Thursday, November 12, 2009

Singer and Mason’s Anthropocentric Arguments

My discussion of Part II of Singer and Mason’s The Ethics of What We Eat will take the form of a kind of supporting point, namely, that if organized and presented in the proper way, their anthropocentric concerns alone would amount to a convincing argument for the abolition of contemporary factory farming practices. We think this to be worthwhile in light of some of the difficulties facing the argument that animals themselves are wronged by factory farming.

We will begin by considering how one might be unconvinced by the authors’ arguments relating to animal suffering. While much of what is written in the book is simple documentation of how animals are treated, there are also controversial claims made, such as those stating that animals “enjoy” things. Such claims, while not plainly wrong, are definitely controversial.

Even a sentience based theorist such as Peter Singer admits of some gray areas relating to which animals can and cannot, and when animals do and do not, suffer. The authors feel that in such unclear cases “if there is uncertainty about whether what we do will cause serious harm, we should give the benefit of the doubt to the being whom we might harm” (133). This is a possible course of action, but of course we must acknowledge the general fact that in all probability, some individuals will not be seduced by the charm of this principle. Following the question of which animals can feel pain, there are the further difficult questions of how great animal suffering is, how cognitively rich it is (if they can experience something like ‘mental anguish’) and finally, whether this suffering is morally relevant. So, generally speaking, the authors have a lot of work to do to convince their opponents that the animals themselves are wronged.

We will now consider some of their anthropocentric arguments. The authors argue that factory farming negatively affects humans in the form of ‘hidden costs’. Concerning shrimp farming in India, the authors write, “for every rupee the economy gained by shrimp farming, local communities lost at least two, and in some regions, four, through damage to fishing and other resources” (127). This is not special to fish, as factory farms on land have similarly negative impact on their communities. Because the landscape is degraded by millions of pounds of animal waste which comes from factory farms, people in the communities must ultimately pay for this, effectively subsidizing the ‘cheap cost of food’. Similarly, tax money goes to families of farm employees who live below the poverty line because of their low salaries. So, while factory farmed food seems to be cheap, this is made up for in other ways.

Another one of the authors’ primary concerns is the massive amounts of food which are fed to factory farmed animals, and the amount of energy which is required to produce this food. That is to say, we are feeding factory farmed animals such as chicken, fish, pigs and cows substantially more food than they will yield in meat (simply because we like the way they taste). This is a potential anthropocentric argument because, to speak crudely, if we did not have factory farms, we could instead use these crops to feed starving people of the world. Consider the way in which this argument, like the above one, only concern human well being.

Our fear is that these extremely convincing anthropocentric arguments might be obscured by a reader’s disagreement with the arguments from animal suffering. Of course we acknowledge that this would be no fault of the authors. We do not here object to their argument but instead wish to simply advance their anthropocentric arguments independently, as a means of addressing an audience which might possibly be concerned with these issues alone. Furthermore, we find the resulting argument to be convincing.

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