Comstock's Change
From wheeler@super.org Wed Feb 24 17:46:50 1993
Date: Thu, 1 Oct 92 10:30:44 EDT
From: wheeler@super.org (Ferrell S. Wheeler)
To: tms@cs.umd.edu
Subject: Comstock's Change
[In the Summer 1991 issue of "Between the Species: a journal of
ethics", Kathryn P. George reviews the book "Is There a Moral
Obligation to Save the Family Farm?" edited by Gary Comstock.
Following this critical review Comstock is given a chance to
respond to the criticisms in his article "Response: The Rights
of Animals and Family Farmers". Here is a small excerpt of this
article that I thought might be of interest to some.
Ferrell Wheeler - wheeler@super.org]
[...portion deleted...]
Since finishing "Family Farm", I have come to believe that
humane care and slaughter are not the issues. The issues are
whether we harm animals with central nervous systems when we kill
them, and whether we have the right to continue breeding mammals,
with no other purpose in mind than to carve them into steaks at
a young age. This is likely to be the issue of most concern to
readers of BTS, so I begin here, reserving for later my comments
on George's criticisms of my family farm argument.
[...portion skipped in which the author discusses his fond memories
of the Pippert family farm...]
When the book was published in February, 1988, everyone on
my side of the family ate meat, and so did I. None of us, I dare
say, thought much about it. As I began to think about it, I had
a fleeting thought: to reject meat might be equivalent to rejecting
the history and identity of the Pippert family. I say it was a
fleeting thought because I purposely put it out of my mind. I
thought it morally insensitive to waste my time exploring the rights
of hogs and cattle at a time when the economic pressures on hog and
cattle raisers were so severe. The playing field was so biased
against smaller farmers, and smaller farmers' problems produced so
much anxiety, that I found myself wondering what sort of person
would ask questions about the well-being of farm hogs when the
well-being of farm children was at stake.
After finishing the book, I gave the issue the attention it
deserves. I realized very quickly that the intentional killing of
hogs at six months of age, when the animals might otherwise live
for a period ten times that length, calls for justification. I
looked for philosophical defenses of meat-eating, and found
remarkably few. Other than R. G. Frey, very few ethicists have
taken it upon themselves to defend meat-eating. Reading Tom Regan's
"The Case for Animal Rights" convinced me that some mammals probably
have mental lives roughly analogous to some humans' mental lives,
and that some mammals are conscious beings with social lives much
like some humans' social lives. I did not come to believe nonhuman
mammals are morally autonomous, but I did not see why that fact
should entitle us to kill and eat them. I did decide that a central
issue is whether a being has the potential to have interests, in
the sense of "able to take an interest in something." For if a
being potentially has interests in this strong sense, it potentially
has the ability to take an interest in things in its future. Having
the potential to take an interest in things in your future, it seems,
should be all you need to give others the duty note to kill you, in
the absence of good reasons to kill you.
Do cows and pigs and chickens have the potential to take an
interest in things in their future? I think this is largely an
unsettled empirical matter, and it calls for psychological,
neurological, and ethological study. i cannot say that I know for
certain what the answer will be. But in the absence of an answer,
it seems we ought to err on the side of caution. That means not
killing (or breeding more of) cows and pigs and chickens unless we
have strong reasons to override our duty not to harm individuals.
Providing ourselves with protein is not a strong reason, and neither
is scientific research to find out whether animals have future
interests. We can get plenty of protein from vegetable sources,
and we can live happy lives without vivisecting animals.
Thus I came to believe I ought to be a vegetarian. As many
readers of this journal know, to become a vegetarian is much more
difficult than to decide to become a vegetarian. Slowly, over the
course of several years, with much opposition, and much support,
>from various members of my family, I gave up meat and fish. What
finally pushed me over the edge was Tom Regan's account of Barry
Holstum Lopez's stories about wolves planning ambushes of caribou.
If wolves anticipate the course of caribou several days hence, and
devise and follow plans to surprise their prey at a given point,
I can no longer believe that all nonhuman mammals are unable to take
an interest in things in their future. Nor can I continue to think
it ethically unproblematic to raise and slaughter so-called food
animals.
Professor George notices how briefly I discuss animal rights
in my conclusion. Kindly, she does not charge me with the
philosophical coward's way out, begging the question. Unfortunately
for me, the charge sticks. I wrote only that proving animals have
rights "is very difficult to do" and tried to leave my reader with
the impression that animals do not have rights. George calls me on
the point.
But if I now believe pigs and cows have a right to life, how do
I square this belief with my continuing love for family farms?
Can you defend the rights of animals and the rights of family
farmers? To the extent that family farms require the premature
killing of animals, the answer seems to be "no." But that answer
need not be read as a condemnation of the way of life of family
farming, because farming is possible without slaughtering animals.
For most farmers in the Midwest, raising animals, or raising
feedgrains for animals, is the largest part of the agricultural
economy, and to change this situation calls for radical adjustments.
Yet food animals are not the sum total of farming, even in the
Cornbelt, and there will be plenty left over for farmers to do if
one day there is no longer a market for beef and pork. There will
always be green beans, broccoli, and sweet potatoes, apples, pears,
and oranges, filberts, almonds, and pecans to raise. A tofu-cooking,
vegetarian America will need lots of soybean and (sweet) corn farmers.
[...discussion of philosophical defenses of family farms versus
corporate factory farms...]
Animal Rights and Vegetarianism
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