Tiny Ethics

Interesting itty-bitty question in "The Ethicist" today--

When I checked into a hotel in California, I was starving, so I ate the $6 box of Oreos from the minibar. Later that day, I walked down the street to a convenience store, bought an identical box for $2.50 and replenished the minibar before the hotel had a chance to restock it. Was this proper? My view is “no harm, no foul.” In fact, my box was fresher: the Oreos I ate were going to expire three months before the box I replaced them with. 

Would you replace the Oreos?  If so, would you consider that "just fine" or a minor indiscretion?  Here's what Randy says--

The hotel is providing not just a product but also a service — the convenience of having Oreos available in your room, 24/7. To create this utopia of constant confectionery access, the hotel had to pay someone to travel the world and select the finest vintage cookies, order the Oreos and stock the minibar. You enjoyed that service; you must pay the (ridiculously high) price.

Hmm.

Vegans, Donans, Greenans

Following up on another thread (see "In Defense of Vegetarians")--

The abolitionist crowd has a very strange attitude toward vegetarians.  We are  actually worse than omnivores, they think. Unpublished comments from these people (last month) dismissed both my new book and my Animal Rights course as worthless, since I'm a mere vegetarian.  Yesterday Alex even compared vegetarians to embezzlers. Not only do we contribute nothing to animal advocacy, but we actually take away.

Ahem.

I worry these people are single-issue moralists. They never think about any moral issue besides the treatment of animals.  That's my suspicion because nobody would dream of having the "vegans only" type of attitude on comparable issues.

Let's make up some new words.  Donans are people who do all that they should with regard to preventing death from poverty and disease. They give to the point of marginal utility, just as Peter Singer says we should in "Famine, Affluence, and Morality." They may not do so for exactly Singer's reasons (perhaps they're more persuaded by the arguments in Peter Unger's very interesting book Living High and Letting Die), but they never ever do anything like buying an ipod rather than sending $200 to Oxfam, an amount that will save at least one life.

Donatarians don't do as much. They are just as convinced by Singer or Unger (or by other arguments) but find themselves sometimes buying ipods. They are simply not up to doing everything they should.

Greenans are just as exemplary as Donans, but their focus is on the environment.  These are people who recycle every single thing that's recyclable, ride bicyles rather than drive cars, never ever fly, and otherwise reduce their carbon footprint to the absolute minimum. 

Greenatarians don't do as much.  They are just as convinced of the obligation to be totally green, but they recycle as much as practically possible, drive hybrids, limit family size, etc.

Imagine saying that donatarians and greenatarians do nothing for the poor and the environment. Nobody would take this view seriously. It's just as silly to dismiss what vegetarians can do for animals.

Now Available

My book's available at Amazon now, a week earlier than expected.

Avatar and Philosophy

A couple of days ago I turned in my next arts column for The Philosopher's Magazine, a review of the movie Avatar. The very same day, I received an alert that there is to be an Avatar and Philosophy volume in Blackwell's Philosophy and Pop Culture series.  So that tells you the movie gets the philosophical juices flowing...a bit.  But does it, really?  On the face of it, the movie is about indigenous rights, the value of nature, and the like--good stuff!  Unfortunately,  James Cameron treats all these things in such a Disneyfied way that one's brain is not exactly put in overdrive.

But come on, it was gorgeous and it was fun!  Er... I have to admit (don't tell anyone) that I fell asleep for a minute or two in the first 20 minutes. I think that was because I had a sinking feeling I knew exactly how the plot was going to unfold for the rest of the movie (and I was right).  Plus, that wondrously green and holistic world of Pandora did have a soothing effect...zzzzzz....as amazingly wrought and beautiful as it was (especially through 3D glasses).

Evidently the smart people at Blackwell think the movie could inspire a pile of philosophical essays but I can't quite see it.  What would they be about?

Snowkind

Today my new book is theoretically available in the UK--or at least Amazon UK no longer says "not yet released." I'm gratified that even though the entire country is covered in snow, people's minds are on animalkind ... or ... er ... snowkind.  The animals themselves seem to be having fun too--like these two igloo-builders.

Some people just can't turn off the tube.

While you wait for this truck to arrive...

... here's a tiny excerpt to keep you going.  

Stay warm!

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?

I hope Amos doesn't mind me quoting him (he wrote this in yesterday's thread)--

The breakdown of community, the lack of a shared social world, anomie, appears to be one of the chief problems we face. Do we really want to live in a society where each lives in his own mini-kitchen preparing purer than thou meals, buying ever more special foods, tuning into special vegan websites on their own personal Google phone? In any case, it will be a wonderful new market for capitalism to expand into. Then I suppose that they can begin to build vegan gated "communities".

Should I worry that I create this sort of fragmentation, though I am a mere vegetarian?  Do vegans really wind up segregated and alone? Your thoughts welcome!

The Danish Cartoonist

A few days ago one of the infamous Danish cartoonists was attacked by a knife and axe-wielding Somali man in his own home, with his grand-daughter on the premises, prompting this editorial from Nancy Graham Holm.  What's so very stupid about the editorial is not, surely, the questioning of whether those cartoons should have been created and published.  That's got to be a legitimate matter for debate.  The problem is the timing.  As people have been saying all over the internet, the author seems to be blaming the victim, Kurt Westergaard.

Analogy. It's perfectly fine for a concerned party to talk to female students about what they wear when they make their way home late at night, perhaps walking home alone from the subway station.  Yes, there's a right to express yourself, but it just might not be worth asserting that right, if it means putting yourself at risk of being attacked.   That conversation is fine.  But if the attack actually happens?  At that point, the issue of what a woman was wearing is no longer fine.  She may have been imprudent, but bringing that up inevitably sends the message that the attacker is to be excused. 

I have to admit, I did learn something interesting from the editorial.  There are 87 men named Kurt Westergaard in Denmark, all now under police protection.  Some enterprising journalist ought to write an article about them, or even make a little film.  It strikes me as somehow poignant that your life could be turned around just because of your name. 

I also learned something from the response to Holm.  When women are attacked for their ideas, they are often attacked in gender-specific terms. She's a bitch, a this, a that (this blog is PG rated--use your imagination).   I should say, rather, something I already knew was confirmed.  Lately I've been noticing the same thing in animal rights quarters.  A man is attacked for being an idiot (or some such) but a woman is a bitch, a this, a that.  No links, because this stuff doesn't deserve a readership.

In Defense of Vegetarians

Why do they need defense?  From whom?  Well, this Newsweek writer thinks vegetarians are sanctimonious and they sneak corn-dogs when nobody's looking.  From the other side, vegetarians are attacked by vegans for not giving up dairy and eggs as well as meat.  To add to a vegetarian's woes, some of the famous ones are reverting to meat-eating.  I was not at all happy to read that Mollie Katzen, author of my very favorite vegetarian cookbook, has a recipe for beef stew in her newest cookbook.  (I recently looked at the three books of hers I own and realized she was probably never an animal-concerned vegetarian to begin with.  Oh. Well.)

Since I take the vegan perspective most seriously, of all these perspectives, I'm just going to defend vegetarians from attacks that could come from that direction. Note:  just could. I think lots of vegans are sane people who aren't looking to attack anybody.

So--let's start with vegetarianism in a traditional, idyllic world.  You live in a village in the Swiss alps, where the views of the mountain tops are as pretty as can be.  Your cow Bessie lives happily in your field while her domestic partner pulls a plow. There are hens and roosters in your yard.  By milking Bessie and taking eggs from the hens, you are able to enjoy the delicious vegetarian food in Mollie's cookbooks.  Is there a moral problem there?

Tom Regan is the philosopher who put "yes" on the map in his 1983 book The Case for Animal Rights.  Regan says that even in the idyllic scenario, you'd be violating the basic rights of an animal to be treated with respect.  By using these animals as resources (getting work from the bull and and resources from the cow and chickens), you are treating them as means, obviously without their consent.

I'm on board with the notion that animals should be treated with respect, whether or not we add "rights" talk to the mix.  However, I don't share Regan's sense that the animals on Idyllic Swiss Farm are treated disrespectfully.  So I don't in fact think there's a problem there.  Vegetarianism is all that's required of anyone in that setting, and not veganism.  Which goes to show: there's no absolute or universal prohibition against using animals for food or other purposes.

But now jump to your own real situation.  Sad to say, you probably don't have a view of the alps out your window. You don't have a cow in your yard or any chickens.  The animals that produce your eggs and milk are in fact treated with disrespect.  This is glaringly true if they come from factory farms, but still true if they come from "improved" factory farms or even humane farms (which are never as idyllic as Idyllic Swiss Farm).  Barring any special circumstances, you will stop eating eggs and milk if you are in the finest moral fettle.

The thing is, most of us are not in the finest moral fettle.  We recycle, but not everything.  We see that driving and flying produces carbon emissions, but at most we cut back. We don't stop.  We can see that buying luxuries for ourselves is vastly worse than contributing to Oxfam and thereby saving lives, but we still buy some luxuries.  Most of us are not, in short, moral saints.  So when we decide how to behave, we think in terms of priorities.  You recycle the big stuff, but not every scrap of plastic.  You get a smaller car, but not no car.

So the question (for us sinners) is whether a vegetarian diet is based on a rational set of priorities.  And...guess what?...it is.  Just think about eating chicken vs. eggs. If you eat chicken all year, the cost in chicken lives is 25-50.  All those chickens will have endured what chickens go through to wind up on our plates--which is a lot if they were ordinary factory farmed chickens, though less, if they weren't. If you eat eggs all year, roughly one laying hen went through those same things, plus one male chick was killed (since the males have no economic value).  That makes it a very rational choice to give up chicken first before eggs.

If you think through the costs to animals and the environment of beef vs. milk, you will come to the same conclusion. Ideally, we should give up both.  If you're not up to that, then your first priority should be giving up beef.

Even when people desperately want to change their diets for the sake of their own health and appearance, they very often don't succeed.  It's even harder when the issue is not your own well being, but the treatment of other creatures.  I think vegetarianism is a rational half-way house for people not ready to go completely vegan. It's a choice that stems from knowledge about animal products, not from ignorance.

Then again, is it really important to choose a rational half-way house as opposed to just some half-way house?   Be a vegan before 6 pm, says Mark Bittman.  Even Gary Francione approves of Vegan Mondays!  I think vegetarianism makes much more sense than these possibilities, but I'm all for any way of cutting back on using animals for food.   All of these options reduce the number of animals being mistreated, and that simply has to be good.

The Year in Meat

A mega-survey by Erik Marcus is here.  He's the very reasonable and sane proprietor of vegan.com and the author of Meat Market, which is on my "must read" list.  I'll follow up after I've read the article, if there's something to follow up about.

Resenting Motherhood

I awfully much enjoyed this funny, revealing, wacky, heart-rending article about motherhood by Sandra Tsing Loh, but what about this sentence?

To be a mother—even simply to be a woman—in today’s world is to be made exhausted and resentful by a role or set of roles that we don’t recall deliberately choosing.

When I read this before Christmas I thought--Not Me.  I love being a mother. In fact, I love being a mother more than anything else.  I don't feel resentful about the role--in fact, I feel grateful.  Gratitude comes to mind all the time, in the middle of doing all sorts of things. 

So .... how is it that last night I was standing around in  the local Hobby Lobby feeling resentful?  You see, I was trying to find just the right model rocket for my son to take to school.  He couldn't come with me on the shopping trip, so I was yelling into a malfunctioning cell phone about rocket engines and skill levels, and all sorts of other tedious stuff.  It seems there was a sheet of paper he was supposed to have shown me, but didn't.

This brought to mind many other trips to places like that, like the time when my son had to make a model of the Roman coliseum.  I can't say that making a model of the Roman coliseum was really on my list of things to do -- er, help with.  How do you do it, anyway?  After hours of painful discussion and reading, $40 worth of supplies were purchased.  And no, my son didn't go home and cleverly build a coliseum while I sat back and read philosophy books. 

It isn't really anything inherent to parenthood that I resent (much less motherhood).  My husband and I resent the teachers who tell kids to go home and build a Roman coliseum.  We resent the fact that they tell kids to do science fair projects, knowing full well they're assigning the job partly to parents. We resent being expected to enforce the orders of teachers who never, ever ask for parent input. ("Parent Teacher Association"--bah! )  We resent having to crack the whip for hours every school night, getting our kids to complete the 50 math problems, or the endless, mind-numbing worksheets, or preparation for yet another state exam.  In short, we resent the way teachers invade family life, without always having a good reason for doing so.

But what about playing the basic role of mother? Is it really true that to be a mother is to be made resentful?  OK mothers, be honest.  Do you agree with Sandra?

What Karen Dawn Said

Using Amazon's "look inside" feature last night, I discovered that Karen Dawn does a fantastic job of responding to the "anti-welfare warriors" in Thanking the Monkey (pages 6-7).

If I'd read that back in December when I was making similar points (e.g. here and here), I could have saved a lot of time and energy.  What Karen Dawn said!  Her book has graphics and endorsements to die for.  I want to read more of this book.

My First Born

Now that my second book is due to arrive in a matter of days, I am feeling just a little sentimental about my first-born, The Weight of Things: Philosophy and the Good Life.  She's been out in the world for three years now, and I'm happy to report that she's been treated quite nicely.  In the Guardian, Stephen Poole called the book "lucid...warmly written and humanely engaging" (and no, I didn't remove any nasty words to create the elipsis).

A chapter is included in Russ Shafer-Landau's anthology The Ethical Life, right next to one of my favorite ethics readings, Richard Taylor's wonderful essay "The Meaning of Life."  I blush to relate that in his companion volume, The Fundamentals of Ethics, Shafer-Landau calls The Weight of Things "an absolutely delightful book, chock full of real-life stories and interesting examples." (Did you know that January 4 is Shameless Self-Promotion Day?) 

The book must be all grown up now because it's even gone abroad. The Korean version is a very, very beautiful looking book with a very, very funny online promo.  Something was obviously lost in translation.  Soon the book's going to be translated by an Egyptian publisher into Arabic, and by a Brazilian publisher into Portuguese. 

Animalkind will be published in the UK at the end of this week and in the US on January 19.

Suicide Food

My kids and I are fond of noting advertising that makes it look like animals want to be eaten.  We find it (a) revolting, (b) funny, (c) unbelievable...roughly in that order. Now I discover there's a whole blog devoted to tracking this trend.  I love it!  The first chapter of my book (coming out this month), "The Myth of Consent," is about the notion that animals like being our food.  As goofy as it is, this is an idea with a long history.

Note the great psych evaluations at the blog--

A 5 noose example:

Eyeball wash, please. 

This Burger Smells Funny

Unbelievable, but true.  If your kid is eating hamburgers at school, or at fast food restaurants, or even in your home, it turns out he or she is eating (in part) a pink slurry formed out of fatty beef trimmings--the bits that are on the surface of a beef carcass, and so most likely to come into contact with feces.  But don't worry that your kid is eating shit.  The slurry is first injected with ammonia.  And don't worry that this might not be effective.  Beef Products, the company selling this stuff, has done its own studies.  In 2007 they reassured the USDA that the product is safe. The USDA took their word for it (wouldn't you?) and exempted the product from pathogen testing.

Last year the school lunch program sold 5.3 milliion pounds of the pink stuff.  It lowers costs by three cents per burger to replace 15% of the regular ground beef with the stuff.  Touchingly enough, the school lunch folks do require pathogen testing.  But about serving kids ammonia... Apparently it really stinks.  A Georgia prison sent back 7,000 pounds of slurry because the smell was revolting to the folks in the kitchen.   When they get complaints about the smell, Beef Products cuts back a bit on ammonia. But then, less ammonia means more E. coli.   In response to test results presented to them by the New York Times recently, the USDA decided Beef Products shouldn't be exempt from testing anymore.  

Little kids are still being served ammonia treated scraps of high risk beef trimmings, but the good guys at the USDA obviously have the situation under control.  Phew.  And it seemed for a moment there like this might be a really revolting, unconscionable situation!

The mastermind of the ammoniated scraps product is one Eldon Roth.  Is he sitting in prison somewhere eating ammoniated meatloaf?  Why no!

Dr. Theno, the food safety consultant, applauds Mr. Roth for figuring out how to convert high-fat trimmings “with no functional value.”

“There were some issues with that,” Dr. Theno said. “But he, and God bless him, amassed a tidy fortune for it.”

Yeah, just a few issues.

Greatest Hits

This blog's most popular (or at least most commented upon) posts in 2009 were about topics as far apart as atheism and animal rights, yet were in a way about the same thing. On both subjects, I have an attitude that's sometimes derided as "accommodationist." I think there's such a thing as too boldly challenging religion, or doing so at the wrong time or in the wrong place or in the wrong tone, and unnecessarily alienating potential allies in important battles. In the sphere of animal rights, animal advocates must sometimes settle for reform instead of revolution, working toward the possible, and not just toward the ideal. They need to take a broad view of who's a friend and who's an enemy.

This sort of pragmatism is so obviously right to my mind that I've spent a lot of time pondering why it makes people mad. In the case of atheism, perhaps it all comes down to the fact that in the last five years, the new atheists have made it easier to openly talk about non-belief. I do "get" that it's annoying to be "hushed" when (admittedly) nobody has hard data to support the claim that science advocacy is more effective when it isn't married to rambunctious atheism.

I'm far, far more baffled by the hostility toward pragmatism about animal rights and wrongs. Without getting into all the ins and outs of this stuff, here's what I'm starting to think. If you are involved in a movement that wants basic change, you've got to ask yourself "what time is it?" in that moment. If the hour is very, very early--the practice is ubiquitous, entrenched, and widely accepted--then it's downright irrational (and even immoral) not to work toward both reform and revolution. If it's the eve of revolution, and much can be gained by insisting on that and that alone, then activism may have to take another form.

It's a very, very early hour in the movement to change the status of animals. The vast majority of animal advocates and organizations (of many different ideological stripes) know that, and so act accordingly--looking to build a broad based moment that focuses on a wide range of goals, from the very possible to the very ideal. They're not corrupt for doing so, and their pragmatism says nothing about what kind of change they would like to see in the long run.

So much for that...maybe.

Cityophilia (and Happy New Year)

Looking back at the last decade, I have to say I've seen some incredible natural beauty--e.g. I've seen the beaches, volcanoes, and rainforests of Hawaii as well as the glaciers, mountains, and bays of Alaska. E. O. Wilson strikes a chord with me when he talks about biophilia--a yearning for the wildness of unadulterated nature.  I go in search of it whenever I can.

And so it comes as sort of a surprise.... When we were in New York last Thanksgiving I found myself looking out at the skyscape from the top of the Rockefeller center and guiltily realizing this was as thrilling a view as I could possibly imagine. I can't honestly say a view of the Napali Coast in Kauai or the highest peaks of Alaska is more stunning.  It turns out that art and engineering compete pretty well with Mother Nature.  I even love Times Square.  Which reminds me...

Happy New Year!

More On Eating Animals

John Williams has a point (many points, actually).  I too was puzzled by Foer's never referring to Peter Singer.  Almost as surprisingly, he never refers to Matthew Scully's more "writerly" book about animal issues, Dominion.  If I had to recommend one book on the treatment of animals--especially to someone looking for a "good read"--it would be Scully's book.  It is simply fantastic. Singer and Scully come to mind not just because they're obvious predecessors, but because there's a quality in both of them I missed in Foer.  Williams aptly calls it "forcefulness and clarity of purpose." It's interesting, though, how gracious Singer is about Foer's book in this review... another sign of clarity of purpose?  Eating Animals is going to awaken a new generation of readers to the travesty of factory farming.  It wouldn't make sense to fuss too much.

Eating Animals

Some thoughts about Jonathan Safran Foer's book, which I've been reading voraciously while enjoying holiday cheer with family.

Holiday cheer. Well, the book is bright green and some of the lettering is decorated with what looks like holly, but otherwise this is not a festive book. It's a horrifying book.

Foer's prime directive, writing-wise, seems to be "Not linear!"  He zigs and he zags.  The book is first about his own eating decisions, then (screech) about our wildly different treatment of dogs and farm animals; and then (screech) he's talking about fish. He sets off to break into a factory farm with someone named "C" but we're on to other topics before we're told what they saw. Other voices pop into the book in the form of letters.  They are from "C", farmers, activists--people with lots of different points of view.

All of this zigzagging imparts various messages-- There's so much to say.  This subject is overwhelming. There are lots of ways to look at these things.  The truth is complicated.

Which would be all very well, except that the shifts sometimes take a toll.  I really did want to know what Foer saw in that factory farm, but he cut away to something else.  At one point early in the book he says that animals euthanized at shelters are rendered and sold as pet food.  Really?  It wouldn't hurt to follow up with another paragraph of explanation and an endnote.  And what about the statistic that "roughly 450 billion land animals are factory farmed every year"?  Why not explain where the figure comes from?  (My own research suggests 25-50 billion land animals are raised and killed every year, in all types of farming combined.)

The book gets to be much more linear, and more fleshed out, by the second half.  A chapter called "Slices of Paradise/Pieces of Shit" is so powerful and informative it ought to be required reading in US schools.  This is what's going on in factory farms and slaughterhouses, and everyone needs to know about it.

But what should be done?  Foer zigs and zags even in the second half.  The reporting about the worst possible farms and slaughterhouses alternates with reporting about the best possible farms and slaughterhouses.  The latter are so rare, representing perhaps just a couple of percents of the total, that one might wonder "why bother?"

He bothers, I gather, because best-case farms raise the hardest ethical question:  is it inherently wrong to raise animals for food, or is there just a problem (and a huge one) with modern industrial strength farming?  Foer likes the traditional farmers he meets.  He thinks they're well-intentioned and that they genuinely care about what he cares about.  Nevertheless, he's troubled by what he sees when he visits "humane" farms and a small-scale slow-speed abatoir.  There's still castrating, branding, killing...though it's also true that the animals spend most of their lives milling around in spacious pastures under wide blue skies.  What to think?

What he's sure about is factory farming.  "I simply don't want anything to do with the factory farm, and refraining from meat is the only realistic way for me to do that."   My sentiments exactly.  Foer points out that being a "selective carnivore" is a recipe for being an omnivore.  Most of the time factory farmed meat is all that's available, and asking a host where they shopped is much harder than just declaring that you're a vegetarian.  If you really want to keep your distance from factory farming, the best way to do it is to stop eating meat.

But would it be wrong to consume "humane" meat?  Is it wrong that farmers are trying to go back to the traditional farming methods that were ubiquitous 50 years ago?  Foer uses the same word that Peter Singer does in Animal Liberation--he can "respect" people who are trying to run ethical animal farms.  A turkey farmer by the name of Frank is his paragon of the ethical animal farmer.  But is it really, entirely, totally OK?  Bottom line: I think Foer is uncertain. Here's what he says:

I have placed my wager on a vegetarian diet and I have enough respect for people like Frank, who have bet on a more humane animal agriculture, to support their kind of farming.  This is not in the end a complicated position. Nor is it a veiled argument for vegetarianism.  It is an argument for vegetarianism, but it's also an argument for another, wiser animal agriculture and more honorable omnivory.

It may be wrong to raise animals for food, but we're going to be doing it for the foreseeable future, so let's support doing it in the best way possible.  I think that's about what he's saying--and I couldn't agree more.

But what can we do to stop the worse case practices?  The clear message to the reader is "stop eating meat."  But if that message is only going to be heeded by a tiny minority (at most 3% of Americans are vegetarians), then it can't possibly be the whole answer.  We don't need more obsessing about our personal dietary dilemmas, but legislation that prohibits what factory farms are doing to animals and the environment.  We need serious inspections and audits of slaughterhouses. 

As much as I'm looking forward to trying out my new vegan cookbook (see previous post), reading this book made me want to spend more time figuring out which animal rights organizations are most effectively lobbying for change.  I hope a lot of people will read Foer's book--regardless of an excessive zigzag or two or three--and that they'll do the same thing.  Yes, we should boycott the bastards and stop eating meat...but more importantly, we need more state referenda like California Prop. 2 and more systemic change.

Santa Reads My Blog!

I know it, because he brought me Veganomicon, one of the five vegan cookbooks recommended here by YOU, dear readers. (Even Jewish atheists get Christmas presents, by the way--if they marry the right people.)

Which gets me thinking (yes, I think even on Christmas day--but not for too long, lest I be considered an enemy of the people):  why must being a vegan be all or nothing?  You might resolve to be more green or give more to Oxfam in the New Year (yes, I want to do both).  Nobody thinks they have to become Perfectly Green or Perfectly Giving.  Why not think the same way about veganism? (In fact, why think of it as an "ism" or talk of "being a vegan"?)

Complicated question...for another day!

Happy Holidays

Have a warm and fuzzy holiday season!  Looking ahead: in the New Year, this blog's going to diversify a bit. I'm teaching Environmental Ethics for the first time this spring, which should produce "blog fodder," plus I'm going to spend more time in the territory of ethics and parenthood.  My book comes out in the UK January 8 and in the US January 18, just not in time for Christmas...so expect lots of animal talk to continue.  Miao!  Happy New Year!

Super-Super-Egalitarianism

This column by Natalie Angier may seem like a silly attempt at a reductio ad absurdum, but actually raises interesting questions. What Angier shows is that plants pursue their own good in something like the way that animals do. No, they're not sentient, but why do we think sentience is necessary for moral status? It's at least conceivable that the more basic thing is "having a good of one's own," as the philosopher Paul Taylor puts it in his book Respect for Nature. Higher animals pursue their good with the help of sentience, but it's having a good of one's own that marks our a special class of entities deserving of respect, not sentience per se. If that's right, then we seriously need to allow that respect comes in degrees (as I think it does), or we won't be able to explain why brussels sprouts are a better choice for dinner than cats or kids.

Super-Egalitarianism

My forthcoming book urges respect for animals, but not equality.  How's that?  How could it make sense to reject equality, if I mean to raise the status of animals?

I argue against equality not just because I think that's the right position, but because I think assertions of equality get in the way of elevating the status of animals.  Anything that sounds at all like "cats are people too" makes people think animal advocates are on the lunatic fringe.

Here's a bit of super-egalitarianism from the book Speciesism by Joan Dunayer.  Suppose field mice occupy a field where developers want to build.  She argues that the land belongs to the mice like Native American land belonged to Native Americans.  Removing the mice would violate their right to property, she says.  How about gently relocating them? No, she writes, that would deprive them of autonomy. It also might interfere with the rights of animals in the new territory.

What to do?  Just don't build.

Land currently inhabited by nonhumans and humans can remain cohabited, but humans shouldn't be permitted to encroach farther into nonhuman territory...If humans don't want to be more crowded in already-"developed" areas, they can practice zero population growth. (p. 146)

First thought: this sort of thing makes the animal rights movement look ridiculous.

Second thought :  what if she were right?  What if it really were morally impermissible to build on land already occupied by mice (or ants--she says insects have the same rights as mice)?  If we were really convinced of that, I think we would simply change our minds about morality.  We wouldn't think people really have to do the right thing--we'd adopt a new view that morality is just for saints.

Third thought:  why say all of this about the mice?  I think Dunayer operates throughout her book with an incorrect notion of what "speciesism" means.  Here's what she proposes as a test for whether someone is a speciesist--

The test for speciesism is simple: If the victims were human, would you be speaking and acting as you are?  If not, don't speak and act that way when the victims are nonhuman. (p. 73)

This can't be right.  Imagine an analogous defintion of "sexism"--it would say that it's sexist ever to speak and act differently toward men and women.  That's obviously not the case.   For example, we think that women can terminate a fetus but not men.  That's because of an ethically important difference: fetuses are carried by women. It's not sexist to recognize real and morally important differences between men and women and it's not speciesist to recognize real and important differences between humans and animals.

Speciesism, as I would define it, is bias based on species and nothing more.  By abjuring speciesism, we do not automatically abjure making distinctions or attaching ethical import to those distinctions.  Of course, there's no guarantee those distinctions will make sense.  We can be wrong about some type of line drawing.  But we're not automatically being speciesist just because we're drawing lines.

So about those mice. It's not automatically speciesist to think we can build where mice already live, but not build where Native Americans already lived.  There could be a perfectly good reason to grant property rights to Native Americans but not to mice. But what's the reason?

Or is the question just too ridiculous?

Not Eating Animals

It's awfully nice of the New York Times Magazine to have a food section devoted to vegetarian cooking today, but what were they thinking?  Tofu with rice and cauliflower.  Care for a slice of white bread with that?

Not only does the meal have a serious plating problem, as they say on "Iron Chef," but it sounds downright revolting.  The tofu is cooked in a cup of carmelized sugar and the cauliflower is deep fried and then steeped in a cup of carmelized ketchup.  Honestly, we don't have to make up for missed animal protein by gorging on sugar.

For great vegetarian cooking, we can turn to talented people like Mollie Katzen, Deborah Madison, and Annie Somerville.  Still Life with Menu and the Greens cookbooks are wonderful.  But what about vegan cooking?   I'm looking for a vegan cookbook that's completely non-faux--no mock meat, no mock butter, no mock anything.  Anybody have any ideas?

***

Suggestions so far:
Veganomicon
Vegan Soul Kitchen
Millenium Cookbook
Vegan Yum Yum
World Food Cafe

Animal Concern: Emotion or Reason?

Here's an interesting study of the psychology behind concern for animals.  Herzog and Golden tried to find out what role disgust plays in making people animal activists or vegetarians.  They hypothesized that it should play a major role based on Jonathan Haidt's model of moral psychology.  On that model, people have immediate intuitions, colored by disgust and other emotions, and reason comes in as an afterthought.  We rationalize what are really gut level reactions.  So--is that true or false, in the case of people's concern for animals (or lack thereof)?

The authors gathered data from social networking sites like Facebook, dividing study participants into three groups--(1) self-described animal activists they found at animal rights sites, (2) promoters of animal use they found at pro-research sites (and the like), and (3) non-aligned people they found at sites chosen randomly.

Besides finding the answer to their question, they found out some interesting things.  42% of the animal activists were not vegetarians.  The authors say this meshes the finding that 40% were meat-eaters at the 1990 March for Animals. (Vegetarians were defined as non-meat eaters; there was no separate category for vegans.)

On the other hand, 48% of the vegetarians were not animal activists.  Many of them were vegetarians for environmental and health reasons, not for moral reasons. 

As to emotion and reason:  the researchers found that the animal activists scored higher on a general test for disgust sensitivity. They were generally more prone to "yuck" reactions.  That makes a lot of sense to me.  I do trace my initial interest in animal issues to seeing pictures and videos that elicited a strong disgust reaction.

However--big surprise--disgust sensitivity was not a predictor of vegetarianism.  The authors used the Animal Attitude Scale to measure participants' beliefs about animals and ethics.  Their scores did strongly predict whether they ate meat.

What does all this show? Well, a bunch of things.  That beliefs do matter, so people who teach and write about animals are not wasting their time.  That it's a mistake to draw lines between advocates and non-advocates based on who eats what.  That alliances are crucial--environmental and other concerns can draw people toward animal-friendly behavior.

Most interesting, maybe, is that meat-eating is a hard behavior to change--people don't find it disgusting. In light of that, it seems completely wrong-headed to make abstinence the price of admission to the animal movement.  I am reminded of a student I had in my Animal Rights class recently.  Her family had built the downtown animal shelter.  After I learned that, I met her father at a bookstore--we had both come to see PETA president Ingrid Newkirk give a talk.  He wanted to chat about cattle ranching and hunting. 

It's a funny world. We must not draw too many lines.

The Thirsty Cow

Can we go back one more time to my pre-Thanksgiving criticism of Gary Francione (in this comment, to be precise)—the objection that launched a thousand ad hominems? At the time, a few commenters felt I had him wrong and would see this if I just read his book about the animal rights movement—Rain without Thunder. I figured I’d read enough (his first book, some articles, his website), but I was curious.

Now that I’ve read it, I’m all the more baffled by all the hostilities. In fact, the book just substantiates the charge. I said Francione wants to keep animals in the worst possible conditions to achieve abolitionist goals. Well, yes. At least he wants to keep them in much worse conditions, and part of the reason is to achieve abolitionist goals.

Francione is against reforms like Proposition 2 in California, and the recent referenda in Florida and Arizona, but what you learn from the book is that he’s also against the Humane Slaughter Act, the Animal Welfare Act, and any reform that ameliorates the treatment of animals without actually liberating them. The AWA is inadequate, as many have argued (and I argue in my book) but it does provide very basic benefits to animals, like pain relief during experimental procedures, bigger cages and appropriate diets, rest stops and water every 5 hours for animals being transported etc. The Humane Slaughter Act covers too few species and is inadequately enforced, but it does require stunning before slaughter for cattle. I don't see him saying in the book that this legislation doesn't alleviate suffering; clearly it does.  But he fears such reforms will increase the use of animals for food, experimentation, etc. So they will retard progress toward abolition.

There are a couple of other points in the book that shed light on Francione’s thinking. I argued (with a slavery example) that denying basic welfare improvements to animals is incompatible with taking them seriously (particularly on Francione’s view—since he sees animals as “persons”.) But – surprisingly – Francione has just the opposite view. He thinks we violate the rights of animals when we pass humane legislation—

… [E]ven if I am obligated to give a thirsty cow water on the way to slaughter it does not follow that I should pursue that obligation as a legal or social policy, for the practical reason that it will never and can never succeed on an institutional level, and for the theoretical reason that it conflicts directly with the notion that animals have rights. (p. 223)

The same odd idea is stated earlier in the book, when he’s defining the (clearly pejorative) expression “new welfarist”—

The new welfarists believe that it is both coherent and morally acceptable to disregard the rights of animals today (by pursuing welfarist reform that reinforces the property status of animals) in the hope that some other animals will have rights tomorrow.” (pg. 39)

So (he thinks), possibly I ought to give a thirsty cow water on the way to slaughter, but if I try to make sure all cows have water on the way to slaughter, I’m disregarding their rights. I’d be respecting their rights more if I just let them be thirsty on the way to slaughter, and concentrated on vegan education.

But surely not. If we are virtually powerless to liberate animals from farms and labs, then we certainly don’t violate their rights by passing laws that insure that lab and slaughterhouse workers do at least more of what they should to alleviate suffering.

Francione repeats over and over again throughout the book that “new welfarists” support humane reforms as a means of working toward more fundamental change. Thus, he thinks the success of these reforms can be measured based on whether they are actually producing fundamental change. By that measure, they’ve failed. The Humane Slaughter act has not reduced the number of animals killed, and I believe the AWA hasn’t either.

But surely that's not the intent of animal advocates, and not the right standard for judging anmal welfare legislation.  Animal advocates want to alleviate suffering simply because it's bad.  They have further goals having to do with justice and fundamental change.  But they don't want to alleviate suffering in order to achieve those more distant goals. The right way to judge animal welfare legislation is to consider a counterfactual world--one just like this one, but without the legislation.  There's more misery in that world, and no less killing and injustice. That's a worse world and we're right to avoid it.

Time to move to greener pastures.