Social and ethical issues – Page 26

God, animals, and rights

Brandon has a very good post in response to the post below on animal rights. He argues for a view of rights that is grounded in justice and explicitly connected with our status as creatures of God (all of us, that is). He notes that this can be done in a quasi-Lockean manner, seeing all rights as ultimately derived from God, or in terms of natural piety based on relationship and benefits received:

It is along these two lines, I think, that we can establish the claim that animals have at least a weak form of right. They have rights in virtue of being good creatures of God, and in virtue of being our benefactors, in however weak a sense. The problem with basing animal rights on interests is that the only interests that can establish rights are just rights, so an interest-based account, if it is to work at all, simply reduces to a justice-based one.

I agree with pretty much all of this. In fact, it’s similar in significant ways to the case that Andrew Linzey has made for animal rights in his Animal Theology and Animal Gospel. Linzey taks about “theos-rights” – that is, the rights of God with respect to his creatures. “When we speak of animal rights we conceptualise what is objectively owed to animals as a matter of justice by virtue of their Creator’s right.”

I think Brandon may be right that an interst-based account, as an account of why some creatures are in the “moral club” so to speak, reduces to a justice based one as he’s laid it out. Interests by themselves don’t show that they must be respected. You need some principles of justice such as equality and desert. Still, having interests – that is, having the capacity for one’s experiential welfare to be affected – seems like a sufficient indication that a creature deserves to be given some moral consideration (I agree with Brandon that it may not be necessary, and that it’s possible, and indeed likely, that inanimate creation has moral claims). It’s often, if not primarily, with respect to experiential welfare that we apply our principles of justice. I think this is why some kind of interest-based account can play a role in filling out the contents of rights. Given that animals are good creations of God, wouldn’t some description of their vital interests be necessary in order to give content to what it means to respect them as creatures of God? An animal has a vital interest in, say, not being confined or killed in virtue of the kind of creature that it is and what it means for that creature’s life to go better or worse for it. And respecting that creature’s nature strikes me as an essential component of what it means to treat it as a good creature of God.

March 31, 2007

No rights without duties?

A surprisingly common argument against animal rights goes like this: only beings capable of exercising moral choice and reasoning have rights. Animals don’t exercise moral choice and reasoning (i.e. they aren’t “moral agents”). Therefore animals don’t have rights.

I say that the frequency with which this argument is made is surprising because it implicitly denies something that most of us, I think, believe, namely that there are certain human beings who have moral rights who aren’t necessarily moral agents. Infants, children, the severely mentally handicapped, the brain damaged and comatose, and people with severe Alzheimer’s are, almost certainly in some cases and quite probably in others, incapable of moral reasoning and choice, and yet no one (or hardly anyone) is willing to bite the bullet and say that these classes of human beings have no moral rights. In fact, I suspect that most of us would find the denial of moral rights to any or all of these classes of people to be morally monstrous.

So, it’s hard to see why being a moral agent should be taken to be a necessary condition for being a moral patient, or an object of moral concern. No one proposes that we can treat, say, an infant any way we wish simply because he or she isn’t capable of moral reasoning and choice. It may be that being a moral agent is a sufficient condition for being a moral patient, but I’m hard pressed to see any reason why it should be necessary.

I wonder if the roots of this argument lie in a kind of “contractualist” way of thinking about morality. That is, morality is seen as a kind of contract or bargain into which people enter in order to establish mutually beneficial rules of conduct. If that’s what morality was, then you could see the plausibility of holding that only moral agents had moral rights, since they’d be the only ones capable of entering into such a contract.

But it’s pretty clear that’s not what morality is like, at least if we don’t want to abandon deeply held beliefs about the duties owed to infants, children, the mentally handicapped, etc. Contractualism has a very hard time making sense of moral duties that go beyond what self-interested rational agents have, or would agree to.

A better criterion of who counts morally, far more plausible than the capacity for moral agency, is the capacity for experience. That is, the possibility that one’s life can go better or worse for oneself. Rocks don’t count morally because things can’t go better or worse for a rock. But things can certainly go better or worse for a chimpanzee, a pig, a chicken, a trout, and quite possibly a grasshopper. There’s no particular reason why the pain of an adult human being considered simply in itself should count for more than the the pain of an infant, or an animal, other things being equal. And there’s certainly no good reason why the fact that a being lacks the capacity for moral reasoning should entail that we can treat it in any way whatsoever, that anything goes.

It doesn’t follow from this that animals would have all the same rights as human beings (a right to education, say, or health care, or subsidized museums). This is because, as philosopher Mark Rowlands has pointed out, they have no interests in such things. But they do have interests in things like not suffering, not being killed, and so on, and it’s not at all clear why those interests should be utterly disregarded for the mere convenience of human beings, as they often are.

March 31, 2007

Radicalism vs. gradualism on responding to climate change

This is where I, as a layman, get lost. Bill McKibben and others argue that we’re in the middle of a catastrophe in the making and that only radical changes in our way of life can mitigate the disaster.

Meanwhile, Jonathan Rauch admits that climate change is a real and harmful phenomenon, but argues that gradualism is the only workable solution and that we should focus on minimizing the most serious harms at the margins. “No rethinking of capitalism is required.”

I just don’t have a decent enough grasp of the science to adjudicate between these two positions.

March 23, 2007

Can we do without growth?

Bill McKibben writes in the LA Times of the need, primarily for environmental reasons, to cure ourselves of our addiction to economic growth (“Growth is the ideology of the cancer cell,” Edward Abbey once wrote).

But my question is this: is is possible to have an economy that is both sustainable and wealth-creating? There are still millions and millions of people in the world living in abject poverty and simply putting the breaks on economic growth (assuming that’s even possible without seriously draconian measures) hardly seems like an option. It’s easy for us, who have so much, to tut-tut growth, but I doubt people in the third world would see it quite the same way. Can growth in the developing world continue in spite of a massive reduction in growth in the developed world? I guess my wory about some of the “localist” agenda is that it will effectively cut the very poorest people in the world out of the circle of production and exchange.

I don’t know what the answer to this is (McKibbon himself seems to be trying to addess it in his new book, which I haven’t read), and I’d like to learn more about what people are thinking about these kinds of issues. But if the environment is in as much trouble as many think, then we’re likely to be spending a good chunk of the 21st century trying to figure it out.

March 22, 2007

Compassionate eating as Christian discipleship

Here’s a good lecture on our relationship to animals from a Christian perspective by Matthew Halteman, a Calvin College philosopher. He also contributes to a blog on these themes here.

Prof. Halteman conceptualizes “compassionate eating” as a Christian discipline, which he defines as a repetitive daily practice undertaken to narrow the gap between who we are and who we should be. In terms of diet, compassionate eating is a holistic approach to eating that is sensitive to human, animal, and environmental concerns. Halteman says that there are a continuum of responses to the issue of factory farming, from eating humanely raised meat, to vegetarianism, to veganism, but the baseline is opposition to a system of food production that causes extreme animal suffering, degrades the environment, and fosters inequity and exploitation. While his own preferred position is a vegan one, there’s no reason that anyone can’t take incremental steps toward more compassionate eating without committing to a wholesale vegan lifestyle. (The talk was originally given on Ash Wednesday, and he suggest restricting animal products during Lent as a start.)

While making more responsible choices doesn’t extricate us from responsibility for all the ills that our system of industrial agriculture contributes to, it can be a “symbolic commitment to seeking authenticity in imitation of Christ as a witness, agent, and evidence of the coming kingdom.” This stance helps us, he thinks, to avoid self-righteousness and a kind of moral utopianism that thinks that we can fix all the ills of a fallen world. That said, he thinks that being more intentional about our food choices can have many practical beneficial effects, like improving our personal health, connecting us with those who produce our food (by, e.g. patronizing farmers’ markets), increasing our sense of compassion for all sentient creatures, etc.

March 20, 2007

Animal rights across the political spectrum

A writer at Alternet makes the case for vegetarianism to her progressive allies.

I’ve observed before that even on the Left animal rights still seems to strike many as fringy or unimportant.

Matthew Scully, a former speechwriter for President Bush, has made the case for better treatment of animals on broadly conservative grounds. In fact, reading an article by Scully back in 2002 was actually the catalyst that got me re-thinking the whole issue of animals.

There have even been libertarian defenses of animal rights, though, it has to be said, the vast majority of libertarians seem content to class animals as human property.

March 16, 2007

NAE vs. torture

The National Association of Evangelicals, recently in the news due to a dust-up over their position on global warming, has endorsed a good statement on the use of torture.

I think it’s salutary that the NAE is defining itself independently of certain old-guard evangelical leaders who identify the Christian agenda with the politically conservative one. Any time Christians become beholden to a single party they’re in danger of losing their capacity for independent criticism of the powers that be. Even though I probably don’t agree with some of their positions, the NAE seems like they’re trying to walk that line.

March 14, 2007

Superiority complex

Time blogger Joe Klein has produced a couple of posts purporting to identify the characteristics of “right-wing extremists” and “left-wing extremists.” LWEs hate America, capitalism, mom and apple pie, while RWEs think America and capitalism are never in the wrong, that universal health care equals socialism, etc. Determining to what extent these stereotypes match up with actual people who hold power and influence I leave as an exercise for the reader.

However, another one of Klein’s marks of a RWE is that he or she “believes that there are inferior religions.” By this standard, virtually everyone in the world is a RWE. For instance, is there anyone, even atheists, agnostics, or whoever, who doesn’t believe there is more truth in Buddhism or Christianity than, say, Scientology? Maybe there are some who profess to believe that all religions are bunk through and through and that there is no meaningful differences between them, but this must be a rare breed.

It’s also puzzling to claim that it’s a sign of “extremism” to hold that one’s beliefs are true and that the denials of those beliefs are false. While I’m certainly sympathetic to the view that the world’s great religions have more in common than is immediately apparent, it would seem rash to conclude a priori that there are no meaningful differences in the claims they make about reality. If a particular Buddhist denies that ultimate reality can be meaningfully described as a personal being, doesn’t she ipso facto disagree with her Christian friend who affirms this very thing? And isn’t she committed to the view that, in that respect at least, he religion is “superior” to her friend’s?

Note that this is a different issue from whether one should respect the beliefs of others. I happen to take the view that a variety of positions about the nature of reality and human beings’ relation to it can be rationally held. That doesn’t mean they can all be true; where there are genuine incompatibilities, at most one can be right. But our epistemic situation appears to be such that we can’t publicly demonstrate the manifest superiority of a single view in a way that will convince all reasonable people. We can and should acknowledge the fact that reasonable people of good will and deep moral sensibility can come to conclusions different from ours. But none of that changes the fact that to believe x is to deny not-x, and that if I believe x, then I hold that to believe x is superior to believing not-x (since, other things being equal, it’s better to believe truth than falsehood).

It’s interesting, and perhaps significant, that people apply standards to religious belief that they apply in virtually no other area. Take politics. Like religion it involves longstanding disagreements that are resistant to any lasting solution. And hopefully most of us would acknowledge that there are people who don’t share our political beliefs who are nevertheless just as thoughtful, morally sensitive, well-informed, etc. as we are (moreso in many cases!). And yet, recognizing that in no way commits us to being relativists about politics, does it? Does recognizing that there are smart and decent people who disagree with me about abortion, or the minimum wage, or single-payer health care or whatever mean that I would be wrong – and even extremist! – to hold that my views are “superior” to theirs? If I didn’t regard them as superior in what sense would they even by my views?

True tolerance, it seems to me, doesn’t mean denying that we disagree about things. It means recognizing disagreement and finding ways to respect each other and live together anyway.

March 6, 2007

Preventive war is “inherently pernicious”

Andrew Bacevich urges Congress to renounce the Bush Doctrine:

The fifth anniversary of President Bush’s West Point speech [where he promulgated the “Bush Doctrine] approaches. Prior to that date, Democratic leaders should offer a binding resolution that makes the following three points: First, the United States categorically renounces preventive war. Second, the United States will henceforth consider armed force to be an instrument of last resort. Third, except in response to a direct attack on the United States, any future use of force will require prior Congressional authorization, as required by the Constitution.

Of course, as Dana Carvey, in his GHW Bush persona, used to say, na ga happen. It’s a nice fantasy though, to think that our military policy might be brought into some semblence of conformity with our constitutional principles, not to mention the principles of Just War.

At the very least, it would be interesting to see the question put to any and all of the prospective presidential candidates of both parties whether or not they embrace the principles of the Bush Doctrine and whether they consider preventive war to be a legitimate tool of policy.

If there’s one element of traditional Just War theorizing that’s taken a beating over the last five years, it’s the requirement that war be a last resort. Granted that last resort can be a fuzzy concept; after all, there’s always something else you could conceivably try, however improbable. But the very real danger, one that Bacevich has expounded on at length in his book The New American Militarism, is that war has become a routine tool of policy.

March 1, 2007

Eat less meat, save the planet

The Christian Science Monitor reports on yet another report linking the raising of livestock on an industrial scale to climate change:

As Congress begins to tackle the causes and cures of global warming, the action focuses on gas-guzzling vehicles and coal-fired power plants, not on lowly bovines.

Yet livestock are a major emitter of greenhouse gases that cause climate change. And as meat becomes a growing mainstay of human diet around the world, changing what we eat may prove as hard as changing what we drive.

It’s not just the well-known and frequently joked-about flatulence and manure of grass-chewing cattle that’s the problem, according to a recent report by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). Land-use changes, especially deforestation to expand pastures and to create arable land for feed crops, is a big part. So is the use of energy to produce fertilizers, to run the slaughterhouses and meat-processing plants, and to pump water.

“Livestock are one of the most significant contributors to today’s most serious environmental problems,” Henning Steinfeld, senior author of the report, said when the FAO findings were released in November.

Livestock are responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse-gas emissions as measured in carbon dioxide equivalent, reports the FAO. This includes 9 percent of all CO2 emissions, 37 percent of methane, and 65 percent of nitrous oxide. Altogether, that’s more than the emissions caused by transportation.

Read the rest here.

After a while it starts to look like the case is over-determined for at least cutting back on the amount of meat we eat. If you’re not persuaded by animal welfare arguments, there’s the environmental impact, the equity angle (land used for raising livestock that could be far more productively used to raise grain for impoverished peoples), the labor issues (exploited workers, often illegal immigrants, who make up much of the workforce in slaughterhouses and meat-packing plants), and, of course, personal health.

February 26, 2007

Category: Social and ethical issues

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