Posts Tagged Peter Singer

The end of Pollan’s vegetarianism

July 11, 2010 at 12:03 pm · Filed under Philosophy, The Omnivore's Dilemma ·Tagged , , , ,

After completing his factually dubious (see here and here) takedown of the “vegan Utopia” in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan is ready to eat meat again. He writes to Peter Singer to make sure that his arguments for eating meat from a “good farm” are good enough, and he shares Singer’s response:

“I agree with you that it is better for these animals to have lived and died than not to have lived at all … ,” Singer wrote back. Since the utilitarian is concerned exclusively with the sum of happiness and suffering, and the slaughter of an animal with no comprehension of death need not entail suffering, the Good Farm adds to the total of animal happiness provided you replace the slaughtered animal with a new one. (327)

It’s not clear to me whether Pollan’s point about the Good Farm adding to animal happiness is a paraphrase of something that Singer wrote, or whether Pollan has deduced this from Singer’s remarks. Singer’s point seems ambiguous, and it may well only mean that the Good Farm is good for the animals that live on it, not that it’s good for animal happiness overall. As I wrote recently, the Good Farm uses land that might otherwise be home to happy wild animals. I doubt there’s really any objective way to compare “the total of animal happiness” in two different scenarios, though.

Pollan continues,

However, this line of thinking does not obviate the wrongness of killing an animal that “has a sense of its own existence over time, and can have preferences about its own future.” In other words, it might be okay to eat the chicken or the cow, but perhaps not the (more intelligent) pig. Yet, he continued, “I would not be sufficiently confident of my argument to condemn someone who purchased meat from one of these farms.”
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What this suggests to me is that people who care about animals should be working to insure that the ones they eat don’t suffer, and that their deaths are swift and painless — for animal welfare, in others words, rather than rights. (327)

It’s hard for me to see Pollan’s conclusion following from Peter Singer’s concession that he is not “sufficiently confident” in his argument. As I understand Singer, he’s saying that eating meat from the Good Farm occupies a sort of moral gray area; it may or may not be ethical. (This also seems to be his take on the issue in Animal Liberation). Pollan believes Singer suggests much more than that. To Pollan, it’s not merely ethically defensible to eat meat from the Good Farm. It’s the right thing to do if you care about animals.

He goes on,

In fact, the “happy life and merciful death” line is how Jeremy Bentham justified his own meat eating. Yes, the philosophical father of animal rights was himself a carnivore. (328)

This appeal to historical authority is a weak substitute for an argument. It’s quite common for ideas to evolve over time. After all, democracy doesn’t mean the same thing in the United States today that it did 200 years ago.

Of course, Pollan wants to hunt the animal for his meal, so he needs to address the issue of whether it’s ethical to kill a wild animal. He writes, “[I]n theory at least a utilitarian can justify eating humanely raised and slaughtered animals. Eating a wild animal that had been cleanly shot presumably would fall under the same dispensation.”

I’m not convinced. The argument for eating meat from the Good Farm relied on replacing the killed animal with a new one. The hunter doesn’t do that. Under certain circumstances, the hunter might allow the habitat to support an animal that wouldn’t otherwise survive. The argument there seems much hazier than the one for the Good Farm, and Pollan hasn’t made that argument. Instead, he’s asserted that hunting “presumably would fall under the same dispensation” as the Good Farm.

Pollan goes on to appeal to Singer to support his point:

Singer himself suggests as much in Animal Liberation, when he asks, “Why … is the hunter who shoots a deer for venison subject to more criticism than the person who buys a ham at the supermarket? Overall it is probably the intensively reared pig who has suffered more.” (328)

As before, I don’t think Singer really suggests what Pollan says he does. Singer’s point is that hunted meat isn’t as bad as factory-farmed meat. That’s a far cry from saying that it’s ethically defensible.

Of course, Pollan is planning to hunt a pig. The pig, you’ll recall, was the example he gave us of an animal that might have a conception of the future (in which case it should not be killed under Singer’s ethics). This says something about his view of the ethical questions. As in the case of the meat from the Good Farm, his standard of ethical action seems to be based on plausible deniability. We don’t know that pigs have a conception of the future, so it might not be unethical to kill them. Of course, if a pig does suffer when killed, it makes no difference to that pig that the hunter wasn’t entirely sure that it would suffer. In the utilitarian view, then, hunting a less intelligent animal — one that is less likely to suffer — would be a better choice. In this sense, Pollan’s foray into moral philosophy looks more like an effort to construct a defense (I didn’t know the pig would suffer!) than an effort to do what he can to reduce harm.

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The interest of a species

July 5, 2010 at 8:11 am · Filed under Philosophy, The Omnivore's Dilemma ·Tagged , , , , ,

In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan argues that domestication of animals is beneficial to the domesticated species. He explains,

At least for the domestic animal (the wild animal is a different case) the good life, if we can call it that, simply doesn’t exist, cannot be achieved, apart from humans — apart from our farms and therefore from our meat eating. This, it seems to me, is where the animal rightists betray a deep ignorance about the workings of nature. To think of domestication as a form of slavery or even exploitation is to misconstrue that whole relationship — to project a human idea of power onto what is in fact an example of mutualism or symbiosis between species. (320)

As I wrote recently, while the domestic animal would not have a good life in nature, animal farms leave less room for wild animals to live “the good life.” But Pollan also makes the case that human meat-eating benefits the domesticated species as a whole. He writes,

For the animal rightist concerns himself only with individuals. Tom Regan, the author of The Case for Animal Rights, bluntly asserts that because “species are not individuals . . . the rights view does not recognize the moral rights of species to anything, including survival.” Singer concurs, insisting that only sentient individuals can have interests. But surely a species has interests — in its survival, say, or the health of its habitat — just as a nation or a community or a corporation can. (323)

The suggestion that a species takes interest in the health of its habitat is surprising, given the factory farms that are the habitat of the overwhelming majority of food animals. How would we even begin to define the health of such a place? Less surprising, perhaps, is the idea that a species takes an interest in its survival. After all, we humans generally want to survive, so why shouldn’t a species want the same?

What’s missing from Pollan’s argument is any discussion of why such an interest should be assigned moral significance. To clarify this point, I think it’s instructive to consider the other examples of collective entities that Pollan says have interests.

Let’s start with a nation. We might say that a nation takes an interest in the health of its environment or its economy, for example. But these are things that are important because they affect the individuals that live in the nation. Polluted air and an unproductive economy cause individuals to suffer. Thus, I would contend that the interest of a nation in the health of its environment or its economy derives any moral significance from the interests of its inhabitants.

We might also say that a nation takes an interest in its continued existence, but I think it would be hard to argue that such an interest has moral significance. After all, I think that if a tyrannical regime were overthrown in a bloodless coup and replaced by a democratic government that improved the lives of its people, most would consider that an unqualified good thing. Nobody (at least, nobody outside of the old government) would lament that the old nation had to come to an end to save the people from oppression.

This suggests that the only interests of a nation deserving of any moral standing are the interests derived from the interests of individuals. Similarly, I would suggest that the morally significant interests of a community or a corporation are those derived from the interests of the inhabitants and the shareholders, respectively.

That brings us back to the interests of a species. This is a question that came up when I wrote about Pollan’s anthropomorphization of Zea mays. Back then I wrote,

There’s a certain appeal to talking about having large populations in many locations as being in the interest of a species. After all, these things increase the chance that the species will continue to exist in the future. But does a species really want these things in any meaningful sense? The will of a species to survive is certainly unlike the will of a human to survive (although the will of the individuals of some species to survive may be more comparable to that of a person’s)…

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with talking about species in this way. After all, it’s far more pleasing to read about a “reckless-seeming act of evolutionary faith in us” (27) than “a mutation, which, resulted in our planting corn for food, but which, in the absence of humans, might have been fatal.” We should realize, though, that when we talk about a species having interests, the word “interests” is merely a shorthand way of expressing more complicated ideas. The same, of course, is true of individuals having interests, but the underlying complexities are very different in the two cases, even though we refer to both with the same word.

I think that the last couple of sentences (to which I’ve added emphasis) are particularly relevant here (in fact, I wrote them with this post in mind). If we say that a species has interests, those interests are not comparable to the interests of individuals. Whereas individual animals can experience forms of suffering that we know to be unpleasant, the interest of a species is something entirely different. A species doesn’t want to exist in any meaningful sense (but its members have an interest in a happy existence). As in the case of the nation, the community, and the corporation, any interest of the species should derive its moral standing from the interest of the individuals. Indeed, Pollan hints at this connection when he condemns factory farms even though they ensure the survival of certain species.

Of course, the idea that we shouldn’t care about species is one that would trouble most environmentally-minded people. Most of us believe that extinction is a bad thing. Pollan is ready to capitalize on this point, sharing with us the story of animal protectionists’ opposition to an ecosystem restoration project on Santa Cruz Island. Pollan’s exposition of that story is so slanted that I’ll be dedicating a lengthy post to it in the near future.

For now, I’ll just argue that the animal rights view doesn’t imply that we shouldn’t worry about extinction. On the most basic level, the interests of the individuals of a species deserve some consideration in the rights view, and a species can’t go extinct without the death of its members. Furthermore, wild animal species tend to occupy complex niches within their habitats. When a species goes extinct, it vacates that niche, which can lead to ecological instability and extensive individual suffering among members of many species. This suggests that supporters of animal rights should oppose human activities that decrease ecological stability, and this will tend to prevent extinction.

This attitude won’t prevent all extinctions, and I’m not sure that’s a bad thing. Over time, ecosystems change even without human intervention, so the loss of some species is inevitable. If the utilitarian view compels us to minimize our ecological impact, that’s not nearly as troubling as the suggestion that extinction doesn’t matter under the rights view.

I should also point out that my comments about wild animals occupying complex niches don’t extend so well to domesticated animals. Even on Polyface Farm, the number of animal species is relatively small. The existing farm animals could be allowed to live out their natural lifespans with minimal suffering, and excess land could be left to wild animals. The rights view, it thus seems to me, should be generally supportive of preserving wild species, but provides no obligation to perpetuate farmed animal species.

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The life of freedom

July 4, 2010 at 11:52 am · Filed under Misrepresentation of sources, Philosophy, The Omnivore's Dilemma ·Tagged , , , ,

After tackling the question of animal cruelty, Michael Pollan gives us a discussion of animal happiness, drawing on his experience at Polyface Farm. To Pollan, this is where the animal rightists’ argument falls apart. He explains,

To say of one of Joel Salatin’s caged broilers that “the life of freedom is to be preferred” betrays an ignorance about chicken preferences that, around his place at least, revolve around not getting one’s head bitten off by a weasel. (320)

The quote about “the life of freedom” is one that Singer has previously attributed to Peter Singer, and it’s worth looking at the context of Singer’s remark. Singer writes (in Animal Liberation),

Now it is difficult to compare two sets of conditions as diverse as those of wild animals and those on a factory farm (or those of free Africans and slaves on a plantation); but if the comparison has to be made surely the life of freedom is to be preferred. (227)

Singer makes it exceedingly clear that he isn’t talking about Joel Salatin’s broilers when he says “the life of freedom is to be preferred,” but Pollan presents the quote in a modified context to make it appear to betray “an ignorance about chicken preferences.”

Pollan makes the point that most domesticated animals wouldn’t exist in the wild, so we’re to believe that a farm like Polyface actually increases animal happiness. Whether that would make it worth having farms like Polyface is a philosophical question that I’m not going to address right now — in recent editions of Animal Liberation, Singer acknowledges some uncertainty on the underlying moral question. Instead, I’ll raise questions about whether such a farm actually does increase animal happiness.

While Pollan is right to point out that there would be no chickens or cows if people didn’t raise them, that doesn’t mean there would be far fewer happy animals without farms like Polyface. Since raising animals for food requires more land than raising plants for food, plant-based diets leave more land for wild animals, and thus supports more of them. As Pollan has pointed out previously, though, intensively farmed land may support more animals than wilderness.

However, we might also attempt to compare the happiness of wild animals to those of Salatin’s domesticated animals. This is where the fact of domestic animals being unable to live in the comes to work against Pollan’s argument. Owing to natural selection, the behaviors that improve an animal’s chance of surviving and reproducing should tend to also bring enjoyment.

When we domesticate animals, artificial selection replaces natural selection, and the animals that pass on their genes are not the ones that can fend for themselves but the ones that can feed people more efficiently. Thus, even on a farm like Salatin’s we end up with Cornish cross hens which (unlike their red junglefowl ancestors) cannot fly (and which Pollan has told us “grow so rapidly…that their poor legs cannot keep pace” (171)) and broadbreasted white turkeys which have trouble reproducing sexually without human assistance. So it seems very likely to me that an animal that cannot survive in the wild has a greatly diminished capacity for enjoyment.

The way food animals are raised tends to exacerbate this effect. Notably, breeding is carefully managed by humans. As Pollan has pointed out, male food animals are castrated. Thus, even those animals whose breeding does not prevent them from having sex are prevented from having a normal sex life.

What this suggests is that when considering Singer’s point that “the life of freedom is to be preferred”, the relevant comparison is not be between a Cornish cross hen in Joel Salatin’s cage and another one left out in the pasture to be eaten by a weasel. Rather, we should compare Salatin’s hen to another animal that can survive in the wild — unless we see an obligation to preserve the domesticated species, as Pollan apparently does. I’ll address that argument in the near future.

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Pain, suffering, and language

July 3, 2010 at 8:44 am · Filed under Philosophy, The Omnivore's Dilemma ·Tagged , , , , , , ,

After discussing the social and cultural implications of his vegetarianism, Michael Pollan addresses the issue of animal suffering and how it compares to human suffering. On this question, he writes,

The animal people claim, however, that there are neocartesian scientists and thinkers about who argue that animals are incapable of suffering because they lack language. Yet if you take the trouble to actually read the writers in question (Daniel Dennett and Stephen Budiansky are two of the ones often cited), you quickly realize they’re being unfairly caricatured. (315)

Pollan doesn’t tell us which “animal people” are guilty of this, but the focus of his debate on animal rights is unquestionably Peter Singer’s work. I simply don’t see this in Singer’s Animal Liberation. Pollan explains the argument of Dennett,

The offending argument, which does not seem unreasonable to me, is that human pain differs from animal pain by an order of magnitude. This qualitative difference is largely the result of our possession of language and, by virtue of language, our ability to have thoughts about thoughts and to imagine what is not. The philosopher Daniel Dennett suggests we can draw a distinction between pain, which a great many animals obviously experience, and suffering, which depends on a degree of self-consciousness only a handful of animals appear to command. Suffering in this view is not just lots of pain but pain amplified by distinctly human emotions such as regret, self-pity, shame, humiliation, and dread. (316)

In fact, Singer does give this point some attention. He writes,

[T]here is a hazy line of philosophical thought…which maintains that we cannot meaningfully attribute states of consciousness to beings without language. This position seems to me very implausible. Language may be necessary for abstract thought, at some level anyway; but states like pain are more primitive, and have nothing to do with language. (14)

This comes just a few paragraphs after Singer cites evidence from the British government that animals can experience suffering beyond simple pain:

The committee members then went on to consider forms of suffering other than mere physical pain and added that they were “satisfied that animals do suffer from acute fear and terror.” Subsequent reports by British government committees on experiments on animals and on the welfare of animals under intensive farming methods agreed with this view, concluding that animals are capable of suffering both from straightforward physical injuries and from fear, anxiety, stress, and so on. (13)

While I don’t think it’s fair to say that Singer has misrepresented the argument relating suffering and language, I think the point that Pollan tries to make with Dennett’s argument is valid, though its usefulness may be limited. Pollan explains,

As humans contemplating the suffering or pain of animals we do need to guard against projecting onto them what the same experience would feel like to us. Watching a steer force-marched up the ramp to the kill-floor door, as I have done, I have to forcibly remind myself this is not Sean Penn in Dead Man Walking, that the scene is playing very differently in a bovine brain, from which the concept of nonexistence is thankfully absent. (316)

I don’t doubt that a steer and a human will experience death differently, and it’s fair for Pollan to point out that we should keep this in mind. However, we should also keep in mind that when we decide what to eat for dinner, we’re usually not deciding whether to put a human or an animal to death. Rather, the choice might be between a little bit of social discomfort for a human or acute fear and terror for an animal. While those emotions won’t be experienced the same way that we would experience them, they still constitute suffering, and to the extent that they are experienced, they deserve consideration.

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Pollan goes vegetarian

July 1, 2010 at 11:36 am · Filed under Philosophy, The Omnivore's Dilemma ·Tagged , , ,

In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Pollan regretfully concedes that he’ll have to become a vegetarian as he sorts out the ethical questions surrounding meat-eating. He explains,

According to Peter Singer I can’t hope to answer that question objectively as long as I’m still eating meat. “We have a strong interest in convincing ourselves that our concern for other animals does not require us to stop eating them.” I can sort of see his point: I mean, why am I working so hard to justify a dinner menu? “No one in the habit of eating an animal can be completely without bias in judging whether the conditions in which that animal is reared cause suffering.” In other words, I’m going to have to stop eating meat before I can in good conscience decide if I can continue eating meat, much less go hunting for meat. (312)

Pollan takes Singer up on the challenge, but it’s hard to see how this makes him any less biased. He writes,

So on a September Sunday, after dining on a delicious barbecued tenderloin of pork, I became a reluctant and, I fervently hoped, temporary vegetarian. (313)

Even if Pollan is not “in the habit of eating an animal,” he clearly continues to want to eat animals, even telling us that he “fervently” hopes that he’ll be able to eat them again. So how exactly does his vegetarianism reduce his bias?

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A bad start to the debate

July 1, 2010 at 7:40 am · Filed under Misrepresentation of sources, Philosophy, The Omnivore's Dilemma ·Tagged , , , ,

In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan attempts to summarize the argument of Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation, but he quickly begins to oversimplify Singer’s position. Pollan writes,

Equal consideration of interests is not the same as equal treatment, [Singer] points out; children have an interest in being educated, pigs in rooting around in the dirt. But where their interests are the same, the principle of equality demands they receive the same consideration. And the one all-important interest humans share with pigs, as with all sentient creatures, is an interest in avoiding pain. (308)

Singer’s point is both stronger and more complex. Singer writes,

The capacity for suffering and enjoyment is a prerequisite for having interests at all, a condition that must be satisfied before we can speak of interests in a meaningful way. (2001 edition, page 7)

In his summary, Pollan has not only replaced suffering with the narrower concept of pain, but he’s also omitted enjoyment. Furthermore, Pollan suggests that avoiding pain is merely “the one all-important interest humans share with pigs,” whereas Singer goes further. Singer believes that the capacities for suffering and enjoyment are necessary for us to define the notion of interest, so that he isn’t arbitrarily excluding any interests by focusing on these. It is because animals share these capacities with us, he argues, that we should consider their interests.

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A note on animal rights literature

June 30, 2010 at 10:43 am · Filed under The Omnivore's Dilemma ·Tagged , , , ,

In my reading of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, I’ve reached Michael Pollan’s chapter on the ethics of eating animals. This chapter includes a debate with the text of Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation, with quotes of a few other animal rights supporters weaved in. I’ll take issue with a number of Pollan’s counterarguments, but I don’t count myself as a follower of Singer (or any other animal rights philosopher). My criticism of Pollan’s counterarguments should not be interpreted as endorsements of Singer’s arguments. In particular, this means that if you have other unrelated objections to Singer’s arguments, I won’t necessarily be interested in responding to them.

I generally don’t think that discussions of animal rights philosophy make for effective advocacy. However, it happens that Pollan has brought such a discussion to a wide audience, so I’ve decided to do what I can to add to that conversation (albeit to a much smaller audience).

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