APR 6

21. APR 6

Assigned Work

• Milligan, Tony, Animal Ethics: The Basics, Chapter 1

In-Class

• Reports on documentary viewing.

• Anasofia on "Fed Up"
• Jack and Haven on "Meat and Climate Change"
• Ray on "The Dying Trade"

• Some Ethical Arguments about Food
• SCP: Short Critical Paper on the Ethics of Eating - Assigned
• Estabrook, "Hogonomics" Gastronomica

Estabrook, "Hogonomics"

• [Flying pig farm sounds alot like the farm in "The Last Pig"]
• Journalist on a quest to Flying Pigs Farm to discover diff bt $15.00 lb and $3.49 lb pork. comparison

• FP farm: 750 pigs/yr, breeding rates (industrial sows 2.5 litters/year vs. FP: no crates, 20-25% fewer piglets, self-weaning,
• Heritage piglet: $120, industrial piglet $50.
• FP pigs, free range (400 pigs on 20-30 acres), industrial pigs about 5-8 square feet per pig, always indoors
• FP pigs live 6-9 months instead of 6 months for industrial.
• Heritage pigs retain natural behaviors vs. industrial
• Food diffs p. 145. No automatic anti-biotics for FP pigs
• Labor diffs. Industrial: 1 employee per 2,700 pigs. FP: 1 employee per 170 pigs.
• Differences in slaughter and "kill fee".
• Saline injected pink meat used to mask dry meat without flavor. Cosumers now trust only pink ham.

Some of the standard arguments on the ethics of eating animals

• Ecological Arguments

• Following the UN FAO study, "Livestock's Long Shadow," industrial meat production is one of the biggest (and possible the biggest) contributors to climate change. It is also responsible for a wide range of adverse ecological impacts such as desertification, rain forest depletion, unsustainable water use, dislocation of small scale farmers, geo-political conflict, undermining sovereignty, etc.

• Arguments from suffering. Utilitarian arguments.

• Singer: Recall the "equal happiness" principle and Principle of Utility. Moral concern about the suffering of animals, combined with the fact that their consumption is no longer necessary for us, should lead us to reduce or eliminate animal foods, at least from creatures that can suffer (some debate about clams and oysters, for example. Plant "sentience" is a complicating factor as well)

• Rights based arguments.

• Regan: animals are "subjects of a life" - see also age of slaughter information. We should extend rights from humans to animals because they share this important "rights justifying" trait. Even if animals are not "persons," they have an interest in "having a life" that cannot be overridden without argumentation. This view can be combined with a speciesist claim that humans might prioritize human rights over animal rights in some circumstances such as medical research or subsistence agriculture or food insecurity.

• Agrarian arguments supporting limited meat production

• Agrarian arguments about "default animal production". Treating animal foods like a luxury. Other agrarians might advocate non-food use of animals or use of animals for food without killing them. (Eggs, milk, etc. - Note practical issues here.
• Simon Fairlie's "default animal production" argument: We should think of meat as a luxury. Like many other luxury foods. Not sustainable at high levels of production. The relationship between meat production and environmental impact is not linear, according to Fairlie:

• Fairlie's ad for his position. [1]

• Hunter's arguments -- There are some interesting arguments for treating "food hunting" differently from a moral perspective. Hunter's arguably enter into a special kind of relationship with nature that some deep ecologists argue to be authentic. The hunter, after all, could be prey. Hunting, like other traditional forms of food gathering, could be seen as a way of life that justifies limited animal harvesting.

• The "motivational problem" in animal ethics discussions

• As Tony Milligan points out, there is a "motivation problem" with these arguments. They do not motivative change in behavior. Rates of vegetarianism and veganism are very low (outside of cuisines that are intentionally vegetarian). Persistence in diet is also low. Smithsonian Magazine, Animal Charity Evaluators, Vegetarianism by country, Veganism by country. On the other hand, meat consumption has dropped significantly in countries like France and the Netherlands.

Milligan, Tony. Animal Ethics: the basics. "Chapter 1"

• Main approaches:

• Unifying - focus on key concepts like rights, suffering, sentience
• Relational - focus on historical practices

• Unifying approaches

• Singer — "Focus on suffering ; Reagan - rights; being “subject of a life” ; Francione — sentience
• all three treat “being human” as irrelevant in the discussion of rights and obligations.

• Some general objections to unifying approaches: based on the parent theories for Singer and Reagan — utilitarianism and rights theory

• complexity — these theories oversimplify experience by reducing decisions to a single criterion. Suffering, for example, is not always morally problematic. Rights and harms often go together. Rights talk can be thought of as too restrictive. Maybe we should love animals? (12)
• Separation of justification and motivation — in a live example of intervening to prevent cruelty to an animal, appeals to rights and suffering seem to be more about justifications, but don’t capture our motivations, which might be more direct. 13: problem of motivation in ethics. Problem if theoretical views that don’t motivate action.
• Marginalizing our humanity — unifying theories seem not to track differences bt how we think about animals vs. humans. “Speciesism”.

• Relational approaches: Often discursive essays, these approaches explore the lines we draw in our relationships with animals from the care we give pets, how we treat pests and "vermin", to the unspeakably cruel things we do to animals (even primates) in medical research.
• Some examples of relational approaches:

• Work of Cora Diamond: exposing assumptions in categories like “vermin” “pet” “livestock” . On the positive side, it is a great historical accomplishment to use terms like “human” and “humanity” to capture what we owe or what is due to others. It seems wrong to Diamond to treat this as a negative form of “speciesism”. She argues that we need to be human in a way that reduces harm to animals.
• Derrida’s The Animal That I am. - concept of humanity developed in contrast and relation to animals, not in isolation. Not trying to efface the distinction (as unifiers do), but “multiply its figures”. Asks how we are seen by the animal.

SCP: Ethics of Eating Animals

• Stage 1: Please write an 800-1000 hundred word essay on the following prompt by April 14, 2022, 11:59pm.

• Topic: Consider various arguments and information we have been discussing related to both the ethics of eating animals and food from animals (such as egg and dairy products). Which are the strongest? Which are the weakest? How do ethical arguments about eating animals apply differently to different food animals and products or contexts? If you do not find any of the arguments persuasive, try to provide an alternative position. Otherwise, indicate, drawing on your knowledge of dietary change, what steps a carnivore might make to "trade up" to a more ethical eating pattern.

• Advice about collaboration: Collaboration is part of the academic process and the intellectual world that college courses are based on, so it is important to me that you have the possibility to collaborate. I encourage you to collaborate with other students, but only up to the point of sharing ideas, references to class notes, and your own notes, verbally. Collaboration is also a great way to make sure that a high average level of learning and development occurs in the class. The best way to avoid plagiarism is to NOT share text of draft answers or outlines of your answer. Keep it verbal. Generate your own examples.

• Prepare your answer and submit it in the following way. You will lose points if you do not follow these instructions:

1. To assure anonymity, you must remove your name from the the "author name" that you may have provided when you set up your word processing application. For instructions on removing your name from an Word or Google document, [click here].
2. Format your answer in double spaced text, in a typical 12 point font, and using normal margins. Do not add spaces between paragraphs and indent the first line of each paragraph.
3. Do not put your name in the file or filename. You may put your student ID number in the file, but not in the filename. Save your file for this assignment with the name: EatingAnimals.
4. To turn in your assignment, log into courses.alfino.org, click on the "#3: Ethics of Eating Animals" dropbox.
5. If you cannot meet a deadline, you must email me about your circumstances (unless you are having an emergency) before the deadline or you will lose points.

• Stage 2: Please evaluate four student answers and provide brief comments and a score. Review the Assignment Rubric for this exercise. We will be using the Flow and Content areas of the rubric for this assignment. Complete your evaluations and scoring by April 21, 2022 11:59pm.

• To determine the papers you need to peer review, open the file called "#Key.xls" in the shared folder. You will see a worksheet with saint names in alphabetically order, along with animal names. Find your saint name and review the next four (4) animals' work below your animal name. If you get to the bottom of the list before reaching 4 animals, go to the top of the list and continue.

• Use this Google Form to evaluate four peer papers. Submit the form once for each review.

• Some papers may arrive late. If you are in line to review a missing paper, allow a day or two for it to show up. If it does not show up, go back to the key and review the next animal's paper, continuing until you get four reviews. Do not review more than four papers.

• Stage 3: I will grade and briefly comment on your writing using the peer scores as an initial ranking. Assuming the process works normally, most of my scores probably be within 1-2 points of the peer scores, plus or minus.

• Stage 4: Back-evaluation: After you receive your peer comments and my evaluation, take a few minutes to fill out this quick "back evaluation" rating form: [2]. Fill out the form for each reviewer, but not Alfino. You must do the back evaluation to receive credit for the whole assignment. Failing to give back-evaluations unfairly affects other classmates.

• Back evaluations are due Thursday, April 24, 2022, 11:59pm.