Food for Thought

Philosophy and Food

Elizabeth Telfer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781134784523
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Looking at the philosophical issues raised by food this short and accessible book questions the place food should have in our individual lives. It shows how traditional philosophy and its classic texts can illuminate an everyday subject.

1 Feeding the Hungry

The Claims of the Starving

Millions of people, in many parts of the world, are either starving or malnourished. Most of them are in Third World countries, but there are also pockets of severe deprivation in First World countries. For all these people the main question about food is not a philosophical one, but the practical one of how to get enough of it to stay alive and healthy. In what follows I assume that the readers of this book are not in this position, any more than the writer is. For us the pressing question is not ‘How are we going to get enough to eat?’ but ‘What are our moral obligations to the starving and malnourished?’ In this chapter I shall discuss not only First World obligations to the Third World, but also the obligations which the well-off have to those in need in their own country.

If nothing could be done to relieve food shortages in the Third World, there would be no moral issue. But probably a great deal can be done— though it is not always easy to work out what. There are two kinds of problem, as the philosopher Nigel Dower explains:

On the one hand there are disasters of various kinds, like earthquakes, droughts or floods. Emergency assistance is given, people write cheques, and for a moment, there is a strong sense of human solidarity.

On the other hand there is the steady grinding poverty which grips hundreds of millions of people and does not attract media attention. In response to this there are various kinds of programmes, some organized by governments (with or without foreign aid), some organized by charities. These programmes aim to help the very poor escape from their poverty, or to ensure that people do not get into situations of extreme poverty in the first place. These programmes are less glamorous than emergency aid, but their impact is far greater.

(Dower 1991:273)

So behind the emergencies which capture the public attention there is a long-term need which we must address if we have any obligations at all to the Third World.

Sometimes it is claimed that even the most needy country could feed its population if it did things differently: grew different crops, for example, redistributed its land or settled the internal unrest which stops its farmers from farming. If this claim is true it seems to show that the First World has no obligation to help poorer nations, because their plight is their own fault. However, the claim is not true: many poor countries’ problems are the fault of the First World (O’Neill 1986:111; Dower 1991: 274–5). And even if it were true in a particular case—if, for example, hunger arose from a failure to set aside reserves when supplies were plentiful—it would not follow that the First World has no obligation to help. We think it perfectly appropriate to give help to individuals who genuinely need it, even if their difficulties are of their own making. In the same way we should perhaps help nations whose problems are their own fault—the more so when we consider that the failure is often that of the government, but the suffering falls on the citizens.

According to one school of thought, however, the affluent nations do not have a moral obligation to help the Third World solve its food problems: indeed they have a moral duty not to do so. This view originates with Thomas Malthus, the eighteenth-century writer on population, and is therefore conveniently labelled neo-Malthusian. In the twentieth century it is represented by Garrett Hardin, though not only by him. In his famous paper ‘Living on a lifeboat’ (Hardin 1985), Hardin compares the rich nations to lifeboats and the poor ones to swimmers wanting to climb aboard. If we in the First World help the poor nations (allow them to climb aboard), we not only enable their populations to increase, we also take away their incentive to improve their own food production and to save food for emergencies. The world population will increase, eventually it will be impossible to support it and the lifeboats will sink. In other words, there will be disaster on a scale much greater than any disaster which now tempts us to let people on to the lifeboat.

This argument is not intended to be an appeal to self-interest. Rather, it bases a moral choice on the lesser of two evils: it is morally better to let relatively small disasters happen now than to bring about enormous ones in the future. This assumes that the issue is to be judged solely on the overall consequences of intervention. Some would challenge that assumption and say that we should relieve now what suffering we can, regardless of the long-term consequences: but this conclusion is as harsh as Hardin’s own. Fortunately we do not need to choose between the two conclusions, because Hardin’s prediction of the consequences of aid—on which both conclusions are based—does not appear to have any truth behind it. All the evidence shows that when a country’s prosperity increases, its birthrate goes down—perhaps because, as infant mortality decreases, people no longer feel they need large families to ensure that some survive (Lappé and Collins 1988:19–28).

The Human Right to Food

Having disposed of the argument that we ought not to intervene, we can now consider whether we have an obligation to do so. I suggest we begin not with a philosophical theory, but with what—judging from letters to newspapers and so on—are the typical, pre-philosophical reactions of the ‘man in the street’. We cannot end there, because these reactions may turn out to be incoherent, or inconsistent with other moral claims which we are not prepared to give up. But no philosophical account will be plausible unless it makes sense of what people ordinarily feel. And we need to consider not our reaction to the statistics, which most of us find difficult to translate into real terms, but our reaction on those occasions when the realities of the situation are brought home to us. What do we think and feel when we see, on television or in the press, pictures of starving people?

I suggest that many people feel not only compassion (mingled with distress, disgust and a number of other emotions) but also a strong sense that there is something morally wrong. This feeling is different from the one which people have when they see pictures of an earthquake or other natural disaster (unless its effects have clearly been made worse by negligence). It involves the thought that something could have been or still can be done about the situation, and that this action is not a discretionary one but an obligation which some person or persons have failed or are failing to meet.

When photographing disasters, the cameraman often focuses on one suffering individual. This technique has been criticised as sentimental. Perhaps it is, if the person chosen is an unusually pitiful or attractive baby, for example. But if the individual is representative of all, the point being made is not a sentimental one. It is the true claim that the people portrayed are not just a group, an abstract entity which cannot suffer, but individuals, each of whom can and does suffer. And where we think that there is something morally wrong about the situation, portraying individuals in this way can make us realise more clearly that the situation is morally unacceptable, because it is in fact morally unacceptable that any of these individual human beings should be dying of starvation when something could have been done to save them.

The philosophical discourse that deals with these moral ideas is that of human rights. A human right is a basic moral right of paramount importance, belonging to every human being simply in virtue of being a human being, and entailing corresponding moral duties for both governments and individuals. To say that human rights are moral rights is to say that human beings possess them—and ought therefore to be treated in certain ways—independently of whether their government enforces such treatment by legislation. Indeed, part of the concept of a human right is that it provides a standard whereby the level of protection which a government gives to its people may be judged. A human right to subsistence is included among the rights listed in the United Nations’ Declaration of Human Rights:

Article 25. (1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services…

(United Nations 1948:143–8)

There are, however—and this is the point at which the pre-philosophical beliefs come under philosophical scrutiny—serious difficulties in the idea of a human right to food.

Whose Duty?

I am walking along a deserted country road and see a small child in a pond. It is clearly in difficulties and about to drown. I can save the child by wading in, but I am wearing my new and exceedingly tight leather trousers, which I cannot remove without assistance. If I go into the pond I will ruin them, and there is no help at hand. So I walk on and leave the child to drown.

Everyone will condemn my action, and assume that the child had a right to be rescued. If one can avert a disaster without doing something else wrong, surely one should. And everyone will feel that the loss of my trousers is of no importance in comparison with the loss of the child’s life. I suggest that those who are starving have a human right to be rescued just as the child has a right to be rescued, and that they have this right even at the expense of a certain amount of the wealth of the First World, just as the child has it even at the expense of my trousers.

But this analogy, adapted from one suggested by Peter Singer (Singer 1972:229–43), is unsatisfactory in one respect, one which brings out the single most serious difficulty in the idea of a human right to food: the difficulty of deciding whom the right is against, or in other words, who has the corresponding duty. With the drowning child the duty clearly falls upon me: the rescue ought to be carried out, I can do it and I am the only person who can. Indeed, it is easier to talk of duty than of rights in this case: we are prepared to say that the child has a right to be rescued, but hardly that he has a right against me. But with the rights of starving people the situation is reversed: it seems natural to talk of their rights, but not at all clear on whom the corresponding duties fall.

To clarify this problem a little, no single affluent individual can have a duty to provide for all those in need, since no individual is wealthy or powerful enough. Nor is any single rich man duty bound to provide food for any one poor man simply as a human right, though of course the rich man may have duties to specific people in virtue of specific responsibilities, such as parenthood. Similarly, one affluent nation cannot have a duty to provide for all those in need everywhere, since no nation is wealthy or influential enough; and there is no specific nation which a particular affluent nation has a duty to provide for as a matter of human rights—though a nation might have a special duty to (for example) an excolony.

The difficulty arises because the human right to food is (in technical language) a positive right, a right to receive goods and services, rather than a negative right, a right not to be harmed or interfered with or restricted. With negative human rights, such as the right to life and liberty, there is no problem about who has the corresponding negative duty: the duty not to interfere with each other person’s life or liberty falls on, and can be carried out by, each one of us. And the duty to enforce this non-interference—to maintain law and order—falls on each government, and, since it is relatively inexpensive, can in general be carried out by it.

Can we find a way of deciding on whom the duty falls in the case of positive rights, such as the right to enough food? As we have said, individuals cannot have with regard to positive rights the clearly demarcated kind of duty that they have with negative rights, or the specific kind of duty that they have in a face-to-face emergency like that of the drowning child. But we might claim that individuals have the duty of fostering and supporting a set of organisational structures to meet the needs of the hungry. In that case the hungry could be said to have rights of two sorts: against their government, to have an organised system or structure introduced that will provide for their needs, and against their fellow-citizens, to have their support for such a system. To put it another way, the more affluent citizens can fulfil their duty to the hungry by setting up relief schemes through the agency of their government and pooling their contributions (Downie 1964:115–42).

This set of rights, duties and mechanisms deals only with the distribution of goods that are under the control of one government. It therefore makes sense only in a country with sufficient resources, taken as a whole, to feed all its people. But that is not an insignificant part of the world: it includes not only poor Third World countries where some individuals have great wealth, but also a great many affluent First World countries, where there are pockets of deprivation. I shall return later to the question of the rights of the hungry in countries that do not have enough resources to feed all their citizens.

Though affluent citizens—in this case—pool their relief contributions to pay for government aid, the government is not their agent in the same sense that a charity would be, because their contributions are not voluntary. But there are many duties that governments may legitimately compel their citizens to perform: because of their importance, because isolated individuals cannot carry them out, or—as in this case—both. If government action is the only or best way in which every needy person in the country can be guaranteed enough food as of right, then the duty of each individual in respect of that right is a duty to campaign for, vote for and support adequate welfare systems. These typically include training schemes and schemes to create employment, as well as handout schemes.

I said above that the first claim of the needy, in a country that can feed its own people, is against their own government and fellow-citizens. This raises two questions: Why, since human rights are rights against everyone, do the needy have a claim against their own government in particular, instead of against the world community? And does their own government have a greater duty to them than it does to foreigners— should a government, in other words, bring its own citizens’ standard of living up to a given level before offering help to others? These two questions are most easily dealt with in the form of two similar questions: Is a government entitled to treat its own citizens more favourably than those of other countries, and is it obliged to do so?

Given that it is nation-states that raise and spend revenue and control the distribution of welfare, it is natural to think that the rights of their needy citizens are in the first place against them. From the human rights point of view, we can approve of this arrangement as a more efficient way of looking after people than if help were arranged on a world-wide basis. But people also normally approve of governments which, if they can afford it, offer their citizens a higher standard of living than that demanded by their human right, rather than bringing them up to a human rights standard and then spending the rest of the welfare budget on overseas aid. In other words, people generally approve of governments which show partiality to their own citizens.

The customary justification for giving preference to one’s own circle is that it is a natural human characteristic which everyone is entitled to express, and which does not therefore conflict with the essentially impartial nature of morality: we are not saying that Britain may give preference to its own citizens but that every nation may do so. The customary justification of partiality to friends and family in particular is that personal relations are important for a satisfactory human life and for moral development (Blustein 1991:217–30).

This justification does not straightforwardly apply to a government’s favouring its own citizens, but points to two reasons why we can find it morally acceptable. The first is that people often have special feelings towards their fellow-citizens, analogous to those they have those towards their family; and perhaps this relationship, though less intense than friendship and love of family, is an enriching part of human life which governments should foster and give expression to. The second reason is that poor people in a rich country are excluded from normal social life, and may therefore be more wretched and in need of help than materially poorer people in a poor country. So we must conclude that a government has a duty, to some degree at least, to favour its own citizens over those of other countries.

This short account is not meant to suggest that a government that can, in theory, feed all its people will have no philosophical or practical difficulties, even in First World countries, in doing so in practice. Among philosophical problems there is the question of what counts as need: if people can afford enough food only by working at an unjustly low wage, for example, do they need help? And similarly, do people have a right to welfare without making any contribution to it (the ‘workfare’ issue)? Among practical problems is the fact that a government aiming to ensure that all its people are fed must stay in power and get its policies implemented. If it is to do this without using tyrannical methods that would be as great an evil as the starvation it is trying to prevent, it must have the support of the richer citizens. As we have said, they have a duty to provide this support: but even if they acknowledge this duty in general, they may reject a particular measure if they think it unjust or inefficient. There are also the familiar problems of ensuring that everyone gets enough to eat without creating a ‘dependency culture’, and of not interfering unduly when attempting to prevent benefits being wasted.

Adequate treatment of these issues would clearly require a chapter each. In this context all I hope to have shown is that the duty of those who are well-off in an affluent society, in respect of the human right of everyone in their own society to have enough to eat, is primarily a political one: the duty to support the institutions by which this can be done. How far this duty extends into our individual lives, and how it is to be evaluated against other demands made on us, are questions to which I shall return.

The Libertarian Position

There is one group of philosophers for whom the foregoing is an irrelevance, because—they say—there cannot be a human right to subsistence. If there were, governments would be obliged to go beyond their legitimate role of protecting the citizens: they would have to make them contribute, through taxes, to the good of others. This would be to infringe the basic liberties of the citizens and to use them merely as a means of benefiting other people. People who hold this view are known as Libertarians. If what they say is true, the only human rights are negative rights, rights not to be interfered with, as opposed to positive rights to receive goods, and a government’s only duty is to respect negative rights and make others do so. (This is a narrow view of the role of government. Usually nowadays even laissez-faire regimes, such as the Thatcher government in the 1980s in Britain, see their aims as going beyond protection.)

It might be pointed out that even if the state is not entitled to use taxpayers’ money except to protect them, it does not follow that individuals have no obligations to the Third World: what follows is only that any such obligation is not one which the state may compel them to fulfil. However, the existence of individual obligations is not enough to demons...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Feeding the hungry
• 2. The pleasures of food
• 3. Food as art
• 4. Food duties
• 5. Hospitableness
• 6. Temperance
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index