NOV 4

17: NOV 4

Assigned Reading

• Milligan, Tony. Animal Ethics: the basics. "Introduction and Chapter 1" (1-26) (25)
• Lecture on standard arguments for ethical diets
• Writing: Assessing Animal Ethics claims (short writing, peer reviewed, Points)

A couple of followups from last class

• Elitism in food advice.
• Options for reducing complicity in industrial meat production. [1], [2] or read labels at your local high end food store. "Pay more eat less."

The Ethics of Eating Animals

• How we talk about the ethics of eating animals -- very binary, often people mix different kinds of commitments about eating. Think about the difference bt being a biblical vegetarian vs. a climate change vegetarian. Diet ethics discussions trigger strong emotions.

• An Introductory analogy for a better start on the discussion: The Bike Commuter Analogy

• Think about a co-worker who commutes by bike to work. We might offer moral praise without feeling a corresponding obligation to become a bike commuter. Point: Let's separate the moral value of not eating meat from the question of whether you can imagine not eating meat.

• Some starting premises and arguments:

• There is no innocent eating - all eating disrupts intelligent life. Plant intelligence, animal sentience. Agriculture and town life involves controlling pests.
• The sustainability of a culture's diet depends upon trophic levels of eating, arable land/population ratios, types of inputs (level of industrial and petroleum inputs) and efficiency of the supply chain (0 km). Livestock production is one of top 2-3 contributors to climate change. There is a research consensus, roughly since 2010 that livestock production accounts for between 14 and 18% of greenhouse gases. Livestock's Long Shadow -- mention criticisms of this report. Browse the main conclusions here.
• There is a consensus, in both experience and, more recently, research, that land mammals like pigs, goats, sheep, and cows, have complex emotional lives and awareness of their conditions. Many "natural behaviors" have been bred out of domesticated animals (another ethical issue - creepy digression). Mention Cowspiracy. Ok, time for a cute cow video. [3]
• The experience of animals in the hyper-slaughter supply chain is much different than anything in the history of agriculture. Pigs never leave a concrete building until they get on trucks to the slaughterhouse, for example. Research on the treatment of animals in intensive animal ag is disturbing.

Some of standard arguments on the ethics of eating animals

• Extensionist arguments from Singer and Regan in the 1980s.

• Singer: recall "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 - notes trophic level)
• 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.

• 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.
• Ecological (and climate change) arguments about sustainable global diets. (See above.)
• 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. [4]
• Hunter's arguments -- There are some interesting arguments for treating "food hunting" differently from a moral perspective.
• Spiritual viewpoints, such as Ahimsa, biblical vegetarianism, life design philosophies
• Arguments about the naturalness (evolutionary or cultural) of meat.

• It is true that we are omnivores and so adapted to a wide range of foods. This perspective is important in understanding the difficulty of transitioning from a high meat diet, but it would need other premises to be a strong moral argument. It was a better argument when we believed (incorrectly) that meat protein was special. (Exceptions: people with plant protein allergies.)
• Cultural arguments are significant, again for understanding the depth of the problem.

• Speciesist arugments

• One might argue that if we are honest with ourselves, we would acknowledge that we are all speciesists. Thought experiments. This line of thought points out some important inconsistencies in our thinking, but it is not clear how it would justify eating meat, rather than, say try to reduce animal testing in medical research.

Age of Slaughter vs. Natural Life Span

• In thinking about the research on animal awareness and consciousness, we are becoming more sensitive to the idea that animals are indeed aware of their lives, many form friendships, have strong individual preferences, and can understand more about what is going on around them than we used to think.

• Note that the more symmetrically you see animal and human interests, the more likely this information is to be problematic.

• Pigs: Slaughtered at 6 months young; Natural life span: 6 to 10 years
• Chickens: Slaughtered at 6 weeks young; Natural life span: 5 to 8 years for those birds bred as "egg layers" such as Rhode Island Reds; 1 to 4 years for factory layer breeds such as leghorns; and 1 to 3 years for "meat" breeds.
• Turkeys: Slaughtered at 5 to 6 months young; Natural life span: 2 to 6 years
• Ducks/Geese: Slaughtered at 7 to 8 weeks young; Natural life span: domestic ducks: 6 to 8 years; geese from 8 to 15 years.
• Cattle: “Beef” cattle slaughtered at 18 months young; dairy cows slaughtered at 4 to 5 years young; Natural life span: 18 to 25+ years
• Veal Calves: Slaughtered at 16 weeks young; Natural life span: 18 to 25+ years
• Goats: Slaughtered at 3 to 5 months young; Natural life span: 12 to 14 years
• Rabbits: Slaughtered at 10 to 12 weeks young; Natural life span: 8 to 12+ years
• Lambs: Slaughtered at 6 to 8 weeks young for “young lamb” and under 1 year for all other; Natural life span: 12 to 14 years
• Horses/Donkeys: Slaughter age varies; Natural life span: 30 to 40 years

Arguments for reduction of meat consumption vs. Abolition

• Tendency toward binary thinking if your moral position is absolute (slavery analogy)
• Agrarian perspective, define. Simon Fairlie is one.
• Abolitionists argue that gradual approaches to reduction of animal consumption are not sufficient. Some advocate letting domesticated animals go extinct.

A Final Argument

• What if the ethical arguments aren't the problem with adopting an ethical diet? What if, like climate change, the evidence and arguments are rationally persuasive, but not motivating.

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 — 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 discoursive 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.

Writing: Assessing Animal Ethics claims (short writing, 600 words, peer reviewed, Points)

• Stage 1: Please write a 600 word maximum answer to the following question by November 8, 2020 11:59pm.

• Topic Prompt: Drawing on both the reading and lecture material from today, as well as your own knowledge and reading, consider the various ethical arguments for reducing or eliminating meat consumption (land mammals and birds). Which, if any, of these arguments do you find persuasive? Are there other ethical arguments you would advance either for or against meat eating? Spend about 1/2 your answer on considering the most persuasive arguments, and indicating whether and why they are persuasive to you, then go on to the "motivation problem" - the fact that people are not widely motivated to change their diets in response to these arguments. This could be because the arguments are weak or in spite of them being strong, so your solution to the motivation problem depends in part on your review of the arguments. Spend about 1/2 your answer trying to solve the motivation problem.

• Advice about collaboration: I encourage you to collaborate with other students, but only up to the point of sharing ideas, references to class notes and readings, and your own notes. 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. It's a great way to make sure that a high average level of learning and development occurs. 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:

1. Do not put your name in the file or filename. You may put your student id number in the file. Put a word count in the file.
2. In Word, check "File" and "Options" to make sure your name does not appear as author. You may want to change this to "anon" for this document.
3. Format your answer in double spaced text in a 12 point font, using normal margins.
4. Save the file in the ".docx" file format using the file name "EthicsOfEating".
5. Log in to courses.alfino.org. Upload your file to the Points2 dropbox.

• Stage 2: Please evaluate four student answers and provide brief comments and a score. Review the Assignment Rubric for this exercise. We will only be using the Flow and Content areas of the rubric for this assignment. Complete your evaluations and scoring by November 15, 2020, 11:59pm.

• Use this Google Form to evaluate four peer papers. The papers will be on the Sharepoint site under Student Writing, but please do not edit these files or add comments directly on them. This will compromise your anonymity.
• To determine the papers you need to peer review, I will send you a key with animal names in alphabetically order, along with saint names. You will find your animal name and review the next four (4) animals' work.
• 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 ahead and review enough papers to get to four reviews. This assures that you will get enough "back evaluations" of your work to get a good average for your peer review credit. (You will also have an opportunity to challenge a back evaluation score of your reviewing that is out of line with the others.)

• Stage 3: I will grade and briefly comment on your writing using the peer scores as an initial ranking. Assuming the process works normally, I will give you the higher of the two grades. Up to 28 points in Points.

• 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: [5]. Fill out the form for each reviewer, but not Alfino. Up to 10 points, in Q&W.

• Back evaluations are due TBD, 11:59pm.