Philosophy Comes to Dinner

It's a good time to be in animal and food ethics: several strong volumes have been published in the last few years, and more are yet to come. Among them, however, Philosophy Comes to Dinner (PCD) deserves special attention. If you work in animal or food ethics, you should read it.The editors' introduction contains contributor-authored abstracts, which Routledge has made freely available online.1 So, I won't summarize PCD's contents in any detail. Instead, I'll explain why I regard it as such a welcome contribution to the literature.PCD contains discussions of many fascinating issues—among them, wild animal suffering, the ethics of artificial ingredients, and the virtues and vices of locavorism. But PCD is particularly valuable because it teaches two lessons:Despite the many sins of industrial animal agriculture, it's hard to explain why individual consumers shouldn't purchase its products.Even if individual consumers shouldn't purchase the products of industrial animal agriculture, it's hard to explain why they shouldn't consume any animal products whatever.These lessons make plain where the conversation needs to go. I'll spend the rest of this review summarizing and integrating the arguments that PCD contains for them.Consider someone who buys factory-farmed chicken from his local grocery store. His purchases didn't cause the harms that led to that meat being available to him, and given the waste and noise in the supply chain, they won't cause any future harms either. This is the causal impotence problem, and it needs to be addressed by any case against purchasing the products of industrial animal agriculture. Causal impotence is hardest to navigate when we consider “opportunistic purchasing”—that is, buying animal products in circumstances where it's all but certain that there won't be any negative consequences (perhaps because your purchasing is so infrequent, or because the meat is about to be thrown out).Andrew Chignell takes up this issue in his contribution. After examining several unsuccessful attempts to criticize opportunistic purchasing, Chignell proposes that we should instead begin with our collective obligation—as the group of food purchasers—not to support factory farming. Plainly, most members of the group ignore the collective obligation, purchasing factory-farmed meat anyway. What should the rest of us do? He suggests that we should dissociate ourselves from the group's failure to respect the collective obligation, and that the dissociation is meaningful only if we strictly refrain from buying animal products. That is, if we aim to stand with the good and against the bad, then we ought to distance ourselves from collective wrongdoing. And that, he submits, involves avoiding even opportunistic purchasing.This is a plausible proposal. However, we might worry that it gets things backward. When most people are doing their part, perhaps we can infer individual obligations from collective ones. But when most people aren't doing their part—that is, when most consumers ignore the collective obligation not to support factory farming—it's less clear that the rest of us still have responsibilities. When discussing a similar problem for the claim that we ought to give to aid distant strangers, Peter Singer appeals to the effectiveness of an individual action: since a majority isn't acting, the few have to bear even greater burdens. But when it comes to purchasing, the causal impotence problem cuts off this line of response. So, more needs to be said to make Chignell's dissociation theory viable.There's a further complication. In Ted Warfield's contribution, he argues that we face the phone bill problem: “[In] paying one's phone bill, one pays someone who pays someone who pays someone who pays someone who is paid by someone . . . who pays someone to torture chickens” (156). His point is that if we're complicit in the horrors of factory farms by buying animal products, we're also complicit by supporting them less directly. After all, our “direct” support isn't particularly direct—recall the waste and noise in the supply chain between farms and ordinary consumers—so plausible accounts of support are likely to apply more broadly than we'd hope. The upshot? It will be difficult to fully dissociate.In Tristram McPherson's pro-vegan essay, he tries to navigate some of these problems by contending that it “is typically wrong to aim to benefit by cooperating with the wrongful elements of others' plans” (83). Since factory farming is wrong, and grocery stores intend to profit by cooperating with the wrongful plans of that industry, they act wrongly. And since they act wrongly, consumers act wrongly when they cooperate with the wrongful plans of grocery stores. By contrast, consumers don't act wrongly when they pay their phone bills, since they aren't aiming to benefit by cooperating with the wrongful elements of the phone company's plan.But I'm not sure that this contrast is fair. In both cases, consumers aim to benefit. But neither meat purchasers nor phone-bill-payers must aim to cooperate with the wrongful elements of others' plans. That's the whole point of (intentionally engaging in) opportunistic purchasing: your goal is not to make a difference.One way out is to drop the aiming: McPherson could say that it's typically wrong to benefit by cooperating with the wrongful elements of others' plans. But Adrienne Martin's essay highlights the trouble with this move. She makes the case that it is indeed bad to support factory farms: by so doing we join a consumer group that has the function of signaling demand for animal products, which leads to familiar harms. On her view, it doesn't matter whether individual consumers cause those harms; she thinks that they're complicit in virtue of being members of the relevant group. However, she also argues that it doesn't follow that it's wrong to support factory farming, as we're members of many groups that are complicit in the bad acts of others. Unless it's wrong to be a member of all such groups, which would probably require opting out of modern society altogether, we need further argumentation before we can conclude that it's beyond the pale to be a member of the group that supports factory farming. Likewise, unless it's wrong to benefit by cooperating with the wrongful elements of the plans that guide each group of which we're members—which probably rules out university teaching alongside meat purchasing—we need further argumentation before concluding that it's wrong to benefit by opportunistic purchasing.Dan Hooley and Nathan Nobis offer a different principle to avoid these issues. They propose:If a product is such that (a) its production causes serious and unjustified harms and so is morally wrong, (b) the product can be avoided, (c) avoiding the product would not seriously harm the boycotting individual, (d) there are readily available alternatives to that product, (e) the boycotting individual might benefit from boycotting, (f) the probability that not purchasing or consuming the product will lessen or eliminate the wrongdoing is equal to or greater than the probability that purchasing or consuming the product will lessen or eliminate the wrongdoing, and (g) boycotting will make that individual a member of a morally progressive group that opposes a wrongdoing, then individuals are obligated to not purchase or use that product. (99)This principle is attractive because it respects concerns that Christina Van Dyke raises. In her contribution, she contends that we shouldn't endorse a principle that would create “second-class citizens.” She claims that if we affirm a general ideal that's difficult for certain persons to achieve as a result of some disadvantage, then we objectionably “[turn] disadvantage into immorality” (45). Instead, we should affirm a variety of ideals that are sensitive to the details of people's lives. In a sense, that's what Hooley and Nobis are trying to do: their principle probably doesn't imply that the very poor are required to boycott all animal products, though most readers probably are.Still, there are difficulties. Hooley and Nobis's principle is plausible enough, but it's unlikely that we're going to have strong, pretheoretic intuitions about a principle that complex. So, those inclined to accept the conclusion are likely to accept the principle; those not, not. Additionally, those sympathetic to the principle ought to consider it alongside a weaker one with the same antecedent and a different consequent; namely, if a product is such that conditions (a)–(g) hold, then while it isn't morally wrong to purchase or use that product, it would be morally good not to purchase or use it. When we recall Martin's point about the many sources of complicity, it isn't clear to me that Hooley and Nobis's principle is the more plausible of the two.Granted, industrial animal agriculture involves many wrongs. And it does seem—to me, at least—that many consumers are morally obligated not to purchase its products. But as this quick tour reveals, it isn't easy to explain why.And with that first lesson behind us, let's turn to the second; namely, that even if individual consumers shouldn't purchase its products, it's hard to explain why they shouldn't consume any animal products whatever.One explanation goes as follows: we ought to minimize our harm footprint, and since vegan fare has a lower harm footprint than animal products, we ought to eat vegan. Mark Budolfson challenges this line of thought. By certain environmental metrics, for instance, some vegan staples may be worse than some animal products—he argues that apples are worse than mussels or eggs in terms of greenhouse gas emissions and water usage—and migrant laborers picking strawberries may be worse off than those who work in animal agriculture. But, he argues, unless harm to animals (or violations of their rights, or what have you) always trumps harms to humans and the environment, our goal shouldn't be to do whatever minimizes harm to animals. Instead, it should be to optimize our impact based on the various morally relevant considerations. Of course, it may be the case that harms to animals always trump harms to humans and the environment. As Budolfson points out, though, that isn't obvious:Many of the fruits and vegetables that we consume require intensive backbreaking work by humans to harvest, where that work is ultimately debilitating to many of those farm workers before they reach middle age . . . and is performed under conditions that also involve constant exposure to very large amounts of pesticides and harassment, very little access to medical or psychological treatment . . . and inadequate access even to basic requirements for human dignity, such as bathrooms. In the case of female farm workers, this also includes a pervasive environment of sexual harassment and sexual assault. With these serious harms to humans clearly in mind, it is difficult to see how harms to chickens could be thought to outweigh these human harms in a way that is so obvious that it requires no further argument. (171)And, of course, it's easy to imagine circumstances where the choice is between eating objectionable animal products, eating perhaps-more-objectionable vegan products, and going hungry. Given that going hungry isn't always required in such cases, it looks like harm footprints alone don't show that individuals are obligated not to consume any animal products whatever.The emphasis on harm footprints sounds consequentialist. If animals have rights, by contrast, perhaps going hungry is required in those cases. If so, we need to consider just which rights animals have.In Terence Cuneo's contribution, he questions whether they have the specific right “not to be killed [relatively painlessly on family farms] for the purpose of providing nourishing food, which provides gustatory pleasure, sustains valued social practices, and provides a viable alternative to factory-farming, assuming that those animals are given excellent lives” (34). The thought seems to be that your rights cannot overly burden others, and it may be too much to ask people to sacrifice nourishment, gustatory pleasure, valued social practices, and a viable alternative to factory farming.Presumably, Cuneo would insist that humans have the right not to be enslaved for the purpose of providing valuable labor, which provides economic security, sustains valued social practices, and provides (let's imagine) a viable alternative to slaughtering members of the enslaved racial group out of disgust at their way of life. So, Cuneo needs to explain why the burden on slave owners doesn't undermine this particular human right, but the burden on meat-eaters undermines this particular animal right. Still, the position that Cuneo stakes out deserves further consideration. Might there be differences between the lives of (most) animals and the lives of (most) humans that justify different thresholds for when rights are overridden? If so, then veganism doesn't follow from an obligation to not support factory farming.Benjamin Lipscomb's contribution may be helpful to Cuneo here. Lipscomb defends an agrarian approach to eating meat, and two points are particularly salient. First, he argues that “the central goods of a chicken's life” aren't violated if it's raised well and killed painlessly, given what seems to be the case concerning the mental and social lives of such animals (67). He concedes that if chickens are more like us than the evidence currently suggests, then we shouldn't kill them. If we aren't wrong, though, then the differences between the good for chickens and the good for humans might be relevant to the burdens that animal interests can place on us.Second, Lipscomb highlights the value of animals in small-scale agriculture—for example, their waste is highly valuable as fertilizer. Though he doesn't make this connection, this point is highly significant for Cuneo's argument. Any alternative to industrial agriculture is going to offer lower yields (which is the main argument for industrial agriculture), and as Simon Fairlie (2011, chap. 8) points out, veganic fields have lower yields than ones fertilized with animal waste. So given the goal of feeding a large population, even small gains in productivity on family farms may be hugely important. If, as Cuneo suggests, small-scale agriculture is a viable alternative to factory farming, then such concerns might tip the scales in favor of the careful use of some animals. Again, we need to do more to get to veganism.To be clear: PCD doesn't show that consumers may purchase as they please, nor does it spell the end of arguments for veganism. It is, however, particularly clear about the challenges of moving from the wrongs of production to the wrongness of purchasing. It's equally helpful on the move from the wrongness of purchasing to the wrongness of eating. Subsequent discussion needs to be informed by the essays that PCD contains: there's much to be learned from them. As I said at the outset, this book is a welcome addition to the literature

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