Just Food

Philosophy, Justice and Food

J. M. Dieterle

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781783483884
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Ética y filosofía moral

Who has access, and who is denied access, to food, and why? What are the consequences of food insecurity? What would it take for the food system to be just? Just Food: Philosophy, Justice and Food presents thirteen new philosophical essays that explore the causes and consequences of the inequities of our contemporary food system. It examines why 842 million people globally are unable to meet their dietary needs, and why food insecurity is not simply a matter of insufficient supply. The book looks at how food insecurity tracks other social injustices, covering topics such as race, gender and property, as well as food sovereignty, food deserts, and locavorism. The essays in this volume make an important and timely contribution to the wider philosophical debate around food distribution and justice.

Part I

Food Access

Chapter 1

Framing Food Justice

J. Michael Scoville

The discussion of food justice norms tends to be focused on three main concerns.1 One is distributive issues, for example, whether all people have access to safe and healthy food, or whether everyone working within the food system is paid fairly and able to work in a safe environment. A second concern is issues of representation and political voice. Here the focus is whether all people are capable of participating in relevant decision making and the construction of public policies relating to the production, consumption and distribution of food. A third concern is the normatively significant connections between, on the one hand, the values of food and food-related practices, and on the other, collective self-determination. This third focus is often expressed in terms of food sovereignty, and has its origin in peasant social movements, notably, La Via Campesina. Discussion of these three concerns is complex, subject to ongoing disagreement and practically fraught.

Different views of what justice requires always reflect particular framings of what questions or concerns are thought to be crucial. Not surprisingly, the question of which framing (or framings) is best is controversial. With this in mind, I assume it is critically important to consider sustainability as a relevant framing for any contemporary theorizing about justice. Articulating an account of food justice, specifically, in isolation from broader questions about sustainability would leave many important normative issues unaddressed. The primary aim of this chapter is to explore how our thinking about food justice norms might be guided, constrained and in general enriched if we consider these norms in relation to sustainability.

A difficulty for this proposed focus is that many philosophers (among others) have viewed the concept of sustainability with suspicion. Reasons for this range from concern about sustainability being hopelessly vague and hence useless for policy, to concern that interest in sustainability is just the latest cover for business as usual and thus a betrayal of the environmental cause. While I believe such concerns are unconvincing, there is no question that sustainability is a contested concept—one that needs careful specification and defense if it is to do any work helping to frame discussions of food justice.

I assume that a significant reason to care about sustainability is the worry that we are shortchanging future generations through our collective conduct, giving them less than is their due.2 This is partly a matter of justice, but it is also a broader question of what we ought to be doing to preserve conditions that will make life worth living in the future.3 With this in mind, a fundamental aim of discussions of sustainability should be to clarify the X that we ought to be preserving, insofar as we can, for future generations both as a matter of justice and as a condition for living worthwhile lives.4 The challenge is to clarify the relevant X and the normative account that supports it.

In my reading of the literature, there are basically three types of sustainability views. One, which I’ll call “the minimalist view,” aims to specify our obligations to present and future generations (of human beings) in terms of maintaining the capacity to be well off. A second, which I’ll refer to as “the human flourishing account,” rests on the belief that human beings need access to a variety of specific and disaggregated goods, experiences and relationships in order to achieve well-being.5 A third incorporates aspects of the first two, but includes in addition nonanthropocentric reasons; I’ll call this “the demanding view.” Depending on the view of sustainability one adopts, there can be significantly different implications for how we should think about, and try to realize in practice, food justice. I explore some of these implications with respect to each type of sustainability view sketched.

I. The Minimalist View

A number of economists and philosophers defend something like what I’m calling the minimalist view.6 Despite differences in detail, defenders of this view more or less share three basic commitments. First, the core ethical commitment of the minimalist view is that the obligation of sustainability requires the present generation to aim at enabling all people, present and future, to have the option or capacity to be well off.7 With respect to the X that we ought to be sustaining, defenders of the minimalist view answer that our collective aim should be to maintain a nondeclining stock of total capital assets, which is assumed to be necessary for maintaining welfare over time. This stock is understood broadly and includes a diversity of things—for example, infrastructure, knowledge, technology and savings and investment, as well as the various resources and life-support functions provided by nature (commonly referred to as “natural capital”).8 Of course, there could be a nondeclining stock of the relevant goods and yet people might lack access to it. So defenders of the minimalist view should be read as assuming that all people should have access to the relevant goods as a matter of basic justice.

A second commitment of the minimalist view concerns the conception of welfare or well-being that is presupposed. Some prominent defenders of this view assume a desire or preference satisfaction account, where welfare consists in the satisfaction of an individual’s desires or preferences.9 Such a view faces serious difficulties. Desires and preferences are highly adaptable, largely dependent on what is, or is expected to be, available, and can be distorted in ways that give us no reason to aim at satisfying them.10 Further, the fact that desires and preferences are subject to great variation, dependent as they are on changing circumstances, presents a problem when we try to clarify the content of our obligations to future generations. After all, how can we know with any certainty what future people will desire or prefer? If we endorse a modest “ought implies can” principle, then a desire or preference satisfaction account has the result of potentially undermining, or at least leaving largely unspecifiable, our obligations to future people. This implication may be unintended, but that hardly removes the problem.

To avoid these difficulties, the minimalist view does best to incorporate a need-based conception of well-being. Though the specification of the relevant needs is theory dependent, and not without controversy, it seems reasonable to think that theorists and policy makers could clarify a set of “core” or basic needs that would focus and guide social and political decision making. A statement from James Sterba suggests the general idea here: “Basic needs, if not satisfied, lead to significant lacks and deficiencies with respect to a standard of mental and physical well-being. Thus, a person’s needs for food, shelter, medical care, protection, companionship and self-development are, at least in part, needs of this sort.”11

A third aspect of the minimalist view is a commitment to a permissive view of substitutability. The economist Robert Solow gives expression to this idea when he writes:

Goods and services can be substituted for one another. If you don’t eat one species of fish, you can eat another species of fish. Resources are, to use a favorite word of economists, fungible in a certain sense. They can take the place of each other. That is extremely important because it suggests that we do not owe to the future any particular thing. There is no specific object that the goal of sustainability, the obligation of sustainability, requires us to leave untouched.12

Clearly, assumptions about substitutability have a direct bearing on the question of whether we ought to be preserving some particular X in order to fulfill our sustainability-related obligations. While defenders of the minimalist view are not committed to the unlimited substitutability of (natural) goods and resources in practice, they are not opposed to this idea in principle.13 This commitment makes the view blind to some important normative considerations. The human flourishing account helps to illuminate these considerations, and I’ll turn to this now.

II. The Human flourishing Account

As a focus for my discussion of the human flourishing account, I’ll consider the recent work of John O’Neill, Alan Holland and Andrew Light.14 By articulating a normative basis for objecting to certain sorts of substitution, even if such substitutions are technically possible, the human flourishing account illuminates a significant potential shortcoming of the minimalist view.

The account developed by O’Neill et al. has two main elements. First, the authors defend a version of an objective state theory of well-being.15 The usual list of objective states or goods is endorsed (physical health, personal relations, autonomy, etc.), with one notable addition: the good of having a well-constituted relation with the nonhuman world.16 The relevant states are conceived as necessary constituents of a flourishing life, such that one is harmed if one lacks access to these states.17 Further, the authors suggest that the goods in question are disaggregated, meaning, a lot of one good cannot substitute for too little or none of another.

The second aspect of the account rests on an appeal to the importance of historical considerations for our thinking about value, human well-being and the natural (or partly natural) world. To value something in a historical way is to value it in virtue of its particular history, or because it is the product of processes of a certain sort.18 The contrast to a historical view is one that regards the value of an object as consisting solely in terms of its specific cluster of properties, where this cluster is understood in isolation from the history of the object or the ...