A Thinking Reed

Category: Social and ethical issues

  • Countryman: Principles for a Christian sexual ethic

    We saw earlier that Countryman argues that we can’t, because of the vast gulf that separates our social world from those of the Bible, simply apply “the Biblical ethic” to contemporary concerns. But does that mean that the Bible has nothing to say to us regarding sexual ethics? By no means!

    First, as already mentioned, Countryman thinks that one of the chief functions of the Bible is to “relativize” our own social world by bringing us into contact with the very different ones of the biblical world. Second, and more importantly, the Bible records the transformation of the social world of first-century Christians as they encountered the gospel of God’s grace.

    If Scripture is important partly because it is alien to and therefore relativizes our own historical-cultural situation, it is even more important in that it can show, by reference to the way the grace of God broke into the self-sufficiency of another culture, how it breaks into our own as well. The New Testament writers did not try to construct a new sexual ethic from the ground up. They took over the existing cultural patterns and refocused them, pushing some elements from the center to the periphery, altering the balance of powers allotted to various members of society and, most important, relativizing the familiar life of this world by subordinating it to the reign of God. (p. 219)

    To provide a framework for doing the same in our own historical-cultural situation, Countryman offers six “generative principles” derived from the NT which, in turn, can offer guidance for navigating current ethical dilemmas in the realm of sex:

    1. “Membership in the Christian community is in no way limited by purity codes.” This means that nothing is “unclean” in itself, but only as it violates one of the other substantive principles. “To be specific, the gospel allows no rule against the following, in and of themselves: masturbation, nonvaginal heterosexual intercourse, bestiality[!*], polygamy, homosexual acts, or erotic art and literature” (p. 223). This doesn’t mean that there aren’t circumstances under which any of these might be wrong, but that wrongness doesn’t have to do with the “unclean” nature of any of these acts.

    2. “Christians must respect the sexual property of others and practice detachment from their own.” Countryman makes the interesting observation that “the New Testament interests itself in property not so much in order to defend me against my neighbor as to defend my neighbor against me” (p. 221). In other words, property–including the “property” each person has in his or her self–refers to a kind of zone of inviolability around each person. The corresponding point is that Christians ought to be ready to give up their own prerogatives in service to the neighbor’s well-being.

    3. “Where, in late antiquity, sexual property belonged to the family through the agency of the male householder, in our own era it belongs to the individual.” This principle is derived from the changed cultural situation rather than from the NT itself, and necessarily qualifies the previous principle. In our world “the individual is the primary arbiter of his or her sexual acts” (p. 222). Among other things, this implies that the goods one seeks in entering into a lasting sexual relationship no longer have to do primarily with political alliances between families, ensuring legitimate heirs, etc. Rather they are more likely to be intangible goods like “friendship, encouragement, counsel, solace, and a new sense of family to supplement and eventually replace the natal family” (p. 233)–in addition, of course, to the satisfaction of sexual desire.

    4. “The gospel can discern no inequality between men and women as they stand before God’s grace.” While the NT authors made certain accommodations to the social realities of their day, the trajectory of Christian ethics is toward one of egalitarianism between men and women. This qualifies, for example, any assessment of polygamy which, if not proscribed because of “impurity,” does not have the greatest track record when it comes to securing the dignity and well-being of women. In addition to “the revision of household rules and the alteration of household roles,” Christian egalitarianism calls for nothing less than “new understandings of manliness and womanliness” (p. 239). Countryman suggests that heterosexual couples could have much to learn from homosexual ones, who lack socially-prescribed roles and division of labor.

    5. “Marriage creates a union of flesh, normally indissoluble except by death.”     In the ancient world, ensuring the virginity and fidelity of the bride was essentially to shoring up the familial property regime. But how does this principle apply to marriages based on the intangible “internal” goods mentioned above? Countryman flatly denies that we should expect young people getting married always, or even typically, to be virgins since “the goods sought in connection with marriage in an individual society are goods which can best be offered only by a mature person and such a person will more often than not have acquired some sexual experience” (p. 241). He goes on to suggest that the church might defer blessing marriages until a mature relationship has had time to develop and does not rule out, in principle, pre-marital sexual activity.

    6. “The Christian’s sexual life and property are always subordinate to the reign of God.”     This is the most fundamental principle. Christians “belong” to Christ, and seeking first his kingdom and righteousness will not uncommonly require “sacrifice of lesser to greater good” (p. 222). While sex is “an integral part of the human person, particularly as joining us to one another, and therefore has a right to be included in the spiritual transformation which follows upon our hearing of the gospel,” (p. 245) it is not central, any more than other finite goods. To the extent we make it central to our lives, we are fashioning an idol.

    I don’t necessarily agree with all of Countryman’s specific applications of these principles (though his discussions of, among other things, birth control, abortion, and prostitution are well worth attending to). But I do think that his general position is on more or less the right track. It’s unrealistic to expect to have timeless commandments that apply equally well to the tight-knit pastoral society of ancient Israel, the urbanized Mediterranean world of the first century, and our contemporary globalized, individualist world. More to the point, many of the traditional rules only made sense in the context of a purity system or a familial-property ethic that we wouldn’t want to resurrect even if we could! This isn’t relativism, but an attempt to uphold the gospel as that in light of which we can criticize and question those partial and relative truths that often masquerade as absolutes.
    ————————————————————
    *Regarding bestiality, Countryman says “where it is the casual recourse of the young or of people isolated over long periods of time from other humans, [it] should occasion little concern. It is probably too isolated a phenomenon to justify strong feelings” (p. 224). That may be true, but he neglects to mention that such acts may also wrong the animals involved!

  • Countryman on modern individualism

    One of the main reasons we can’t simply apply the “Biblical” sexual ethic (or ethics!) to our contemporary world, argues Countryman in Dirt, Greed & Sex (see the previous post), is that we have gone from a family-centered society to an individual-centered one. The property ethic that governed sexual relations in the ancient world existed to uphold the importance of the patriarchal family; given that this state of affairs no longer exists (at least in much of the world), we can’t assume the applicability of that ethic to our world.

    A refreshing thing about Countryman is that he’s willing to look at both the pros and cons of modern Western individualism, instead of embracing it or rejecting it wholesale. Here’s a representative passage:

    The individualization of modern American society is a social fact, an aspect of the environment in which we make ethical decisions, not an ethical principle itself. As such, it is neither good nor bad. It represents some losses as against earlier, family-structured eras and also some gains. If the human being now lacks the kind of inevitable links with a social continuum that the earlier society afforded, that loss must be balanced against the fact that individualization has gone hand in hand with–and is probably the condition for–what progress this century has made toward genuine equality of races, nationalities, and the sexes. The ability of modern people to choose for themselves with regard to education, work, living place, life-partner, religion, or politics became conceivable only as the family ceased to be the basic unit of society and was replaced by the individual. (p. 231)

    And yet, we need to distinguish between relatively benign and more objectionable forms of ethical individualism:

    Individuality can become an ethical principle in two ways. Philosophically speaking, it may become so by a recognition that my individuality is intelligible only as an expression of the principle which renders every other human being an individual, too. This principle was already being expressed in late antiquity in the Golden Rule; respect for my individuality implies respect for that of others. As such, it enters into Christian ethics, but it is by no means the crowning element in them. It could not, for example, have generated the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross or the witness of the martyrs, which require the further principles of love, faith, and hope for their understanding. On the other hand, individuality can also become an ethical principle in the form of individualism–an idolatry of the self, which treats the self as its own source and end. Such individualism has been a pervasive ethical influence in the modern West, enshrined in certain forms of capitalist ideology as the image of the “self-made” person–that is, the person who has chosen to forget the role others played in his fashioning and rise and who regards with interest only those people and things that contribute to his own aggrandizement. This individualism, like any other idolatry is utterly inconsistent with the gospel. (p. 231)

    It’s common to hear denunciations of “individualism” from theological quarters, but some critics aren’t as careful as Countryman in making these distinctions. The individualism that has been the precondition of much social progress is different than the idolatry of the self that Countryman (rightly, I should think) says is incompatible with the gospel. This new individualistic context will play a significant role in assessing the sexual property ethic and its relevance for our time.

  • Dirt, Greed & Sex

    Having been stuck at home for the better part of a week, I’ve had ample time to catch up on my reading. One book I finally got around to was L. William Countryman’s Dirt, Greed & Sex, a study of the sexual ethics of the New Testament.

    Countryman–a professor of New Testament and an Episcopalian–focuses on the ways in which the NT modified or discarded the existing rules surrounding sexual conduct that it inherited from Judaism and the broader Greco-Roman culture. The two organizing concepts he uses are related to the Torah’s purity code (“dirt”) and the property ethic rooted in the patriarchal family of the ancient world (“greed”).

    In his telling, the NT is consistent, indeed almost unanimous, in rejecting sexual norms based on physical purity/impurity. As enunciated in the Torah, purity has to do with maintaining the “wholeness” of individuals and boundaries between kinds of things. The resulting ethic is based on avoiding or removing ritual impurity, whether intentionally incurred or not. (This covers everything from contract with menstruating women to homosexual relations.) By contrast, he says, when “purity” is used in the NT, it refers to purity of heart, or the intention underlying our actions.

    Obviously, the question of the law and its ongoing role in the Christian community was an important topic for the NT writers. Countryman shows, however, that the NT takes a fairly consistent line that allowed Jewish Christians to continue observing the purity requirements of the law, while definitively rejecting that observation as a requirement for Gentiles to become full-fledged Christians. Purity is not a condition for receiving God’s grace. And purity and ethics are two different kinds of discourse. (Relevant here is his particularly fascinating exegesis of the much-discussed Romans 1 as it relates to homosexuality.) “With the possible exception of Jude and Revelation, all the documents that dealt with physical purity at all agreed in rejecting it as an authoritative ethic for Christians as such” (p. 123).

    The sexual ethic of the NT, to the extent we can discern one, is a modified form of the property ethic common both to ancient Israelite culture and the broader ancient world. This family-centered culture rested squarely on the patriarchal family unit in which women, children, and slaves were essentially the property of the male head of the household. For example, adultery was condemned on the grounds that the man who committed it was stealing property from another man (because depriving him of the possibility of legitimate heirs), not because it represented the violation of a relationship of trust between the adulterer and his wife.

    The NT introduces some major changes to this ethic. First, Jesus’ ministry disrupts the centrality of the patriarchal family. By calling disciples to “leave everything” and follow him, Jesus rejects the priority of the family to all other loyalties. And by telling his disciples they must become “like children,” he introduces an egalitarianism into the Christian community that contrasts starkly with the hierarchy of the “traditional family.” Second, both Jesus and Paul affirm–at least in principle–the equality of men and women. One critical example is Jesus’ teaching that both men and women can be guilty of adultery, and the corresponding implication that both partners have sexual “property rights” in the other. This represents a major elevation of women’s status compared to the traditional patriarchal family.

    Both Jesus and Paul, Countryman insists, see sexuality as good, but not something to be put at the center of one’s life. Loyalty to God’s reign is the overarching value of the Christian life, and all other goods find their proper place only in relation to this. This accounts for the NT’s–at times radical–disregard for traditional family structures.

    Countryman recognizes that there are some outliers in the NT, such as the Pastoral Epistles, which seem to be trying to put a more socially respectable face on Christianity, and Revelation, which seems perhaps to uphold virginity as the ideal for all Christians. But the mainstream tendency of New Testament Christianity is neither strictly ascetical nor hedonistic (two dissenting tendencies Paul had to fight in his Corinthian community), but subordinates sexual fulfillment to the calling each one of us receives from God.

    Paul in particular is fairly pragmatic: he may prefer that people remain celibate, but recognizes that celibacy is a gift not given to everyone. Sexual desire is a sufficient reason for getting married, though Paul is careful to note that, in light of God’s inbreaking reign, the distinctions between married, single, betrothed, etc. aren’t all that important.

    One of the key points Countryman wants to make is that there is no “Biblical” sexual ethic that we can simply adopt wholesale and apply to our current situation. Both the purity ethic and the property ethic presuppose social structures that are almost completely foreign to us. This doesn’t mean, however, that the NT has no value for our ethics. For one thing, the very “alien-ness” of the biblical world can provide a critical perspective on our own: the way things are isn’t the way they have to be.

    Secondly, Countryman thinks we can extract some “generative principles” that provide guidance for contemporary Christian ethics. But since this has already gone on long enough, I’ll save that discussion for a future post.

  • Addendum on personhood

    Just to further clarify what I think is wrong with Margaret Somerville’s “personhood” argument discussed below: she essentially wants to evacuate the notion of person of any substantive content and make it coterminous with human being. Thus, saying that a human animal is a person isn’t a factually informative statement; it becomes a tautology.

    Note, though, that once this move is made, the possession of personhood can no longer function as a reason for according special moral status to human beings. “Being a person” and “being a human being” are, on this view, just two different expressions for the same status.

    But this is surely not what traditional moral philosophers (e.g., Kant) had in mind when they distinguished between persons and non-persons. For them, persons had special moral worth because of some property that persons–and only persons–possessed such as the ability to follow the moral law. This is why, on the traditional view, it makes sense to ask whether there can be non-human persons, whether terrestrial (e.g., dolphins) or extra-terrestrial (e.g., space aliens or angels). On Somerville’s view, it would literally be nonsensical to ask if there could be non-human persons.

    Now, personally, I’m not sure personhood is even a particularly important concept for morality, but that’s a whole other post.

  • Personhood, human and animal

    Well, since we’re on the topic of the personhood of non-human entities, here’s an article by Margaret Somerville, a Canadian law professor, arguing that we shouldn’t apply the concept of “person” to non-human animals (via the First Things blog):

    My reasons for rejecting personhood for animals include that it would undermine the idea that humans are “special” relative to other animals and, therefore, deserve “special respect.”

    Professor Somerville cites the views of Peter Singer, among others, to show that attributing “personhood” to animals would blur the boundary between humans and non-human animals which would lead to bad consequences, such as euthanasia. This is because Singer, et al. understand personhood to be a category that is tied to having certain capabilities (e.g., for self-reflection). By this criterion, some animals would count as persons, but not all humans will (e.g., infants, the severely mentally disabled).

    Prof. Somerville rejects this capabilities approach to defining personhood and says that the category should be restricted to only (and all) human beings:

    The contrasting approach, which I believe is the one we should continue to uphold, is that all humans are persons (at least, as the law stands at present, those humans who have been born) and only humans are persons. This accounts for using the words “human being” and “person” interchangeably. Universal human personhood means that every human being has an “intrinsic dignity” that must be respected that comes simply with being human; having that dignity does not depend on having any other attribute or functional capacity. This is a status approach to who is a person.

    The closest Prof. Somerville comes in identifying any substantial human characteristic that justifies ascribing personhood to (only) us is to say that “we humans have a ‘human spirit,’ a metaphysical, although not necessarily supernatural, element as part of the essence of our humanness.” But without further specification, this is either a reversion to some variant of the capabilities definition or essentially an arbitrary decision to confine the label “person” only to humans. After all, traditional philosophy and theology typically defined the “human spirit” precisely in terms of the sort of capabilities (rationality, free will, etc.) that Prof. Somerville earlier rejected as necessary conditions for personhood. It seems that what she’s advocating is a kind of metaphysical fiction–that we act “as if” human beings have an essentially undefinable metaphysical spark that confers personhood.

    For my money, if we want to say that humans, qua humans, are more valuable than non-human animlas, then we’d do well to drop “person” as a moral category altogether. There is just no non-question-begging bright line to be drawn between persons and non-persons that includes all and only humans in the category of persons. If you say that “person” means an entity with properties x, y, and z, then you simply can’t rule out the possibility that some animals will end up counting as persons and some humans won’t. But if, on the other hand, you’re just going to restrict “person” to human beings by fiat, then why do you need the concept of person in the first place? What philosophical or moral work is it doing?

  • More on assisted migration

    Here’s a Wired article from last year on assisted migration (or colonization) for species endangered by climate change, as discussed in the previous post. Apparently this is something that at least some ecologists take quite seriously. Obviously, a huge concern is the havoc that such transplants could wreak on their new ecosystems, as Camassia pointed out in a comment. Yet, others argue that, at least in some cases, the risks might be worth it.

    The article has some good discussion of the pros and cons of both positions. Echoing Southgate, though, it makes the point that there is no longer any “pure” nature untouched by human influence. Like it or not, the fate of other species is now contingent on our actions (or inaction).

  • Noah, climate change, and “assisted migration”

    In Celia Deane-Drummond and David Clough’s Creaturely Theology, Christopher Southgate expands on an idea he discussed briefly in his recent book The Groaning of Creation (see my posts here). Southgate points out that, due to human-caused climate change, we’re looking at a massive die off of animal life in the near future (what has been called the sixth great extinction). Naturally, when we debate climate change and what, if anything, we should do about it, we focus primarily on the costs and benefits to us. Occasionally, if we’re feeling expansive, we might briefly consider the effects that rising temperatures and sea levels may have on millions desperately poor people around the world, but it would be a huge stretch to say that those people’s interests are given anything like the appropriate weight in our debates. How much less, then, are we taking into consideration the interests of the billions of non-human animals that will be affected?

    Extinction, Southgate says, is a sui generis event. It’s not just a harm inflicted on numerous individual creatures, but the final disappearance of an entire way of being in the world. The seriousness of such an event, much less many such events, and the near-certainty of at least some degree of significant climate change should lead us, he argues, to consider whether we have responsibilities, Noah-like, to ensure the continued existence of threatened species.

    Southgate argues that traditional environmentalist and animal-rights philosophies are ill-equipped to deal with this scenario. Environmentalists have tended to urge human beings to leave wild nature be–our responsibilities toward non-human creatures are couched in terms of restricting our impact on them. Meanwhile, animal rights proponents have been concerned primarily with the plight of animals already within the sphere of domestication and, hence, human society to some extent. But what Southgate urges us to recognize is that we’re rapidly approaching–if we haven’t already reached it–the point where human action is inescapably changing the conditions for all life on earth. (What Bill McKibben called “the end of nature.”) We can’t simply abdicate our responsibility for that influence by taking refuge in the comforting illusion that we can shrink our impact to nothing. The damage is done, or is inevitably being done, so we have some responsibility for mitigating it.

    Given the limitations of existing environmentalist and animal rights frameworks, Southgate proposes turning to the Bible for some ethical principles. The OT teaches us that God cares for everything she has created, and the NT, while short on pro-ecology passages, upholds a normative ideal of concern for the other and servant-hood. Southgate here echoes Andrew Linzey’s idea that human beings are the “servant species,” the one kind of creature capable of taking an interest in the needs of others, even at great cost to itself. Moreover, Christian theology inculcates a moral preference for the most vulnerable, the voiceless, those who are unable to stand up for their own interests. Finally, Southgate appeals to a Pauline notion of community as mutual giving and receiving, suitably expanded to include non-human creatures. The interdependence of the entire ecosystem drives home the point that not only can non-humans be the beneficiaries of our gifts, but we also constantly receive from them.

    With these principles in hand, Southgate proposes that we need to seriously consider costly programs of assisted migration for species threatened by habitat loss due to climate change. This could take two forms: the first would be the creation of “corridors” allowing animals safe passage from their old, increasingly unsuitable habitats to more hospitable ones; the second would be actually physically transplanting a viable population from one habitat to another. (Southgate offers a thought experiment of relocating polar bears to Antarctica.) Such measures would not be easy or cheap, but there may be cases where a daring and sacrificial use of resources would be called for. At a more practical level, merely making people aware of such seemingly far-fetched possibilities might drive home the need to make preventative changes now.

    Southgate warns that we’re not in a position to save all the creatures as Noah was, but

    the profoundly difficult and risky exercise of moving animals from one locus to another should reinforce the point that the earth is our only ark, and the great preponderance of our current current creativity and ingenuity must be towards prayerfully and humbly ensuring the continued health of the “vessel,” such that it is no longer necessary to keep displacing its inhabitants. (pp. 264-5).

    This is a radically different notion of “dominion” or even “stewardship” than the one we’re used to: it calls upon humans to take active steps to foster the continued flourishing of the rest of creation, even if it requires significant sacrifice on our part. Southgate distinguishes between an anthropocentric and an anthropomonist ethic: we must recognize the central place that humans, inescapably, play in caring for creation, but without elevating our own interests to the sole, or even most important, criterion for how we exercise that care.

  • Health care reform and Catholic social teaching

    Commonweal has an interesting article on Catholic critics of health care reform. The principle of subsidiarity, a key tenet of Catholic social teaching, is often conflated with the kind of small- or anti-government rhetoric you sometimes get from the Right. J. Peter Nixon argues that this is a mistake. His conclusion:

    Catholic critics of health-care reform may be correct that, according to Catholic social teaching, a “right” to health-care services does not necessarily require those services to be provided by the government. At some point, though, the burden of proof is on the critics to provide a workable alternative. They have largely failed to do that. It is hard to escape the conclusion that the concept of subsidiarity is being employed to mask an antigovernment animus that has little support in the Catholic tradition. There may be other reasons for Catholics to be concerned about aspects of health-care reform, but subsidiarity is not one of them.

    Read the rest here

  • Building a better farm animal?

    Thanks to mizm of the fine blog Left at the Altar for alerting me to this paper by Adam Shriver that makes a case for replacing factory farmed animals with animals genetically engineered to feel less pain. The author cites recent research that seems to show that it’s possible to eliminate, or at least reduce, animals’ capacity for suffering and goes on to argue that, on consequentialist grounds, this could provide a certain technological fix to the moral problem of factory farming.

    I have two problems with this piece, a somewhat superficial one and a deeper one. First, even if it is possible to reduce or eliminate the unpleasant sensations associated with pain, there’s still the issue of how factory farming frustrates animals’ natural tendencies toward certain behaviors. A pig wants to get up and move around, and a hen wants to stretch her wings. This is true even if they aren’t in pain per se. Not to mention the various social and other behaviors that are proper to these creatures but which the confined conditions of factory farming prevent them from engaging in. Even if we could genetically engineer away pain, is it possible to engineer away the frustration, boredom, and fear that these animals undoubtedly also experience?

    Suppose it is possible, though–is it desirable? This brings me to my more fundamental objection. Even if such a thing was technically feasible, would it be right to engineer animals with such radically different natures that they no longer even wanted to express the patterns of behavior proper to their kind? Granted, we can’t necessarily see natural kinds in quite the same ways that our pre-Darwinian ancestors might have, but isn’t there something monstrous about the prospect of fashioning such unnatural beings? Is our gluttony for flesh so insatiable that there’s no length we won’t go to in order to satisfy it?

    In fairness to Shriver, he seems to be an animal advocate, and his argument is motivated in part by a deep pessimism that moral argument will persuade large numbers of people to boycott the products of factory farms. Replacing existing farm animals with ones incapable of suffering is, for him, a second-best option. I’m not sure I share his pessimism, but even if I did, there are some things that we shouldn’t do even if they seem to promise the best available utilitarian outcome. The kind of engineering he envisions would, it seems to me, be the ultimate reduction of animals to commodity status–it would be an explicit affirmation that they are entirely material to be manipulated for our use, rather than creatures with an independent dignity and worth. The result might well turn out to be a case of winning the battle only to lose the war: a society with such a wholly instrumentalist view of non-human life is not likely to learn to restrain itself from running roughshod over creation whenever it feels like it. Is that the kind of society we want? And is it one that can last?

  • Vegetarianism without foundations

    Freddie at the group blog the League of Ordinary Gentleman probes the philosophical underpinnings of vegetarians/vegans and contends that they are insufficiently developed.

    I think he’s wrong in suggesting that vegetarians haven’t devled deeply into these issues: there’s quite a vast philosophical literature on the subject that has sprung up in the last 30 years, and there are accounts of why animals matter morally that are as good as any other philosophical theory in ethics. (Which doesn’t mean they’re problem free, of course.) But more to the point, I don’t think you need a fully developed philosophical view to find vegetarianism compelling.

    Almost everyone admits, in practice if not theory, that animals can suffer. And nearly everyone admits that it’s a moral truism that you shouldn’t cause unnecessary suffering. From those two simple, commonsense premises, it follows pretty quickly that you shouldn’t cause animals unnecessary suffering.

    Throw in a few basic factual premises about the conditions under which animals are raised for food, and I think you arrive in short order at the minimal conclusion that our current system for raising animals for food (and probably most other feasible systems) is morally objectionable to say the least.

    None of this requires you to make any major conceptual shifts in your worldview, such as accepting a particular theory of value or animal “rights” or whatnot, merely to draw a conclusion from premises that you (probably) already accept. It’s true that there are some people who claim to believe that animals don’t suffer, or that their suffering doesn’t matter. But the widespread revulsion at, say, the antics of Michael Vick indicate that this is a minority position.

    In this sense, vegetarianism is like a lot of other reform movements: it doesn’t offer new values so much as try to make explicit the implications of values that people already accept. Why would you treat a pig in ways you would never dream of treating your dog or cat? The obstacles to reform are probably more institutional, psychological, social, and practical impediments than logical ones.

    I’m, of course, all for investigating the question of whether animals have a right to life (as opposed to a right not to be made to suffer), but as far as the practical question goes, this makes almost no difference. Assuming there are idyllic farms where animals are allowed to roam freely and express their particular natures, do not have their tails docked or beaks clipped, are not castrated without anesthesia, and are killed suddenly and painlessly, these farms represent a tiny (if not nonexistent) percentage of meat production in industrial nations. For all practical purposes, avoiding the products of factory farms means being a near or total vegetarian.