Vegetarianism: A Guide for the Perplexed

Kerry Walters

• Editorial: Continuum
• Año: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781441196880
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Philosophy
• Categoría: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

The choice of whether or not to consume animals is more than merely a dietary one. It frequently reflects deep ethical commitments or religious convictions that serve as the bedrock of an entire lifestyle. Proponents of vegetarianism frequently infuriate nonvegetarians, who feel that they're being morally condemned because of what they choose to eat. Vegetarians are frequently infuriated by what they consider to be the nonvegetarians' disregard for the environment and animal-suffering. Vegetarianism: A Guide for the Perplexed offers a much needed survey of the different arguments offered by ethical vegetarians and their critics. In a rigorous but accessible manner, the author scrutinizes the strengths and weaknesses of arguments in defense of vegetarianism based on compassion, rights, interests, eco-feminism, environmentalism, anthrocentrism, and religion. Authors examined include Peter Singer, Tom Regan, Carol J. Adams, and Kathryn Paxton George. As the global climate crisis worsens, population increases, and fossil fuels disappear, ethical and public policy questions about the ethics of diet will become ever more urgent. This book is a useful resource for thinking through the questions.

CHAPTER ONE

Animals, pain, and
factory farms

There is a gulf between the reality of animal production and the perception of animal production in the non-farming American public.

WES JAMISON

The production-line maintenance of animals . . . is without doubt one of the darkest and most shameful chapters in human culture.

KONRAD LORENZ

The in-laws are coming to dinner, and the pressure is on to prepare a meal that lives up to their persnickety standards. Examining the various cuts of meat at your local butcher’s, you wonder if they’d prefer a nice side of shmoo, a fricassee of Chicken Little, or a goulash of renew-a-bits. After some consideration, you opt for the shmoo roast. It’s not as exciting as the goulash or fricassee, but it is a safe choice.

If these three meats are unfamiliar to you, the reader, it’s because they don’t exist. They’re the fantasies of a philosopher and a pair of science fiction novelists. Shmoos, named in honor of one of cartoonist Al Capp’s characters, are animals whose only desire in life is to be killed and eaten by humans. Chicken Little, the science fiction creation, is meat grown in vitro, absolutely devoid of brain or pain sensors—a mere “blob of inert and insensate flesh awaiting consumption,” as one commentator puts it (Fox 1999, p. 165). Renew-a-bits is meat from animals genetically engineered to provide body parts for human consumption without having to be killed. Their limbs can be removed with no distress to the animal, after which they spontaneously regenerate.¹

The first interesting thing about these fantasy meats is that they seem to eliminate reasons for any moral qualms about eating flesh. Animals don’t suffer in providing them. Chicken Little is no more sentient than a finger nail, shmoos positively long to be eaten, and renew-a-bits animals are neither killed nor hurt. In the case of Chicken Little, there’s no worry about polluting land and water with excess animal waste. Since no real harm is done to shmoos or renew-a-bits animals when their body parts are harvested, there’s little chance of slaughterhouse workers or meat consumers growing callous to pain inflicted on food animals. Additionally, let’s stipulate that the same genetic engineering science that gives us these new varieties of meat also makes them cholesterol free, so there’s little health risk in consuming them. The only obvious objection that might be raised to eating shmoo, Chicken Little, or renew-a-bits meat is from a perspective that sees all life as somehow sacred. But surely in vitro meat isn’t “alive” in any interesting sense of the word, shmoos want us to kill and eat them, and regenerative food animals aren’t harmed any more than tomato bushes are when their fruit is plucked.²

The second interesting thing about this imaginary scenario is that its message appeals to us at a deep level. Most of us have never heard of fictional shmoo, Chicken Little, or renew-a-bits meat. But we’re continuously exposed to food advertising that depicts happy, pink, and plump pigs inviting patrons to come into barbeque joints to eat them, smiling chickens who can’t wait for you to bite into one of their legs, and cows joyfully leaping out of green pastures and landing on our plates as juicy steaks and hamburgers.³ This cartoonish kind of marketing is pervasive because it works, and it works because it reinforces what we want to believe: that the animals whose meat we eat aren’t any more inconvenienced or harmed than shmoos, Chicken Little, or renew-a-bits critters would be.

But that, of course, is the real fantasy. In the world in which we live, we must kill an animal to eat it, and most of the billions of land animals we eat—the favorites being chickens, turkeys, cattle, pigs, and sheep—display unmistakably aversive behavior at slaughterhouses. Moreover, the conditions under which the vast majority of them are raised are unspeakably horrendous. Food animals are warehoused by the tens of thousands in facilities aptly called “factory farms.” They live in cramped quarters, are stuffed with hormones to accelerate growth and antibiotics to keep at bay the multitude of illnesses their unsanitary living conditions breed, and often never see the light of day until they’re herded into trucks on their way to the slaughterhouse. As one observer notes, “The vast majority of food animals are now raised under methods that are systematically abusive. For them, discomfort is the norm, pain is routine, growth is abnormal, and diet is unnatural. Disease is widespread and stress is almost constant”⁴ (Fearnely-Whittingstall 2004, p. 24). To top things off, factory farms pollute the environment and expose humans to a spectrum of health risks ranging from Escherichia coli infection to avian flu and mad cow disease. (We’ll explore this more fully in Chapter 7.)

The treatment of animals who supply our meat is so inhumane that more than one commentator, as we’ll see shortly, has likened factory farms to Nazi death camps. Predictably, the comparison often offends people. But most of those who object to it have little or no idea of what goes on in modern factory farming. That’s not surprising, given another marketing deception: bacon, eggs, dairy products, veal, and even hamburger meat are frequently sold in wrappings or cartons that suggest they come from small, family-owned farms. Even though such farms have nearly vanished, replaced by agri-industry that raises food animals on a huge scale, the average American consumer still believes that his hamburger comes from a cow peacefully grazed in green and open meadows, fresh air, and sunshine

Given these realities, moral questions about the propriety of eating meat take on a certain urgency. The most obvious question arising from them is whether humans are justified in a dietary choice that inflicts so much suffering and destruction upon so many animals. Chapters 2–5 will wrestle specifically with this problem. But we need to do a couple of preliminary things. First, we need to examine the claim made by a few philosophers that animals are actually incapable of the suffering that opponents of factory farming techniques claim they endure. Following that, it’s important to take a closer look at just what goes on in factory farms. Defenses of vegetarianism today are fueled in great part (but not exclusively) by moral revulsion with factory farming methods. So a better understanding of them is good preparation for examining animal-based arguments for vegetarianism in later chapters.

Animals and pain

The assertion that animals, at least higher order ones like mammals and birds, are incapable of feeling pain strikes most of us as bizarre. But philosophers are in the business of questioning nearly everything, and some have even taken on what most of us see as self-evident: the claim that animals feel pain.

The seventeenth-century philosopher Rene Descartes popularized the notion that animals were painless because they were mindless. Before him, even though most European thinkers denied that animals possessed souls, none of them thought beasts incapable of pain and generally condemned the infliction of needless suffering on them.

Descartes broke with this tradition. As a dualist, he believed that humans were thinking creatures because they were composites of two distinct substances, body and mind. (Exactly how the two managed to interact is a riddle neither he nor any other dualist has persuasively cracked.) But because he found no sign of mind in animals—rationality, for example, or language—he concluded that they possessed but one substance: body. The “greatest of all prejudices,” he wrote, “is that of believing that brutes think,” an error born “from having observed that many of the[ir] bodily members . . . are not very different from our own in shape and movements, and from the belief that our mind is the principle of the motions which occur in us” (Descartes 1999, p. 263). But animal behavior, unlike human behavior, doesn’t come from cogitation. It’s simply an automatic series of reflexes, more analogous to the motion of a clock than to the conscious deliberation practiced by humans.

What this means, concluded Descartes, is that animals are incapable of experiencing pain. Pain, after all, is a mental state. Since animals lack the capacity for mental states, they lack the necessary condition for the experience of pain. They may behave in pained ways, shrieking or snarling or running around in circles. But such activity no more entails pain than does the whistling, quivering, or bursting (to make a twentieth-century comparison) of an overheated car radiator.

Modern-day philosophers Peter Carruthers and Peter Harrison agree with Descartes’s denial of animal pain, although not his brand of dualism. As far as Carruthers is concerned, there’s no evidence that animals possess enough of an interior life to have conscious experiences at all. Their bodies may react to certain stimuli in biochemically “pained” ways, but the beasts themselves lack conscious awareness of the pain because they are incapable of “thinking about their own thinkings” (Carruthers 1994, p. 193). Lacking consciousness, much less the ability to reflect on their experiences (which Carruthers denies they have anyway), their unfelt biochemical “pain” is in no way relevantly similar to human-felt experiences of pain.

Peter Harrison denies animal pain by appealing to a purportedly evolutionary argument. Unlike animals, he says, humans aren’t closed instinctual systems. We possess free will, the ability to make choices in the world. Our capacity for pain is an evolutionary attribute that signals the need for us to make a choice when faced with a potentially dangerous situation. Animals, by comparison, are simply programed to flee potentially harmful situations. They have neither the need nor the capacity to make choices. Consequently, ascribing pain to them is unnecessary because they have no evolutionary need for it. They possess no continuous sense of self that would enable them to grasp any experience of pain as their own anyway. Animals, like chronic amnesiacs, always live in the present moment. Even if they had felt pain receptors, they would be unable to recall or, for that matter, anticipate pain (Harrison 1989, 1991, 1993).

Philosopher Jan Narveson takes a less extreme, more common sense approach than either Carruthers or Harrison. He doesn’t deny the capacity of certain animals to feel pain, but he questions the propriety of likening either its intensity or its moral weight to human pain.

Isn’t it reasonable to hold that the significance, and thus the quality, and so ultimately the utility, of the sufferings of beings with sophisticated capacities is different from that of the sufferings of lesser beings? Suppose one of the lower animals to be suffering quite intensely. Well, what counts as suffering of like degree in a sophisticated animal—one like, say, Beethoven or Kierkegaard, or you, gentle reader? If we are asked to compare the disutility of a pained cow with that of a pained human, or even a somewhat frustrated one, is it so absurd to think that the latter’s is greater? (Narveson 1977, p. 166)

Narveson’s point is that “sophisticated” human pain typically involves more than just immediate physical discomfort. Implicated in the experience of pain are mental states such as fear, anxiety, dread, frustration, regret, shame, hope, and disappointment. All of them flow from an acute “aware[ness] of the future stretching out before us, and of the past in the other direction” (Narveson 1983, p. 53). Animals lack this temporal sensibility, thus making their experiences of pain profoundly different from humans’.

Two broad assumptions typically underlie many arguments that deny pain capacity to animals. The first is the Cartesian-inspired claim that animals lack any kind of mental states—not merely experiences of pain, but also beliefs, language, or the capacity to reason. Denying a creature these qualities is tantamount to saying that it isn’t a person, since only persons, from a Cartesian perspective, are capable of mental states. So animals don’t experience pain because they’re not persons. The second assumption reflects a rather tired epistemological skepticism about the possibility of knowing other minds. I observe only the external behavior of others, not their interior mental states. How, then, can I know with any degree of certainty that the mental states I infer on the basis of their behavior are actual? Perhaps the person under observation is pretending. Or perhaps she’s a robot, an automaton programed to behave in certain person-like ways but utterly devoid of mental states. Any mental state I ascribe to her is ascribed, not observed, and inferences based on observation are always liable to error. And if I can’t speak with certainty about mental states when it comes to fellow humans, how can I possibly be confident in assuming that animals have them?

There are a couple of responses to the first assumption. To begin with, an argument can be made for the claim that personhood ought not to be limited to humans. If the determining characteristics of what it means to be a person include abilities such as reasoning, believing, or manipulating language, then it’s entirely possible that nonhuman mammals such as chimpanzees and gorillas qualify as persons.⁵ If that’s the case, we have no reason for denying them mental states like pain.

Granted, no one wants to argue that great apes possess the reasoning skills of a normal human adult. But they may well be similar to that of a human toddler or a developmentally disabled adult.⁶ And this brings us to the second response to the Cartesian-inspired denial of mental states in animals. We don’t doubt for an instant that human persons, even marginal ones, experience pain. When we observe an infant or an adult with the mental capacity of a toddler scream and flinch after touching a hotplate, we immediately infer the presence of pain. Yet neither of them has fully developed reasoning skills. Why then presume that animals with similar cognitive capacities are incapable of experiencing pain? As we’ll see in the next chapter, Peter Singer argues that there’s no good reason whatsoever to do so, and chalks the presumption up to a prejudice he calls “speciesism.”

But what about animals that obviously fail to qualify as nonhuman persons? This question brings us back to the epistemological skepticism that denies we can know the mental states of other humans, much less animals. From a philosophical perspective, the perplexity is intriguing. But from a practical one, it seems profoundly irrelevant. Doubt about whether other humans have mental states is surely contrived rather than genuine. We may be honestly perplexed about what the exact nature of another person’s mental state is, but we don’t really doubt its presence simply because we can’t offer a rigorous proof for it. Even more, the mental state of pain is correlated with certain behavioral displays that we all recognize. Granted, a person can either fake or hide pain. But in the first case, she mimics the behavioral display that everyone associates with pain, and in the second she inhibits it.⁷

If we observe similar behavioral displays in nonperson animals, we have good reason to presume, by analogy, that they are indeed experiencing pain—without, again, being able to offer a knockdown proof. Peter Singer, for example, notes that “the basis of my belief that animals can feel pain is similar to the basis of my belief that my daughter can feel pain. Animals in pain behave in much the same way humans do, and their behavior is sufficient justification for the belief that they feel pain” (Singer 2008, p. 69). Feminist vegetarian Josephine Donovan agrees. In her opinion, a homologous analogy can be drawn between humans and animals that focuses on displays such as body language, eye movement, facial expression, and tone of voice:

If that dog is yelping, whining, leaping about, licking an open wound, and since if I had an open wound I know I would similarly be (or feel like) crying and moving about anxiously because of the pain, I therefore conclude that the animal is experiencing the same kind of pain as I would and is expressing distress about it. One imagines, in short, how the animal is feeling based on how one would feel in a similar situation. (Donovan 2007c, p. 363)

But surely, it might be objected, homologous analogy will take us only so far. How can we invoke the same behavioral standards that we use to determine pain in mammals to, for example, cuttlefish and lobsters? Facial expressions and tones of voice obviously won’t do at all. Aversive behavior—Donovan’s “moving about anxiously”—is fraught with risk too; after all, amoebae and paramecia display aversive behavior when exposed to light. But are they experiencing pain?

To address the analogy difficulty, some animal behaviorists and philosophers (Birke 1994; Dawkins 2006; Rollin 1989) suggest additional criteria for identifying pain. First, careful observation of animals may teach us species-specific signs of distress that signal pain in even hard cases like cuttlefish and lobsters. In addition, we can gauge animal pain by paying attention to physiological changes in hormone levels or the ammonia content of muscles, the presence of pain-inhibiting chemicals such as endorphins and enkephalins, and fluctuation in body temperature, all of which can signal the presence of pain. It may, however, be objected that focusing on physiological signs of pain is still an exercise in homologous inference. And as we’ve already seen, Peter Carruthers makes a distinction between unfelt biochemical “pain” and felt pain.

Speaking of Carruthers, what about the specific arguments against the possibility of animal pain defended by him, Peter Harrison, and Jan Narveson? Carruthers, it will be recalled, argued in Cartesian fashion that animals lack the capacity for genuine mental states such as pain because they’re unable to “think about their own thinkings”—or, in other words, to reflect on the content of their consciousness. But if this self-reflection is a necessary condition for possessing...

Índice

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Introduction: The ethics of diet
• 1   Animals, pain, and factory farms
• 2   The basic argument
• 3   The argument from interests
• 4   The argument from rights
• 5   The ecofeminist argument
• 6   The environmental argument
• 7   The anthrocentric argument
• 8   The reverence for life argument
• Notes
• Works cited
• Index