Dale Jamieson on Beef Addiction

The addiction to beef that is characteristic of people in the industrialised countries is not only a moral atrocity for animals but also causes health problems for consumers, reduces grain supplies for the poor, precipitates social divisions in developing countries, contributes to climate change, leads to the conversion of forests to pasture lands, is a causal factor in overgrazing, and is implicated in the destruction of native plants and animals. If there is one issue on which animal liberationists and environmentalists should speak with a single voice it is on this issue.

(Dale Jamieson, "Animal Liberation Is an Environmental Ethic," Environmental Values 7 [February 1998]: 41-57, at 46)

Animals in Winter

Here is an interesting essay from today's New York Times. By the way, I assume that regular readers of this blog have signed up for free New York Times stories. Once you have an account, you can click on the links I provide and go directly to the sign-in page (or to the essay itself).

Edward O. Wilson on Biophilia

The critical stages in the acquisition of biophilia have been worked out by psychologists during studies of childhood mental development. Under the age of six, children tend to be egocentric, self-serving, and domineering in their responses to animals and nature. They are also most prone to be uncaring or fearful of the natural world and of all but a few familiar animals. Between six and nine, children become interested in wild creatures for the first time, and aware that animals can suffer pain and distress. From nine to twelve their knowledge and interest in the natural world rises sharply, and between thirteen and seventeen they readily acquire moral feeling toward animal welfare and species conservation.

(Edward O. Wilson, The Future of Life [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002], 137-8)

Reader Mail (Name Withheld by Request)

don't give me the lecture, but - i ate a steak last night. (i'm on that south beach diet.)

I LOVE animals ....... we have pet birds, and i cannot tell you how smart my cockatiel . . . is.

i can imagine that, in one sense, it IS irrational for me to eat meat, because of how much i love animals and i KNOW that at least animals like birds and dogs & cats DO have feelings & intelligence, etc. but - i still eat beef & pork & chicken.

i've read what you have written about vegetarianism........ but i don't think i will change. irrational, perhaps. but - i feel better eating some meat protein

Barry Holstun Lopez on Winter Herons

One winter evening in New York he had had dinner with a classmate from Amherst, on 56th Street. When they emerged it was to find it had been snowing. They were dressed for it. They were full of food and wine and did not care to get away anywhere. They stood on the corner of 54th and Park and talked. The falling snow obliterated their footprints and left them standing in a field of white illuminated by a street lamp before the friend finally caught a cab uptown. He watched the cab until it was only red taillights. He did not want to hurry away. In the chilled air and falling snow was some universal forgiveness and he did not want to disturb it. He stepped slowly off the curb, headed south.

Overhead, above the surface of the pool of light cast by the street lamps, the canyon of the wide avenue disappeared into darkness. He had walked only a few blocks when he realized that birds were falling. Great blue herons were descending slowly against the braking of their wings, their ebony legs extended to test the depth of the snow which lay in a garden that divided the avenue. He stood transfixed as the birds settled. They folded their wings and began to mill in the gently falling snow and the pale light. They had landed as if on a prairie, and if they made any sound he did not hear. One pushed its long bill into the white ground. After a moment they were all still. They gazed at the front of a hotel, where someone had just gone through a revolving door. A cab slowed in front of him—he shook his head, no, no, and it went on. One or two of the birds flared their wings to lay off the snow and a flapping suddenly erupted among them and they were in the air again. Fifteen or twenty, flying past with heavy, hushing beats, north up the avenue for two or three blocks before they broke through the plane of light and disappeared.

(Barry Holstun Lopez, "Winter Herons," in his Winter Count [New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1981], 15-25, at 23-4)

Vegan Blog

Here is a blog that may be of interest to readers of Animal Ethics. I put a permanent link to it on the left side of the page.

You Are What You Eat

Those of you who eat beef ought to read this. Enjoy that hamburger!

Lisa Mighetto on the Tension Between Hunting and Conservation

Theodore Roosevelt was the best-known proponent of wildlife conservation in his day. He was also the nation's most famous hunter. Today, many animal lovers would find that a strange and unappealing combination. Indeed, among environmentalists, it is becoming increasingly fashionable to be against hunting. Although sportsmen are included in such organizations as the Audubon Society, Sierra Club, and Earth First!, they are continually criticized by other members. One of the most aggressive groups to oppose hunting is The Fund for Animals. Its members actually meet sportsmen in the wild, in the hopes of convincing them to refrain from killing animals. This tension is not new; in the United States, organized protests against blood sports emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Hunting, however, is not antithetical to conservation. A hundred years ago, much of the groundwork for the protection of wildlife was laid by sportsmen. Their call for conservation was conveyed through a variety of hunting journals, including American Sportsman, Forest and Stream, Field and Stream, and American Angler—all of which were founded in the 1870s and 1880s. Some hunter-conservationists were particularly concerned about birds; the Audubon Society was founded by a sportsman.

(Lisa Mighetto, Wild Animals and American Environmental Ethics [Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1991], 27)

Animal Cognition

See here for a refutation of Descartes.

Rosemary Rodd on the Original Position

The original position as described by [John] Rawls requires that the original contractors must be all moral agents (otherwise they could not make the decisions needed for the contract), and it is assumed that they will remain so in the real world. I am not sure that this second rule is essential for the idea of a social contract. By analogy with the idea of 'living wills', in which people leave directions about the way they want to be treated if they subsequently lose the ability to make rational decisions, it seems possible that moral agents in the original position might want to safeguard themselves against the possibility of becoming moral patients in the real world. If the contractors do not know whether they may be moral agents or patients later on, they cannot rationally be prepared either to deny the basic rights of moral patients or to commit moral agents to an intolerable burden of ceaseless labour for the welfare of the former. By definition moral patients are not capable of understanding the nature of moral duties so the contractors cannot reasonably decree that the right to basically fair treatment should depend upon acceptance of reciprocal obligation since this would mean giving up their own rights should they happen to be, or to become, moral patients.

(Rosemary Rodd, Biology, Ethics, and Animals [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992 (1990)], 241 [footnote omitted])

Organic Eggs from Cage-Free (Uncaged) Hens

I found a good source of eggs the other day. See here.

The Latest PETA Farce

A Tucson friend sent this link. Make of it what you will.

Reader Mail (Reprinted by Permission)

Dear Keith,

I enjoy your blog and find it very edifying—thanks, and keep up the great work. Some time soon I hope to start working through your suggested reading list for philosophy. One request: PLEASE syndicate your blog content in RSS or RDF if at all possible. I don't know if Blogspot offers that service, but if they do, I would greatly appreciate it and I'm sure there are others who would as well.

I want to take issue with the Tom Regan excerpt you posted on 1/6, arguing from the creation account that Christians should be vegans. The problem with Regan's argument is that he overlooks God's covenant with Noah (Gen. 9), in which God gives humans all creatures, both plants and animals, as food (Gen. 9:3).

I realize that you are a religious sceptic, that you see no need of resort to God or revelation in your thinking, and that you therefore won't find an appeal to scripture very convincing.

Nonetheless, I think that Regan creates at least two kinds of problem for his argument by using scripture selectively, citing God's dietary ordinances at creation but ignoring those proposed in his covenant with Noah.

First, he opens himself to the charge of cherry-picking scripture for those passages that support his position. Clearly, if all parts of scripture are equally authoritative, he is wrong to argue in this fashion, because his position requires that he deny authority to the Noahic covenant. Thus, he must deny that all parts of scripture are equally authoritative. In that case, we must ask why he considers the one passage authoritative and not the other.

The best account he can give of his use of scripture in support of his argument is: (1) he has good reason for considering one set of passages authoritative, but not the other; and (2) he has conformed his positions to the teachings found in the passages he does regard as authoritative.

If he can demonstrate (1), I'll take him on his word that he has done (2), though I'll still disagree with his handling of scripture. Note that it is problematic to cite the moral quality of the authoritative passages as criteria for (1) if he is in turn using these passages to support moral arguments: great care would be needed to avoid circularity (and in some cases it might even be impossible to do so).

Of course, if he is simply selecting those parts of scripture that support a position he already holds, he is undermining any claim that scripture has intrinsic authority. In that case, scripture contributes nothing to his argument. It is meaningless except as an appeal to sentiment in order to persuade the careless thinkers.

Second, because his argument assumes that Creation is still in the state in which it was created, it is cogent only for a subset of people calling themselves Christians (and certainly not for me). Christianity as I (and orthodox Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Lutherans, Wesleyans, Calvinists, and others) understand it posits a Fall due to human sin. The Fall radically altered all aspects of Creation (Romans 8:22ff). It radically altered humanity's relationship with Creation (Gen. 3:16-24). It entails that the state of original human blessedness is now inaccessible to us, due to our sins. Indeed, within the creation account, God signifies the human need for redemption by making garments of leather for Adam and Eve (Gen. 3:21). Clearly, things have changed, and in his curses on Adam & Eve, God indicates that their existence will be very different than it has been up to that time. Those Christians who hold to the Fall and the Noahic covenant have to reject Regan's argument if they are consistent. That amounts to quite a few Christians for whom this argument lacks cogency.

I realize that I haven't stated my points as clearly as I might have, but it's way past my bedtime and I do want to get this email "onto the wire" tonight.

Thanks again for your blog, and please try to implement some kind of XML syndication of your content.

Best wishes,
Chuck Bearden

John Benson on Peter Singer

For a reason that I do not understand Singer advocates giving up meat-eating but not the use of drugs whose development involves the use of experimental animals. He makes the good point that the meat industry needs not our approval but our money. 'So long as people are prepared to buy the products of intensive farming, the usual forms of protest and political action will never bring about a major reform.' The same point applies to the drug companies, but Singer's recommended forms of action do not include refusing to accept treatment that involves the use of their products. The heavy emphasis on how to make the personal change in way of life implied by giving up meat seems to be unbalanced. A less extreme anti-speciesist might say that as long as we do not use drugs to relieve slight discomforts but only in cases of serious illness we need not worry. But Singer's general position requires a more rigorous approach than that.

(John Benson, "Duty and the Beast," Philosophy 53 [October 1978]: 529-49, at 531-2 [footnote omitted])

Sierra Club

A reader brought this to my attention.

Cow Parts and Cow Wholes

Here is an interesting essay by New York Times columnist Verlyn Klinkenborg, whose writing I admire.

From the Oxford English Dictionary, 2d ed.

animal, n. and a.

A. n.

1. a. A living being; a member of the higher of the two series of organized beings, of which the typical forms are endowed with life, sensation, and voluntary motion, but of which the lowest forms are hardly distinguishable from the lowest vegetable forms by any more certain marks than their evident relationship to other animal forms, and thus to the animal series as a whole rather than to the vegetable series.

b. The living body or soft fleshy part of a mollusc, crustacean, etc., as distinguished from its shell or other hard part.

2. In common usage: one of the lower animals; a brute, or beast, as distinguished from man. (Often restricted by the uneducated to quadrupeds; and familiarly applied especially to such as are used by man, as a horse, ass, or dog.)

3. a. Contemptuously or humorously for: a human being who is no better than a brute, or whose animal nature has the ascendancy over his reason; a mere animal. (Cf. similar use of creature.)

b. With the. The animal nature in man: cf. beast n. 1c.

4. As in the slang phr. 'go the whole hog.'

5. ellipt. in pl. for animal spirits. Obs. rare.

6. colloq. A person, thing; esp. in phr. (there is) no such animal.

B. adj.

1. Connected with sensation, innervation, or will; sometimes = psychical. (Opposed to vital and natural; the animal functions being those of the brain and nervous system; the vital of the heart, lungs, etc.; and the natural those of nutrition and assimilation.) See animal spirits. Obs.

2. Animate, living, organized, as opposed to inanimate. Obs. rare.

3. Of or pertaining to the functions of animals; or of those parts of the nature of man which he shares with the inferior animals. (Thus opposed to intellectual and spiritual).

4. a. Carnal, fleshly, as opposed to moral, spiritual.

b. Characteristic of or resembling (that of) a lower animal. Also Comb., as animal-bodied adj.

5. Of or pertaining to animals, as opposed to vegetables. (Not separable from the n. used attrib.) Cf. animal pole below and vegetative a. 1d.)

C. Comb. and phrases. Here it is often impossible to separate the n. and adj. (see prec.)

1. attrib. or adj. animal-lover, -name, -ornament; animal black, that formed by the carbonization of animal substance (cf. bone-black, ivory-black); animal charcoal, that formed by charring animal substance; animal electricity, that developed in certain animals, as the torpedo and electric eel; animal food, animal substances used as food; animal flower, one of the actinozoa, as the sea-anemone; animal grab [grab n.2 5], a card game similar to 'snap'; animal heat, the constant temperature maintained within the bodies of living animals; animal kingdom, the whole species of animals viewed scientifically, as one of the three great divisions of natural objects; animal liberation, the act or process of freeing animals from exploitation (e.g. in laboratory experiments) by man; applied chiefly attrib. to groups dedicated to this, as Animal Liberation Front; hence animal liberationist; animal magnetism = mesmerism; animal magnetist, a mesmerist; animal myth, one founded upon the habits of animals; animal painter, a painter of animals as opposed to landscapes, portraits, or incidents of human action; so animal painting and animal piece; animal plant, a zoophyte or polype, as coral; animal pole Embryology (see quots. and cf. pole n.2 7); animal psychology, the study of the behaviour of animals; hence animal psychologist; animal rights [after human rights, etc.], the natural rights of animals to live free from exploitation, confinement, etc., by humans; esp. as the slogan of a movement seeking to achieve this end; animal size [size n.2], a size made from gelatine; animal tree, one cut into the outline of an animal; animal (tub)-sized, tub-sizing (see quot. 1937 and tub n. 10); animal world, the world of animals. Also animal spirits, q.v.

2. similative and synthetic deriv., as animal-minded.

APPENDED FROM ADDITIONS 1993

animal, n. and a. Add: [C.] [1.] animal-free a., (esp. of diet or foodstuffs) not containing or using animal products.

John Rawls (1921-2002) on the Moral Status of Animals

A final remark. Justice as fairness is not a complete contract theory. For it is clear that the contractarian idea can be extended to the choice of more or less an entire ethical system, that is, to a system including principles for all the virtues and not only for justice. Now for the most part I shall consider only principles of justice and others closely related to them; I make no attempt to discuss the virtues in a systematic way. Obviously if justice as fairness succeeds reasonably well, a next step would be to study the more general view suggested by the name "rightness as fairness." But even this wider theory fails to embrace all moral relationships, since it would seem to include only our relations with other persons and to leave out of account how we are to conduct ourselves toward animals and the rest of nature. I do not contend that the contract notion offers a way to approach these questions which are certainly of the first importance; and I shall have to put them aside. We must recognize the limited scope of justice as fairness and of the general type of view that it exemplifies. How far its conclusions must be revised once these other matters are understood cannot be decided in advance.

(John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, rev. ed. [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1999], 15 [first edition published in 1971])

Carl Cohen on Speciesism

I am a speciesist. Speciesism is not merely plausible; it is essential for right conduct, because those who will not make the morally relevant distinctions among species are almost certain, in consequence, to misapprehend their true obligations. The analogy between speciesism and racism is insidious. Every sensitive moral judgment requires that the differing natures of the beings to whom obligations are owed be considered. If all forms of animate life—or vertebrate animal life?—must be treated equally, and if therefore in evaluating a research program the pains of a rodent count equally with the pains of a human, we are forced to conclude (1) that neither humans nor rodents possess rights, or (2) that rodents possess all the rights that humans possess. Both alternatives are absurd. Yet one or the other must be swallowed if the moral equality of all species is to be defended.

(Carl Cohen, "The Case for the Use of Animals in Biomedical Research," in Intervention and Reflection: Basic Issues in Medical Ethics, 6th ed., ed. Ronald Munson [Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Thomson Learning, 2000], 538-44, at 541 [essay first published in 1986])

From Today's New York Times

To the Editor:

Re "Fear of Beef" (letter, Jan. 13): I am a meat eater! I eat meat four or five times a week. I eat roasts, steaks, chops, hamburger. Mad cow didn't really scare me, but after reading what they feed cows, I will stop eating meat. If the ranchers lose consumers like me, they are really in trouble.

ROBERTA B. POSNER
New York, Jan. 13, 2004