the colony, and don't compete with each other to become a reproducing queen. By contrast, humans do compete with each other. We each expect to have a full life, complete with mating and child-rearing. We are unlike ants, and also unlike wolves--who leave reproduction to an alpha-male and alpha-female.
Part of human morality (at least post-enlightenment) is the idea that each individual counts. Martha Nussbaum, for example, offers the principle of each individual as an end. A society can't give subservient roles to women, or lower classes, or particular castes, in the name of the overall good of society. Every individual must have access to a life that's good in itself. In the animal chapter of Frontiers of Justice, she seems to extrapolate the same idea into the world of animals. Every animal counts, every animal must have a chance to live a good life.
That idea is to found in all the leading pro-animal philosophers. Every individual counts. There are no animal castes--the cows don't exist to be our food, the horses don't exist to carry us into battle or entertain us. Fair enough. The roles we assign to animals are obviously self-serving. But in thinking of each individual animal as an end, are we actually exporting a peculiarly human morality beyond the realm where it makes sense?
There are ant castes. There are wolf castes. Should we nevertheless view every individual ant and every individual wolf as an end, insisting on a good and complete life for every individual? Should we think every individual animal counts in just the way every human counts, or should we see each species as having its own built-in morality?
11/17/08
Free Range Turkey
Another post from the "archive." I originally published this right before last Thanksgiving. It's been getting a lot of hits lately, no doubt because it's that time of year again.*
So why not get yourself a free range turkey? Maybe you agree with my last post to the extent that you want to avoid supporting cruelty to animals and you're also, like me, something of a traditionalist. But why go to the trouble of making that complicated (but delicious!) vegetable pie? Why not buy yourself a happy free range turkey?If that's your plan, your intentions are surely excellent. But the "humane meat" alternative isn't really so simple. First of all, you have to consider where you're planning on getting your happy turkey. If you live in the country, maybe you have a small-scale "humane farm" you can buy from. Michael Pollan describes that kind of farm in this excellent article.
Polyface Farm sounds idyllic, but before you buy, think about how much of a life the turkey got to have. For tender flesh, you have to kill when animals are young. How was the slaughter done? If at an abattoir, then not nicely. There are no laws at all regulating the slaughter of poultry in the U.S.. Even if the butchering is done on site, it's not necessarily done with any kindness. In his book The Omnivore's Dilemma (great book!) Pollan describes participating in the killing process at Polyface Farm. Speed seems to be the overriding consideration, not kindness.
More likely, you don't live in the country. Your only option is to purchase a "humane certified" turkey at some place like Whole Foods. By all means this is better than getting the usual "butterball" or whatnot (do have a look at that PETA link if you're not sure). I'm a big fan of Whole Foods and do believe in incremental steps. But when you look into the facts about animal welfare at big organic farms, they're disappointing. Free range chickens and turkeys are stuffed into massive barns. They're not in cages, which is great. If they're "free range," as well as "cage free," then they have access to the out of doors. But this may not be until the bird is many weeks old, and at that point slaughtering day isn't far off. That's the inside story I get from Pollan's book and also from The Ethics of What We Eat, a very informative new book by Peter Singer and Jim Mason.
Small farms that can demonstrate truly humane practices are better than big organic. But must you eat a turkey? I'm all for good food, and wouldn't eat a "tofurkey" in a million years. I'm not 100% sure I think eating meat is inherently wrong no matter what. But 95% of what we do to animals in raising them for food is totally repulsive. I'm much happier staying as clear as I can of the whole ugly business.
11/13/08
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