Philosophy Comes to Dinner

Arguments About the Ethics of Eating

Andrew Chignell, Terence Cuneo, Matthew C. Halteman, Andrew Chignell, Terence Cuneo, Matthew C. Halteman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781136578069
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Everyone is talking about food. Chefs are celebrities. "Locavore" and "freegan" have earned spots in the dictionary. Popular books and films about food production and consumption are exposing the unintended consequences of the standard American diet. Questions about the principles and values that ought to guide decisions about dinner have become urgent for moral, ecological, and health-related reasons. In Philosophy Comes to Dinner, twelve philosophers—some leading voices, some inspiring new ones—join the conversation, and consider issues ranging from the sustainability of modern agriculture, to consumer complicity in animal exploitation, to the pros and cons of alternative diets.

Part I
Dietary Ideals

1
Conscientious Omnivorism

Terence Cuneo

Is it morally permissible for people like us—denizens of the affluent Western world—to purchase or eat meat? Conscientious omnivores believe so, provided that the meat is not factory farmed (or otherwise produced by treating animals cruelly). Moral vegetarians take a more hard-line approach, maintaining that people like us in our circumstances ought not to purchase or eat meat at all because doing so would be wrong. I find myself conflicted about which of these positions to accept. I believe that, at the very least, we should be conscientious omnivores. But I am unsure whether, having accepted conscientious omnivorism, there are principled reasons not to take the further step of embracing moral vegetarianism full stop. My project in this chapter is to explore this issue.¹

I should warn you that my discussion does not aim to be ethically neutral, as I will be working with a broadly deontological view of what makes acts right. According to this view, when an act is right, it is not because it brings about the best consequences or maximizes value. Rather, ordinarily, when an act is right, it is determined by the rights and obligations that agents have against one another, which they possess in virtue of the worth that they have. I will work with this position not only because doing so will help to focus our discussion, but also because it seems to me true.

A Standard Deontological Argument

Most of us believe that the Native Americans who lived in the United States one hundred fifty years ago did nothing wrong when they killed animals for food. Given their conditions, they needed to do so to survive and flourish. But it is different for us. We occupy conditions in which food is ordinarily plentiful and there is no need to hunt. Although meat is typically both easily available and affordable, most of us can lead extremely healthy and satisfying lives without eating animals at all.

Many philosophers believe that, since we occupy conditions such as these, we ought to be moral vegetarians. A prominent type of argument for this conclusion, due in its essentials to Tom Regan, rests on two concepts: being the subject of a life and having a basic welfare right. Let’s take a moment to unpack these concepts.²

A subject of a life is a creature that can flourish or fail to flourish, has strong interests in its own flourishing, and can be aware of its own flourishing or failure to flourish.³ For present purposes, think of flourishing along broadly Aristotelian lines: Beings flourish inasmuch as they, to some sufficient degree, use and enjoy the use of their senses, have and enjoy having adequate health, have and enjoy having bonds of kinship or friendship, engage and enjoy engaging in play, and so forth. Thus understood, rocks, plants, insects, and mollusks cannot be the subjects of a life. Animals of many kinds, however, are. In ordinary conditions, both human and nonhuman animals, such as chickens, sheep, cows, and pigs, are keenly interested in using their senses, establishing and maintaining bonds of kinship, and engaging in play. (By saying this, I do not mean to elide important differences between animals of these kinds. For immediate purposes, however, these differences will not matter.) Human and nonhuman animals have at least this much in common.

It is because (in part) subjects of a life can engage in activities such as establishing, maintaining, and enjoying bonds of kinship that they have noninstrumental or inherent worth. This worth matters morally, for it is in virtue of possessing such worth that we can wrong subjects of a life. It is because a dog possesses worth of this sort, for example, that I can wrong it by intentionally crippling it. When we wrong the subject of a life, it is entitled to better treatment.⁴ That, however, is more or less a different way of saying that subjects of a life have rights of various sorts, such as what I’ve called the basic welfare rights. At a first approximation, let’s say that if an agent A has a basic welfare right against an agent B, then B morally ought not intentionally to frustrate or destroy A’s flourishing by doing such things as preventing it from using its senses, destroying its capacity to form bonds of kinship, maiming its body so it cannot engage in movement or play, and so forth.

Later in our discussion, I will have more to say about these rights. For now, let me make several preliminary points about them. First, these rights are defeasible; they can be trumped by other countervailing moral considerations. For example, you might have a basic welfare right against me that I not maim or kill you. But if you attack me, then (all else being equal) it is morally permissible for me to maim or kill you in self-defense. Second, the basic welfare rights are kind relative. They are rights that a thing has against only those agents that are of such a kind that they can recognize them. If ordinary farm animals such as cows have the basic welfare rights, for example, then they do not have them against other animals such as coyotes but only against creatures like us. For, unlike coyotes, we are the sorts of beings that can recognize and honor these rights. Finally, many of these rights are context dependent. If I am a child, I may have a right against my parents that they provide me with adequate water and food; were I to die of thirst, they would have wronged me. But in a season of terrible drought, I have no such right. There is no water that they can provide me. If this is so, rights are ordinarily indexed to situations. The right that a child has against his parents is the right to provide him with food and water in conditions in which water is available.

Having made these observations about subjects of a life and rights, we are now in a position to formulate:

The Standard Deontological Argument

• (1) If something is a subject of a life, then it has the basic welfare rights.
• (2) Farm animals are the subjects of a life.
• (3) So, farm animals have the basic welfare rights.
• (4) In conditions such as ours, purchasing or eating the meat of farm animals violates their basic welfare rights.
• (5) We ought not to violate the basic welfare rights of others.
• (6) So, in conditions such as ours, we ought not to purchase or eat the meat of farm animals.

Let me offer both a comment about and a criticism of this argument. The comment is that this argument has some intuitive pull. After all, if a creature is such that it can flourish and its own flourishing matters to it, then that creates a strong moral reason not to do such things as maim or kill it. Still—and this is the criticism—the argument is not persuasive. The fundamental problem is that premise (4) appears to be false. When we purchase or eat meat, the animal whose meat we’ve purchased or eaten is dead. And we cannot violate the basic welfare rights of the dead. In saying this, I do not wish to deny that the dead have rights. Perhaps, for example, if you were intentionally to bad-mouth your dead grandmother at her funeral, you would wrong her. Even so, you would not violate her basic welfare rights, since she has none.

It is natural to wonder whether the Standard Deontological Argument can be repaired. Surely—it might be said—by purchasing or buying meat we can support or be complicit in activities, such as the slaughtering of animals, which violate the basic welfare rights of these animals. And, all else being equal, we ought not to do this. As will become evident in a moment, I believe that there is something to this thought. But I also believe that it is difficult to formulate a satisfactory argument for moral vegetarianism that relies on it, at least if we understand “supporting” and “being complicit” in terms of causally supporting an institution by, say, enabling it to stay afloat. In their chapters in this volume, Mark Bryant Budolfson and Ted Warfield explain why. If Budolfson, Warfield, and I are right about this, then it is worth exploring different reasons for why it might be wrong to eat or purchase meat. That is my concern in the next section.

Cruelty and Symbolic Value

Call a person who purchases or uses some good a consumer of that good (by a “good,” I mean a commodity). The argument I wish to present in this section relies on an abstract ethical principle that I will call:

The Support Principle: Suppose an essentially cruel practice provides some good G. All else being equal, one morally ought not to support that practice by being a consumer of G if an alternative to G is readily available, which is comparable in cost and quality and is not the product of an essentially cruel practice, since being a consumer of G has considerable symbolic disvalue.

The Support Principle introduces the ideas of an essentially cruel practice and that of symbolic disvalue. Let me try to give you a better feel for these ideas and how they relate to one another by sketching an imaginary scenario.

Imagine that ESPN and the US government strike a deal: To reduce the population in the nation’s overcrowded prisons and to provide entertainment for the ordinary person, ESPN will—for a modest fee—televise events in which prisoners fight to the death employing a variety of techniques, including those used by the ancient gladiators. At first, this arrangement proves highly controversial, since (among other things) these prisoners are coerced into fighting. But people see immediately the arrangement’s impressive benefits. The population of prisons is in fact reduced dramatically. Moreover, the televised events generate huge amounts of money, which allows the government to slash taxes and reduce poverty. With time, the televised killings become wildly popular, at least among a certain segment of the population. Of course they are not the only type of game shown on ESPN. The network still televises games of baseball, basketball, football, hockey, and soccer on a regular basis.

There are, I believe, two things to say about this arrangement between ESPN and the government. First, it is morally beyond the pale. In conditions such as ours, there is no way in which manipulating human beings to kill each other for the viewing pleasure of others could be morally justified. Like forced slavery or waterboarding, gladiatorial killing is an essentially cruel practice.

The second thing to say is that because these new games are an essentially cruel practice, you have strong moral reason not to pay for or watch them. Admittedly, in your more sober moments, you might realize that, given their momentum and popularity, there is probably little that you can do to stop these games. If you and your friends neither pay for nor watch them, this will probably have little effect. Indeed, if you were to watch these events, you wouldn’t thereby violate the basic welfare rights of those who are killed in them, for by merely watching these games, you wouldn’t be depriving these prisoners of their right not to be maimed or killed for sport.

Even so, you have strong moral reason not to be a consumer of these games. Why is that? The answer, it seems to me, is that the moral life is about not only how to act well, but also how to live well. And to live well is to be for the good and against what is evil. Being for the good, however, is not simply a matter of producing or protecting what is good. Sometimes it is to engage in actions whose primary value is symbolic in which we stand for the good. While I have no definition of what it is to stand for the good by engaging in actions that have symbolic value (or refusing to engage in actions that have symbolic disvalue), we can readily recognize examples of the phenomenon. For example, sometimes being for the good consists in refusing to engage in actions that have symbolic disvalue, such as bowing to a cruel emperor. In other cases, it consists in actively engaging in actions that have symbolic value, such as holding vigil in remembrance of the dead. Indeed, in situations in which we are more or less helpless to change what is evil—either because that evil is so pervasive or because we must answer to other demands—engaging in activities of these sorts is often the best we can do. Since we often do find ourselves in such situations, awareness of the symbolic dimensions of our everyday activity is an important way in which we can be for the good.⁵

In principle, there are many types of actions that can have symbolic value or disvalue. Being a consumer of goods of certain types, I assume, is among them. Paying to watch ESPN’s gladiatorial games is, for example, an action that has considerable symbolic disvalue, while protesting them is one that has considerable symbolic value. The former is a way of symbolically supporting or being for a practice that is cruel, while the latter is a way of standing against it. To which I should add that symbolic value or disvalue can attach to actions even when we fail to recognize it. Even if I pay no attention whatsoever to the moral dimensions of the gladiatorial games, being solely concerned with their economic aspects, being a consumer of them has considerable symbolic disvalue. Moreover, even if I deeply dislike a given practice that is essentially cruel, but continue to consume the goods it produces, my actions can have symbolic dis-value. If this is right, the symbolic disvalue of my being a consumer of a good needn’t walk in lockstep with the attitudes I have toward being a consumer of that good.

There is much more to say about the notions of an essentially cruel practice and symbolic value. For the purposes of our discussion, I am going to assume that we have a satisfactory understanding of them, since we can identify instances of each, such as those offered in the examples above. The point I am interested in making is that the Support Principle yields the verdict that, all else being equal, you ought not to be a consumer of ESPN’s gladiatorial games. Not only does being a consumer of the games have considerable symbolic disvalue, you also have alternatives available. You can, for example, watch a game of fo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• About the Contributors
• Introduction
• PART I Dietary Ideals
• PART II Puzzling Questions
• Index