A Thinking Reed

Category: Social and ethical issues

  • A note on Christ and culture

    Derek has a convincing piece at Episcopal Cafe arguing that it’s simplistic to see “liberals” (specifically, those who support things like women’s ordination and same-sex marriage) as simply going with the cultural flow while “conservatives” are upholding timeless standards of biblical morality. Using H. R. Niebuhr’s typology from his classic Christ and Culture, he points out that both liberals and conservatives are frequently beholden to culture in various ways. Moreover, he urges “liberals” to genuinely ground their convictions in the soil of the gospel.

    While I largely agree with this, I also think Christians should honestly admit that “the culture” is sometimes up ahead of us in various respects. In other words, it’s not necessarily a question of our bringing “Christ” to bear on “culture,” since we can’t claim to have a monopoly on truth and churches have their own cultures that are often shaped by things other than the gospel. The church always remains under the judgment of the gospel (hence the Reformation slogan that the church should be “always reforming”–semper reformanda).

    Plus, if, as Christians believe, Christ is a living reality, he eludes any attempt by the church to grasp or “own” him. And because Christ is Lord of the whole world, his Spirit can manifest itself in people and movements outside the formal confines of the Christian community. It’s hard to imagine, for instance, that churches would’ve made what progress they have in equality for women and LGBTQ folks if they hadn’t been prodded by largely secular movements.

    Obviously Christians need to use discernment and the resources of their own tradition to sift the wheat from the chaff. But this is just to say that different approaches (as described by Niebuhr’s typology) will be appropriate under different circumstances. Sometimes the church will be called upon to take a rejectionist “Christ against culture” stance, sometimes it will be more accomodating, sometimes it will exist in a paradoxical tension, and sometimes it will seek creative transformation.

  • Bad arguments against vegetarianism, the continuing series

    The Atlantic‘s Ta-Nehisi Coates recently wrote two posts on why he’s “going vegetarian.” One thing that always seems to happen when someone discusses their decision to become vegetarian is that people take umbrage–as thought they’re being personally attacked. Some of TNC’s commenters fall into this category.

    One argument made there–and one that comes up with surprising frequency–is that vegetarians (and vegans) are being irresponsible by “dropping out” of the meat production system instead of working for change “from within.” One of TNC’s commenters writes:

    I would argue that vegetarianism is in fact the easy way out: removing oneself from the problems of meat consumption and societal harm it causes doesn’t necessarily change anything–even on a personal level.

    There are a few problems with this argument. First, it cuts both ways: if my going veggie doesn’t necessarily change anything (presumably because one person’s impact is too small), then how would my buying “ethical” meat change anything? Second, there’s nothing preventing vegetarians from working on a societal level to reform the practices and institutions of food production. (The Humane Society’s Wayne Pacelle is a good example: he’s a vegan who is ruthlessly pragmatic in working for factory farming reforms.) Third, I’m willing to bet that vegetarians are more likely, on average, to be involved with efforts to reform and find alternatives to our industrial food system than their meat-eating counterparts.

    It’s also strange to suggest that it would be somehow bad to “remove oneself form the problems of meat consuption.” Would it be bad to remove oneself from the problems of clothes made in sweatshops or produce harevested by exploited workers if it were possible? And besides, surely no one is obliged to eat meat.

    Ultimately the motive for ethical vegetarianism (and veganism) isn’t just to effect change in an obvious consequentialist sense. It’s an act rooted in a desire for integrity, of opting out of the products of an industry that is cruel and unjust. There is moral value in simply refusing to participate in some practices, even if others don’t follow suit, and even if doing so doesn’t bring those practices to a halt.

  • What would “conservative” marriage look like?

    “Advance or Decadence are the only choices offered to mankind. The pure conservative is fighting against the essence of the universe.” — Alfred North Whitehead

    As more and more people come to support same-sex marriage, social conservatives and other opponents of marriage equality have been driven to reject the fundamental premise of modern marriage. This is because that premise–namely, that people should marry the person of their choosing and should marry primarily for love and happiness–seems to entail that there’s no good reason why people who are predominantly or exclusively attracted to members of the same sex shouldn’t also be able to marry the person of their choosing.

    So you get conservatives insisting that marriage isn’t really about love and happiness after all, but should be tied in some unspecified way to reproduction. (Ross Douthat’s latest column is just one example of this line of argument.) Few opponents of same-sex marriage are willing to bite the bullet and advocate denying various non-procreative groups–the infertile, those past child-bearing age, and those who for whatever reason just don’t want to have kids–access to the estate of marriage. So, it’s hard to see just what would be the practical upshot of upholding the supposed “Judeo-Christian” ideal of marriage-with-reproduction-only apart from opposing same-sex marriage.

    In the past, people had a variety of institutional or social pressures trying to dictate whom they should marry and why. This could be economic necessity, family pressure, the desire for social respectability, and so on. The conservative view of marriage may have made sense in such a context. But with those pressures largely gone, at least among large swaths of the populace, people are more or less free to marry whomever they want. So why wouldn’t they marry for love and happiness? (This isn’t to deny, of course, that people still marry for a variety of reasons, some more creditable than others.)

    Moreover, how would one put the conservative marriage ideal into practice? By pointedly not marrying for love? Most people I know want to have children (or have them already), but they want to raise their children with someone whom they love and are compatible with. Why would you want anything else? And why would you need to deny marriage rights to those who can’t or don’t want to have kids, or aren’t going to have them on the same terms, to validate your own relationship?

  • A very brief argument for animal liberation

    From philosopher Steve Sapontzis:

    Very briefly, the argument for [animal liberation] runs as follows. Morality is goal-directed activity which aims at making the world a better place in terms of reduced suffering and frustration, increased happiness and fulfilment, a wider reign of fairness and respect for others, and enhanced presence and effectiveness of such virtues as kindness and impartiality. Through our exploitation of nonhuman animals we detract from all of these moral goals. Factory farming, fur trapping and other exploitations of nonhuman animals increase the suffering and frustration in the world and reduce happiness and fulfilment – the exact opposite of our moral goals. In using our vast power over nonhuman animals to make them bear burdens and suffer losses so that we may be comfortable and prosperous, we extend and enforce a reign of tyranny and disregard, verging on contempt, for others – again, the exact opposite of our moral goals. Finally, by giving revulsion at and compassion for the suffering of nonhuman animals the demeaning labels of ‘squeamishness’ and ‘sentimentality’ and by conditioning children to disregard such feelings as they learn to hunt, butcher or vivisect nonhuman animals, we limit and inhibit the virtues of which we are capable — again, just the opposite of our moral goals. Consequently, in all these ways our goal of making the world a morally better place will be more effectively pursued by liberating from human exploitation all those capable of suffering and happiness and of being treated fairly and virtuously.

    This extract comes from an article found here.

  • Food rules for Christians

    I think it was Stanley Hauerwas who said, with typical pungency, that no religion can be interesting if it doesn’t tell you what to do with your pots and pans or your genitals. By at least part of that criteria, Exeter University theologian David Grumett seems to be trying to make Christianity interesting again. In an article in the Christian Century, he argues for a recovery of “food rules” among Christians.

    Young Augustine’s experience with the Manichees, Grumett argues, left a somewhat unfortunate legacy to Western Christianity of disdaining any religious limitations on how much and what kinds of food we consume. In reacting against the anti-materialism of the Manichees, Augustine delivered a blow to the valuable practice of regulating our diets according to religious ideals.

    Grummett suggests that recovering a more traditional ideal, like that associated with early Benedictine monasticism, can help Christians relate their eating practices to their faith:

    The desert fathers were famous for their meager diets, and early monastic rules were codifying this practice in moderated form. The major rule for monasteries in the West, St. Benedict’s Rule, prohibited healthy adults from eating the flesh of four-footed animals. It also limited the number of meals that could be taken in a day and the range of choices at a single meal.

    This ban on what we today call red meat points to a Christian tradition different from that of Augustine, one in which food choices express spiritual devotion and identify people as part of a faith community. It also shows how, through avoiding the food typically thought of as high-status food, Christians may resist the networks of oppression which such food symbolizes and on which it depends. To eat meat frequently requires significant quantities of land, feed and water—either your own or those belonging to someone else, who might, on a good day, be paid a fair price for them. Worldwide, animals farmed for meat generate more pollution than motor vehicles and consume vast quantities of food while elsewhere people are going hungry.

    “Modern Christians,” he writes, “are in danger of slipping into a fast-food mentality: speed, convenience and illusory abundance rule, regardless of the consequences for the planet.” Attending to the sources of our food–how it’s produced, where it comes from–can be ” a means of reconnecting to our spiritual heritage and traditions and marking the Christian calendar and the seasonal calendar—which is itself God-given.”

    Grummett doubts that agreement on a set of food rules is either likely or desirable, but observing cycles of fasting and feasting, restricting certain types of food, and reconnecting to the sources of our food are all ways of living out our faith in concrete, daily practice.

  • What would ethical egg production look like? And how would we get there?

    To make the point of the previous post a little more concrete, let’s think about what truly ethical egg production would look like from a “moral vegetarian” perspective. Remember, the moral vegetarian isn’t opposed to all forms of animal use, but opposes those uses that constitute exploitation (i.e., harm the interests of the animals involved).

    It seems that, for egg production to be ethical (i.e., non-exploitative), it would have to meet at least these conditions:

    – hens have access to the outdoors and the space and opportunity to engage in natural behavior;
    – no debeaking;
    – no forced molting;
    – no routine killing of male chicks; and
    – hens are allowed to live out something approximating a natural life span.

    As the Humane Society points out, the most common labels that consumers might take to indicate a higher standard of treatment (“free range,” “cage free,” “organic,” etc.) permit at least some of these practices, and in only some cases do they require third-party auditing of compliance. Only eggs labeled “Animal Welfare Approved” are produced in ways that avoid most of these objectionable practices; yet, as HSUS says, “there are no participating producers that sell to supermarkets.” (Though the Animal Welfare Approved website lists participating producers from whom you can buy directly.)

    So, it seems that for the moral vegetarian, the goal should be to support egg producers that meet, or are at least moving toward meeting, standards like the Animal Welfare Approved ones. The question, then, is: are they doing that by buying, say, “cage-free” eggs (as I do myself from time to time)? Does buying cage-free eggs serve to nudge producers in the direction of more stringent standards? Or does it send a signal that cage-free is enough and consumers won’t demand anything further?

    In light of Tzachi Zamir’s argument, it’s a question of whether this is a case of selective consumption that supports progress or one that leads to moral complacency. I honestly don’t know what the right answer is here, but I’d feel better if I was more sure it was the former.

  • Vegan versus vegetarian utopia revisited

    Jean Kazez and Scu of Critical Animal both have critical posts on this essay on veganism by philosopher Tzachi Zamir. The argument appears in a slightly different form in his book Ethics and the Beast, and I discussed it a bit here.

    While I, as a “moral vegetarian” (to use his terms) find Zamir’s argument appealing, at least in a self-serving way, I thought he was a little too quick to assume that modest “humane” reforms of the dairy and egg industries would lead eventually to an ethically acceptable result. Even if we accept the terms of the debate as Zamir has laid them out, to demonstrate the superiority of the moral vegetarian position, we would need a viable model of non-exploitative, institutional animal use that could be sustained on a large-scale basis (as distinguished from the ad hoc procurement of animal products, for instance, eggs from backyard chickens) and a path for realizing it. My conclusion was that “[t]o 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.”

  • Musings on a social- and ecological-market economics

    My two recent posts on property rights and libertarianism don’t really adequately represent the way I think about economics these days. For the sake of argument, I accepted certain principles held by libertarians, but I don’t think those principles are sufficient. Libertarian principles have a simplifying austerity that can be appealing–I found them appealing for some time–but I’ve become convinced over time that they oversimplify things quite a bit.

    The view I’ve gravitated toward instead is what is sometimes called a “social market” perspective. By this I mean that “the market” taken by itself is an abstraction without any privileged status. This is because economic production and exchange are always already embedded in and structured by their social, cultural, and political context. Property rights, rules of contract, etc. are not timeless, abstract principles, but artifacts of a particular society and its history. The social-market perspective doesn’t reject private property or freedom of exchange, but it situates it within the broader social nexus. The market is a part of society, not the whole of it, and a proper goal of economic policy is to restrain the market and balance the goods it delivers with other goods.

    For instance, this position would favor a robust social safety net and other welfare-state mechanisms that enable people’s participation in the market (e.g., state supported education and health care) as well as public goods and services like roads, parks, libraries, museums, etc. that are available to all on a non-paying basis. It would also set limits to economic activity in the interest of environmental protection, quality of life, and community self-determination.

    As political philosopher John Gray describes the idea,

    the market is not a natural social phenomenon, but instead a creature of law and government. A second idea is that the market is not free-standing or self-justifying but part of a larger nexus of institutions, sharing with them a justification in terms of the contribution it makes to human well-being. A third idea is that the market lacks ethical and political legitimacy unless it is supplemented or complemented by other institutions that temper its excesses and correct its failures. … The theory of the social market economy, at its core, is that market institutions are always embedded in other social and political institutions, which both shape them and legitimate them. (Gray, Beyond the New Right, p. 116)

    A social-market perspective has a lot of overlap with social democracy or democratic socialism, but the route by which I’ve come to it has been primarily through ecological thinkers like E.F. Schumacher, Herman Daly, and John Cobb, who emphasize that the market exists within the context of society, which in turn exists within the context of the economy of the entire earth. As Daly writes, “the economy [is] an open subsystem of a larger, but finite, non-growing, and closed ecosystem on which it is fully dependent for sources of low-entropy raw materials and for sinks to absorb high-entropy waste materials” (Herman E. Daly, Beyond Growth, pp. 218-9). Consequently, they reject unlimited growth for its own sake and promote a “steady-state” economy with strong limits on inequality.

    This is consistent with a Christian perspective, which sees people as persons-in-relation, as part of a community in the widest sense that includes not only other people, but nonhuman animals and the non-sentient creation, with God as the ultimate context. We can only make fully informed judgments about our economic life when we situate the human community in this wider sphere. Daly again: “The vision of economy as subsystem is not the same as the fundamental religious insight that the world is God’s Creation, and that we and all our little creations are part of and limited by that larger creation, but it is certainly more in harmony with that insight than the vision of man’s economy as the total system with nature a subsector whose services can be substituted by other sectors” (Beyond Growth, p. 219).

    Market institutions can, therefore, rightly be curtailed based on ethical judgments arising from this broader perspective. The proper goal of economic policy is healthy communities in the widest sense, not “growth” in the abstract. This may require value judgments about good human lives that are anathema to certain doctrinaire forms of liberalism, but liberal worries can be partly met by observing that the best way to collectively make such judgments is through establishing a more thoroughly democratic and participatory polity.

  • Jonathan Balcombe on the lives of animals

    Ethologist Jonathan Balcombe has a new book called Second Nature: The Inner Lives of Animals and was recently interviewed on the Diane Rehm show (listen here). Not a lot of earth-shattering information in the interview if you’ve read much in this area, but it provides a nice overview. Balcombe also makes a good case for the ethical salience of our ever-increasing understanding of animals’ lives.

    (Link via.)

  • What are they saying about sex?

    Following up on the Countryman series, I have to wonder: Where is the serious Christian teaching on premarital sex? Or the purpose of sexuality more generally? He sketches out some principles, but I don’t know that our churches (i.e., mainline Protestant one) are really teaching much in the way of a substantive sexual ethic.

    It seems to me that it’s unrealistic to expect people to remain virgins until they’re married, particularly when people are frequently delaying marriage till their late 20s or early 30s (or beyond). Nor is it altogether clear how you’d justify such an expectation. Moreover, Christians do more harm than good when they insist that losing your virginity means losing your “purity” or that people who have sex before they’re married are somehow damaged goods.

    Mainliners typically don’t adopt the more zealous pro-chastity rhetoric and tactics favored by some evangelicals, but what have they replaced it with, if anything? What are teenagers and young adults in our churches learning about how they should carry out their sexual lives? Since I was not a churchgoer during that particular period of my life, I really have no idea what our churches are saying about this stuff. But it seems to me that we need to say something.

    I do get the impression that mainliners almost expect there to be a period during young adulthood when people leave the church and “sow their oats,” only to return once they’re settled down (married, having kids). So we can leave any teaching about pre-marital sex to a kind of benign neglect. Leaving aside whether this pattern will continue to hold (more likely, it seems to me, that fewer and fewer people will bother coming back to church), this hardly strikes me as a responsible approach since the vacuum left by the church will be filled with who-knows-what from the surrounding culture. But what is the alternative?