Paul Krugman, explaining how the various pieces of the health-care reform bill tie together and why splitting it into discrete measures wouldn’t work. (E.g., requiring insurance companies not to deny coverage implies the need for an individual mandate and subsidies.)
Month: January 2010
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Saturday morning Southern-style tofu fry-up
I’m in the process of making this recipe for crispy tofu with bourbon BBQ sauce, and it promises to be delicious.
I found a helpful tutorial on frying tofu here.
And I’m using Bulleit Bourbon for the sauce, a spicy bourbon with a fairly high rye content.
Yum!
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Beyond “traditionalism vs. liberalism”
Nice piece from Harvard Divinity School professor Mark Jordan attempting to complicate the simplistic “traditional Christianity vs. liberalism” narrative that almost inevitably appears in reporting about religious controversies:
What we are living through is not a fight between a pristine Christianity and the encroaching world, but a divide within Christianity over what exactly should count as tradition. It isn’t a fight between religious conservatives and activist revolutionaries. It is a deep disagreement inside Christianity over what conserving faithfulness means.
Link via.
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“Speciesism”: a red herring?
There have been some great comments on the “veganism versus vegetarianism” post below, which you should check out if you’re interested. But I thought I’d shift gears and look at some of the other arguments in Tzachi Zamir’s book.
A major concern of Zamir’s is arguing that “speciesism” is a red herring in arguments over animal liberation. He’s not out to defend speciesism per se but wants to argue that moral principles already firmly in place call for radical changes in the way we treat non-human animals.
I found one of the key points he made a bit difficult to grasp at first, maybe because once you do grasp it, it’s actually rather blindingly obvious. You can hold, he says, that humans are more important than animals, in the sense that human interests have priority over non-humans. However, it in no way follows that it’s permissible to harm animals for the sake of non-survival-related human interests:
Say that I believe that A’s interests take priority over B’s in the sense that they are overriding when in conflict. This can mean that I am obligated to help A or to promote any of A’s interests before I assist B (if I see myself as obliged to assist B at all). This is far from supposing that I am entitled to hurt B or curtail any of B’s interests so as to benefit A. This distinction is routinely recognized in human contexts: my commitment to assist my child does not extend to a vindication of me actively harming other children in order to advance my own. While aiding my child can be detrimental to other children, as long as I did nothing actively and directly against them, there is nothing immoral in my actions. (p. 9)
Even though we make this distinction all the time in intra-human contexts, it tends to be neglected in debates about animal ethics. Usually the argument focuses on whether human “superiority” can be established in some sense, with the implication that, if it can, then humans have a license to do basically whatever they want to animals.
But even if, according to Zamir, you’re a speciesist in the sense of believing that human interests always take priority over the interests of non-humans whenever they conflict and that we are obligated to help humans and promote their interests before helping animals, it still doesn’t follow that it’s okay to actively harm the interests of animals.
Zamir goes further: even an animal liberationist may agree that it’s sometimes permissible to actively thwart minor animal interests when they conflict with human interests and to thwart the survival interests of non-humans when they conflict with human survival interests (the “lifeboat” scenario). The only form of speciesism that is actually opposed to a robust liberationist agenda is one which holds that any human interest, no matter how trivial, trumps any non-human animal’s interest, no matter how significant. So, even if speciesism in some sense can be justified (which Zamir remains agnostic about), the only form of speciesism that is actually opposed to the liberationist agenda is this very strong, and correspondingly very shaky, version.
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The fundamentalist hangover
It occurred to me that there may be something more personal driving some of the points I tried to make in the previous post. I’ve enountered a fair number of people who were raised in very conservative or fundamentalist churches, and who had bad experiences in some cases. For some of these folks, encountering the writings of, say, Marcus Borg can be profoundly liberating simply because they hadn’t realized that there was a different way of looking at Christianity or the life of faith. They exult in a newfound freedom to explore possibilities that would’ve been closed off to them before. And I wouldn’t want to dispargage or downplay how important that can be for some people.
However, this experience of liberation, it seems, can harden into a permanent anti-fundamentalist defensive crouch. This means that any claims–whether on one’s belief or obedience–can appear to be the thin edge of the fundamentalist wedge. The result is that liberal Christians who are so busy being anti-fundamentalist aren’t always particularly clear on what they’re for (apart, that is, form tolerance, inclusiveness, and social justice, defined in somewhat vague and largely secular terms).
The problem for me–someone who didn’t grow up fundamentalist and is not particularly reacting against its strictures–is that I am looking for a positive, substantial vision of Christian faith. I don’t imagine that traditional formulations of that vision can be taken over by contemporary people wholesale, but I do think there is a stream of continuity. We catch glimpses of this in the creeds, the liturgy, the lives of the saints, and the writings of some of the great theologians and mystics, but our churches all too frequently come across as afraid to use these treasures they have inherited. Is this because any affirmation of a robust Christian identity is considered a step down the slippery slope to fundamentalism?
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On not exactly identifying as a “progressive Christian”
I’ve noticed a trend recently of Christians in mainline chruches, often self-identifying as “progressives,” developing an alternative “canon” of books, Sunday school curricula, approved authors, etc. parallel to those of their conservative counterparts, but which offers an interpretation of Chrisitianity more to their liking. Anyone who’s hung around moderate-to-liberal mainline churches will recognize some of the names: John Dominic Crossan, Marcus Borg, Diana Butler Bass, John Spong, Brian McLaren, etc. The idea seems to be that more liberal Christians need to construct their own identity, an identity that is at least in part one created in opposition to “conservative,” “fundamentalist,” or “evangelical” Christianity.
There’s much to applaud here, at least to the extent that one thinks that U.S. Christianity has been distorted by too close an association with certain conservative interpretations of the Bible and the conservative political agenda they supposedly provide support for. No doubt there are people put off from Christianity because they associate it with a particular social and political stance, and who are relieved when they realize that being a Christian doesn’t require adopting that stance.
But I’m not entirely comfortable with the “progressive” alternative either, for a few different reasons. First, it risks creating another theological ghetto where certain authors, ideas, etc. are “safe” or “sound” because they’re on “our side.” Second, the critique of fundamentalism–while appropriate–often fails to replace it with a substantial or satisfying alternative. Too many progressives seem opposed to the idea of doctinal truth, per se, creating a void into which rush all sorts of theological individualism and eclecticism.
Finally, the theology that many of these progressive authors promote is thin and unsatisfying because it’s too detached from Christian history and tradition. Borg and Crossan, for example, though they both have some good insights, seem to want to replace 2,000 years of Christian reflection on the person of Christ with a historical reconstruction of their own devising. Indeed, their theology threatens at points to be replaced by Jesus-ology: all we need are the social ethics of Jesus (appropriately filtered through a particular set of historical criteria), and we can dispense with most of the God-talk that has characterized historic Christianity, replacing it with, at most, a kind of vague mysticism.
This may be unfair to the more nuanced insights of some of these scholars, but once those insights get filtered down to the level of the layperson in your average mainline parish, the theology you end up with is thin gruel indeed. Maybe what we need instead is more of an ad fontes approach: recovering a more complex understanding of Christian tradition by actually engaging with it. Is it really beyond the average Christian layperson to, say, participate in a group study on Athanasius’ On the Incarnation, or Augustine’s Confessions, or the writings of Luther and Calvin, or even more recent authors who are accessible and firmly rooted in the tradition without being easily pigeonholed as “conservatives”? (Bonhoeffer, C.S. Lewis, Dorothy Sayers, William Placher, Luke Timothy Johnson, and others come readily to mind.) Traditional theology can have surprisingly radical implications in the areas of social ethics–sometimes far more radical than the tepid liberalism sometimes offered as the only alternative to fundamentalism. And, as Christopher and Derek would no doubt remind us, our tradition is embodied in our prayers and liturgies, the history and theology of which most laypeople are, I think it’s safe to say, woefully ignorant.
Of course, really engaging with these sources would require leadership who actually believed there was something to be gained by doing this. But I can’t help but think that progressive Christians are too captivated both by a kind of presentism and a kind of primitivism: on the one hand, they take a dim view of tradition, but at the same time think we can leap back to the original Jesus, unobscured by ecclesiastical accretion, with the soul of an egalitarian social refomer and a tolerant, undogmatic theology. Once you’ve watered Christianity down to that point, though, I for one have a hard time seeing why it’s worth bothering about.
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Vegan versus vegetarian utopia
In his book Ethics and the Beast, Tzachi Zamir makes an interesting “speciesist” case for animal liberation. But for the purposes of this post I want to focus on his argument in favor of moral vegetarianism, and against veganism. That he makes this argument is surprising since most liberationists, I think it’s safe to say, regard veganism as the ideal even if they recognize that practice will often fall short. (This seems to be Peter Singer’s view, for instance.)
To make his case, Zamir distinguishes between veganism, “tentative” veganism, and moral vegetarianism and argues that the last position is superior to the first two. He defines vegans as those who are opposed to all uses of animals period, including using them for milk or eggs. Tentative vegans are those who allow that egg and milk production might, in theory, be carried out in non-exploitative ways, but believe that under current conditions, liberationists should boycott all such products. Moral vegetarians oppose the killing of animals for their flesh, but not the use of milk and eggs under at least some current conditions.
As the first step in his argument against veganism, Zamir makes the case for a distinction between exploitation and the permissible use of animals. The hard-core vegan recognizes no such distinction and insists on a strictly “hands off” approach to animals, at least as the ideal. But, Zamir argues, all use is not necessarily exploitation. It’s possible to be involved in a give-and-take relationship with animals that is not exploitative. X exploits Y only when the relationship is substantially detrimental to Y’s interests, or Y is unable to fully consent to the relationship, or under some combination of these conditions. While the line between exploitative and non-exploitative relationships can be a fuzzy one, there are clear-cut cases on both sides of it. “Generally, you are clearly exploiting someone if your relationship predictably benefits you and harms the person involved” (p. 92).
As an example of a non-exploitative human-animal relationship, Zamir discusses the case of well-cared-for pets. Cats and dogs that could not flourish on their own and are well fed, well housed, and have their medical and other needs seen to are being used by humans (pets give us great pleasure), but not necessarily exploited. “Well-kept pets are a source of joy to their owners, live a much better life than they would have lived in the wild, and, as far as I can tell, pay a small price for such conditions” (p. 97). Note that this only applies to domesticated or quasi-domesticated animals like dogs or cats; keeping genuinely wild animals as pets is pretty clearly detrimental to their interests because it usually involves frustrating deep-seated desires and preventing those animals from engaging in characteristic behaviors.
If this is right, then we have at least one case of non-exploitative animal use. Thus, the strong vegan position–that animal use is always wrong–can’t be right. But what about the use of animals for milk and eggs? (Remember, we’re only dealing here with the narrower vegan-vegetarian debate; Zamir has argued earlier in the book that killing animals for their flesh when other nutritionally adequate food sources are available is wrong.) If pet-keeping can be justified, roughly, by its overall utility to the animals, then a similar justification for raising animals for eggs and milk is potentially available. Zamir contends that it is theoretically possible to provide dairy cows and laying hens with overall good lives and without the “collateral damage” that the dairy and eggs industries currently inflict (e.g., the fates of veal calves and male chicks). And this ideal is superior to the vegan ideal in which these animals cease to exist in significant numbers. If, like pets, these animals can be allowed to live good lives and die natural deaths, then our use of them for eggs and milk wouldn’t be morally problematic and would be superior to the envisaged alternative vegan ideal. If the lives of pets can be an overall good, so can the lives of farm animals, under the right circumstances. A mutually beneficial relationship is possible.
Zamir recognizes that current practice in the egg and dairy industries falls far short of even his vegetarian ideal. This is where the “tentative vegan” position–that absent reform, it’s morally mandatory to boycott the products of these industries–comes in. Tentative vegans don’t oppose the use of animals for eggs and dairy in principle, but nevertheless believe that the current egg and dairy industries are so morally compromised that it’s wrong to buy their products. The moral vegetarian, on the other hand, believes that encouraging reform by purchasing the products of relatively more progressive producers (e.g., cage-free eggs) can be a step toward a better world, even if it falls short of the vegetarian ideal: wholly non-exploitative animal use.
Deciding in principle whether a particular producer is “good enough” to merit buying from, Zamir says, is probably impossible. Instead, he argues for the political superiority of the vegetarian position to that of the tentative vegan. He says that “step-by-step cooperation with partial improvements [can pave] the way to radical reform” (p. 109).
To conclude, against the tentative vegan’s claim that vegetarians participate in an exploitative practice when they eat products that are derived from free-roaming animals, vegetarians first that nothing in the consumption makes the vegan description of it more reasonable than the vegetarian one. Second, political considerations make the vegetarian description of selective-consumption-as-promoting-progress preferable to the overly purist stance of the vegan. (p. 109)
I should admit up front that this argument appeals to me for what are no doubt partly self-serving reasons. I’m a lacto-ovo vegetarian with something of a guilty conscience for not being vegan. So I’m probably predisposed to like the idea that the vegetarian actually occupies the moral high ground. Nevertheless, I do think that Zamir is probably right that use is not necessarily exploitation. (I think the case of pet ownership shows that this is at least a live possibility.) And if dairy and egg production is not wrong per se, then supporting incremental steps toward reform makes sense.
My sense, however, is that most people who buy “free range” eggs or organic milk are under the impression that the animals lead largely pleasant lives. How many of them (us) see these as just one small step on a long road toward a wholly different model of egg and dairy production? To make good on their commitment to non-exploitative animal use, vegetarians need to articulate more clearly what the end goal is and describe a plausible path there from the status quo. Otherwise, the vegan critique will continue to have significant bite.
A Thinking Reed 