The Oxford Handbook of Food Ethics 9780199372263, 0199372268

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T h e Ox f o r d H a n d b o o k o f

F O OD  E T H IC S

The Oxford Handbook of

FOOD ETHICS Edited by

ANNE BARNHILL MARK BUDOLFSON and

TYLER DOGGETT

1

3 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2018 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Barnhill, Anne / Budolfson, Mark / Doggett, Tyler, editors. Title: The Oxford handbook of food ethics / edited by Anne Barnhill, Mark Budolfson, and Tyler Doggett. Description: New York : Oxford University Press, 2018. Identifiers: LCCN 2017012921 | ISBN 9780199372263 (hardcover : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Food—Moral and ethical aspects. Classification: LCC TX357 .O94 2017 | DDC 641.3002—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017012921 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America

Contents

Acknowledgments  List of Contributors 

ix xi

1. Introduction  Anne Barnhill, Mark Budolfson, and Tyler Doggett

1

PA RT I   C ON V E N T IONA L AG R IC U LT U R E A N D A LT E R NAT I V E S 2. Sustainable Agriculture, Environmental Philosophy, and the Ethics of Food  Clark Wolf

29

3. Farming, the Virtues, and Agrarian Philosophy  Paul B. Thompson

53

4. Food, the Environment, and Global Justice  Mark Budolfson

67

5. Genetically Modified Food  Rachel A. Ankeny and Heather J. Bray

95

6. Local Food Movements: Differing Conceptions of Food, People, and Change  Samantha E. Noll and Ian Werkheiser

112

PA RT I I   A N I M A L S 7. Concerning Cattle: Behavioral and Neuroscientific Evidence for Pain, Desire, and Self-​Consciousness  Gary Comstock 8. The New Hunter and Local Food  Charles List

139 170

vi   Contents

9. Ethics for Fish  Eliot Michaelson and Andrew Reisner

189

PA RT I I I   C ON SUM P T ION  10. The Ethical Basis for Veganism  Tristram McPherson

209

11. Arguments for Consuming Animal Products  Bob Fischer

241

12. Consumer Choice and Collective Impact  Julia Nefsky

267

13. Religious Dietary Practices and Secular Food Ethics; or, How to Hope that Your Food Choices Make a Difference Even When You Reasonably Believe that They Don’t  Andrew Chignell 14. The Clean Plate Club? Food Waste and Individual Responsibility  Jaclyn Hatala Matthes and Erich Hatala Matthes

287 313

PA RT I V   F O OD J U ST IC E A N D S O C IA L J U ST IC E 15. Racial Imperialism and Food Traditions  Lee A. McBride III 16. Food Sovereignty, Justice, and Indigenous Peoples:  An Essay on Settler Colonialism and Collective Continuance  Kyle Powys Whyte

333

345

17. Food, Fairness, and Global Markets  Madison Powers

367

18. Multi-​Issue Food Activism  Jeff Sebo

399

PA RT V   E T H IC S A N D P OL I T IC S OF F O OD P OL IC Y 19. Public Justification and the Politics of Agriculture  Dan C. Shahar

427

Contents   vii

20. Paternalism, Food, and Personal Freedom  Sarah Conly

449

21. Deceptive Advertising and Taking Responsibility for Others  Seana Valentine Shiffrin

470

22. Food Labor Ethics  Tyler Doggett and Seth M. Holmes

494

23. The Moral Burdens of Temporary Farmwork  Sabine Tsuruda

521

PA RT V I   G E N DE R , B ODY I M AG E , A N D “H E A LT H Y ” E AT I N G 24. Eat Y’Self Fitter: Orthorexia, Health, and Gender  Christina Van Dyke

553

25. Food Insecurity: Dieting as Ideology, as Oppression, and as Privilege  572 Tracy Isaacs 26. Shame, Seduction, and Character in Food Messaging  Rebecca Kukla

593

27. Obesity and Responsibility  Beth Dixon

614

PA RT V I I   F O OD A N D S O C IA L I DE N T I T I E S , C U LT U R A L P R AC T IC E S , A N D VA LU E S 28. I Eat, Therefore I Am: Disgust and the Intersection of Food and Identity  Daniel Kelly and Nicolae Morar

637

29. Morality and Aesthetics of Food  Shen-​yi Liao and Aaron Meskin

658

30. Food Choices and Moral Character  Kate Nolfi

680

31. The Etiquette of Eating  Karen Stohr

700

viii   Contents

32. The Ethics of Being a Foodie  Susan Wolf

722

PA RT V I I I   H I STORY OF P H I L O S OP H Y A N D F O OD E T H IC S 33. Who You Are Is What You Eat: Food in Ancient Thought  Katja Maria Vogt

741

34. Food Ethics in the Middle Ages  Henrik Lagerlund

759

35. You Are What You Eat, But Should You Eat What You Are? Modern Philosophical Dietetics  John Grey and Aaron Garrett

773

Index

795

Acknowledgments

We thank Andy Egan for help in getting this started and Caley Millen-​Pigliucci, Isla Ng, Peter Ohlin, Emily Saccharin, and Andrew Ward for help once it was underway.

Contributors

Rachel A. Ankeny is Professor in the School of Humanities at the University of Adelaide. Anne Barnhill is Research Scholar at the Berman Institute of Bioethics at Johns Hopkins University. Heather J. Bray is a Senior Research Associate in the School of Humanities at the University of Adelaide. Mark Budolfson is Assistant Professor at the University of Vermont. Andrew Chignell is Professor in Religion and Philosophy, and in the University Center for Human Values, at Princeton University. Gary Comstock is Professor of Philosophy in the North Carolina State University Philosophy and Religious Studies Department. Sarah Conly is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Bowdoin College. Beth Dixon is Professor of Philosophy at S.U.N.Y College at Plattsburgh. Tyler Doggett is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Vermont. Bob Fischer is Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Texas State University. Aaron Garrett is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Boston University. John Grey is Visiting Assistant Professor at Michigan State University Department of Philosophy. Seth M. Holmes is Associate Professor of Public Health and Medical Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. Tracy Isaacs is Professor of Philosophy and of Women’s Studies and Feminist Research at Western University in London, Ontario, Canada. Daniel Kelly is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Purdue University. Rebecca Kukla is Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University, and a graduate student in the Department of Urban Geography at the City University of New York. Henrik Lagerlund is Professor of Philosophy at Western University in Canada.

xii   Contributors Shen-​yi Liao is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at University of Puget Sound. Charles List is Professor of Philosophy at S.U.N.Y. College at Plattsburgh. Erich Hatala Matthes is Assistant Professor of Philosophy, and Advisory Faculty for Environmental Studies, at Wellesley College. Jaclyn Hatala Matthes is Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences, and Advisory Faculty for Environmental Studies, at Wellesley College. Lee A. McBride III is Associate Professor of Philosophy at The College of Wooster (Wooster, Ohio). Tristram McPherson is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Ohio State University. Aaron Meskin is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for Aesthetics at the University of Leeds. Eliot Michaelson is a Lecturer at King’s College London. Nicolae Morar is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Environmental Studies and an Associate Member of the Institute of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Oregon. Julia Nefsky is Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. Kate Nolfi is Assistant Professor at the University of Vermont. Samantha E. Noll is Assistant Professor in the School of Politics, Philosophy, and Public Affairs at Washington State University. Madison Powers is Professor of Philosophy, Francis J. McNamara, Jr. Chair in Ethics, and Senior Research Scholar, Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Georgetown University. Andrew Reisner is Senior Lecturer and Docent in Practical Philosophy at the Uppsala University Department of Philosophy. Jeff Sebo is Clinical Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies and Director of the Animals Studies M.A. Program at New York University. Dan C. Shahar is Research Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Seana Valentine Shiffrin is Professor of Philosophy and Pete Kameron Professor of Law and Social Justice at University of California, Los Angeles. Karen Stohr is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University and Senior Research Scholar in Georgetown’s Kennedy Institute of Ethics. Paul B. Thompson holds the W. K. Kellogg Chair in Agricultural, Food and Community Ethics at Michigan State University, where he serves on the faculty in the departments of Philosophy, Community Sustainability and Agricultural, Food and Resource Economics.

Contributors   xiii Sabine Tsuruda is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Philosophy at the University of California, Los Angeles. Christina Van Dyke is Professor of Philosophy and Director of Gender Studies at Calvin College. Katja Maria Vogt is Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, New York. Ian Werkheiser is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas-​El Paso. Kyle Powys Whyte holds the Timnick Chair in the Humanities at Michigan State University and is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Community Sustainability. Clark Wolf is Director of Bioethics, and Professor in the departments of Philosophy and Political Science at Iowa State University. He is also a faculty member in the ISU Graduate Program in Sustainable Agriculture. Susan Wolf is Edna J. Koury Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

chapter 1

INTRODU C T I ON Anne Barnhill, Mark Budolfson, and Tyler Doggett

There are seven billion people. Nearly one billion are estimated to be malnourished. Several million die each year of easily preventable hunger-​related conditions. Yet others are living through a culinary golden age: new cuisines, old cuisines brought to new places, cookbook upon cookbook, and TV food shows. Food for a huge price. Food for cheap. But plenty of food for those who can afford it. Some of the food is produced by raising and killing animals. Worldwide, tens of millions of buffalo are killed for us to eat, hundreds of millions of cattle and sheep, billions of pigs, and tens of billions of chickens.1 Some of the food is produced by raising and killing plants. Worldwide, over 5 billion tons of crops are produced annually. This includes several billion tons of cereals, over a billion tons of vegetables and melons, and about half a billion tons of other fruit.2 Such a large quantity of crop production has negative impacts on biodiversity, on soil and water quality, and on other aspects of the environment.3 Some of the food is produced by the people who eat it. Much of it is produced by others, others who labor in a range of circumstances. In 2007, Barbara Kingsolver published a book about her family’s exhausting but idyllic life farming for themselves in Virginia, while John Bowe published one about agricultural slave labor in Florida. Some of the food is marketed: piled in boxes with handwritten signs at a farmers’ market or wrapped in plastic and put in a box with Count Chocula on the cover. Some of it gets eaten. A lot of it does not. As Erich and Jaclyn Hatala Matthes write in their contribution to this book, up to 30% of rice produced fails to reach consumers. 1 

Böll Foundation, “The Meat Atlas,” 2014, https://​www.boell.de/​en/​2014/​01/​07/​meat-​atlas. FAOSTAT, “Crops,” 2017, http://​www.fao.org/​faostat/​en/​#data/​QC. USDA, World Agricultural Production Data, 2017, http://​usda.mannlib.cornell.edu/​MannUsda/​. 3  Union of Concerned Scientists, “Hidden Costs of Industrial Agriculture,” 2017, http://​www.ucsusa. org/​food_​and_​agriculture/​our-​failing-​food-​system/​industrial-​agriculture/​hidden-​costs-​of-​industrial. html. 2 

2    A. Barnhill, M. Budolfson, T. Doggett Up to 50% of fresh produce fails to do so. Nearly 40% of food the United States produces is wasted. Still other food is not wasted, but is also never even intended for human consumption: it is instead turned into biofuels or used for other industrial purposes. One might ask various ethical questions about the foregoing: Are the states of affairs good? Bad? Are individual people in them acting wrongly? Are things other than individual people—​ governments, corporations, collectives, economic orders—​ acting wrongly? If some of these actions are wrong, why are they wrong? Because they are unjust? Cruel? Oppressive? Or something else? Are agents who perform the wrongful actions blameworthy for doing so? If certain states of affairs (or policies or market structures) are not ethically good states of affairs, should they be replaced? With what? Food ethics has developed various responses to these questions. It has made ever more careful, nuanced versions of arguments that date back to ancient philosophy. It has made new ones on new topics. Food ethics, as an academic pursuit, is vast. It incorporates work from philosophy but also anthropology, economics, environmental sciences and other natural sciences, geography, and sociology. Scholars from these fields, including some philosophers, have been producing work for decades on the food system, and on ethical, social, and policy issues connected to the food system. Yet in the last several years, there has been a notable increase in philosophical work on these issues—​work that draws on multiple literatures within practical ethics, normative ethics, and political philosophy. This Handbook introduces and adds to that philosophical work across multiple areas of food ethics.

A Short History of Recent Work in Food Ethics In a recent essay on the origins of food ethics, Paul Thompson distinguishes between what we here call food ethics—​“a deliberative inquiry into the normative dimensions . . . of food”4—​and the social movement to promote ethical states of affairs in the food system, the constellation of food producers, processors, marketers, transporters, preparers, and eaters that gets food from ground to mouth. This distinction between food ethics as an academic pursuit and its related social movement is a useful one, notwithstanding that some individuals are engaged in both pursuits. As Thompson discusses, recent popular work on food ethics, fueled by and fueling the social movement he mentions, has followed a somewhat unsteady trajectory.5 Some classic books (Silent Spring, Animal Machines) and a documentary (Harvest of Shame) 4 

Paul Thompson, “The Emergence of Food Ethics,” Food Ethics 1 (2016): 64–​74.

5 Ibid.

Introduction   3 appeared in the early 1960s. Two more classics (Diet for a Small Planet and Animal Liberation) appeared in the early and mid-​1970s. Then there was a lull before Fast Food Nation and Omnivore’s Dilemma appeared in the early and mid-​2000s along with books and journals (Food Politics, Gastronomica, pieces in the Utne Reader) that were both scholarly and accessible. And then came not just books and magazine articles but special issues of magazines, popular documentaries, TED talks, regular columns in national newspapers. Chefs now publish ethical arguments in addition to cookbooks. Food columnists now argue the ethics of veganism as well as sharing recipes. Food ethics as a deliberative, academic inquiry could be traced back hundreds or even thousands of years. As Katja Vogt’s, Henrik Lagerlund’s, and John Grey and Aaron Garrett’s contributions to this book show, ancient, medieval, and modern philosophers concerned themselves with questions of what one may and may not eat, of what consumption said about eaters, and of the ethics of production. New technologies have always provided good, new subjects for popular food ethics: these technologies enabled the industrial farms that were the subjects of Animal Machines and Harvest of Shame and that were the background for Silent Spring and Diet for a Small Planet, as they were the background for The Jungle in an earlier era. These technologies are important to deliberative, academic food ethics too. The recent history of deliberative, academic food ethics might be traced to Peter Singer’s work on animals and hunger in the early and mid-​1970s, notably Animal Liberation and “Famine, Affluence and Morality.” The journals Environmental Ethics, Agriculture and Human Values, and The Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics were founded in 1979, 1984, and 1988, respectively, as the pace of papers on food ethics picked up. The 1990s saw the publication of books on philosophy and food, including books on food ethics by Deane Curtin and Lisa Heldke,6 Ben Mepham,7 Elizabeth Telfer,8 and Paul B. Thompson.9 By the new millennium, there was enough academic work to support three complementary histories of food ethics.10 More journals came: Gastronomica (2001), The Journal of Animal Ethics (2011), and Food Ethics (2016). Books came faster and faster. Food ethics, as a philosophical endeavor, now includes work on animals and hunger, but much more to boot: collective action, disgust, food justice, food labeling, genetic modification, locavorism, obesity, and the list goes on.

6  Deane Curtin and Lisa Heldke, Cooking, Eating, Thinking (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992). 7  Ben Mepham, ed., Food Ethics (New York: Routledge, 1996). 8  Elizabeth Telfer, Food for Thought (New York: Routledge, 1996). 9  Paul Thompson, The Ethics of Aid and Trade (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Paul Thompson, The Spirit of the Soil (New York: Routledge, 1995). 10  Hub Zwart, “A Short History of Food Ethics,” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 12 (2000): 113–​126; Michiel Korthals, “The Birth of Philosophy and Contempt for Food,” Gastronomica 8 (2008): 62–​69; Thompson, “The Emergence of Food Ethics,” 64–​74.

4    A. Barnhill, M. Budolfson, T. Doggett

Overview This book takes in some of that vastness but, as a matter of course, not all. It gives a sample of some philosophical work on food ethics. It is split into eight parts.

Part I: Conventional Agriculture and Alternatives Part I, “Conventional Agriculture and Alternatives,” surveys the industrial model of farming that dominates in developed countries, looking most closely at industrial crop farming and its environmental effects. Industrial agriculture is typified by large-​scale, highly mechanized farms that grow a single crop on large areas of land and use liberal amounts of synthetic fertilizers, synthetic pesticides, synthetic herbicides, and genetically modified seeds. Industrial farms have larger capital inputs of fertilizer, irrigated water, fossil fuels, and so on per unit of land area than alternative forms of agriculture, and are in this way much more intensive than alternatives. These large farms are clustered in areas of natural advantage:  the Central Valley of California, the prairies of Saskatchewan, the cerrados of Brazil, and so on. Industrial agriculture aims for the production of the greatest quantity of food in the smallest amount of space with the least labor, all for the ultimate goal of maximum profits. Of course, these goals were also more or less pursued by some preindustrial farmers. In order to achieve these goals now, however, farmers must invest large amounts of capital in recent technological advances, which have in turn made possible huge increases in crop yields both overall and per unit of land area, and reductions in the amount of land and labor necessary to achieve those yields. These technological changes and economic forces put the “industry” in “industrial” and explain the transformation in almost every developed nation from agriculturally focused societies to something else. As a result of this transformation, there has been a large increase in the amount of food produced on agricultural land. This was made possible by nineteenth-​century plant and soil science that suggested that what plants need from the soil is just a few nutrients—​nutrients that could be given directly to plants in the form of fertilizer—​and by selective breeding that produced higher yielding seeds. It was made possible, too, by important subsequent technological advances and investments in machinery, synthetic fertilizers, synthetic herbicides, synthetic fungicides, synthetic pesticides, irrigation (sometimes in the form of large public works projects paid for by taxpayers, such as large dam and water transportation infrastructure, but also including technology such as improved drilling, center pivot irrigation, etc.), and by GMOs that produced more food and promised a reduced need for herbicides and pesticides. Previously, farmers had, of course, worked to fertilize, kill weed, fungi, and pests, and plant high-​yielding, hardy plants. But recent technological advances have massively improved that situation

Introduction   5 and enabled farmers to work much larger farms without much more work. A US government official described this new form of agriculture as containing “the makings of a new revolution. It is not a violent red revolution like that of the Soviets, nor is it a White Revolution like that of the Shah of Iran. I call it the Green Revolution.”11 His term “Green Revolution” caught on and is now widely used to refer to the large increases in crop yields in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s that were associated with the development and deployment of important instances of the technologies we have described, especially as implemented in Asia and Latin America. Larger farms located in the most advantageous places also enabled farmers to benefit from economies of scale: as farmers produced more, the costs they needed to pay for that production went down proportionately. This was aided by ever larger and more capable machinery. Larger farms reduced the number of farms, freeing up people to do other jobs. And the productivity of those large farms in certain especially agriculturally apt places enabled those farms to produce enough for places near and far. For example, whereas small states on the East Coast used to grow their own wheat, huge wheat producers in the Midwest and Great Plains—​possessed of better natural resources than New England for growing wheat—​eliminated that need. Whereas some places are unsuitable for growing much given their soil and climate, mega-​farms in suitable spots made it possible to grow and then ship widely. But, at the same time, to make the most efficient use of many of these technologies and thus maximize the profitability of their farms, many farmers need to shift almost exclusively to monoculture—​that is, planting all the same crop over a large area, and suppressing the growth of absolutely everything else. This is necessary because, for example, the combine harvester can very efficiently harvest many rows of corn, but, it cannot very well harvest a row of corn + strawberries + potatoes. However, shifting to monocultures, like shifting to industrial agriculture generally, has environmental, social, and economic costs. Clark Wolf ’s “Sustainable Agriculture” discusses the environmental costs. The essay considers various accounts of what sustainability is and then evaluates various practices according to whether they satisfy such accounts. Some of these are compatible with the industrial model. Others are alternatives to it. Mark Budolfson’s “Food, the Environment, and Global Justice” also engages various conceptions of sustainability and argues that none should be the fundamentally important objective in connection with food systems or other societal issues. The bulk of his essay identifies and critically examines a standard form of argument for organic and vegan alternatives to contemporary industrial agriculture. This argument faces objections to its empirical premises, to its presumption that there is a single food system that minimizes harm along every dimension that matters and is best for the 11  William Gaud, “The Green Revolution: Accomplishments and Apprehensions,” 1968, speech to the Society for International Development. Text on-​line at http://​www.agbioworld.org/​biotech-​info/​topics/​ borlaug/​borlaug-​green.html.

6    A. Barnhill, M. Budolfson, T. Doggett environment, and to the presumption that the ethically best food system for us to promote is the one that would be either best in ideal theory or best from the perspective of our domestic society. He argues that determining which food system we should actually promote requires a complex global, empirically and ethically integrated assessment that includes a proper accounting for values of global justice in nonideal theory, where that proper accounting arguably recommends a view that is called “sustainable intensification” in the food science literature, which involves more elements of contemporary industrial agriculture than are favored by proponents of organic or vegan alternatives. One aspect of industrial farming in its current form is the use of genetically modified crops, crops modified to be drought-​resistant, to be more nutritious, but also to withstand various synthetic chemicals that can be applied liberally to them. In “Genetically Modified Food,” Rachel A. Ankeny and Heather J. Bray survey ethical arguments for and against the production and consumption of genetically modified food. They argue that there should be more public discussion of these arguments and of genetic modification in general. In “Local Food Movements: Differing Conceptions of Food, People, and Change,” Samantha E. Noll and Ian Werkheiser discuss the local food movement—​a movement that aims to create alternative food systems focused on local production and distribution, a shorter supply chain, and, in some cases, more community control. Localized food systems are seen as “providing an alternative and challenge to the corporate-​led, industrialized, global food system by reconnecting food with environmental health and sustainability, social justice concerns, and the importance of place.” Yet the local food movement has been criticized as not accomplishing these goals because it does not mount a significant challenge to the status quo or more fundamentally because localized food systems do not have the aimed-​for benefits (e.g., a globalized system can actually be more ecologically sustainable than having localized food systems). Noll and Werkheiser get beneath the surface of these critiques, identifying three distinct sub-​movements within the local food movement, which differ in their goals and their conceptions of food. They discuss the strengths and weaknesses of these three sub-​movements and which critiques get traction with which sub-​movements. In “Farming, the Virtues, and Agrarian Philosophy,” Paul Thompson considers the philosophical approach to agriculture that is found in agrarianism, and contrasts agrarianism with mainstream consequentialist and deontological approaches in ethics. Agrarianism emphasizes the unique nature and significance of farming—​from Aristotle, who saw the household farm as a model for the state, to Thomas Jefferson, who saw farmers as the best citizens, to the work of early modern thinkers, to contemporary agrarian thinkers who see farming as having special importance for environmental ethics and sustainability. Thompson contrasts agrarian approaches to farming and agriculture with the dominant approach in food ethics, which assumes that agriculture “can be analyzed and ethically evaluated using the same concepts and norms that would be used to critique any other sector of the economy”—​concepts from consequentialist, deontological, and contractualist approaches.

Introduction   7

Part II: Animals The second part of the book, “Animals,” is partly about the industrial model of agriculture—​ large scale, highly mechanized, concentrated in few locations—​applied to animal farming. Many billions of animals are raised for our consumption each year, the vast majority of them at high stocking density in conditions that discomfit them in various ways. Animals on industrial farms cannot feed themselves. Since they need to be fed, farmers need to get food for them. And once they get fed, they make waste. These simple points about industrial animal agriculture underlie most of their environmental effects. The food that is grown for these animals—​often called feed when it is fed to them rather than to humans—​is typically derived from industrial plant agriculture and often derived from corn or soy that is grown using the synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and so on that are crucial to contemporary industrial plant agriculture. Their manufacture and distribution require fossil fuels. Feeding these crops to animals (which are then eaten by humans) uses many times as much food as would be required if humans ate these crops directly. As the number of animals on these farms rises, so too does the amount of food that needs growing. This leads to forest and other lands being turned into farmland, which leads to loss of habitat for wildlife and loss of biodiversity. When forests are clear-​cut so the land can be used for agriculture, this is a loss of carbon sinks that remove greenhouse gases (GHGs) from the atmosphere, and the replacement of them with sources of GHGs, since agricultural fields are net emitters. That is what goes into animals on industrial farms. Another environmental problem is what comes out. Animal feces are a valuable resource in the right quantity because they can be used as fertilizer. Yet too much waste is produced to be useful fertilizer. It collects in “lagoons,” where it threatens to overrun or to leech into water. It gets sprayed on fields where it runs off and becomes a pollutant that renders water undrinkable, unswimmable, and, for aquatic animals, uninhabitable. In too concentrated a form, it renders soil unusable. And animal feces produce GHGs, just like animals’ burps and farts do. It produces stench and respiratory illness for those nearby. People who will live in the future will deal with environmental problems that are indirect results of industrial farming, traceable in part to the quantities of GHGs produced by industrially farmed animals and to the clear-​cutting that is done to grow food for factory-​farmed animals. When GHGs from crops that are grown to feed animals are taken into account, and also the associated deforestation in some areas associated with grazing and cultivating this feed, most experts estimate that around 10% to 15% of all global GHG emissions are the result of animal agriculture.12 By comparison, all of the 12  For the high end of this range, see P. J. Gerber, H. Steinfeld, B. Henderson, A. Mottet, C. Opio, J. Dijkman, A. Falcucci, and G. Tempio, “Tackling Climate Change through Livestock—​A Global Assessment of Emissions and Mitigation Opportunities,” UN FAO, 2013 (hereinafter FAO 2013); note that this study is by many of the same authors as and supersedes the slightly higher earlier estimates of H. Steinfeld, P. Gerber, T. Wassenaar, V. Castel, M. Rosales, and C. de Haan, “Livestock’s Long Shadow,” UN FAO, 2006; for the low end, see USA Environmental Protection Agency, “Non-​CO2

8    A. Barnhill, M. Budolfson, T. Doggett world’s commercial airline emissions account for only about 2% of global GHG emissions, and all of the world’s road transport emissions (including, but not limited to, automobile emissions) account for about 10%.13 So, globally, consuming animal products is a larger contributor to climate change than even driving automobiles. Industrial animal agriculture also has negative effects on present people, some of which are immediately perceptible and other of which are not. People who live near industrial animal farms suffer from stench and sickness from contaminated water and from gases and parasites. Workers on industrial farms suffer high rates of work-​related injuries. People who live farther away might deal with contamination from seepage due to farm waste. People might deal with contamination due to excess waste being spread on fields and then draining off into the water supply. They might deal with contaminated meat. People who live farther away might deal, too, with farm-​bred viruses and antibiotic-​ resistant bacteria. Industrial animal farms are, in various ways, good breeding grounds for viruses and bacteria. The stress on the animals weakens their immune system. Their proximity to each other makes passage of viruses easy. The antibiotics they take wipe out some bacteria but, in doing so, clear the field for the “fittest” bacteria. Most obviously, industrial animal agriculture has effects on animals and raises questions about the ethics of raising animals for food, of hurting them for food, and of killing them very young for food. Yet those questions are also raised, to some extent, by more humane, less industrial methods of farming. In the ideal, these methods of farming involve raising domestic animals (mostly) outdoors in ways that take advantage of their natural tendencies and make them well-​off. So for pigs it might involve giving the animals plenty of room outdoors to roam, places to build nests, areas in which to forage, and so on. It might also involve giving them toys to play with and man-​made piles of things in which to forage, neither of which is at all natural but both of which take advantage of pigs’ natural proclivities. Is it permissible to raise and kill living things to eat them? Moral vegans typically think so: it is permissible to kill carrots to eat them. Some think it is permissible to kill oysters. But not cattle. It is wrong to kill cattle. So, on their view, that a thing is alive Global Inventory: Appendix,” 2012 (hereinafter EPA 2012). By adding the same proportion of indirect to direct emissions from FAO 2013 to the estimates of direct emissions from animal agriculture that are the focus of EPA 2012, one arrives at approximately 10% of the global GHG emissions. Compare also Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC 2010), WG3 AR5, ch. 11, where the relevant discussion is based on the same sort of estimates as EPA 2012, and compare the claim that “the livestock sector may be responsible for 8–​18% of GHGs, a significant share considering their projected growth,” in Mario Herrero and Philip Thornton, “Livestock and Global Change: Emerging Issues for Sustainable Food Systems,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110 (2013): 20878–​20881; see also Mario Herrero et al., “Biomass Use, Production, Feed Efficiencies, and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Global Livestock Systems,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110 (2013): 20888–​20893. 13  IPCC, WG3 AR5, ch. 8, p. 606, where domestic and international aviation are reported to be a little less than 1 GT CO2eq and road transport emissions 5 GT CO2eq, out of total global emissions of 49 GT CO2eq. The bulk of the rest of global GHG emissions are from power plants and industrial sources. (For global totals, see IPCC, WG3 AR5, Technical Summary, p. 42.)

Introduction   9 does not make it morally wrong to kill it. What does? A certain sort of mentality. Plants, they think, lack it. Oysters too. Cattle, by contrast, have it. It is because of this mental life that it is not only morally objectionable to kill them but also to hurt them. In “Concerning Cattle: Behavioral and Neuroscientific Evidence for Pain, Desire, and Self-​ Consciousness,” Gary Comstock surveys the extant psychological literature on the mental lives of cattle, arguing that while they lack self-​consciousness, they are sentient and have desires, including desires for the (near) future. Because of this package of cognitive capacities, he argues, it is wrong to deprive them of life (and, derivatively, to consume their dead bodies). Charles List, by contrast, argues in “The New Hunter and Local Food,” that killing and eating large mammals is permissible and, in particular, hunting and consuming hunted animals is. He argues for this on environmental grounds but also on the basis of locavore considerations and anti-​industrial agricultural considerations, some of which are described in Noll and Werkheiser’s essay. He argues, too, for the importance of producing meat oneself and for the moral importance of gratitude and respect toward animals. List’s essay has clear applications to the case of fishing, one focus of Eliot Michaelson and Andrew Reisner’s “Ethics for Fish.” Like Comstock’s, the essay is partly about extant psychological evidence about the mental lives of animals—​in Comstock’s essay cattle; in Michaelson and Reisner’s fish—​and partly about ethical conclusions that that evidence supports. It considers both the permissibility of large-​scale fishing that makes possible Fishwiches and elementary school cafeteria fish sticks and also small-​scale subsistence fishing, the sort that List’s arguments can be extended to support. Whereas some think there are plain ethical dissimilarities between, say, fish and cattle that render killing the latter ethically problematic but killing the former unproblematic, Michaelson and Reisner think the two stand or fall together.

Part III: Consumption Although the essays in Part II have some discussion of consumption, they are primarily about the ethics of food production, especially whether it is permissible to treat animals in various ways to get food from them and whether it is permissible to kill animals for food. Part III, “Consumption,” is primarily about whether it is permissible to consume various products (and, in one case, whether it is permissible, instead, to waste them). Of course, these issues about production and consumption might be very closely connected. Indeed, it might seem that consumer ethics is straightforward and does not raise any difficult issues, and that the correct theory of consumer ethics is easy to identify: namely, that if something is produced in a way that is wrong, then it is always wrong to be a consumer of it. Call this the “Simple Principle” about consumer ethics. If the Simple Principle is true, then anytime some product is wrongfully produced, it immediately follows that it is wrong to be a consumer of it. If sweatshop labor is wrong, it is wrong to wear sweatshop-​produced clothes. If cosmetics are made by wrongfully hurting

10    A. Barnhill, M. Budolfson, T. Doggett animals, it is wrong to buy them. If it is wrong to kill animals for food, it is wrong to eat their dead bodies. Against this, someone who proposes that there is nothing wrong with watching NCAA sports on television, even though NCAA athletes are exploited in a way that makes it the case that the product being consumed—​namely, NCAA sports on television—​is wrongfully produced. Similarly, such a person might claim that there is nothing wrong with using electricity to watch a movie in one’s home even if it is produced by a coal power plant and even though coal-​generated electricity is produced in a way that is wrong because it generates a lot of pollutants as well as GHGs that do serious harm to people when better ways of producing electricity are available. Finally, such a person might expect us to agree that, at the very least, a dumpster diver who eats factory-​farmed meat from the garbage has done nothing wrong, even if we think that factory-​farmed meat is wrongfully produced. These seem like counterexamples to the Simple Principle. There are other putative problems with it. Consider the inefficacy objection to it, an objection discussed in this section by Andrew Chignell, Bob Fischer, Tristram McPherson, and Julia Nefsky. The inefficacy objection is, roughly, that even if it is true that a large number of additional consumers of an objectionable product would make the world worse, nonetheless it makes no difference whether there is one more or one less single individual consumer of such a product because the addition or deletion of a single consumer would not make any difference to the quantity produced in the sort of large marketplaces that are the norm in the developed world. For example, if you buy a pork chop from a store every day, this will probably make no difference to how much pork the store orders, and thus will make no difference to how much pork the wholesaler that supplies the store orders, and so on—​and thus will ultimately make no difference to how many pigs are raised for meat. If so, then it is permissible to consume such things even if they are wrongly produced. If so, the Simple Principle is false. The question is: What to replace it with? In “The Ethical Basis for Veganism,” Tristram McPherson argues the case for veganism, first arguing that it is wrong to raise and kill animals for food and then arguing from that to the conclusion that it is wrong to consume animal products because doing so is variously, objectionably related to the wrongness of producing food. Yet McPherson’s veganism is “modest,” allowing for the consumption of bivalves, of roadkill, and of eggs that are produced under certain conditions (but not the conditions that produce eggs for grocery stores). Bob Fischer’s “Arguments for Consuming Animal Products” goes over arguments for more catholic eating habits, providing some support for the consumption of bivalves and roadkill but also bugs, in vitro meat, meat that will otherwise go to waste, and also animals that have been raised for food but given good (and long-​ish) lives. These essays partly address the difficult issue of connecting the wrongness of the production of certain products to the wrongness of consumption of those products. It is not, in general, true that it is wrong to benefit from wrongdoing. Perhaps it is

Introduction   11 wrong to “support” wrongdoing? But in what way is giving $5 to McDonald’s for a Happy Meal supporting McDonald’s? Five dollars is not even a rounding error in their books. And if you do not buy that Happy Meal, the next person in line will. In “Consumer Choice and Collective Impact,” Julia Nefsky notes that of course it is true that if everyone stopped buying some wrongfully produced product, the product would stop being produced, but it is far from clear what that shows about whether an individual consumer should stop buying that product. It is even less clear what to do when the consumer knows that if she does not buy that product, someone else will. May she buy? If not, why not? Nefsky surveys a range of answers to these questions. In “Religious Dietary Practices and Secular Food Ethics; or, How to Hope That Your Food Choices Make a Difference Even When You Believe That They Don’t,” Andrew Chignell motivates what he calls a “broadly religious way of thinking” about food choices that helps to motivate people in the face of what seems like individual inefficacy. Dietary restrictions—​Muslims and Jews are forbidden pork, Catholics are forbidden meat on Fridays, some Buddhist monks are required to eat all and only what is given to them—​constitute an important part of religions. And while motivations vary, an important thread is that the effects of adhering to these restrictions are not limited to what we perceive and are valuable even in the absence of effects on anyone other than the eater. Confronted with one’s apparent inefficacy to change the food system, someone—​ religious or not—​might “seriously believe, or at least tenaciously hope, that the significance of her individual food choices goes well beyond what is immediately observed or empirically measurable” and because of this persist in the face of real or apparent inefficacy. Worries about inefficacy and the importance of collective action arise not only with regard to consumption of food but with its non-​consumption: food left on the vine, food left to rot in stockpiles or thrown in a dumpster, food we do not eat and throw away. Your parent tells you not to waste food because somewhere people are starving. Your personal food waste, your parent thinks, is a moral concern; you should eat up. In “The Clean Plate Club? Food Waste and Individual Responsibility,” Jaclyn Hatala Matthes and Erich Hatala Matthes question whether an emphasis on individual action is appropriate, specifically in the context of food waste. In the United States, 40% of the food that is grown or produced is wasted—​for example, it is left in the fields because it looks funny, it spoils in transport, or it is thrown out by processors, retailers, or consumers, much of it ending up as methane-​producing waste in landfills. Waste in the food system extends beyond the waste of food, including also the inefficient use of water and other resources in agriculture. After describing the nature and scope of the waste problem, Matthes and Matthes argue that food waste should be seen as a political and institutional problem—​and thus that “discharging our moral duty with respect to reducing food waste will be largely a matter of political advocacy and activism rather than a matter of making substantial changes to our individual food behaviors.”

12    A. Barnhill, M. Budolfson, T. Doggett

Part IV: Food Justice and Social Justice Part IV, “Food Justice and Social Justice,” concerns a set of issues related to justice—​ including racial, social, and economic justice—​in the food system. Just as we might distinguish the academic study of food ethics from the movement to make the food system more ethical, we might distinguish the food justice movement from the academic study of food justice. The food justice movement is a social justice movement that aims to transform the food system by addressing a range of problems, including: • Low wages and poor working conditions for agricultural workers, fast food workers, and other food service workers • Hunger, malnutrition, and food insecurity (not being able to reliably afford enough food) • Inadequate access to high-​quality food, which includes issues like the higher price of many healthier foods and the existence of food deserts, areas where a significant percentage of people have low access to healthier food because they live far from a grocery store or another source of healthy food and do not have access to a car • Racism, classism, sexism, and exclusionary practices in the food system and in other food movements • Lack of equal participation in decision-​making about food • Indigenous peoples losing access to foods that were traditionally central to their identity, culture, and economy (what are called first foods) • The environmental unsustainability of many contemporary forms of industrial agriculture Different food justice organizations may understand food justice somewhat differently, and have different priorities with regard to it. But they typically reflect an understanding of food justice as requiring more equitable access to resources and more decision-​making power for communities, with an explicit focus on racial equality. This is how some proponents describe food justice: A socially just food system is one in which power and material resources are shared equitably so that people and communities can meet their needs, and live with security and dignity, now and into the future.14 Food justice is the right of communities everywhere to produce, process, distribute, access, and eat good food regardless of race, class, gender, ethnicity, citizenship, ability, religion, or community.15 14  Patricia Allen, “Realizing Justice in Local Food Systems,” Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society 3 (2010): 295–​308, 297. 15  Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, “Draft Principles of Food Justice,” http://​www.iatp.org/​ documents/​draft-​principles-​of-​food-​justice#sthash.Q4XHqUQm.dpuf.

Introduction   13 Food Justice is communities exercising their right to grow, sell, and eat healthy food. Healthy food is fresh, nutritious, affordable, culturally-​appropriate, and grown locally with care for the well-​being of the land, workers, and animals. People practicing food justice leads to a strong local food system, self-​reliant communities, and a healthy environment.16

Philosophers typically understand justice as, most basically, about fair relations between people and about people getting what they are owed. It is about fair relations between existing people but also about fair relations between existing people and future people, and future people getting what they are owed, which is known as intergenerational justice. Some theorists claim that animals fall under the purview of justice, and so justice is also about fair relations between people and animals, and animals getting what they are owed. Some theorists claim justice applies only within a society; others claim that justice can cross social and national borders. Justice requires, at a minimum, that people have basic liberties and political rights. It requires, too, distributive justice, which is concerned with the fair distribution throughout society of important things. Theorists disagree about what must be distributed fairly: goods and services (such as income and health care), well-​being, opportunities (such as educational opportunities), capabilities, or something else? Theorists also disagree about what counts as a just or fair distribution. They disagree about which laws and institutions—​for example, educational policies or tax policies or food assistance policies—​will achieve this distribution. However, it is not only the actions of governments, the distribution of goods, or the structure of public institutions that can be unjust. Social attitudes, social norms, and social practices can also constrain people’s options and life chances in ways that seem unfair, and thus seem like instances of injustice. Thus, some theorists argue that justice requires, in addition to a fair distribution of important goods, opportunities, and so on, equal social standing or equal social status of other sorts. Now return to the list of problems identified by the food justice movement. We can map this list onto forms of injustice identified by philosophers. Hunger and malnutrition, food insecurity, lack of access to healthy food in food deserts, and the high cost of healthier foods are all distributive justice issues—​that is, issues of fair distribution throughout society of important things. Food deserts are also seen as a racial justice issue because they are caused in part by housing policies that are racist and are unjust for that reason. Low wages and poor working conditions for workers raise concerns of exploitation as well as being a distributive justice issue. Racism in the food system (e.g., discrimination against African Americans farmers by the US Department of Agriculture) is an issue of procedural justice, an issue of fair procedures for making decisions, as well as an instance of what Iris Marion Young holds is the injustice of marginalization, in which some groups are cut off from work opportunities.17 The environmental unsustainability 16 

Just Food, “What Is Food Justice?” http://​justfood.org/​advocacy/​what-​is-​food-​justice. Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011). 17 

14    A. Barnhill, M. Budolfson, T. Doggett of industrial agriculture is an issue of intergenerational justice—​future generations are given less than their share of certain environmental goods. Some critics of the alternative food movement say that it is exclusionary, reflecting the experience and values of middle-​class white people and not reflecting the perspectives of low-​income people and people of color. The criticism, in other words, is that the alternative food movement is characterized by a form of cultural imperialism, in which a dominant group establishes its culture as the norm. There is an additional form of justice at play in the food justice movement, as Kyle Powys Whyte explains in his contribution to this volume, “Food Sovereignty, Justice, and Indigenous Peoples: An Essay on Settler Colonialism and Collective Continuance.” Food justice arguably also requires that groups have those experiences and social relations involving food that are central to their way of life, free from certain kinds of interference by others. In other words, food justice requires collective self-​determination with regards to food and the food-​related aspects of a way of life—​often called food sovereignty. The underlying ethical idea is that justice requires collective self-​determination. Food sovereignty raises a number of interesting and deep questions. What moral reasons do we have not to interfere with groups’ collective relations? Are there moral reasons not to interfere with groups’ collective relations in addition to our moral reasons not to harm individuals, or violate their autonomy, or interfere with their self-​ determination? What kinds of interference with collective food relations are morally acceptable and consistent with justice? The essays in Part IV of this book concern issues that fall under the broad heading of food justice and social justice. Lee A. McBride III’s essay “Racial Imperialism and Food Traditions” begins by noting that “one topic that is seldom broached in food ethics is race.” Part of the explanation is disagreement about what whether race is a useful thing to talk about at all or, instead, is a “harmful fiction.” And then there is disagreement about whether race is a useful thing to talk about with regard to food ethics in particular. Are racial categories not necessary to get a handle on ethical issues related to food? Or are racial categories necessary in order to articulate certain ethical concerns, for example, ethical concerns with the cultural appropriation of foodways by outgroups? McBride argues that we should adopt Alain Locke’s account of race. “Race, on this account, names inherited or preferred traits and values passed from generation to generation; it operates as tradition. Cultivated and maintained styles, techniques, and cultural products are the characteristic features of racial groupings.”18 McBride argues that this view allows us to recognize cultural contributions to cultural products, for example, the contributions of South Asians to curries and the contributions of black Americans to rock and roll; these cultural contributions have sometimes been discredited by socially dominant groups. At the same time, Locke’s account of race does not require us

18 

Alain Locke, The Philosophy of Alain Locke, ed. Leonard Harris (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989).

Introduction   15 to advocate “proprietary ownership of cultural products.” Indeed, McBride argues that cultural products typically result from cultural exchange, and the exchanges that have created current foodways are complex. McBride argues furthermore that “vested interest in the ownership of cultural goods lies at the heart of racial imperialism” and thus should be rejected. In his essay, Kyle Powys Whyte outlines a theory of indigenous food systems that describes the type of value food has in relation to the concept of indigenous collective continuance. His essay first articulates the nature of the relationships that make up collective continuance, focusing on trustworthiness and redundancy in particular. He then argues that US settler colonialism can be seen as a form of injustice that directly undermines these relationships that make up collective continuance. According to Whyte, an “injustice occurs, under settler colonial domination, when at least one society, the settler society, interferes with the qualities of relationships constitutive of collective continuance, which imposes social and environmental changes on indigenous peoples in a way that is nonconsensual and at a rate so rapid that the indigenous communities suffer harms that would have been preventable before settlement.” This kind of injustice can furthermore be understood as a violation of food sovereignty; Whyte suggests that one dimension of food sovereignty, as some indigenous people understand food sovereignty, includes maintaining these food-​related aspects of collective continuance, free from domination by other groups. In his essay “Food, Fairness, and Global Markets,” Madison Powers argues that the organization of global agricultural markets is unfair in multiple ways. The global food supply needs to increase in coming decades in order to feed a rapidly growing world population, yet there is fundamental disagreement about how to increase agricultural output while satisfying norms of fairness. “Market fundamentalists” support pro-​market, pro-​globalization approaches, seeing them as both the most efficient option and capable of being fair. Critics, including Powers, argue that markets can fall short, failing to achieve efficiency or failing to satisfy norms of fairness. Powers argues, in particular, against trade subsidies and protectionist restrictions, contract agriculture, large-​scale farmland acquisition, and promoting shifts in agricultural production from crops intended for local consumption to commodities intended for export. The perception of unfairness in global agricultural markets has helped to produce some of the most visible food activism. Yet other complaints have contributed, too: complaints about racism or imperialism, complaints about a lack of autonomy, complaints about unjust distribution of food, and so on. Indeed, as Jeff Sebo notes in “Multi-​Issue Food Activism,” food activism not only responds to a variety of food-​ ethical complaints, in particular, but to ethical complaints more generally. The movement comprises small bore activists (people looking for a few extra hours for their farmers’ market) and large bore activists (people working to abolish factory farming). It comprises people narrowly focused on, say, chickens and people focused on dismantling neoliberalism. Sebo argues in favor of multi-​issue activism and provides some guidance in how to get it done.

16    A. Barnhill, M. Budolfson, T. Doggett

Part V: Ethics and Politics of Food Policy Part V, “Ethics and Politics of Food Policy,” includes some further discussion of two topics that are taken up by food justice advocates: food and autonomy and the treatment of food workers. It discusses some ethical and legal issues with specific kinds of food policies, including healthy eating policies, food labeling, and agricultural guest worker programs. The first essay in this part, “Public Justification and the Politics of Agriculture” by Dan C. Shahar, discusses the meta issue of how controversial policies—​policies about which there is deep disagreement and ethical controversy—​can be acceptable to citizens, even though many citizens object to them. Shahar discusses disagreement about industrialized agriculture—​seen by proponents as necessary to feed the world and seen by opponents as environmentally disastrous, unjust, and objectionable in other ways. Shahar asks whether we can expect agricultural policies to be acceptable to citizens, and acceptable in what way, given that any conceivable set of policies will likely be seen as deeply problematic by some citizens. He reaches the sobering conclusion that we should not expect any set of policies and rules to earn wholehearted support or even to be embraced as morally authoritative by all. Perhaps the best we can hope for is a Hobbesian form of public justification, in which each side accepts policies as “justified”—​in the sense of being willing to acquiesce to these policies—​because they recognize these policies as better than nothing, even if they also find the policies abhorrent. In “Paternalism, Food, and Personal Freedom,” Sarah Conly argues in favor of (some) coercive policies that promote healthy eating, for example, policies limiting the portion size of junk foods. Insofar as these policies are meant to make individuals eat more healthfully in order to make those individuals better off, they are subject to ethical objections to government paternalism, for example, that these policies fail to respect individual autonomy, that they are demeaning, or that they will fail to make individuals better off because individuals are better placed than the government to know and to promote their own good (an assumption that behavioral economics has called into question, with evidence that humans have bounded rationality and do not reliably make welfare-​enhancing choices).19 Conly argues for policies that are paternalistic and coercive by arguing that they are relevantly similar to food safety measures that we generally accept, such as inspections for salmonella. “In each case government tries to protect people from choices that do not advance their ends,” Conly argues. The government is also coercive about food labeling. As Seana Valentine Shiffrin discusses in “Deceptive Advertising and Taking Responsibility for Others,” in California, it is illegal for Gerber baby food to advertise a product as being made with “real fruit juices 19  John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2002); Gerald Dworkin, “Paternalism,” Monist 56 (1972): 64–​84; Richard H. Thaler and Cass Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008); Cass R. Sunstein, Why Nudge?: The Politics of Libertarian Paternalism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), ch. 3; Sarah Conly, Against Autonomy: Justifying Coercive Paternalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), ch. 1.

Introduction   17 and other all natural ingredients” even though that product is made with real fruit juices and other all natural ingredients. The advertising is held to be deceptive—​and Gerber legally liable for that deception—​since people naturally but fallaciously infer that all the baby food’s ingredients are all-​natural. At first blush, this is puzzling: How can Gerber be responsible for deception when the false belief comes from a fallacious inference by consumers? Isn’t it objectionably paternalistic toward consumers to hold Gerber so responsible? Or inconsistent with free speech law? Shiffrin argues that food advertisers, like advertisers generally, have a duty of care toward consumers such that they may not court “misunderstanding—​even when the listener bears intellectual fault for the error.” This picture is undergirded by the idea that it is part of the producer’s job to free up consumers from figuring out various things about the food they buy. Far from being paternalistic, holding Gerber liable enhances the freedom of consumers. This suggests some general ideas about deception and liability as well as some particular ideas about how to label food. Part V finishes with two essays on food producers, in particular, food workers. In “Food Labor Ethics,” Tyler Doggett and Seth M. Holmes survey some of the ethical issues that come up in food work. They use agricultural labor on large farms in the western United States as an entry into issues of coercion and exploitation, immigration, racism and classism, and the suffering that goes into providing cheap produce year-​round. Of course, lots of jobs are bad in all sorts of ways. Food work, in particular, has long been bad in all sorts of ways. Its special, contemporary, American badness derives partly from American laws—​and their (lack of) enforcement—​and international trade agreements. One effect of these agreements has been a steady flow of labor moving to the United States from Central America. Social scientists estimate that between 25% and 70% of farm labor comes from illegal immigrants. Much of the hard labor Doggett and Holmes detail is undertaken by impoverished people from other countries.20 Is this just? What if the labor is part of a program, a “guest worker” program, that is designed to provide short-​term labor that is financially beneficial for farm owners and workers? Sabine Tsuruda’s “The Moral Burdens of Temporary Farm Work” explains the workings and moral defense of such programs and argues that they are fundamentally morally flawed, based on the idea that we can render the various bads of farm work permissible by providing enough money to the person upon whom those bads are inflicted. Crucially, this is not an argument against farm work per se but, rather, of farm work done on a temporary basis out of one’s country. Yet currently America and other countries depend on such labor. 20 

The low estimate comes from the Pew Research Center’s 2015 article by Jeffrey S. Passell and D’Vera Cohn, “Share of Unauthorized Immigrant Workers in Production, Construction Jobs Falls since 2007”: http://​www.pewhispanic.org/​2015/​03/​26/​share-​of-​unauthorized-​immigrant-​workers-​in-​ production-​construction-​jobs-​falls-​since-​2007/​. The high end is mentioned—​but not endorsed—​in this 2014 Farmworker Justice article, “Selected Statistics on Farmworkers”: https://​www.farmworkerjustice.org/​sites/​default/​files/​NAWS%20data%20 factsht%201-​13-​15FINAL.pdf.

18    A. Barnhill, M. Budolfson, T. Doggett Tsuruda finishes with some ideas about how to improve this morally problematic state of affairs.

Part VI: Gender, Body Image, and “Healthy” Eating Part VI, “Gender, Body Image, and ‘Healthy’ Eating,” includes four essays that take a critical eye to our public discourse about, and personal experiences of, dieting, healthy eating, and obesity prevention. Feminist philosophers have argued for decades that dieting and eating disorders need to be seen as reflecting gender ideology and the pressure women face to be thin and fit, and need to be seen as forms of gender oppression that perpetuate inequality.21 In “Food Insecurity: Dieting as Ideology, as Oppression, and as Privilege,” Tracy Isaacs takes the feminist critique of dieting on board and offers a twist on it. Isaacs argues that dieting is a practice that reflects both oppression and privilege. Isaacs agrees with feminist arguments that “dieting and the pursuit of thinness constitute an oppressive ideology.” Yet those who diet are privileged in relation to the food insecure people around the world who lack access to sufficient food: from this perspective “restrictive dieting by choice in order to lose weight is an unimaginable luxury.” Some recent philosophical work takes scholars’ critical approach to dieting and applies it to healthy eating and obesity prevention. According to this work, intense concern with eating healthfully and preventing obesity, and efforts at the same, need to be understood in their cultural context. They reflect moral attitudes and cultural norms about eating, gender, body shape, fat, and pleasure. In “Shame, Seduction, and Character in Food Messaging,” Rebecca Kukla argues that eating practices are seen as having characterological significance—​how you eat reveals what kind of character you have. The perceived connection between eating and character is complex: fat people are framed as disgusting, irresponsible, and having poor character. Yet they are also seen as eating “unhealthily” and “unhealthy” eating is also seen as pleasurable, and rewarding, on analogy with sexual perversions: “just as we aesthetically and morally denigrate those who indulge in unusual, or frequent . . . gustatory pleasure, we inseparably and correspondingly valorize them as brave and impressive risk-​takers unafraid of pleasure. Conversely, we stigmatize ‘prudes’ and ‘frigid’ people who are overly pure and self-​controlled, at the same time as we hold them up as paragons of appropriate self-​discipline.” This simultaneous denigration and valorization of “unhealthy” eating means that there is no “right” way to eat and “so there is no right kind of person to be in our culture, when it comes to food.” Beth Dixon’s essay “Obesity and Responsibility” concerns another respect in which obesity and healthy eating are moralized:  individuals are held responsible for being 21  Susie Orbach, Fat Is a Feminist Issue: The Anti-​Diet Guide to Permanent Weight Loss (New York: Paddington Press, 1978); Sandra Lee Bartky, Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression (New York: Routledge, 1990); Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993).

Introduction   19 obese. Scholars have described the public conversation about obesity as characterized by moral judgments about people with obesity, including attributions of responsibility to them. Scholars have responded by pointing out that obesity has social and environmental causes: obesity is a response to a food environment pervaded with unhealthy foods that are designed to be hard to resist and are aggressively marketed.22 And obesity results not just from our immediate food environments but is also influenced by poverty and social inequality, as well as technological and lifestyle change, which are buttressed by social policies. Given the environmental and social causes of obesity, the argument goes, individuals lack the kind of causal responsibility for obesity that would warrant holding them responsible for obesity—​that is, morally blaming them or holding them liable for health care costs or other social costs associated with obesity. Dixon’s essay is broadly sympathetic to this response, while adding some nuance to it. Dixon argues that we should reject the false dichotomy of attributing moral responsibility for being obese to all people with obesity, or attributing it to none. Dixon provides an account of situated moral agency and uses it to argue that some people with obesity are not morally responsible because factors interfere with their capacity to detect moral considerations in favor of healthy eating or because structural inequalities interfere with their capacity to act on these considerations. Although she does not use the term, Christina van Dyke, too, considers the situated moral agency of people with orthorexia, the obsession with finding and sticking to an ideal diet. In “Eat Y’Self Fitter: Orthorexia, Health, and Gender,” van Dyke argues that orthorexia is a real, surprisingly widespread phenomenon, that its appearance is partly due to features of food marketing that Isaacs, Kukla, and Shiffrin discuss in this book, partly due to contemporary ideas of health, but also partly due to the variety of foods available in large parts of the world. She argues it has something like a religious significance for people that suffer from it, promising a way to “transcend rather than to embrace the realities of embodiment . . . orthorexia is best understood as a manifestation of age-​old anxieties about human finitude and mortality—​anxieties which current dominant sociocultural forces prime us to experience and express in unhealthy attitudes toward healthy eating.”

Part VII: Food and Social Identities, Cultural Practices, and Values For the orthorexic, what is eaten has a deep personal significance. What we eat also has undeniable social significance. The personal, social, and moral significance of food is the topic of Part VII, “Food and Social Identities, Cultural Practices, and Values.”

22  See Anne Barnhill, Katherine F. King, Nancy Kass, and Ruth Faden, “The Value of Unhealthy Eating and the Ethics of Healthy Eating Policies,” Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 24, no. 3 (2014): 187–​ 217. doi:10.1353/​ken.2014.0021.

20    A. Barnhill, M. Budolfson, T. Doggett As Guptill et al. write, “the popular saying ‘You are what you eat’ is not just a nutritional adage.”23 Specific food practices are linked to some personal identities and group identities. For example, as is discussed in Chignell’s essay in this book, religions prescribe food practices, including eating certain foods as part of rituals and on holidays, not eating certain foods, and periodically fasting. Guptill et al. give some further examples of how food practices are linked to identities: If you eat Vegemite every day, you are probably Australian; if you nosh on grits and collard greens, chances are high that you are from the southern US; if you eat steak and lobster regularly, you are most likely middle or upper class; and, if you normally consume salad and other ‘lighter fare,’ you are probably a woman.24

Because they are so strongly linked with group identity, food practices are an effective way to monitor group boundaries, identifying some people as insiders and others as outsiders, with both positive and negative effects. Participating together in food practices that are unique—​food practices that are “ours” and not “theirs”—​can bring groups of people closer together, giving them feelings of commonality and solidarity, making them feel connected to a shared history. But group-​based food practices can also serve as a locus of hostility between groups. Food practices are obviously linked to social identities. But what exactly is the relation between them? The opening essay of this part, “I Eat, Therefore I Am: Disgust and the Intersection of Food and Identity,” takes up this issue. Daniel Kelly and Nicolae Morar explain the relations that hold between food (and cuisine, eating, and dining) and social identities (which are unpacked in terms of social roles and social norms), giving an account informed by work in empirical moral psychology. Having given this general account, they emphasize that disgust is the emotion most predominant in food norms—​ making disgust an effective tool in attempts to change food norms. They raise ethical concerns with using disgust in this way, given evidence that disgust disrupts our ability to see the object of disgust as an agent—​in other words, evidence that disgust is dehumanizing. Lastly, they consider the implications of their account for efforts to change what people eat—​noting that “if you are what you eat, then attempts to change what and how you eat are, in effect, attempts to alter your identity, who you are.” What other ethical issues are raised by the fact that food practices are linked to group identities? One set of issues concerns our duties to accommodate such food practices. Are there cases in which food practices that would otherwise be prohibited should be tolerated because of their centrality to group identities or their cultural significance? For example, should kosher and halal foods be provided in school lunch programs? As Ronald Sandler notes, “if there are not religiously appropriate foods [available, then people] may have to choose between eating and being faithful to their values/​ 23  Amy E. Guptill, Denise A. Copelton, and Betsy Lucal, Food & Society: Principles and Paradoxes (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2013), 18–​19. 24 Ibid.

Introduction   21 traditions.”25 So should school lunches include not only kosher and halal options but also vegan options? As another example, discussed by Paula Casal,26 should practitioners of the religion Santeria be allowed to sacrifice animals in the way prescribed by their religion, even though that method of sacrifice would otherwise fall foul of animal cruelty laws, because the practice is central to their religious and cultural identities? These questions connect to the food sovereignty debate and group’s rights to collective self-​determination. As Kyle Powys Whyte has argued, one demand of food justice is that groups have a right to exercise their collective food relations without interference from other groups, unless there is a morally weighty reason for the interference.27 To some, the whole idea of morally weighty reasons to interfere with others’ eating practices will sound odd. “Is it delicious?” is, for most people, more important than “Is it okay to eat it?” For most, “Is it okay to eat it?” does not even sound moral—​it sounds like a question about prudence or etiquette or aesthetics. In “Morality and Aesthetics of Food,” Shen-​yi Liao and Aaron Meskin consider some questions squarely in aesthetics—​ Is food art? What is the role of expertise in discerning how delicious food is?—​and some of the relations between food ethics and food aesthetics. Centrally, it argues for “food immoralism,” according to which a moral defect in food can explain an aesthetic virtue. In a way, food’s bad character can be part of what makes it delicious. Kate Nolfi’s “Food Choices and Moral Character” concerns the character of eaters rather than the eaten. So much of our eating is unthinking, and, so far as we think about what we eat, that thought is typically not careful, thorough deliberation about whether we may eat this or that. Such unthinking or not-​carefully-​thought-​out action, Nolfi argues, is especially illuminating of moral character. In “The Etiquette of Eating,” Karen Stohr discusses etiquette, in particular the etiquette conventions that govern eating together. These conventions serve an important moral purpose, she argues: they form the essential structure of eating together, setting the terms on which guests interact, and thus facilitating interactions that can be morally valuable. For example, Kant thought that eating together, when conducted properly, is an opportunity to improve one’s understanding through rational conversation and to create social bonds through mutual enjoyment. But for shared meals to serve these purposes (rather than to undermine them) requires participants to abide by certain rules, such as avoiding challenging topics at the beginning of the meal while people are still hungry (and cantankerous). In short, etiquette extends far beyond rules about which fork to use for what; and at its best, etiquette is not a way to reinforce social distinctions and hierarchies. Rather, when executed properly etiquette is a part of morality because

25 

Ronald Sandler, Food Ethics: The Basics (New York: Routledge, 2015), 169–​170. For further discussion, see the chapter “Food and Culture,” in Sandler. 26  Paula Casal, “Is Multiculturalism Bad for Animals?” Journal of Political Philosophy 11, no. 1 (2003): 1–​22. 27  Kyle Powys Whyte, “Food Justice and Collective Food Relations,” in Food, Ethics, and Society: An Introductory Text with Readings, ed. Anne Barnhill, Mark Budolfson, and Tyler Doggett (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 122–​134.

22    A. Barnhill, M. Budolfson, T. Doggett it facilitates social interactions that improve us morally and create morally valuable relationships. So Stohr argues that what strikes some as fussiness or preciousness of etiquette is actually valuable. Susan Wolf in “The Ethics of Being a Foodie” argues for something similar with regard to another activity sometimes regarded as fussy or precious, being a foodie. Like an etiquette maven, a foodie might seem morally suspect. Wolf explains why and then defends foodie-​ism from the charge, concluding that “foodies . . . have nothing to be ashamed of. Not only is there nothing morally wrong with being a foodie, being a foodie has the potential to influence and contribute to one’s life in particularly rich and ethically rewarding ways” as one’s aesthetic passion for food naturally leads to various ethical concerns.

Part VIII: History of Philosophy and Food Ethics The book ends—​untraditionally—​with a discussion of some of the history of food ethics. Katja Maria Vogt discusses ancient Greek thought about eating in “Who You Are Is What You Eat: Food in Ancient Thought.” Like Susan Wolf, ancient ethicists pondered the role of food in the good life. Like Shen-​yi Liao and Aaron Meskin, they wondered about the relations between aesthetic and ethical reasons. Like some contemporary philosophers of language, they wondered about whether differences in taste showed something interesting about relativism. Yet Greek ethics, as Vogt demonstrates, includes a range of questions about eating and its role in our everyday lives, questions contemporary ethicists may not even recognize as ethical: what hunger is, why we hunger, and how and why to control the desire to eat that hunger produces. Vogt proposes that these questions should be included in food ethics once again, “thus starting out, like ancient thought on eating, from ordinary experiences.” Whereas there has been some work on ancient Greek food ethics, there has, as Henrik Lagerlund notes in “Food Ethics in the Middle Ages,” been nearly no work done on medieval food ethics. In Tristram Stuart’s massive survey of modern vegetarianism, medieval influences appear four times, significantly less often than pagan influences.28 In Daniel Dombrowski’s condensed summary of the history of vegetarianism, medieval philosophy merits a paragraph, a much briefer appearance than modern work or the ancient work to which it was deeply indebted.29 Both medieval and ancient Greek food ethics include work on the ethics of raising and killing animals for food and on the ethics of consumption, and some of the medieval arguments there clearly owe a debt to the Greeks. There was work, too, on the Aristotelian issue of whether and why to control appetites. Yet the thinkers Lagerlund focuses on depart from the ancient Greeks in filtering their ethical concerns through medieval Christianity. Issues like fasting and 28 

Tristram Stuart, The Bloodless Revolution (New York: Norton, 2006). Daniel Dombrowski, “A Very Brief History of Philosophical Vegetarianism and Its Influence,” in Food for Thought, ed. Steve Sapontzis (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Press, 2004). 29 

Introduction   23 gluttony that are not widely discussed in contemporary food ethics—​although fasting is a central topic in Andrew Chignell’s contribution to this book—​were of central concern. And issues that remain discussed today—​the raising and killing of animals—​ were approached differently, making much of the idea that God gave people dominion over the animals, an idea that shows up in contemporary discussions30 but is somewhat uncommon. As John Grey and Aaron Garrett discuss in “You Are What You Eat, but Should You Eat What You Are? Modern Philosophical Dietetics,” modern food ethics will seem on the whole more familiar to contemporary eyes in both form and content without seeming entirely familiar. Topics alien to contemporary food ethics showed up, too, most strikingly whether there is a moral requirement to eat well in order to do good work or a moral requirement to eat well to build a “moral republic.” Again, there is a concern with why we eat as a moral issue that is largely absent from contemporary discussions. But topics familiar to contemporary food ethics—​the moral status of animals, the ethics of letting people starve, the justice of various distributions of food—​surfaced too and were dealt with in ways that are sometimes strikingly familiar (Anne Conway’s idea that we owe justice to animals) and other times strikingly odd (Conway’s idea that eating releases the spirits of what we eat).

Acknowledgments Some of this introduction is based on our contributions to Food, Ethics, and Society:  An Introductory Text with Readings, ed. Anne Barnhill, Mark Budolfson, and Tyler Doggett (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).

Bibliography Allen, Patricia. “Realizing Justice in Local Food Systems.” Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society 297 (2010): 295‒308. Barnhill, Anne, Mark Budolfson, and Tyler Doggett, eds. Food, Ethics, and Society:  An Introductory Text with Readings. Oxford University Press, 2016. Bartky, Sandra Lee. Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression. New York: Routledge, 1990. Böll Foundation. “The Meat Atlas.” 2014. https://​www.boell.de/​en/​2014/​01/​07/​meat-​atlas. Bordo, Susan. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993. Bowe, John. Nobodies:  Modern American Slave Labor and the Dark Side of the New Global Economy. Reprint edition. New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2008.

30  Notably, Matthew C. Halteman, “Compassionate Eating as Care of Creation,” 2008, http://​www. humanesociety.org/​assets/​pdfs/​faith/​compassionate_​eating_​halteman_​book.pdf; and Matthew Scully, Dominion (London: St Martin’s Press, 2002).

24    A. Barnhill, M. Budolfson, T. Doggett Conly, Sarah. Against Autonomy:  Justifying Coercive Paternalism. Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2013. —​—​—​. “Coercive Paternalism in Health Care:  Against Freedom of Choice.” Public Health Ethics 6, no. 3 (2013): 241–​245. doi:10.1093/​phe/​pht025. Curtin, Deane, and Lisa Heldke. Cooking, Eating, Thinking. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. Dombrowski, Daniel. “A Very Brief History of Philosophical Vegetarianism and Its Influence.” In Food for Thought, edited by Steve Sapontzis, 22‒33. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Press, 2004. Dworkin, Gerald. “Paternalism.” Monist 56 (1972): 64–​84. FAOSTAT. 2017. http://​www.fao.org/​faostat/​en/​#data/​QC. Feinberg, Joel. Harm to Self. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Fraser, David. Understanding Animal Welfare: The Science in Its Cultural Context. Cambridge, MA: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2008. Gaud, William. “The Green Revolution: Accomplishments and Apprehensions.” Speech to the Society for International Development. 1968. http://​www.agbioworld.org/​biotech-​info/​topics/​borlaug/​borlaug-​green.html. Gerber, P. J., H. Steinfeld, B. Henderson, A. Mottet, C. Opio, J. Dijkman, A. Falcucci, and G. Tempio. “Tackling Climate Change through Livestock –​A Global Assessment of Emissions and Mitigation Opportunities.” UN FAO, 2013. http://​www.fao.org/​3/​i3437e.pdf. Guptill, Amy E., Denise A. Copelton, and Betsy Lucal. Food & Society: Principles and Paradoxes. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2013. Halteman, Matthew C. “Compassionate Eating as Care of Creation.” 2008. http://​www. humanesociety.org/​assets/​pdfs/​faith/​compassionate_​eating_​halteman_​book.pdf. Herrero, Mario, and Philip Thornton. “Livestock and Global Change:  Emerging Issues for Sustainable Food Systems.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110 (2013): 20878–​20881. Herrero, Mario, et  al. “Biomass Use, Production, Feed Efficiencies, and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Global Livestock Systems.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110 (2013): 20888–​20893. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). “Climate Change 2014: Mitigation of Climate Change. Contribution of Working Group III to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.” Edited by O. Edenhofer, R. Pichs-​Madruga, Y. Sokona, E. Farahani, S. Kadner, K. Seyboth, A. Adler, I. Baum, S. Brunner, P. Eickemeier, B. Kriemann, J. Savolainen, S. Schlömer, C. von Stechow, T. Zwickel, and J. C. Minx. Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Kingsolver, Barbara, Camille Kingsolver, and Steven L. Hopp. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. New York: Harper, 2007. Korthals, Michiel. “The Birth of Philosophy and Contempt for Food.” Gastronomica 8 (2008): 62–​69. Locke, Alain. The Philosophy of Alain Locke. Edited by Leonard Harris. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989. Mepham, Ben, ed. Food Ethics. New York: Routledge, 1996. Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2002. Orbach, Susie. Fat Is a Feminist Issue:  The Anti-​Diet Guide to Permanent Weight Loss. New York: Paddington Press, 1978. Sandler, Ronald. Food Ethics: The Basics. New York: Routledge, 2015. Scully, Matthew. Dominion. London: St Martin’s Press, 2002.

Introduction   25 Singer, Peter. “Utilitarianism and Vegetarianism.” In Philosophy and Public Affairs 9 (1980): 325‒337. Steinfeld, H., P. Gerber, T. Wassenaar, V. Castel, M. Rosales, and C. de Haan. “Livestock’s Long Shadow.” UN FAO, 2006. ftp://​ftp.fao.org/​docrep/​fao/​010/​a0701e/​a0701e00.pdf. Stuart, Tristram. The Bloodless Revolution. New York: Norton, 2006. Sunstein, Cass R. Why Nudge?: The Politics of Libertarian Paternalism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014. Telfer, Elizabeth. Food for Thought. New York: Routledge, 1996. Thaler, Richard H., and Cass Sunstein. Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008. Thompson, Paul B. “The Emergence of Food Ethics.” Food Ethics 1 (2016): 61–​74. —​—​—​. The Ethics of Aid and Trade. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. —​—​—​. The Spirit of the Soil. New York: Routledge, 1995. Trout, J. D. “Paternalism and Cognitive Bias.” Law and Philosophy 24, no. 4 (July 2005): 393–​ 434. doi:10.1007/​s10982-​004-​8197-​3. Union of Concerned Scientists. “Hidden Costs of Industrial Agriculture.” 2017. http://​www. ucsusa.org/​food_​and_​agriculture/​our-​failing-​food-​system/​industrial-​agriculture/​hidden-​ costs-​of-​industrial.html. USA Environmental Protection Agency. “Non-​ CO2 Global Inventory:  Appendix.” 2012. https://​www.epa.gov/​global-​mitigation-​non-​co2-​greenhouse-​gases/​non-​co2-​greenhouse​gases-​international-​emissions-​and USDA. World Agricultural Production Data. 2017. http://​usda.mannlib.cornell.edu/​ MannUsda/​. Whyte, Kyle Powys. “Food Justice and Collective Food Relations.” In Food, Ethics, and Society: An Introductory Text with Readings, edited by Anne Barnhill, Mark Budolfson, and Tyler Doggett, 122–​134. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Young, Iris Marion. Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011. Zwart, Hub. “A Short History of Food Ethics.” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 12 (2000): 113–​126.

Pa rt  I

C ON V E N T IONA L AG R IC U LT U R E A N D A LT E R NAT I V E S

chapter 2

Sustainable Ag ri c u lt u re , Environm e nta l Ph il osophy, a nd t h e Ethics of Fo od Clark Wolf

Introduction: Eating Sustainably If our food is delicious and nutritious, why should we care how it was made or where it came from? Why concern ourselves with the question whether our food was produced humanely or sustainably, as long as it keeps us healthy and satisfied? But many of us do care, and arguably we should care quite a lot. If our practices, institutions, or ways of life are unsustainable, then they cannot be perpetuated over time or continued on into the future. If we value our way of life, we may want to pass that value on to our children and to later generations. If we care about environmental protection and preservation, we have reason to avoid practices that are unsustainable because they cause progressive environmental damage. Beyond our parochial values, and our broader concern for the environment, there is another important moral reason to make our institutions sustainable: unsustainable practices, including food production practices, are unfair to our descendants (Wolf 2013), leaving them worse off than they might otherwise have been (Solow 1991; Fleurbaey 2015). It is unfair to organize our lives or societies in a way that would close off the possibility that future generations might live similarly good lives. If unsustainable practices deny to future generations resources that would otherwise have been available to them, it is worth asking whether we have wronged them, whether they will have a legitimate complaint against us, and whether we have violated their rights (Wolf 2012). If our practices deprive them of something, was it something they had a claim to possess? The claim that is strongest when such behavior compromises resources people will need, and when the present benefits we gain from our

30   Clark Wolf unsustainable activities are less pressing and urgent. If we fail to leave future generations living soils and oceans, a breathable atmosphere, and the ability to meet their basic needs, then it would seem, at the very least, that they have the right to ask what could have justified us in using up resources on which their lives depend. Did we have a pressing, morally significant purpose that could justify the fact that we did something that denied them the things they need? While needs are among the most essential human requirements, even claims based on less pressing requirements can support the argument that our present resource use might be unfair. Even if our unsustainable practices do not deny to future generations what they need, they still raise questions of equity: Are we taking for ourselves resources that should have been shared more broadly by a larger group of people over a longer period of time? Did we enrich ourselves by using up renewable resources we might have passed on to our resource-​poor descendants? If we leave future generations financially secure, have we adequately compensated them for the loss of resources we have used up? Can we compensate them by developing new technologies and intellectual resources they would not have had but for our efforts? Did we burn up, for trivial purposes, resources that they might otherwise have put to better, crucial uses? While all of our practices may raise these questions of sustainability and intergenerational obligation, agricultural practices raise them with special urgency. Everyone needs to eat. While there are other urgent requirements—​energy, for example—​it is easier to imagine human life without energy infrastructure than to imagine life without food. “Sustainable agriculture” refers to a social and political movement, a scientific discipline, and for some people, a way of life. As a political and social movement, sustainable agriculture is constituted by farmers, food activists, and rural-​life activists who urge, among other things, that eating is both a moral and a political act. People who identify with this aspect of sustainable agriculture argue that our relationship with food expresses our values and involves engagement with the social and political institutions that shape the farms and industries that produce what we eat. As a scientific discipline, sustainable agriculture includes researchers in a variety of different fields from agronomy, biotechnology, and agricultural sciences, to sociology, rural studies, and economics. Researchers involved at this level study agricultural systems and communities, and evaluate agricultural production practices for their environmental impact and for their impact on producers and human communities. Some work to develop environmentally appropriate crops and cropping systems or study ways to minimize the negative impacts of agricultural production. Those who regard sustainable agriculture as a way of life are mostly farmers and producers who strive to realize an ideal of sustainability in their daily practice. Members of this last group are varied, including organic producers, private farmers who run community-​supported agriculture (CSA) farms, and still others who seek to adopt methods of agricultural production that conform to their ideals. Behind these different conceptions of sustainable agriculture there may be some underlying principles that adherents hold in common. It might be a useful task for a philosophical anthropologist to gather together the ideas of people who embrace these difference conceptions and to try to find a subset of ideas about agriculture that they all share. In one sense, the intersection of their beliefs about the subject might constitute a philosophy of sustainable agriculture. What this essay will undertake to do

Sustainable Agriculture   31 here, however, is a little bit different. The next section briefly discusses the place of agriculture in contemporary philosophy. For the most part, agriculture has received less attention than other important social institutions, and philosophical treatments of agriculture have mostly been undertaken by philosophers who view themselves to be doing environmental ethics. Some philosophical treatments present agriculture and “nature” as essentially opposed forces, but the ideal of sustainability calls this view into question. The section on “Sustainability Myths? Two Worldviews of Agricultural Production” discusses the role of ideology in both conventional and sustainable agriculture. Ideologies are constituted by a complex of beliefs and values that inform the choices people make. This section argues that our agricultural practices are importantly shaped by ideals and values. Because of this, philosophical analysis has an important function to play, helping us to articulate these beliefs and values in order to subject them to critical evaluation. “The Concept of Sustainability” section more specifically addresses the concept of “sustainability” and various ways in which that concept has been used in political philosophy and economic theory. Moving from more general conceptions of sustainability, this section provides an interpretation of the common view that agricultural practices must be “economically, socially, and environmentally sustainable” if they are to count as “sustainable” in the broader sense. “Comparing the Sustainability of Alternative Agricultural Practices” examines three different practical issues that should be addressed in a philosophical treatment of sustainable agriculture. In particular, this section considers the sustainability of animal agriculture, the question of whether the use of biotech or genetically modified crops can count as sustainable, and the question of whether “eating locally” is an appropriate practice for consumers who want to consume a more sustainable diet. Finally, the last section briefly revisits the question of personal food consumption as an ethical and political activity.

Agriculture and the Environment: Nature versus Culture? Environmental philosophers have not, for the most part, focused much on agriculture. For a long period of time, work in environmental ethics seemed fixated on a paradigm of wildness as nature untouched and uninfluenced by human beings. As Paul Thompson (1995) documents, this has sometimes led to absurdities. In the abstract, it may be easy to sympathize with the view that human beings are separate from nature, but in practice this view is both false and pernicious. It is false because human beings evolved as a product of natural forces, and for a long period of human history human communities were well integrated with the natural systems in which they lived. It is pernicious because the ideal that we must return “nature” to its original untouched condition has sometimes led to policies that are unjust and environmentally inappropriate. The ideal of nature as separate from human communities led, in some instances, to policies that removed indigenous peoples from the land they and their communities had inhabited

32   Clark Wolf for millennia. In other contexts, this ideal presents an inappropriate ideal for environmental management in a world where there are no longer any major biotic systems that have not been deeply changed by human influence. Agriculture, however, may be a special case. Some critics see the advent of agriculture as the moment when our species left its natural environmental niche and started down a path to perdition (Diamond 1987). Others, including the great naturalist T. H. Huxley, have viewed agriculture as “artifice,” which he saw as essentially opposed to the forces of “nature.” Speaking of gardens, Huxley wrote: It will be admitted that the garden is as much a work of art, or artifice, as anything that can be mentioned. The energy localized in certain human bodies, directed by similarly localized intellects, has produced a collection of other material bodies which could not be brought about in the state of nature. The same proposition is true of all the works of man’s hands, from a flint implement to a cathedral or a chronometer; and it is because it is true, that we call these things artificial, term them works of art, or artifice, by way of distinguishing them from the products of the cosmic process, working outside man, which we call natural, or works of nature. (Huxley 1894, 10‒11)

Huxley viewed gardens and agriculture in general as “both useful and justifiable,” but others are less optimistic. A more recent writer, Lierre Keith, sees agriculture and nature as inexorably opposed forces. On her view, agriculture constitutes a genocidal war against “nature”: The ‘nature of nature’ and the ‘nature of agriculture’ are completely at odds: one is a war against the other. You have to understand what agriculture is: you take a piece of land, you clear every living thing off it, even down to the bacteria, and you plant it to human use. It’s biotic cleansing. This lets the human population grow to gigantic proportions, because instead of sharing that land with millions of other creatures, you’re only growing humans on it. (Keith 2009a)

Keith’s view is extreme—​surely not all agricultural practices fit this dire description. But is it entirely wrong? Modern industrial agriculture does clear away the native biodiversity and replaces it with monoculture. According to Keith, we need a revolution to overthrow the entire system, so that we can move back to a more sanguine relationship between human beings and the biotic systems on which we depend. We might reasonably doubt that it is necessary for agriculture to be “at war” with the natural world, rather than supposing that this is merely a contingent feature of agriculture as it is practiced in the modern industrialized world. Certainly many forms of agriculture are much less invasive than Keith’s description would imply. The possibility that agriculture might be, or might become sustainable would constitute a response to the view that agriculture is a war against the natural world. Another important reservation involves the concept of “nature” itself. Some uses of this term, especially when “nature” is contrasted with “culture,” appear to exclude human beings and human society from the start. This can have practical consequences,

Sustainable Agriculture   33 for example, when indigenous peoples are evicted from land their communities have relied on for centuries, following the creation of a wildlife preserve. In a world where few if any environmental systems have been untouched or unchanged by human influence, it is often difficult to separate the natural from the cultural. For example, if native peoples burned off the prairies in the central United States, should we judge that this makes them agricultural lands, or that it renders them a product of culture rather than nature? Should we consequently value human-​impacted prairies differently from the way we value forest lands? Some writers urge that the concept of “nature” is so ambiguous or so deeply problematic that we should avoid using it carelessly, or perhaps abjure its use altogether (Mill [1874] 1998; Purdy 2015). For our purposes here, it is enough to note that “nature” is conceptually complex. Any effort to distinguish nature and culture (thereby implying that culture is unnatural) will be unavoidably controversial.

Sustainability Myths? Two Worldviews of Agricultural Production Sustainable agriculture holds up an ideal that agricultural production might avoid environmental damage, or perhaps that agricultural production processes might work with environmental and biotic systems rather than against them. This ideal animates many of the people who pursue research on sustainable agriculture and those who seek to farm sustainably. When actions are informed by ideals, we might regard them as “ideological,” in a certain sense, but both conventional and sustainable agricultural ideals involve ideological commitments. To say that agricultural production systems are ideologically informed is to say that their structure reflects underlying ideas and values—​ the ideologies—​of the people who create them. Like other ideologically informed social institutions, the structure of agricultural production systems may come to seem inevitable to those who act within them. “Sustainable agriculture” is often contrasted with “conventional agriculture.” In this case, “conventional” simply means agriculture the way most people in industrialized countries do it. Many farmers engaged in conventional agricultural production see the choices they make as the only reasonable or rational choices to make, under the circumstances in which they find themselves. It is worth considering the extent to which this perception is a function of ideology, and the extent to which it reflects an appropriate and objective grasp of the material circumstances of modern agricultural production. One goal of philosophical critique of agriculture—​a goal of philosophical critique of any human institution or endeavor—​must be to articulate and critically evaluate the ideologies that lead people to make the choices they make. Contrasted with conventional agricultural production, the ideal of sustainable agriculture may seem to its advocates to be a revolutionary anti-​ideological ideal. But revolutionary goals are also embedded in a rich nest of ideas and values. Just as a philosophical understanding of agriculture requires an understanding of the ideology of

34   Clark Wolf conventional production, it equally requires a critical understanding of the values and ideas that inform the development of alternative and potentially sustainable modes of agricultural production. Can we characterize the worldviews or ideologies of conventional agriculture or the various alternatives that are believed by their advocates to be sustainable? The plural and heterogeneous character of sustainable agriculture makes this difficult. As a field of study and practice, sustainable agriculture includes researchers working to develop perennial polyculture alternatives to annual cropping systems; it includes some organic producers; it includes small-​scale producers running CSA businesses; it includes biodynamic farmers who are trying to enact the ideas of the German philosopher Rudolph Steiner; it includes farmers who are trying to develop cropping systems that mimic, both in form and biosystemic function, the environmental systems they replace; it includes researchers who are trying to develop large-​scale cropping systems that reduce topsoil loss and increase soil health. Can there be any single ideology that ties together the members of this heterogeneous mix? Any attempt to express one will be selective and imperfect. What may bind them together, however, is that they are critics of conventional production, which they see as an unsustainable status quo. In each case, we may learn more about conventional and sustainable agricultures by considering what their advocates think about each other. The descriptions that follow are an attempt to characterize the views under consideration, after which we can use a more formal account of “sustainability” to evaluate them. These competing worldviews are not presented as truths to be passively accepted. Instead, they express ideologies available for critical evaluation.

An Ideological Worldview of Sustainable Agriculture? Advocates of sustainable agriculture often urge that conventional modes of agricultural production are environmentally damaging. Conventional production involves the environmentally inappropriate use of heavy industrial equipment, genetically modified crops, liberal application of pesticides and herbicides, and monoculture cropping systems that ignore or (more commonly) eliminate any irregularities in the landscape that might reduce the systematic consistency of the agricultural outputs. Those outputs—​ conventional monoculture crops—​are then sold and introduced into the market as industrial inputs. Most corn grown in contemporary fields is not food for human beings. Most soybeans are sold as animal feed. Conventional production methods involve enormous industrial equipment required for large-​scale industrial monocultures, since these industrial crops are grown on enormous fields that may stretch for thousands of acres. Any organism growing in a conventional field is either a crop plant or a weed, and weeds are targeted for elimination by spraying fields with herbicides. Most conventional farm crops are armed with patented and genetically modified genes that help them to resist herbicides and to fight off diseases and pests (Wolf 2015). Most corn grown in the United States, for example, has been genetically modified with a gene from Bacillus thuringensis (Bt), a microorganism that produces a toxin fatal to the European corn borer and

Sustainable Agriculture   35 other related insect species. Insects that eat these modified crops ingest the toxin, which crystalizes in their gut and soon causes them to die. Most conventional crops are also genetically protected against herbicides. This enables conventional farmers to douse their fields with chemicals so that nothing will survive except the desired crop plants. Because of these practices, herbicides and pesticides not only find their way into our food, they are also carried downstream, along with fertilizer and other agricultural runoff. There they cause yet more environmental damage. Moisture content in conventional agriculture fields is regulated using “tiles,” pipes that run under the fields to drain off excess water. Tiling systems also carry a heavy load of nitrogen-​rich fertilizer into waterways. This nitrogen load is not just pollution in itself; it leads to algae bloom that removes the oxygen content of the water. This leads, in turn, to fish kills, and to dead zones in the world’s oceans at the delta mouths of most major water systems worldwide. Conventional agriculture also includes industrial meat production. For hogs and many other animals, this means confined animal feeding operations, or “CAFOs.” Hogs are raised in long low barns, where individual animals have little room for movement. From birth to death, they may never see the sun or breathe fresh air except once: the truck ride to the slaughterhouse where they are killed and their meat processed in factory-​efficient division-​of-​labor production lines. The products of conventional agriculture are driven by truck to factories where they are processed with preservatives and then packaged in disposable wrappers, after which they are shipped all over the world by trucks, train, and boat. The resultant consumer products are consistent, anonymous, and identical. Anything that could have identified these products as having come from somewhere in particular—​a field in California, a CAFO in Iowa, or a feed lot in Wyoming—​has been carefully removed in the process of packaging. Advocates see sustainable agriculture as a non-​industrial alternative that uses natural farming methods to produce food. Sustainable agriculture is frequently envisioned as small-​scale production that avoids pesticides and herbicides, and which minimizes negative environmental impacts. Sustainable production often involves the use of heirloom or open pollinated crop varieties instead of genetically modified crops. Heirloom crops are traditional crop varieties, genetically descended from varieties that were grown long ago. Pests and weeds are managed by hand, or by non-​chemical interventions. Integrated pest management (IPM) is a suite of pest control methods which can include chemical, biological, mechanical, and horticultural components. IPM minimizes chemical control by combining different natural management methods to create environmental conditions unfavorable to pests. Instead of killing them with poisons, farmers who use IPM carefully monitor their fields and crops so that they can identify the specific pests to be targeted. Then, to the extent possible, they use biological control or mechanical rather than chemical methods to control (rather than extirpate) pests. For example, IPM might involve the introduction of natural predators or pathogens or parasites to target a specific pest species, or the use of mechanical methods, such as screen barriers, to keep pests away from crops. Where these techniques are insufficient, IPM may involve development of disease or pest resistant cultivars for production.

36   Clark Wolf Farmers who use these practices need to make a living. Economic viability through the sale of healthy food crops is a primary goal of sustainable agricultural production, but it is not the only one. Sustainable producers also aim to protect the environment. The term “agro-​ecology” is used to describe agricultural practices that are intended to integrate seamlessly with the natural environmental systems in which farming takes place. Proponents of sustainable agriculture also aim to integrate farming as a sustaining community activity. Agriculture cannot be sustainable unless it keeps going from generation to generation. But a production process can only be maintained over time, in this way, if the people who are involved constitute a reliable intergenerational community. Communities are sustainable, on this view, only when their members know the people who grow their food, and when farmers produce specific food crops for members of their own community instead of producing mass industrial food inputs for faceless consumers much further down the economic pipeline.

An Ideological Worldview of Conventional Agriculture? Farmers who are engaged in conventional agriculture often view themselves as feeding the world, not merely (merely?) feeding their local community. The large-​scale machinery and other technology make possible an economy of scale that increases production by many orders of magnitude. Increasing the yield-​per-​hectare of production is an environmentally sound strategy, since it makes it possible to avoid placing new land under production. If we can “feed the world” on fewer productive acres of land, this will relieve us of the need to clear new land and plow up new fields. Genetically modified crops generally serve the same function and market as the non-​modified crops they replace, but they enable farmers to increase yields in several different ways. Herbicide-​resistant crops decrease competition between crops and weeds, since they enable farmers to use more herbicides without killing their crops. Pest-​resistant crops like Bt corn make it possible for farmers to avoid using pesticides, since the crop protects itself against predacious insects. Crops like Bt corn minimize the environmental pesticide load, as well as minimizing the use of pesticides that might be harmful to human consumers. While Bt toxin crystalizes in the insect’s gut when it moves through the larval phase, it is not dangerous to humans because our gut chemistry is different from that of the target insects. Many conventional farmers see efforts to develop traditional or environmentally friendly modes of production to be essentially at odds with the goal of production: since conventional production methods have been expressly designed to maximize production, any divergence from those methods should be expected to reduce production levels from that maximum. But farming is essentially about production—​the crop one harvests is the entire point. Why would anyone adopt practices that would be expected to reduce the size and value of the end result? In a competitive market, producers who are less efficient will be driven out by those who are maximally efficient. It follows that the only way to avoid being driven out of business is to adopt the most modern, the most effective, the most efficient, and the most

Sustainable Agriculture   37 productive production system available. Further, intensive production methods may seem environmentally damaging, but in fact they are environmentally appropriate: by producing more on less land, high-​tech production techniques make it possible to leave land fallow that would otherwise be farmed. By using intensive production methods, we actually relieve the overall environmental burden of agriculture. People who do not see that this is the right way—​the only way—​are idealistic utopians. Conventional farming uses the advantages of technology in the service of efficient production that reduces the environmental impact of agriculture.

Evaluating Ideologies? One way to describe the differences between the two ideological perspectives described would be to say that conventional farmers believe that agriculture should be maximally productive, while advocates of sustainable agriculture think that agriculture must be sustainable. But are these goals entirely at odds with one another? Advocates of sustainable agriculture would point out that long-​term productivity is served when sustainable methods are used. Perhaps the difference between these two views reflects reference to a different time horizon: advocates of sustainable agriculture have in mind productivity over a long term or indefinitely distant time horizon, while conventional farmers are focused on short-​term productivity that will facilitate competition in a competitive global market where low-​producing farms cannot stay in business. If the descriptions capture, at least in part, the ideological differences between people who engage in conventional agriculture and those who hope to develop more sustainable alternatives, how can we critically evaluate them? It is characteristic of ideological commitments that they come to seem like necessary, fixed truths to those who are in their grip. Is there a way to distinguish features of these competing ideologies, to find out what they get right? Since we have no ideology-​free platform from which to view them, our critical evaluation will no doubt carry some of our own unexamined commitments. Perhaps, however, we can develop the concept of “sustainability” so that it provides some purchase to enable us to evaluate these competing visions.

The Concept of Sustainability What would it mean for agriculture to be sustainable? The concept of “sustainability” plays different roles in economic and philosophical contexts, and turns out to be both ambiguous and potentially vague. Because of this, it is useful to begin by identifying different ways that the term is used and to specify different things that are intended when people refer to agriculture, or other human practices, as “sustainable.”

38   Clark Wolf

Sustainability as Prevention of Deprivation In broadest contexts, “sustainability” is couched very explicitly in terms of intergenerational fairness or intergenerational justice. One conception of this sort is the famous “Brundtland conception” of sustainability, named for the former Prime Minister of Norway, Gro Harlem Brundtland, who was responsible for the development of a United Nations report on sustainable development. According to the Brundtland definition, sustainable development is development that “meets the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs” (Brundtland 1987, 43). By extension, sustainable agriculture might be understood as agriculture that meets present needs while protecting the ability of future generations to meet their needs. The focus of this account is the prevention of deprivation with respect to basic needs, or the minimization of deprivation if prevention is not possible. A closely related, though not identical account of sustainability appears in the work of the economist Robert Solow. According to Solow, sustainability essentially involves an obligation that we, as members of the present generation have, to “conduct ourselves so that we leave to the future the option or the capacity to be as well-​off as we are” (Solow 1993, 181). Solow’s statement is couched in terms of well-​being, while Brundtland’s is couched in terms of need satisfaction. To see that they are not identical, consider that Brundtland’s criterion is satisfied even if there is no later generation, while Solow’s criterion requires that there must be one, and its members should be as well off as we are. Perhaps it would be a mistake, however, to conclude from this that Solow’s criterion is more demanding than Brundtland’s: at present, many people are unable to satisfy their most basic needs. Brundtland would require that we meet their needs and future needs, while Solow would merely require that the rate of future unmet need should not be worse than present unmet need. While it may not be clear which of these criteria is more demanding, it seems clear that our present institutions do not satisfy either one. Conceptions of sustainability like Solow’s, that assert an obligation to ensure that later generations are not worse off than we are, turn out to be problematic and ambiguous, there are different views about what it would mean for later generations with different population size to have the same welfare level as the present generation. Problems with various conceptions of intergenerational welfare were recognized by Henry Sidgwick, and later explored by Derek Parfit (Sidgwick [1874] 1981; Parfit 1984). To see the problem, consider whether it is sufficient that the total welfare of later generations must not be less than the total welfare of the present generation? Total welfare is calculated by simply adding up the welfare level of each member of a generation. If later generations are larger than the present generation because of population growth, then future generations might have equal total welfare even if every member is worse off. Should we instead use non-​decreasing average welfare as the standard? Average welfare also has important limitations, since a repugnant policy to kill off those who are worse off will effectively increase the average utility level. Average utilitarianism also runs up against what Derek Parfit has called the “mere addition” paradox. Should we disapprove of the

Sustainable Agriculture   39 existence of people whose lives are worth living merely because their welfare level is below the population average? Does their “mere addition” to a very well-​off population really make things worse? One might see the Brundtland proposal and other need-​based or capability-​based proposals as alternatives to traditional welfare-​based conceptions of sustainability, since they avoid some of these problems. Other conceptions of sustainability focus not on needs or well-​being, but on opportunities, capabilities, or freedoms. Thus, Brian Barry (1989, 494) urges that each generation should ensure that its successor enjoys the same range of productive opportunities, and Richard Howarth that “the members of future generations have a moral right to inherit a set of life opportunities that is undiminished relative to those enjoyed today” (Howarth 2007, 658). And more recently, Amartya Sen has suggested that sustainability, in the broadest sense, should be articulated as an obligation to preserve, and when possible expand, “the substantive freedoms and capabilities of people today ‘without compromising the capability of future generations’ to have similar—​or more—​freedom” (Sen 2004, 2009, 250). These conceptions, focused as they are on human needs or welfare, opportunities, capabilities, or freedoms, may be contrasted with conceptions of sustainability that focus on resources. Bryan Norton (1999, 2005) recommends that we should develop a conception of sustainability that includes a “list of stuff,” an inventory of crucial resources we should pass on to future generations undiminished or undepleted. According to Norton, we have an obligation to pass on options to future generations, in the form of specific natural resources that will be available for human use. It is inappropriate, he argues, to think of natural resources as an undifferentiated mass of natural capital. Some resources are essential for human well-​being, and we cannot hope to leave later generations adequately well-​off unless these essential resources are maintained at safe minimum levels. Some resource use creates irreversible damage, while other resources can grow back or recover over time. Some resources, like breathable air, an adequately healthy biosphere, oceans that are not dead and depleted, are key resources. Norton argues that we should preserve such resources at safe minimum levels, so that future generations will not face scarcity constraints different from those faced by the present generation. He emphasizes that options are linked to, but not identical with opportunities: the option is the resource itself—​the stuff that has been passed on. Opportunities, by contrast, are occasions when circumstances are right for people to use the resource that has been preserved.

Sustainability as Non-​Depletionary Use Focused, as it is, on the maintenance of resources themselves, Norton’s conception is closely related to another common conception of sustainability:  that of non-​ depletionary use. On this conception, we use resources sustainably just in case our use of them does not leave less of the same resource for later generations. Non-​depletionary use is only possible in the case of durable resources that do not degrade when they are used, or in the case of renewable resources that grow back as we use them.

40   Clark Wolf In the case of renewable resources—​an especially important case for agriculture—​if we know the rate at which resources grow back, we can calculate the sustainable rate at which we can use them without depletion. This conception can be given a simple mathematical representation (Dasgupta 1974). If α is the rate of growth for a resource R—​that is, the resource grows back by a factor of α for each given period of time—​and K1 is the amount of that resource available in period 1, then the amount available in period 2 will be αK. If some amount C of the resource is consumed in period 1, then the total amount available in period 2 will be [α(K1 − C1) = K2]. The sustainable rate of consumption will be a consumption rate C1 that will leave an undiminished supply of resources for the next generations, so that K2 = K1. To find this sustainable rate C, simply solve [α(K1 − C1) = K1] to express C1 in terms of K1 and α. In English, that means that the amount of the total stock (K1) minus the amount consumed in period 1 (C1) multiplied by the growth rate α should equal the amount of the resource that was available at the beginning of the process. If the resource is consumed at a rate no faster than this—​that is, no faster than the rate at which the resource regenerates or grows back—​then present use will result in no diminishment of the resource available for the next generation. This conception of sustainability as non-​depletionary use is regularly applied in agriculture and environmental management sciences. Whether the calculation involves the amount of fish that can be taken without depleting a fishery, the rate at which trees can be cut without reducing the overall biomass of a forest, or the rate at which soil may be degraded in a year without reducing its fertility for the following year, the goal of non-​depletion is to use the resource without reducing the total stock available in the next period—​or to the next generation. If the concept of sustainability is to be used to inform decision-​making and policy choice, it sometimes matters quite a lot which conception is used, and how, very specifically, that concept is formulated. But it would be a mistake to think that one and only one of these conceptions of sustainability must be the right one, while all the others are wrong. Different conceptions might be appropriate for different decision contexts, or at different levels of decision-​making. For example, we might need a broader and more general conception of sustainability to fit into a general theory of intergenerational justice, while more concrete and specific conceptions will be needed to evaluate agricultural production systems, or to use in making environmental management decisions.

Agricultural Sustainability and the “Triple Bottom Line” In literature on sustainable agriculture, the most common conception of sustainability used is the so-​called three-​legged stool, or triple bottom line (TBL) conception. According to the TBL conception, an agricultural production system is sustainable just in case it is ecologically, economically, and socially sustainable. The benefit of this account is that it directs our attention toward the human institutions and environmental systems that must be maintained if agricultural production is to be stable over long periods of time. But the problem with this conception of sustainability is that it is not

Sustainable Agriculture   41 a definition of sustainability at all: it is circular, since it uses the term “sustainable” to define itself. Before this conception can tell us anything about what we ought to do to achieve sustainability, it needs to be filled in. We need two different conceptions of sustainability, S1 and S2 so that we can interpret TBL as defining a conception of sustainability S1 such that a production system is S1-​sustainable just in case it is ecologically, economically, and socially S2-​sustainable. What conception fits into S2? We might experiment, trying each of the conceptions discussed in turn. In the case of agriculture, it may be most useful to think of S2 sustainability as the conception associated with non-​depletionary use. Understood in this way, the TBL conception draws our attention to three different kinds of resources that need to be maintained if an agricultural production system is to keep going: economic, social, and environmental. A production system depletes its economic resources if the people who run it cannot make a living. Businesses that go bankrupt are not sustainable in this simple sense. Similarly, agricultural production systems involve human resources, and human beings live in societies. If the community of people running the system is dying or disintegrating, the system cannot keep going into the long-​term future. A sustainable system needs to avoid depleting the human resources—​social resources—​that it needs. A social system—​a community—​is sustainable only if the norms that create and constitute it can be passed on more or less intact from one generation to the next. Finally, a sustainable agricultural production system must be environmentally non-​depletionary: it must not undermine the environmental resource base on which it depends. Other things being equal, production methods that progressively damage the soil will eventually pay for that damage with diminished productivity. In the short run, damaged soil can be supplemented with fertilizer to cover over the damage, or with other technologies, such as improved crop varieties, that may help to maintain yield. But unless the supply of fertilizer or the technology fix are also stable and sustainable, this cannot be a long-​term solution. How is this TBL conception of sustainability related to the earlier accounts from Brundtland, Solow, and others? Like Solow, the TBL conception aims to describe a process that can continue, with undiminished productivity in the future. Unlike Brundtland, the TBL conception is not primarily concerned with meeting generational needs. It is easy to see, however, how one might conclude that TBL-​sustainable agricultural systems might be practically necessary if we hope to satisfy future needs, or to achieve any of the more general sustainability goals discussed so far. This may explain why the TBL conception is so frequently used to analyze and understand agricultural production systems.

Costs, Benefits, and Scale The TBL conception of sustainability is usually applied at the level of an individual farm. But when we ask whether a broader system—​for example, an agricultural production

42   Clark Wolf system—​is sustainable, it will matter a great deal at what scale we consider the question. At the level of an individual farm, we might consider whether the farm provides a living-​ wage income for those who operate it (economic sustainability), whether the farm provides a satisfying and desirable way of life, sustaining the social needs of the community it supports (social sustainability), and whether it preserves the fertility of the soil and other environmental resources on which production is based. So far so good: an agricultural production system that successfully meets these goals is sustainable in at least the minimal sense, at a modest scale of analysis. But farms exist within larger communities, towns, states, and nations, and they depend for their continued existence on the stability of these larger units. The economic sustainability of a farm will depend on the economic circumstances of the state and the nation. If farms depend on subsidies for their survival over time, as many in the United States and elsewhere do, then evaluating the economic sustainability of the farm will require examination of the political and economic basis of the subsidy system. And since most farms use resources that are brought in from the outside—​tractors, fuel, fertilizer, pesticides, fence-​posts, and other necessities—​a full-​scale evaluation of the sustainability of any farm will require evaluation of the sustainability of the total system of inputs and outputs. As is so often the case, evaluating a part of the system requires an evaluation of the whole system; evaluating the sustainability of a single farm requires an evaluation of the sustainability of the broader economic, social, and environmental systems in which the farm is situated. Understanding the part requires an understanding of the whole. In spite of the fact that large-​scale (even global-​scale) analyses must always have the final word, there are two important reasons why smaller scale (including farm-​scale) analyses are valuable, instructive, and indeed essential if we hope to make judgments about the sustainability of farms, agricultural systems, or indeed any institution at all. First, the sustainability of large-​scale systems is often a function of the sustainability of their smaller-​scale components: a whole made up of sustainable parts is not guaranteed to be sustainable, since there may be cumulative effects. But often, the most practical way to construct larger sustainable systems is by ensuring that the parts that comprise them are individually sustainable. Second, and even more important, smaller-​scale analyses of large-​scale social institutions are humanly possible. We can model some global-​scale phenomena (e.g., climate), but we have not yet learned how to model and implement sustainability analyses of social and agricultural institutions on a global scale. The data requirements for such an analysis would be bewildering, and at present, such an analysis is unmanageable. In spite of these difficulties, the ideal of sustainability provides a valuable norm for evaluating human-​scale institutions, modes of agricultural production, and farms. When asking whether farming practices or food crops are sustainable, or sustainably produced, we can consider the various inputs and outputs involved. It may be impossible, at this scale of analysis, ever to confirm definitively that a farming practice or individual farm is fully sustainable. But it is often possible to use such analysis to discover ways in which our practices are not sustainable. Where agricultural practices

Sustainable Agriculture   43 impose progressive environmental damage at a rate faster than the replenishment rate, they are unsustainable in a simple and obvious sense that can be revealed in analysis. Where farming involves the use of depletable resources like phosphorus, it is predictable that production methods cannot continue if these resources run low. More broadly, there are some resources, like coal and oil, that cannot be used at any sustainable rate: once they are used, they are gone. In the case of fossil fuel, resource use imposes another quite permanent environmental cost that constitutes a form of progressive environmental degradation: burning fossil fuels moves carbon from the earth’s crust into the earth’s atmosphere, in the form of CO2. Once in the atmosphere, CO2 may remain there for centuries, reflecting solar radiation back to the earth, and contributing to global warming and global climate change. No production system that is based on fossil fuel consumption can ever be fully sustainable. But in the developed world, virtually all agricultural production uses fossil fuels at some point in the process, whether it is oil for the tractor, plastic used in packaging, or fuel used to transport produce to market. Does this sound bleak? Is sustainable agricultural production therefore impossible? Three final considerations may serve to soften the blow. First, even if we discover that no currently available system of agricultural production is fully sustainable, we can improve these production methods by analyzing the inputs and outputs they require, and considering their impact on the environmental, social, and economic systems into which they are integrated. We can use the norm of sustainability to improve our agricultural systems so that we minimize the costs they impose on the human and natural environment. Second, analyzing different institutions or production systems can help us to make judgments about which ones are less (or more) sustainable than the available alternatives. Comparative judgments of this kind matter and can help us to move toward more sustainable practices even when we are unable to employ fully sustainable methods. Third and finally, if we find that we are unable, at present, to make our agricultural production systems fully sustainable, we may be able to offset the disadvantages associated with unavoidable unsustainable practices by expanding other kinds of options. For example, our use of irreplaceable fossil fuels might impose a constraint on later generations, but we might compensate by investing in research to develop alternative and more environmentally sustainable forms of energy. For example, we might invest in technologies to sequester CO2, or even technologies that would remove CO2 from the atmosphere. In general, if we are unable to achieve sustainability, we can at least hope to compensate future generations for our unsustainable practices, and to improve their chances of achieving the goal more perfectly than we can.

The Triple Bottom Line and Judgments about Sustainability It is easiest to make comparative judgements when comparisons can be done on a single scale. If judgments about sustainability could be calculated precisely, then we could

44   Clark Wolf imagine assigning a real number value to the sustainability of any practice or institution. Perhaps perfect sustainability should be represented as zero, while unsustainable systems would be given a negative number—​a larger number for institutions or practices that are more unsustainable, with a smaller negative number for those that are less so. In that case, to compare the sustainability of one practice against that of another we could simply compare the precisely calculated real numbers representing their degree of sustainability. Unfortunately, in this case, we do not have analytic tools to make such precise judgments. The strength of the TBL conception is also a weakness: while it draws our attention to different systems—​economic, social, and environmental—​on which sustainable agriculture must depend, it puts us in the position of making comparative judgments across radically different categories. If we could improve social sustainability, but only at cost to economic sustainability, how should we evaluate that change? If environmental sustainability comes at economic and social cost, is there some systematic way to balance these against each other? Standard cost-​benefit analysis practice, as developed by economists and practiced by project analysts, typically assumes that all values can be represented as monetary costs and benefits, but advocates of sustainable agriculture and sustainable ecosystem management have expressly rejected that view (Norton 2002, 2005; Thompson 2010). Without further development, the TBL conception of sustainability does not support precise judgments about the relative sustainability of alternative methods of agricultural production. However, some judgments can confidently be made even with tools that are imprecise. Even without a full theory about how social, economic, and environmental costs should be compared with each other, we can already make judgments about the relative sustainability of alternatives that vary along one of these dimensions. In many cases, this will be enough.

Comparing the Sustainability of Alternative Agricultural Practices Suppose we have two different pest management systems that are equally effective, but one involves the infliction of more progressive environmental damage than the other. Other things being equal, we might reasonably judge that the one that inflicts less damage is the less unsustainable of the two. We may sometimes be able to make similar judgments about agricultural systems and crops, and even about consumer food practices. For example, we can ask whether meat and animal agriculture is more or less sustainable than vegetarianism, or than diets that include less meat. We can address the question whether genetically modified crops might be an appropriate component of a sustainable agricultural system. And we might ask whether “eating local” is an appropriate strategy for food-​conscious consumers who want to adopt a

Sustainable Agriculture   45 more sustainable (or less unsustainable) diet. This section will briefly evaluate three questions: Can animal agriculture be sustainable? Is the use of genetically modified crops consistent with sustainable production? And are we more sustainable consumers when we buy local produce? A fuller treatment of sustainable agricultural practices would require examination of many more issues than these. The goal, in this case, is not to resolve the issues raised, but to show how an ideal of sustainability can be used to frame decisions we might make about food, agricultural technology, and agricultural production systems.

Animal Agriculture as a “Mirror of Nature?” Advocates of sustainable agriculture, as a group, are ambivalent about meat and about animal agriculture in general. Some people argue that meat production and animal agriculture can never be sustainable. Others urge that there are appropriate and sustainable ways to raise animals for food, and some people even argue that environmentally sustainable production systems must include animals. Among participants in this debate, there is no real dispute about the fact that meat is less environmentally efficient than plant-​based agriculture as a way to produce food or that vegetarian diets impose lighter costs on the planet. Nor is there significant disagreement about the fact that standard mass-​meat-​production systems are among the more significant contributors to pollution and greenhouse-​gas emissions. The Environmental Working Group (EWG) reported a 2011 study in which they found that beef production results in about 27 units of CO2 for every unit of beef produced. This compares with 2 units of CO2 produced for every unit of beans produced. According to the EWG data, lamb is the least efficient meat, at 39.2 units of CO2 for every unit of lamb. Lentils are the most efficient, at 0.9 units of CO2 for each unit of lentils (EWG 2011). According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), livestock were responsible for about 14.5% of all anthropogenic greenhouse-​gas emissions in 2007 (FAO 2007). Another group of researchers estimated in 2009 that the adoption of a universal worldwide vegan diet would result in a reduction in global carbon emissions by 17%, a reduction in methane emissions by 24%, and a reduction in nitrous oxide emissions by 21% (Stehfest et al. 2009). If the goal is to minimize greenhouse-​gas emissions, then cutting down on meat would seem to be the right thing to do. And these emissions are not the only environmental cost of animal agriculture. Obviously, the world is not going to adopt a universal vegan diet. And some sustainable agriculture advocates urge that it would be a mistake to do so, since there are other considerations at play: one strategy for the development of sustainable agricultural production involves the attempt to develop systems that mirror the ecosystem function of the biotic communities they replace. Such “biomimicry” is favored because environmental systems are regarded by some to be more natural and more sustainable than human-​created counterparts. But if biomimicry is the goal, then

46   Clark Wolf eliminating animal agriculture might be a mistake. In a famous passage, Sir Albert Howard writes: Mother earth never attempts to farm without live stock; she always raises mixed crops; great pains are taken to preserve the soil and to prevent erosion; the mixed vegetable and animal wastes are converted into humus; there is no waste; the processes of growth and the processes of decay balance one another; ample provision is made to maintain large reserves of fertility; the greatest care is taken to store the rainfall; both plants and animals are left to protect themselves against disease. In considering the various man-​ made systems of agriculture, which so far have been devised, it will be interesting to see how far Nature’s principles have been adopted, whether they have ever been improved upon, and what happens when they are disregarded. (Howard 1943, 4)

Many sustainable agriculture advocates work to incorporate meat production in sustainable systems, in part because they view animal waste—​manure—​as a natural substitute for fertilizer. In fact, since manure came first, they might more properly view fertilizer as an inferior substitute for manure, not the other way around. While Howard’s words are often taken as a defense of the idea that animal agriculture can be environmentally appropriate, it is easy to see that they provide no defense at all for conventional methods used to raise animals for meat. Howard aimed to develop an agricultural production system that mirrored the structure and function of the natural system it replaced. No confined animal feeding operation will do this. Howard’s work advocates agricultural biomimicry—​the effort to develop agricultural systems that mimic the structure and function of “natural” biological systems. Such biomimicry may be a promising way to develop non-​depletionary modes of production. But biomimicry is not an end in itself, and farming systems that mirror the structure of natural systems may or may not be more sustainable than the alternative production systems they could replace. According to the TBL conception, agricultural systems that mimic nature must be judged according to their ability to create profitable, environmentally non-​depletionary production systems that support the communities that keep them going. The principal burden, in the case of animal agriculture, is to show that the environmental benefits associated with animals will outweigh the environmental damage farm animals inflict. If this cannot be shown, then no amount of biomimicry will save the claim that animal agriculture is sustainable agriculture.

Biotechnology as Sustainable Agriculture? The Case of Genetically Modified Crop Varieties Genetically modified (GM) crops present another challenge for sustainable agriculture. Many people regard GM crops as inimical to sustainable agriculture. There are many different kinds of reasons for this view. Some regard biotechnology as essentially unnatural and are convinced that unnatural crops can never be part of a sustainable system. Others are concerned about the human or environmental health effects of GM crops. It

Sustainable Agriculture   47 is often urged that we should adopt a precautionary approach to the use of genetically modified organisms, and that we should therefore avoid using them, since we cannot be sure what risks are involved in the use of this relatively young technology. The claim that GM crops are “unnatural” constitutes a very questionable reason for excluding them as inappropriate for inclusion in sustainable agricultural systems. As already noted, “natural” is a tricky term. By some standards, agriculture itself, whether sustainable or not, is not natural, nor are antibiotics and other life-​saving medicines, or books or music or computers. And condemnation of practices people regard to be “unnatural” often hides underlying prejudices. The fact that GM crops are “unnatural” is a very weak reason to exclude them as unsustainable agriculture. What about risk? There are risks associated with the introduction of any new organism, or new variety. Kudzu began as an agricultural crop, imported from Asia, but it took over in the American South, and has been responsible for very serious environmental problems. The ex ante risk associated with GM crop varieties should be expected to be smaller than the risk associated with the importation of a new non-​GM agricultural species, at least when the GM variety is a member of a species that is already in use as a regional crop. The reason for this is that the difference between the modified crop and the original crop should be expected to be relatively small, as compared with the difference between existing crops and new non-​GM species we might import. But it is worth asking whether this difference will always be small—​minute genetic changes can sometimes have dramatic phenotypic effects. Some of these effects may not be obvious from the start. Consider the case of pest-​resistant crops. Farmers who use Bt crops can avoid using pesticides, with the associated environmental damage pesticides inflict. If Bt crops result in less pesticide use, that would be a reason to consider them more sustainable than their non-​GM alternatives. When considering whether to employ new crops or crop varieties, we should consider the relative risks associated with GM crops, as compared with the risks associated with any of the non-​GM alternatives we might otherwise employ. It is difficult to make the case that the risks of GM crops as a group should be higher than the risks associated with new varieties developed through traditional selective breeding methods. Because GM crops, as a group, have very little in common with each other, it is very unlikely that any common risk factor would apply to them all. Because of this, the fact that a crop variety was produced through genetic modification is not by itself a reason to think that its use is risky or unsustainable. Precautionary principles urge that we should forbear from the use of potentially risky technologies, even if the risks are imperfectly understood. This makes sense where consequences are potentially irreversible or catastrophic, and where we have no way to estimate the probability that these consequences will result. But critics point out that there are risks associated with all alternatives, no matter what the choice context may be. The precautionary argument assumes that the status quo is less risky than interventions to the status quo, but this is not always the case. To argue that some GM crop present risks, one must also consider the risks associated with the use of the alternative non-​GM crop one might otherwise grow.

48   Clark Wolf I do not mean to pre-​judge the outcome of such a comparison. There are surely some conventionally bred or “natural” crops that would be risky to use. It seems likely that some GM crops will be significantly less risky, by comparison. What I will urge, however, is that broad generalizations about the risks associated with GM crops—​ for example, the claim that GM crop varieties pose higher risks to human and environmental health than non-​GM alternatives—​are sure to be wrong. The case for or against GM crops should be made on a case-​by-​case basis, without prejudging the conclusion. Might sustainable agricultural production systems include the use of genetically modified crops? Maybe. The argument that such crops are unsustainable “because they are unnatural” will be weak if the use of these crops can be shown to reduce pesticide use or to reduce the amount of land under production. At this point in time, there is no conclusive evidence that GM technology has reduced the use of pesticides or reduced the amount of land under agricultural production, though there may be reasons to think that GM crops might help with respect to both of these goals. There is no shortcut: to make such a judgment, we need to consider the environmental, social, and economic effects of individual GM crops. The considerations relevant when evaluating the GM papaya, widely believed to have saved Hawaii’s papaya industry, will be entirely different from those relevant to evaluating herbicide-​resistant soybeans. To make a case for or against the sustainability of farming systems that employ GM varieties, it will be necessary to judge the real effects of the specific variety being used.

Eating Locally? A common recommendation from advocates of sustainable agriculture is that we should eat locally. When consumers buy fresh produce from local producers, the food travels less, saving fuel costs, as well as packaging and processing costs associated with ordinary grocery store produce, which has often been flown, sailed, and trucked in from distant farms on the other side of the world. A local grocery store in the United States may carry lamb from New Zealand, chocolate and coffee from West Africa, and grapes from South America. Some recommend the term “food miles” as a measure of the transportation costs associated with goods that travel long distances from producer to consumer. The environmental cost of such produce includes the total environmental cost of its production but also the cost to package it and ship it across the world to a consumer. Consumers who buy local produce cut out all those intermediate costs. The injunction to “eat locally” is not without its critics. Some argue that local production and consumption may have more costs than the argument recognizes: some argue that the transport costs for local foods may sometimes be greater than the transport costs for foods that are transported farther. There are two factors that could cause this: local foods are usually transported in smaller quantities, so if transport costs are not simply measured in food miles, but (say) in food-​miles per kilo, it may sometimes turn out that the per-​kilo food cost of food produced by small-​scale producers is greater

Sustainable Agriculture   49 than one might expect. In addition, conventional foods are often transported en masse to a major hub: a grocery store or an everything-​store, where consumers go to purchase many different things. Advocates of sustainable agriculture often urge that shopping at multi-​product everything-​stores is an impersonal corporate experience, while shopping at a CSA or a farmers’ market provides community benefits. Is it possible that there could be transport-​cost savings for people who shop at such places? If everything-​stores result in fewer shopping trips, then there might indeed be savings. But this possibility is not sufficient to provide convincing support for the view that the travel-​cost of local foods is greater than the travel cost of foods in impersonal corporate everything-​ stores. It is likely that travel costs will differ vastly for different items. But when we judge whether eating locally is more sustainable than the alternatives, it will not be enough to rely on vague hunches about food miles. Vague hunches are often informed by information and may reflect good judgment. But sometimes they are just wrong. To be confident in such judgments, it will be necessary to try to estimate the various costs and benefits, and to do the math (Sexton 2009; Martinez 2010; Cowen 2013). A second critical perspective on the movement to “eat locally” calls into question whether the goal is possible for city dwellers. In a study focused on Seattle, Washington, Jeffrey J. Richardson and L. Monika Moskal (2016) considered different ways to maximize land use within the city to estimate the maximum food crop production capacity for a city like Seattle. They found that Seattle could produce between 1% and 4% of the city’s food needs, but only if every resident used all backyard space for food production, if public green spaces were converted into gardens, and if everyone in the city converted to a vegetarian diet. In order for Seattle residents to “eat locally,” the study estimates that Seattle would need to install an agricultural buffer zone of about 58 km around the city. According to the authors of this study, one of whom is himself a small-​scale local producer, Seattle citizens are unlikely to “eat locally” for more than a tiny fraction of their diet. If these results hold up, do they imply that “eating locally” will remain an unreachable goal for most people—​at least for people who live in urban and city environments? Perhaps. It would be inappropriate to put too much weight on a single study. But if the overall goal is to move toward a system of agricultural production that avoids depleting natural resources, Richardson and Moskal’s study does not imply that eating locally is an inappropriate step toward achieving that goal, only that sustainability will, in the end, take much more. Because sustainability is not an all-​or-​nothing goal, steps toward a more sustainable diet can be valuable and significant even if they do not achieve the whole goal. Moreover, the benefits of eating locally cannot just be measured in food-​miles or food-​miles-​per-​kilo. Recall that sustainable agriculture requires non-​depletionary production processes and economic security (sustainability) of farms. But it also requires the stability of the communities in which agriculture takes place. For people who “know their farmer,” eating is a community-​building action, not mere consumption. In the best case, we might hope that eating can be an environmentally appropriate interaction within a thriving community of producers and consumers who mutually support

50   Clark Wolf one another in the production and consumption of delicious and nutritious food. That seems a worthy goal, one worth working to achieve.

Agriculture, Food, and the Ethics of Personal Consumption Most of us are not farmers, making choices about pesticide use and crop yields and tilling practices. Even fewer of us are agronomists, working to develop environmentally and socially sustaining techniques of agricultural production. We encounter our food on the plate, not in the field. No doubt many of us prefer it that way: food rituals are a respite from other obligations and an opportunity for social interaction. But eating is a political and moral action as well, and our food choices reflect underlying values in at least two different ways. First, people can make purchasing and lifestyle choices that expressly and intentionally reflect underlying values. Deciding to “eat local foods” or to be vegetarian are typically choices of this kind. But there is a second way in which food choices reflect values: if our food is produced unsustainably, if its production involves the exploitation of workers and undermines families and communities, if it is produced in ways that compromise important environmental resources that are needed by future generations, then our purchase and consumption of it embodies values we might reject if we understood and reflected on them. In order to know what values our food choices express, in this second sense, we need to know where our food comes from, how it was produced, and what alternatives are available. Sustainable agriculture embodies an ideal of agricultural production that expresses values of environmental responsibility, intergenerational fairness, and the integrity of human communities. The goal? Food we can enjoy with good conscience and full understanding; food that can be consumed without imposing unfair costs on future generations; food that is produced on farms that support the economic and social needs of the people who are involved in farm production. Even modest steps toward such a goal are worthwhile.

Bibliography Barry, Brian. 1989. Democracy, Power, and Justice: Essays in Political Theory. New York: Oxford University Press. Cowen, Tyler. 2013. An Economist Gets Lunch:  New Rules for Everyday Foodies. New  York: Penguin Books. Dasgupta, Partha. 1974. “On Some Alternative Criteria for Justice between Generations.” Journal of Public Economics 3:405–​423. Diamond, Jared. 1987. “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race.” Discover May, 64–​65.

Sustainable Agriculture   51 Environmental Working Group (EWG). 2011. “Meat Eater’s Guide to Climate Change and Health: Lifecycle Assessments.” http://​static.ewg.org/​reports/​2011/​meateaters/​pdf/​methodology_​ewg_​meat_​eaters_​guide_​to_​health_​and_​climate_​2011.pdf. Fleurbaey, Marc. 2015. “On Sustainability and Social Welfare.” Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 71:34–​53. Howard, Albert. 1943. An Agricultural Testament. New York: Oxford University Press. Howarth, Richard. 2007. “Toward an Operational Sustainability Criterion.” Ecological Economics 63:656–​663. Huxley, T. H. 1894. Evolution and Ethics. London: MacMillan. Keith, Lierre. 2009a. “The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability.” Berkeley City College, November 20. https://​www.youtube.com/​watch?v=TsHaFTia_​Dw. Keith, Lierre. 2009b. The Vegetarian Myth. Crescent City, CA: Flashpoint Press. Martinez, Steve, et al. 2010. “Local Food Systems: Concepts, Impacts, and Issues,” ERR 97, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service, May 2010. https://​www.ers.usda. gov/​publications/​pub-​details/​?pubid=46395. Mill, John Stuart. [1894] 1998. “Nature.” In Three Essays on Religion, by J. S. Mill, 3−65. New York: Prometheus Books. Norton, Bryan. 1999. “Ecology and Opportunity:  Intergenerational Equity and Sustainable Options.” In Fairness and Futurity, edited by Andrew Dobson, 118–​150. New York: Oxford University Press. —​—​—​. 2002. “The Ignorance Argument: What Must We Know to be Fair to the Future?” In Economics, Ethics, and Environmental Policy, edited by Daniel Bromley and Jouni Paavola, 35–​52. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. —​—​—​. 2005. Sustainability:  A Philosophy of Adaptive Ecosystem Management. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Parfit, Derek. 1984. Reasons and Persons. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Purdy, Jedediah. 2015. After Nature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Richardson, Jeffrey J., and L. Monika Moskal. 2016. “Urban Food Crop Production Capacity and Competition with the Urban Forest.” Urban Forestry & Urban Greening 15:58–​64. doi: 10.1016/​j.ufug.2015.10.006. Sen, Amartya. 2004. “Why We Should Preserve the Spotted Owl.” London Review of Books 26, no. 3: 10–​11. —​—​—​. 2009. The Idea of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sexton, Steven. 2009. “Does Local Production Improve Environmental Health Outcomes?” Gianni Foundation of Agricultural Economics 13, no. 2: 5–​8. Sidgwick, Henry. [1874] 1981. The Methods of Ethics. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Solow, R. M. 1991. “Sustainability:  An Economist’s Perspective.” In Economics of the Environment: Selected Readings, edited by R.  and N. Dorfman, 179–​ 187. New  York:  W. W. Norton. —​—​—​. 1993. “An Almost Practical Step toward Sustainability.” Resources Policy, September, 162–​172. Stehfest, Elke, Lex Bouwman, Detlef P. van Vuuren, Michel G. J. den Elzen, Bas Eikhout, and Pavel Kabat. 2009. “Climate Benefits of Changing Diet.” Climatic Change 95:83–​102. Thompson, Paul. 1995. The Spirit of the Soil. New York: Routledge. —​—​—​. 2010. The Agrarian Vision. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) 2007. “GHG Emissions by Livestock.” http://​www.fao.org/​news/​story/​en/​item/​197623/​icode/​.

52   Clark Wolf Wolf, Clark. 2012. “Environmental Ethics, Future Generations, and Environmental Law.” In Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Law, edited by A. Marmour, 397–​414. New York: Routledge. —​—​—​. 2013. “Intergenerational Distributive Justice.” In Routledge Companion to Social and Political Philosophy, edited by J. Gaus and F. D’Agostino, 467–​479. New York: Routledge. —​ —​ —​ . 2015. “Patent Fairness and International Justice.” World Intellectual Property Organization Journal 7, no. 1: 62–​72.

chapter 3

Farming, the V i rt u e s , and Agrarian Ph i l o s oph y Paul B. Thompson

Agriculture and Farming Common wisdom holds that food comes from farms, and some version of a family farm is often presumed to be the way that agriculture is or should be organized. This essay queries that presumption; or, to be more precise, it examines two philosophical approaches that might be pursued in the attempt to query it. I propose that we think of the issues in terms of two competing philosophies of agriculture. The view that I have (somewhat mischievously) called the industrial philosophy of agriculture presumes that food and fiber production should be approached just like any other sector of an industrial economy when evaluated from the perspective of ethics. This implies that we should evaluate food production in much the same terms that we use to evaluate the automobile industry or the steel industry. We can ask whether workers are being treated fairly, and we can ask whether production methods cause pollution or consume too many resources. People with different philosophical orientations will have different answers for these questions, of course. Those who advocate for greater social equality may be more disturbed by the low wages and poor working conditions of field hands, for example, while others of a more libertarian bent may think this outcome to be the morally neutral workings of the labor market. Feminists may criticize the gender stereotyping of “farmers” as male and can go further in their critique when property laws and government farm policies aligned with this stereotype create hardship, exclusion, and barriers for women (as they do in many parts of the world). There is a lot to say about the ethics of food production given the assumption that agriculture is just one of several key sectors in the industrial economy (Thompson 2010). In labeling this approach as an industrial philosophy, I do not mean to imply that it necessarily recommends industrial agriculture.

54   Paul B. Thompson The alternative to this approach takes up a long history of social, political, and ecological writers who see farms and farming as having some form of special significance that makes agriculture different from other sectors of the economy, and especially from manufacturing. Although there is significant diversity in the ways in which agriculture might be thought to have special significance, I lump these approaches together as agrarian philosophies of agriculture. In considering this history, I hope to show that someone who takes contemporary ethical theories as the starting point for evaluating the organization of agriculture is, for all intents and purposes, adopting the presumptive orientation of the industrial philosophy of agriculture. Readers might fairly accuse me of a doubly mischievous intent, for not only am I duplicitous in my usage of the word “industrial,” my inquiry into the philosophy of agriculture is also meant to place some limitations in contemporary food ethics on display. Nevertheless, I will not argue directly for these broader implications, and I do not say that that ethical theory and applied ethics are entirely without resources for accommodating and adapting the insights I will exhibit by taking a more historical approach. In fact, I do not contend that agrarian philosophies are inherently superior. The contrast between the industrial philosophy of agriculture and agrarian alternatives takes on importance for food ethics in three ways. First, it is a heuristic device for gaining an initial purchase on the diversity of ways that various methods or social institutions for food production might be evaluated from an ethical perspective. Both philosophies I will outline are quite general and require more specification before they yield ethical evaluations that could be subjected to classical tests for logical or normative adequacy. Second (and here is where the mischievousness comes in), many current critiques of industrial agriculture derive from the assumption that it can be analyzed and ethically evaluated using the same concepts and norms that would be used to critique any other sector of the economy. The moral ontology that is implicit in this form of critique is itself a cultural product of the Industrial Revolution. The thought process of many contemporary food activists aligned against concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), genetically engineered crops, and the large corporations that are said to be in control of the food system comes straight out of this philosophy as it gets applied to agriculture. If critics are aware of the way in which agrarian approaches suggest an alternative way to think about food systems, the nature of their critiques does not suggest it. So third, gaining some grasp of agrarian philosophies should be a goal for anyone who hopes to develop a comprehensive and philosophically rich understanding of food ethics. It is especially crucial for understanding why preserving “the family farm” might be an ethical issue. In short, this chapter is offered as an introduction to the philosophy of agriculture geared to these three ways in which having a philosophically articulate view on the social goals of agriculture and farming is relevant for food ethics. Given that the critiques derived from an industrial philosophy of agriculture are well represented elsewhere in this volume, the main focus of the chapter is to outline some issues in food ethics that are especially sensitive to agrarian values. The chapter works through several ways of configuring and articulating an agrarian philosophy, ending with the

Farming, Virtues, Agrarian Philosophy    55 views of influential contemporary agrarians such as Wes Jackson and Wendell Berry. But, first, it is important to situate this discussion of agrarian philosophy by emphasizing the importance of claims and critiques that are mounted from an industrial perspective.

Why the Industrial Philosophy of Agriculture Is Important A family of somewhat generic approaches to questions in social ethics began to emerge in the closing decades of the eighteenth century. Drawing upon sources as diverse as the natural law tradition instituted by Hugo Grotius (1583−1645) and the mathematics of the Bernoulli family (Jacob [1654−1705], Johann [1667−1748], and Daniel [1700−1782] among others), the closing decades of the 1700s witnessed a powerful formulation of consequentialist ethical theory in the writings of Jeremy Bentham (1748−1832) and the masterful deontological ethics of Immanuel Kant (1724−1804). Figures in the Scottish Enlightenment helped give shape to these approaches to ethics by describing a sequence of developmental stages. For the Scots, moral sentiments emerge largely as tribal sympathies. These sentiments become institutionalized as a system of interpersonal relationship norms in settled agricultural societies. As more complex civil societies emerge, moral codes are needed to specify norms for conducting one-​off transactions with strangers. In trading societies, there is a further evolution toward more abstract moral codes reflecting the judgment of an impartial spectator (Smith 1759). Bentham’s utilitarianism and Kant’s categorical imperative can be understood as ways of conceptualizing the criteria that such a spectator might apply. For present purposes, it is important to stress how applicability across a broad spectrum of transactional relationships came to be one desideratum for social ethics throughout this period in philosophy. Norms for agrarian societies could be place-​ specific because farming was of necessity practiced at a particular place. As roads and transport networks improved, it became possible to move farm commodities from village to village, leading to a period of social upheaval as more generic legal codes for specifying the rights and responsibilities for trade began to evolve (Thompson 1971). Norms that initially evolved for trade of harvested commodities could be equally well applied to manufactured goods, giving rise to a conception of an economy with a highly specialized division of labor that is nonetheless overseen by a generalized conception of social ethics applicable to all the various trades and sectors emergent during the early years of the Industrial Revolution. The summary just given indicates that there are diverse and competing philosophical strategies for resolving the problem of developing a generic approach. Hence, we have the plethora of consequentialist, deontological, and contractualist or communitarian approaches to ethical theory that is familiar today. When I speak of an industrial philosophy of agriculture, I mean only

56   Paul B. Thompson to say that agricultural production can be seen as falling under the same general set of norms and concepts that might be used to evaluate and critique production practices in manufacturing, transportation, energy, or other commercial sectors of the economy. Rights theorists and utilitarians might disagree in how they would analyze a problem in food ethics, but they tend to agree that whatever approach wins out philosophically will be as applicable in agriculture and food as it is in health care, industrial labor relations, or energy ethics. For example, agricultural laborers have been among the least well compensated among all forms of wage or piece labor in the industrial economy throughout the twentieth century. Workplace reforms that began to be enacted in the 1930s called for a cluster of legal entitlements intended to equalize power relations between employer and employee, and to institute key protections for all workers in an industrial economy. These include basic amenities and opportunities for personal necessities, workplace safety provisions, child labor laws, limitations on the length of shifts, minimum wages, and other more complex rules for insuring fair employment practices. Not the least of these was a hard-​won right to organize. For various reasons, farms, ranches, and other firms employing agricultural workers were generally exempt from these laws. The outcry against the horrible working conditions of migratory fieldworkers began to be sounded in the 1930s with Carey McWilliams’s Factories in the Fields (1939). It continued with Edward R. Murrow’s broadcast Harvest of Shame over Thanksgiving weekend of 1959 and with Caesar Chavez’s attempts to organize California farmworkers in the 1960s (Thompson 2015). These issues are very much with us today. The categories of mainstream consequentialist and deontological ethics are well equipped for articulating and debating the ethical issues associated with agricultural labor and the inequalities and abuses that are associated with race and gender among farmworkers. If workers in manufacturing or retail are entitled to protections or procedural rights on the basis of consequentialist or deontological considerations, there is no reason why similar questions should not be raised about workers in agriculture. Environmental impacts from agriculture provide another and perhaps even more obvious and striking example of issues where a generic set of philosophical concepts can be applied usefully. Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring documented the impact of insecticide use on songbirds and aquatic species, animals that were not the intended target of farmers who were using these chemicals to protect their crops from agricultural pests. In the intervening years, we have come to a fuller appreciation of the toll that agricultural chemical use can have for human health and for all “non-​target” species. More generally, agriculture itself is the willful removal of natural ecosystems and their summary replacement by human-​managed cropping and livestock production systems that generally disrupt the habitat for whatever species may have occupied the niches destroyed by agricultural conversion. Nutrients from CAFOs and from synthetic fertilizers can pollute water supplies and cause dramatic changes in downstream ecosystems. The list of potential environmental impacts from agriculture is long, and it is arguable that some of the most effective ethical concepts for describing and critiquing the environmental

Farming, Virtues, Agrarian Philosophy    57 damage caused by agriculture are derived from norms and patterns of analysis that were originally applied to industrial pollution from manufacturing or mining. There is, again, a rich sense in which the social ethics developed for a generic evaluation of various sectors in the industrial economy is quite well adapted to the environmental impact of agriculture (Thompson 2017). There is, in short, no sense in which this chapter should be read as dismissing the importance and general applicability of ethical critiques that draw upon what I have called “the industrial philosophy of agriculture.” The industrial philosophy of agriculture just is the application of consequentialist and deontological frameworks that arose during the early years of the Industrial Revolution to problems that arise within or that are caused by existing methods of agricultural production. These are absolutely crucial topics, and they make up the largest part of what is now being called “food ethics.” But the theorists who developed these approaches to moral theory during the early years of industrialization also insisted upon their universality. Ever since Kant and Bentham, advocates of consequentialist and deontological theories have presumed—​ nay, demanded—​that they articulate the basis for everything that is normatively significant about transactions and relationships throughout industrial societies. Contrary to this claim, I do offer agrarian philosophies both as a historical and cultural explanation of why agriculture might have been exempted from ethical scrutiny in the past, and as amendments to the kind of considerations that should be included in the food ethics discussions of the present.

Agrarian Philosophy:  The Household Farm Mainstream ethics provides a number of reasons to support small, household farmers whenever their interests clash with those of large landowners or multinational corporations. One might do so on grounds of economic equality, or one might take a more generally suspicious view of economically powerful actors or the concentration of wealth or capital. History supplies other arguments. Agriculture can be organized in a number of different ways, and the Greco-​Roman world was distinctive in comparison to other civilizations in the Fertile Crescent for the dominance of household farms. Greek and Roman writers were aware of this difference and a certain strand of agrarian argument is written into the subtext of many doctrines that philosophers still take to be emblematic of their discipline. Succinctly, agricultural systems of the Ancient world could be classified into three types. Early empires (notably Egypt) had been built on a highly productive system that deployed slave labor to tend extensive fields that were owned by the sovereign and centrally managed. In the case of Egypt, this unfree workforce was also deployed to build and manage an extended infrastructure for containing the annual flood of the Nile

58   Paul B. Thompson River. In contrast, the agriculture of the Peloponnesian Peninsula relied upon relatively small production units controlled and managed by the head of the household. Although both systems relied upon the labor of slaves, the nature of work differed significantly. The Greek (and later Roman) farm was a mix of crops—​grains, trees, and vines punctuated by livestock—​that took full advantage of the topography and climate, while demanding mastery of dissimilar skills suited to distinct crops and seasons of the year. In the Egyptian system, practical knowledge was limited to members of the priesthood and a few overseers. The third type of system was true subsistence farming found on the margins of the ancient world. In general, it was not productive enough to sustain the division of labor needed to support the military and economic institutions of civilization (Mazoyer and Roudart 2006). The Greek householders (the hoi mesoi) were the citizens of the city-​states. Their common interest in defense of their lands and in maintaining the craft industries (wheelwrights, blacksmiths, etc.) that were needed to support their farms was the basis of a polis, understood here as the shared values that form the foundation for political life. Classicist Victor Davis Hanson argues that articulation and defense of this agrarian-​ based polis is the back story for significant components of Hellenistic philosophy (Hanson 1995). Indeed, one can see the argument being made in relatively explicit fashion in Aristotle’s Politics, where the household is described as the model for the state, and the hoi mesoi are identified as the most valuable citizens. A society built on this model is superior because the interests and daily practice of the hoi mesoi are naturally consonant with that of polis, the basis of community life. Because their farms are inherently tied to a particular geographic location, they develop a loyalty to the polis as a place. Because their investment in tree and vine crops requires multigenerational stability, they exhibit both a loyalty and a proficiency in the arts of defense and citizenship that mercenaries and those whose professions can be relocated will never have. Hanson argues that of all the city-​states, Athens’ development of sea power created a class of traders whose economic interests were not so closely tied to the land, leading to the political upheaval that we associate with the time of Socrates and the eventual clash with the more firmly agrarian Sparta (Hanson 1995). Aristotle also clearly thought that the hoi mesoi were superior to true subsistence farmers. While very small farmers might have interests quite consonant with forming polis, their sheer poverty and their bondage to the hard, repetitious physical labor of farming meant that they seldom had time to attain the literacy and acumen associated with a Greek ideal of citizenship. Hence, when Greek philosophers praise farming (most evident in Xenophon’s Oeconomicus), they are not necessarily recommending that one should get one’s hands in the dirt. Aristotle’s claim that virtue requires a certain level of wealth reflects a version of agrarian values that stresses the importance of leisure time that can be devoted to philosophy. It is thus important to see that household agrarianism is not simply a blanket praise of farmer’s virtue, but is more properly understood as a philosophy that takes agriculture to be especially significant for larger questions in social ethics. And it is only certain kinds of agricultural systems that are going to suffice.

Farming, Virtues, Agrarian Philosophy    59

Agrarian Political Economy Greek farms were relatively small, relying on a slave labor force that rarely exceeded single digits. Roman farms were often much larger, and the heads of household were correspondingly much wealthier. European history continued this trend, as a manorial system of peasants farming lands held by titled aristocrats became commonplace. Under this system, the idea that landownership would bind the nobility’s personal and security interests to that of the larger polity continued. Ownership of land became a requirement for citizenship and participation in governance. At the same time, systems of land tenure were diverse, and some extended rights of occupancy, use, and limited abilities to transfer said rights through inheritance and exchange to commoners. English politics of the sixteenth and seventeenth century were especially influenced by debates over land tenure, and the evolution of “possessive individualism”—​the philosophy that C. B. Macpherson (1962) saw as the precursor to capitalism and the form of ethics we associate with Bentham and Kant—​was strongly shaped by agrarian ideals. A succinct summary of the role that agrarian ideas played in the evolution of European political theory would stress three themes. First, as European societies become more diverse, political economists began to recognize the production of food as an activity having special significance. Second, the physiocrat tradition viewed agriculture as having a unique tie to the creation of wealth. Finally, as already suggested, the Greco-​Roman emphasis on the farm household and its place-​based loyalty was transformed into a criterion for citizenship and the distribution of political power. In contrast to many contemporary economic analyses that see no problem with a global trade in food commodities, early political economists argued that a nation’s farming population was a primary guarantor of sovereignty and a source of resistance to foreign powers. English political economist James Harrington (1611−1677) valued farmers not for their civic virtue but for their obvious role in securing the nation’s food supply. Harrington was especially solicitous of the need for secure lines of supply to a nation’s military forces, recognizing that for the peasant farmer and the landed lord alike, sheer proximity to the site of production would be adequate to assure access to food. As the division of labor was increased, meeting a nation’s food needs through trade came to be seen as more acceptable, and arguments for and against reform of the English Corn Laws became a topic for the generation that included David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill (Montmarquet 1989). The French physiocrat school of political economy is remembered for its advocacy of laissez-​faire, but it also advocated the doctrine that only agriculture could actually produce wealth. Manufacturing was seen as simply rearranging materials, while farming could seemingly bring forth new goods from the very bowels of the earth. Although this latter doctrine holds little allure for present-​day economics, the physiocrats were influential in their day for advocating national policies to promote the development of agriculture and to give priority to farming over every other form of economic activity. As

60   Paul B. Thompson such, physiocrats endorsed political institutions and policies that favored farm interests over industrialists and the proletariat that supplied a workforce for their factories. The importance of protecting private property from all forms of interference (including by the state) had its origins in the curious idea that only farms and farming could produce genuine wealth for national accounts (Vardi 2012). In a vague and generalized way, these doctrines from political economy merged with older political ideas handed down from the Greeks and derived from figures such as Machiavelli and Montesquieu who had written on the Roman Republic. In this latter tradition, the decline of the Roman Empire was sometimes traced to a series of ill-​ considered changes that separated the power to make policy from the source of tax revenue, which was, of course, the latifundia (e.g., farms) controlled by the Roman aristocracy. The income from these lands financed the complex patronage system that in turn provided the basis for Roman political life. Political reforms created new urban-​ based power blocks in Roman society that did not contribute to the fiscal underpinnings of the city (neither did they feed people). The upshot was that agrarian ideas stressing the importance of private property, the need for power to reside with an educated and moderate propertied class, and the view that agriculture was more conducive to virtue than manufacturing or trade provided a rationale for resisting democracy or anything that would empower the working class. The argument becomes a key basis for the view that landed aristocrats are the most reliable source of political stability. Many contemporary readers are still impressed by the seemingly inherent conservatism of agrarian reasoning (see Carlson 2000; Murphy 2001). Thomas Jefferson’s agrarianism turned much of this reasoning on its head. Jeffersonian agrarianism accepted many of the agrarian premises (though there is little evidence that he was strongly influenced by the physiocrats’ view that land is the sole source of wealth). Yet Jefferson argued that in the Americas, where ownership and control of land was broadly distributed, these very ideas could be martialed in support of democracy. Jeffersonian agrarianism is too often seen as a romantic attachment to a bucolic past, but in the context of the American Revolution, where manufacturers and traders were much more likely to abandon the revolutionary cause than farmers, the idea that farmers’ interests align more tightly with those of the polity was very clear. Jefferson advocated an agrarian democracy because he felt that farmers were “the best” citizens, and, as he wrote, “mobs of great cities add just so much to support of pure government as sores do to the strength of the human body” (Jefferson 1783). American agrarianism took a further turn during the administration of Abraham Lincoln. On the one hand, abolitionists were appealing to moral arguments derived directly from Bentham and Kant, while defenders of slavery tended to recite agrarian arguments in its defense. Slavery was thought essential for the characteristically southern form of agriculture, which was in turn defended as a bulwark of political stability and the font of culture (see Smith 2003). There is thus an important sense in which the Emancipation Proclamation (1863) and the Thirteenth Amendment (1864) represent the emergence of an industrial philosophy of agriculture in the United States. No longer would the preeminence and political necessities associated with farming be permitted

Farming, Virtues, Agrarian Philosophy    61 to override the patent suffering and abrogation of human dignity inherent in race slavery. On the other hand, in 1862 Lincoln signed both the Morrill Act creating the public university system dedicated in significant measure to the promotion of agricultural science and the Homestead Act making Federal lands available for agricultural settlement. In the same year, he created the Department of Agriculture, also dedicated to furthering the interests of farmers. Lincoln articulated the rationale for these actions in starkly agrarian terms, equating farming interests with those of “the people” and reinforcing the Jeffersonian vision of an America founded upon the natural marriage between the interests created by land-​based economic activity and a broadly distributed pattern of ownership (Lincoln 1859). To summarize, the Greek polis and the corresponding notion of citizenship rests on the agrarian foundation of the hoi mesoi. Imperial agricultures (Egypt and China) produce only subjects, not citizens. Other forms of agrarianism emphasize the tight link between feeding the populace and military stability (Harrington), the tight link between farming and the material production of wealth (the physiocrats) and the tight link between those whose wealth comes from the land and political stability (mainstream political economy prior to the Industrial Revolution). To these three kinds of agrarianism, Jefferson and Lincoln added the view that when control of the land is broadly distributed, agrarian thinking supports democracy. The new political economy launched by the Scottish Enlightenment was, in an important sense, still grounded in these ideas, but Hume and Smith believed that the Industrial Revolution was creating opportunities that could not be fully exploited by a moral and legal system in which legal rights and moral sentiments were so permanently tied to a particular plot of land. Thus, the idea of property and the right to property had to be freed from its agrarian moorings in order to facilitate the growth of manufacturing and gains from trade. This in turn required a new conceptualization of labor as an alienable good, also subject to the terms of barter, rather than as a set of duties fixed by demands of a particular soil and climate (in bondage to a particular lord whose interests were defined by that soil and climate). The actual political changes that were needed to bring about this “great transformation” away from agrarian ideals took more than a century (Polanyi 1944).

Contemporary Agrarianism I see three reasons why scholars of food ethics should be attentive to agrarian views. The first may be a personal prejudice: my training emphasized the history of philosophy, and I cannot bring myself to imagine true philosophical thought in the absence of coming to terms with the texts of Aristotle, Locke, and others. The history of philosophy cannot, in my opinion, be read accurately without an understanding of the role played by agrarian values. If food ethics has something to contribute more broadly to the discipline of philosophy as I understand it, it must surely begin by noting that contemporary scholars’ lack of familiarity with the tradition of agrarian argument contributes to a limited

62   Paul B. Thompson understanding of the discipline itself. However, I realize that this is a minority view, and it is in respect to two other themes that food ethics, understood as an inquiry into the full consequences of eating one way rather than another, takes on its fuller significance. The second reason is that echoes of agrarian argument forms continue to be heard in contemporary food ethics. Michael Pollan has promoted Wendell Berry’s aphorism, “Eating is an agricultural act,” but what did Berry mean by that? Kimberley Smith’s Wendell Berry and the Agrarian Tradition: A Common Grace provides an overview of agrarian themes in American political thought including both Jeffersonian democracy and the less attractive aristocratic defense of slavery on agrarian grounds that was mounted by Jefferson’s contemporary (and political ally) John Taylor of Caroline. Smith argues that Berry’s significant engagement with debates over race and slavery (not fully appreciated by many readers) serves to significantly constrain some of the politically conservative elements of the agrarian tradition. Furthermore, Smith argues that Berry is the first agrarian to bring ecological themes explicitly into the agrarian lexicon. For Berry, agrarianism is an ecological worldview that emphasizes connectedness in every dimension. Not only are traditional farmers socially connected in a manner consistent with the way that Aristotle might have suggested for the hoi mesoi, they are attentive to the seasons, to the soil, and to the full sense in which they are both dependent on their encompassing world and at the same time responsible to it. Berry’s 1977 book The Unsettling of America was one of the first critiques to discuss the disconnectedness of modern “scientific” agriculture and to see the tight marriage between industrial farming and commodity markets as an ecological and political disaster (Smith 2003). Berry’s environmentalist agrarianism has been taken up by advocates of reform in agricultural practice. Wes Jackson interprets an ecologically sensitive approach to farming as the route to pursuing Thoreau’s goal of “becoming native to our place.” It is through farmers’ attentiveness to the structure and vulnerabilities of the specific, place-​bound ecosystem in which they farm that human practice can resolve into cultures that respect and even amplify the potential inherent within the natural world. It is through work, rather than leisure, that moral character is formed, hence it is the person who works within and with nature that satisfies the demands of environmental virtue (Jackson 1994). Agrarian arguments were also rehearsed in another volume with a title echoing Thoreau, Meeting the Expectations of the Land (1984), co-​edited by Jackson, Berry, and Bruce Coleman. Here, essays advocating a more ecological approach to farming as well as attention to the impact of agricultural chemicals on farmworkers were advanced through ethical arguments that appealed to a declining (if not lost) virtue of agricultural stewardship, rather than drawing upon uncompensated harms or violations of human (or nonhuman) rights (Jackson, Berry, and Coleman 1984). Similarly explicit appeals to agrarianism can be found in Eric Freyfogle’s The New Agrarianism: Land, Culture and Community (2001) and Norman Wirzba’s The Essential Agrarian Reader (2003). There are other authors who appeal to agrarian themes without also evoking the term “agrarianism.” The role of the farmer is stressed by Raymond Boisvert and Lisa Heldke in their book Philosophers at Table. Consistent with the discussion, Boisvert and Heldke

Farming, Virtues, Agrarian Philosophy    63 argue that late modern figures such as Bentham, Kant, and Hegel adopted a “spectator” standpoint toward the evaluative process. Boisvert and Heldke are as keen to stress aesthetics as ethics. The aesthetic practices of high culture—​a visit to the museum or a concert—​are modeled on leisure activities. The value theory of late eighteenth and early twentieth century came to stress a disinterested judgmental practice as a way to control the sway of passion. Boisvert and Heldke see the specter of Cartesian dualism in these theories, where disembodied minds attempt to curb the potential for animal spirits. They recommend the farmer over the spectator as the model for aesthetic and moral judgment. It is the farmer’s active engagement with material practice that gives this archetype its generative force for value theory (Boisvert and Heldke 2016). Boisvert and Heldke’s use of virtue talk differs from that of contemporary theorists who emphasize dispositional attitudes. In appealing to the farmer as a cultural archetype, they suggest that our moral and aesthetic imaginations can be piqued by our implicit understanding of the way that an archetypical figure would respond (hence be response-​able) in specific situations. The mere spectator has been stripped of the embedded understandings that reside at the root of responsibility in this situated sense. In contrast, known individuals (an admired mentor or family member), famous personages (Jesus, George Washington), and even fictional characters (Harry Potter or Jane Austen’s Elizabeth Bennett) can inspire a moral and aesthetic response from us when we ask, “What would X do?” It is doubtful that Boisvert and Heldke would view their approach as a form of agrarianism, yet their use of “the farmer” as a generative archetype for eliciting a normative standpoint indicates how agrarian ideals might challenge mainstream forms of consequential or deontological moral theory. Finally, I see agrarianism as a way to link systems and sustainability. Drawing upon the ideas of Berry and Jackson, I have interpreted the way that Jefferson or Aristotle link the virtue of citizenship to agrarian ideas as a way to emphasize both the difficulty and also the importance of taking a systems perspective. The threats to Athens or Rome that were associated with the rise of a trading mentality or military imperialism arose because the people advocating these thrusts could not grasp the sense in which their own interests depended on a prior commitment to polis, to protecting the land and soil-​ based interests that were the source of these cities’ initial wealth and sense of common purpose. The hoi mesoi represent a crucial political form because the management of their farms lends itself to a systems mentality. The complementarity between olive trees and grapevines, on the one hand, and the grains growing in the lower valleys becomes expressed as a palpable household rhythm. It defines what must be done when and where, and orders their lives through seasonal cycles at the same time that the scale of the household farm allows these tasks to be performed by a relatively small and autochthonous family group. Except that their autochthony is visibly constrained by their dependence on craftsmen and by their need for a common defense against invaders. The household farmer represented by Xenophon’s Ischomachus can see how the systemic integrity of his household is integrated within the larger system of the polis. In our present era, it is crucial to add dependence upon the integrity of broader ecosystem processes, as well. My own work has stressed the tension between

64   Paul B. Thompson conceptualizations of sustainability that draw upon the idea of sustainable development and those that emphasize the resilience or adaptiveness of systems (be they biological, social, or some combination of the two). I have argued that attention to agrarian philosophies can alert us to the way that systems thinking has been given political salience in the past, and I note a series of figures (including Liberty Hyde Bailey and Aldo Leopold) who emphasized the foundational importance of agricultural practice during more recent times (Thompson 2010). The chief contemporary spokespersons for the system perspective have been ecologists. It may thus be significant that recent work in conservation biology has begun to emphasize the agrarian values of indigenous communities and has argued that these farming peoples possess an understanding of the systems perspective that has been extremely difficult to cultivate among more highly educated Westerners (Rozzi 2015). When Berry says that eating is an agricultural act, he is in fact opening the door to a number of diverse ways in which farms and farming might stimulate a deep and highly situated form of moral reflection. This is not to say that those who see the enactment of food ethics primarily through consumption practices that resist the industrial have it altogether wrong. Cage-​free eggs and free-​trade coffee have their place. Yet Berry is also calling us to appreciate how agrarian values can enrich our moral ontology and push us toward a more integrated systems perspective. At a minimum, it is to say that food ethics is much more than hoping to save the world with better shopping. In the end, the best reasons to promote consciousness-​raising food practices, from vegetarianism and locavorism to community-​supported agriculture and fair trade may have little to do with the causal connection between our food purchases and the larger supply chain. They may be better justified as first steps toward broadening our ethical horizons in a manner that is not only more sensitive to the philosophies of the past but more generative of response for the challenges of the future.

Conclusion In concluding, I note again that the industrial philosophy of agriculture, the ethical approach that sees agriculture as just another sector in complex industrial societies, brings absolutely crucial resources to the table. There is very little in the classical agrarian mindset that would advocate for a minimum wage for farm laborers or fast-​food workers. Indeed, there is little basis on which one might advocate for a right to food. As noted, agrarian arguments were advanced in defense of race slavery, arguably the least defensible institution ever countenanced by human civilization. At the same time, however, I have tried to indicate briefly how contemporary authors are trying to save what was wise about agrarian values, while also adding ecological themes that were never explicitly argued by classical advocates of agrarian philosophy. The unifying theme is that there is something special, something unique, and something normatively generative about agriculture and farming. It is precisely this element that is lost

Farming, Virtues, Agrarian Philosophy    65 when ethical theories that depend upon an ideal spectator are applied in the typical manner. This is not to say that the themes I have associated with the agrarian worldview cannot be incorporated into consequentialist or deontological perspectives. In a similar vein, contemporary movements such as particularism, virtue ethics, and even feminist theory clearly do pick up themes that would have once been associated with an agrarian perspective, while shedding any sense that agriculture and farming as such have much to contribute. Perhaps the one thing that does distinguish farming from these perspectives is that for the time being, at least, this is how we get our food. And food is manifestly different from other goods produced by other sectors in the industrial economy. Yet there are thrusts on the horizon that would end this linkage, while the arguments for synthetic meat and climate-​controlled agriculture are being advanced on moral grounds (Welin, Gold, and Berlin 2012; Dey and Pinel 2015). If there truly is anything special about farming, the time to consider that question is now.

Bibliography Berry, Wendell. 1977. The Unsettling of America:  Culture and Agriculture. San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club Books. Boisvert, Raymond D., and Lisa Heldke. 2016. Philosophers at Table:  On Food and Being Human. London: Reaktion Books. Carlson, Alan. 2000. The New Agrarian Mind: The Movement toward Decentralist Thought in 20th Century America. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Press. Dey, Anind, and Florian Pinel. 2015. “Pervasive Food.” IEEE Pervasive Computing 4:22−23. Freyfogle, Eric, ed. 2001. The New Agrarianism: Land, Culture and Community. Washington, DC: Island Press. Hanson, Victor Davis. 1995. The Other Greeks:  The Family Farm and the Agrarian Roots of Western Civilization. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Jackson, Wes. 1994. Becoming Native to this Place. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Jackson, Wes, Wendell Berry, and Bruce Coleman. 1984. Meeting the Expectations of the Land. San Francisco, CA: North Point Press. Jefferson, Thomas. 1783 [1995]. Notes on the State of Virginia, edited with an introduction and notes by William Peden. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Lincoln, Abraham. 1859. Speech before the Wisconsin Agricultural Society. http://​www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/​lincoln/​speeches/​fair.htm. Macpherson, C. B. 1962. The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism:  Hobbes to Locke. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Mazoyer, Marcel, and Lawrance Roudart. 2006. A History of World Agriculture:  From the Neolithic Age to the Current Crisis. Translated by James H. Membrez. New York: Monthly Review Press. McWilliams, Carey. 1939. Factories in the Fields:  The Story of Migratory Farm Labor in California. Boston: Little Brown & Co. Montmarquet, James A. 1989. The Idea of Agrarianism:  From Hunter-​Gatherer to Agrarian Radical in Western Culture. Moscow: University of Idaho Press.

66   Paul B. Thompson Murphy, Paul V. 2001. The Rebuke of History:  The Southern Agrarians and American Conservative Thought. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Polanyi, Karl. 1944. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Rozzi, Ricardo. 2015. “Earth Stewardship and the Biocultural Ethic:  Latin American Perspectives,” in Earth Stewardship: Linking Ecology and Ethics in Theory and Practice, edited by R. Rozzi, F. S. Chapin III, J. B. Callicott, S. T. A. Pickett, M. E. Power, J. J. Armesto, and R. H. May Jr., 87−112. Dordrecht: Springer. Smith, Adam. 1759. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Edinburgh: A. Kincaid and J. Bell. Smith, Kimberley. 2003. Wendell Berry and the Agrarian Tradition:  A Common Grace. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas. Thompson, E. P. 1971. “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century.” Past and Present 50:76−136. Thompson, Paul B. 2010. The Agrarian Vision:  Sustainability and Environmental Ethics. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. —​—​—​. 2015. From Field to Fork: Food Ethics for Everyone. New York: Oxford University Press. —​—​—​. 2017. The Spirit of the Soil:  Agriculture and Environmental Ethics. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge. Vardi, Liana. 2012. The Physiocrats and the World of the Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Welin, Stellan, Julie Gold, and Johanna Berlin. 2012. “In Vitro Meat:  What Are the Moral Issues,” in The Philosophy of Food, edited by D. Kaplan, 292−304. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Wirzba, Norman, ed. 2003. The Essential Agrarianism Reader. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.

chapter 4

F o od, the Env i ronme nt, and Gl obal J u st i c e Mark Budolfson

In order to eat a single meal, would you dump thousands of gallons of water down the drain, dump pollutants into our rivers, kill the creatures that inhabit our ecosystems, and harm other human beings? Of course, you wouldn’t. But an average meal in a developed nation typically has exactly that kind of extensive harm footprint, given the resources that are used to produce it and other consequences of its production. The “harm footprint” of a unit of a food is the measurement of the amount of harm that the food system causes in producing each unit of that food on average. (See the chart later in this essay for quantification and comparison of the harm footprints of different foods.) So, how should we take these different kinds of harms into proper account, including environmental harms, as well as the needs of humans? And in light of that proper accounting, what is it best to do about the disturbingly large harm footprint that is associated with our food? What is the best improved food system for us to aim for with policy? To some, the answer to this question is simple: we should promote a food system that simply minimizes each and every one of these negative impacts. But if this simple answer is understood to mean unconstrained minimization of all of these negative impacts, it has the striking implication that we should generally stop using the tools of contemporary agriculture altogether, even if this means that we cannot then produce enough food for ourselves—​ since choosing to produce food using the tools of contemporary agriculture will generally have negative impacts, particularly on the environment. Most people would reject this unconstrained minimization view once it is noted that it could have this self-​sacrificing implication. However, not everyone rejects such an answer, for example, many deep ecologists would say, “Yes, that is exactly what is implied by the values I endorse, which imply unconstrained minimization of negative impacts

68   Mark Budolfson on ecosystems, even if it means the human population must wither away.”1 As such, deep ecologists and some other environmental theorists endorse the view that humans might have to make dramatic sacrifices on behalf of the environment. In what follows, I assume for the sake of discussion that the correct answer to the question of what food system we should promote cannot have the implication that humanity as a whole should dramatically sacrifice itself. Thus, I will assume for the sake of argument that our pursuit of environmental and other objectives must be constrained by or balanced against meeting the basic needs of humans (and perhaps their further desires as well), contrary to the sort of environmental ethics endorsed by deep ecologists and some others.2 But even if we assume that meeting our need for food must constrain any acceptable answer, it may still seem relatively easy to answer the question of what food system we should promote: namely, that we should promote whatever system gives us enough (nutritious) food, and subject to that constraint also minimizes harm along every dimension we should care about, such as harm to our farmers, nonhuman animals, and our environment. In fact, many leading arguments in favor of particular alternative food systems—​such as organic food systems or vegan food systems—​can be understood as based on this “Standard Argument,” combining this normative premise, together with an empirical premise to the effect that the favored food system would in fact minimize harm along every dimension we care about: The Standard Argument

Normative Premise:  We should promote the food system that provides us with enough nutritious food, and subject to that constraint minimizes harm along each and every normatively relevant dimension. Empirical Premise: Food system X (e.g., a local and organic system or a vegan system) would provide us with enough nutritious food, and subject to that constraint would minimize harm along each and every relevant dimension. Conclusion: Therefore, we should promote food system X. 1  For a clear statement of deep ecology and this kind of idea, see Paul Watson, “Clarification of Where Director Paul Watson Stands on Some Issues,” http://​www.ecospherics.net/​pages/​wonw.htm. For a classic philosophical statement of deep ecology, see Arne Naess, “The Shallow and the Deep, Long-​ Range Ecology Movement: A Summary,” and for some representative criticism of philosophical views that give significant non-​instrumental value to nature, see Elliott Sober, “Philosophical Problems for Environmentalism,” both reprinted in Environmental Ethics: What Really Matters, What Really Works, 2d ed., ed. David Schmidtz and Elizabeth Willott (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 2  Note that this assumption does not involve the assumption that nature has only anthropocentric value. For an introduction to this issue, see “Introduction: The Last Man and the Search for Objective Value” in Schmidtz and Willott, Environmental Ethics; and Richard Routley, “Is There a Need for a New, an Environmental, Ethic?” Proceedings of the XVth World Congress of Philosophy, Bulgaria, 1973. For a further overview of the literature on this and other leading issues in environmental ethics, see Andrew Brennan and Yeuk-​Sze Lo, “Environmental Ethics,” in the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2015), Claire Palmer, Katie McShane, Ronald Sandler, “Environmental Ethics,” Annual Review of Environment and Resources (2014), and Dale Jamieson, “The Value of Nature”, in his Ethics and the Environment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

Food, Environment, and Global Justice    69 This chapter outlines a number of important objections to arguments that have this structure. First, the empirical premises of these arguments are called into question by the work of experts on the relevant empirical issues about food production. Second, the relevant empirical facts also calls into question the assumption that there is a single food system that minimizes harms along each and every dimension that matters. Instead, many experts would argue that the essence of the food-​systems challenge is to decide what regrettable trade-​offs it is best to make so that we can best salvage what matters overall—​where the best overall food system is likely to be worse along some dimensions (including some environmental harms) than some feasible alternatives. Finally, in order to answer questions about what food system our society should promote with policy, it is arguably necessary to first take the perspective of the entire world, and thus the global food system, and first answer questions such as: What global food system is best when everything is taken into proper account, including all of the global consequences for people and the environment of any local change we might make? And in light of this, how should rich and poor nations coordinate their efforts to achieve the optimal food system for the world, given the different capacities of nations, different levels of power in negotiations, and different levels of responsibility for the defects of the current system? What is our society’s place in that optimal system? How exactly do these facts about the complex global system complicate the answer to these and other questions about what we should do from the perspective of our society? The progression of these questions—​beginning with questions that can seem to have answers that depend only on easily known facts about our society and our local environment, but that ultimately require a complex global empirical and ethical integrated assessment that includes a proper accounting for values of global justice—​is arguably the future of debates about food and the environment, and is also representative of the arc of much of environmental ethics and policy over the past century. This chapter also explains why some food-​science experts believe that a correct global assessment ultimately recommends what is called sustainable intensification of food systems, which involves more elements of contemporary industrial agriculture than are favored by proponents of organic or vegan alternatives. As a further complication, this is not equivalent to the idea that sustainability should be our main objective. Various leading conceptions of sustainability are considered later in the essay, and none appear to capture a fundamentally important objective for societies.

The Pro-​Organic View and the Challenge of Feeding the World Returning to the large harm footprint of our food as it is currently produced, some commentators insist that the correct conclusion to draw is that we need to shift away from contemporary industrial agriculture and move back toward more traditional organic farming methods that avoid synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and the inputs that drive

70   Mark Budolfson many of these high harm footprints, and that we should also move back toward smaller-​ scale local food systems.3 As a result, to the majority of these commentators, the answer to the question of what food system we should have is a function of facts about our regional foodshed, where a “foodshed” is roughly the geographic region that would most naturally produce the food for a particular population in the absence of a modern food distribution network.4 So, for example, what food system should be promoted by people in Vermont is a function of facts about Vermont and its people and closely geographically connected areas, and what food system should be promoted by people in Uttar Pradesh is a function of different facts about people in that region and other closely geographically connected areas, and so on. These “pro-​organics” arguments often appeal to a number of values that local and organic agriculture is alleged to better promote: values of community, tradition, respect for nature, and, most important, better quality of food and minimization of negative environmental impacts. Beyond these, the main goal of the pro-​organics view is generally taken to be maximizing soil health and biodiversity in foodsheds using agricultural practices that invoke ecologically natural processes (e.g., fertilizing fields with animal manure, ideally applied by the animals themselves as they graze and forage, as opposed to using synthetic fertilizer). As with many terms in public discourse, “organic” is usually not defined more precisely beyond this implicit definition in terms of these values and goals. (Note that most proponents of the pro-​organic view bemoan the fact that more precise definitions of “organic” in policy, such as the definition used by the USDA, do not go far enough in ensuring these values and goals are promoted.) Given these values and goals, it is unsurprising that many who endorse the pro-​organics view gravitate toward permaculture, where the focus is on creating and maintaining agriculturally productive ecosystems that have the diversity, stability, and resilience of natural ecosystems—​and are a seamless part of the local socioecological system, perhaps providing other ecosystem services for local populations of the sort common in the preindustrial era. Pro-​organics arguments typically depend implicitly on the assumption that such an organic and local system does not do worse on any relevant dimension. Thus, leading arguments for the pro-​organics view typically have the structure of the Standard Argument, even though many details of such an argument are typically left unstated and taken for granted by proponents of the view.5 3  For leading examples of pro-​organic arguments in public discourse, see Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma (New York: Penguin, 2006); and Marion Nestle, What to Eat (New York: North Point Press, 2006). 4  Although it is not important to the argument here, as a conceptual point it is worth noting that contrary to the standard definition, “foodshed” cannot be defined as simply “the geographic region that actually produces food for a given population,” because in the developed world this definition would imply that virtually the entire world is the foodshed for every population in the developed world (given the globalized food-​distribution system)—​which is contrary to the intended meaning of “foodshed” as it is commonly used. So, something like the definition offered here is needed to capture the intended meaning. 5  For example, the main argument of Pollan and Nestle can be understood as having the structure of the Standard Argument, as they seem to implicitly rely on the premise that organics are better along

Food, Environment, and Global Justice    71 There are two main objections to this pro-​organics view. The first objection is that such a pro-​organics view is mistaken about the most important empirical facts. In particular, although it is true that organics may be better for the environment than conventionals in some locations and with respect to some food products, and although it may be generally true that organic methods produce less environmental harms per cultivated acre, nonetheless experts often argued that all-​things-​considered organics are generally worse for the environment than conventionals because organics have lower yields (at least 20% to 25% lower, and even lower the closer one gets to the alleged ideal of permaculture6), and when the lower yields per cultivated acre are taken into account, arguably it is generally true that organic methods produce more environmental harms of most kinds per unit of product than conventional methods—​which, according to this objection, should surely be the relevant measure of whether organics are better for the environment than conventionals, since doing worse by that metric means doing more total harm for any given level of total food output.7 This is possible because the lower yields of organics imply that shifting toward organics means increasing the amount of the Earth’s land that must be devoted to agriculture, which is bad for the environment in myriad ways—​from destruction of ecosystems and loss of biodiversity as a result of increased land use, to turning carbon sinks into sources of carbon emissions, and many others.8 Furthermore, some studies argue that, in addition to being generally no better for the environment, organics are also generally no better for human consumers than conventionals. Organics are allegedly no more nutritious than conventionals (with exceptions in some locations with respect to some particular products), and organics arguably do not help avoid pesticide levels that have been found to be a threat to human health (with exceptions in some locations with respect to some particular products). The argument for this claim is that overall pesticide residues found in foods are at levels below the tolerances set by science-​based analyses).9 every dimension of value. For example, Nestle summarizes the case for organics as “when you choose organics, you are voting with your fork for a planet with fewer pesticides, richer soil, and cleaner water supplies” (66). 6  A. Kravchenco et al., “Field-​scale experiments reveal persistent yield gaps in low-​input and organic cropping systems,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114 (2017): 926–​931; L. C. Ponisio et al., “Diversification Practices Reduce Organic to Conventional Yield Gap,” Proc. R. Soc. B 282 (2015): 20141396. V. Seufert et al., “Comparing the Yields of Organic and Conventional Agriculture,” Nature 485 (2012): 229–​232. 7  H. L. Tuomisto et al., “Does Organic Farming Reduce Environmental Impacts? A Meta-​analysis of European Research,” Journal of Environmental Management 112 (2012): 309−320; K. Mondelaers et al., “A Meta-​analysis of the Differences in Environmental Impacts between Organic and Conventional Farming,” British Food Journal 111 (2009): 1098−1119; T. Fischer et al., “Crop Yields and Global Food Security,” ACIAR, 2014. 8  Seufert et al., “Comparing the Yields of Organic and Conventional Agriculture”; Fischer et al., “Crop Yields and Global Food Security”; J. Burney et al., “Greenhouse Gas Mitigation by Agricultural Intensification,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107 (2010): 12052–​12057; Norman Borlaug, “Feeding a World of Ten Billion People,” reprinted in Food, Ethics, and Society, ed. Anne Barnhill et al. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). 9  C. Smith-​Spangler et al., “Are Organic Foods Safer or Healthier than Conventional Alternatives? A Systematic Review,” Annals of Internal Medicine 157 (2012): 348‒366. Again, there are sometimes wide

72   Mark Budolfson The second main objection to the pro-​organics view is that even if such a pro-​organics view were not mistaken about the empirical facts about yields and environmental impacts, it would still be mistaken as an answer to the question of what we should do because it mistakenly assumes that we have no important goals beyond simply minimizing our footprint on the environment. But, on the contrary, we have a number of additional goals that are arguably much more important—​for example, we have the goal of feeding the entire world—​not merely feeding wealthy people who can afford to shop at farmers’ markets and the like. This leads to a serious problem for the pro-​organics response because if we shifted heavily toward organic methods of farming, it appears that we would not have nearly enough food to feed the world by mid-​century. Given the world’s growing population and growing affluence, there will be a growing demand for meat, as well as a growing demand for renewable energy, which is provided in part by biofuels that subtract from the agricultural output available as food. For example, a widely defended prediction based on modeling these dynamics is that we will need to nearly double crop production by 2050 over 2010 levels, even without overly pessimistic assumptions about biofuel use (which have the potential to increase future demand even further).10 The problem of feeding the world is only made worse by climate change, which according to one leading study has already reduced average global yields of corn and wheat production by 3.8% and 5.5%, respectively, since 1980 relative to what they would have been without human-​caused climate change.11 And the authoritative United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicts that average global yields will continue to decline by up to 2% per decade for the rest of the century if we do not reduce our emissions from their current “business as usual” trajectory. According to the IPCC, business as usual will pose a “significant risk to food security even with adaptation.”12 And the other side of the coin in connection with climate differences with respect to nutrition between particular items bought at a particular time at a particular location, due primarily to the fact that nutrients decay quickly after harvest in some foods; for discussion, see K. Frith, “‘Is Local Food More Nutritious?’ It Depends,” Harvard Center for Health and the Global Environment, 2007, http://​chge.med.harvard.edu/​resource/​local-​more-​nutritious. Similarly, there are sometimes wide and systematic differences with respect to pesticide levels; for discussion, see the Environmental Working Group report, “EWG’s 2017 Shopper’s Guide to Pesticides in Produce,” http://​www.ewg.org/​foodnews/​summary.php, which provides possible grounds for objecting to the claim that organics are no better than conventionals regarding dangerous pesticide levels (where the objection might be that even though it might be true that organics are no better 99% of the time, it is the 1% of the time that matters). For a report claiming that “overall pesticide residues found in foods are at levels below the tolerances set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency,” see USDA, “Pesticide Data Program: Annual Summary 2014,” https://​www.ams.usda.gov/​sites/​default/​files/​media/​2014%20 PDP%20Annual%20Summary.pdf. 10 

David Tilman et al., “Global Food Demand and the Sustainable Intensification of Agriculture,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108 (2011): 20260‒20264. For a summary of these issues, see J. Foley, “A Five-​Step Plan to Feed the World,” National Geographic, 2014. 11  D. Lobell et al., “Climate Trends and Global Crop Production since 1980,” Science 333 (2011): 616‒620. The article notes that so far “winners and losers largely balanced out” for soybeans and rice. 12  United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), “Food Security and Food Production Systems,” Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability, final draft released,

Food, Environment, and Global Justice    73 change is arguably even worse for the poor this century: if we were to quickly reduce emissions to levels that properly reflect the social cost of carbon emissions, models predict that this would increase food prices even more in the coming decades by increasing the cost of food production and reducing land devoted to agriculture, especially if this is allowed to create a vast increase in diversion of crops for use in biofuels to reach this level of mitigation.13 So, arguments for the pro-​organics view face important objections about their empirical assumptions (namely, that the argument mistakenly assumes that organics would be better along both environmental and other dimensions), and objections to their normative assumptions (namely, that the argument mistakenly assumes that producing enough food to feed the world is not an important dimension of value).

The Pro-​Organics View and Connections to Philosophical Debates about Ideal versus Nonideal Theory and Global Justice Defenders of the pro-​organics view rarely consider these objections. But when they do, many on the pro-​organics side insist that such objections assume that too many regrettable aspects of our current world are unchangeable, including regrettable facts about increasing consumption of meat, regrettable facts about climate change, and perhaps also other regrettable background facts such as the use of biofuels and the general background of the congressional-​agribusiness-​industrial complex. Instead of taking these things as fixed, many on the pro-​organics side insist that the only sustainable way forward is to turn away dramatically from these aspects of the status quo: in particular, they insist that we must combat climate change effectively, reduce human population,14 and

March 31, 2014, http://​www.ipcc.ch/​report/​ar5/​wg2. See also T. Wheeler and J. von Braun, “Climate Change Impacts on Global Food Security,” in Science 341 (2013): 508‒513. 13 

See Stephane Hallegatte et al., Shock Waves: Managing the Impacts of Climate Change on Poverty (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2016), 56. 14  See, e.g., Paul Ehrlich and Anne Ehrlich, “The Food Threat to Human Civilization,” Project Syndicate, 2013, https://​www.project-​syndicate.org/​commentary/​human-​population-​growth-​has-​ become-​unsustainable-​by-​paul-​r-​-​ehrlich-​and-​anne-​h-​-​ehrlich; compare and contrast Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (New York: Ballantine Books, 1968). For the history and criticism of population-​ control policies of the previous century inspired by similar arguments, see Matthew Connelly, Fatal Misconception (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). For a view that rejects coercive policies, as well as the very large population reductions suggested by the Ehrlichs, see Amartya Sen, “Population, Food, and Freedom,” in his Development as Freedom (New York: Anchor Books, 1999). The discussion here will set aside debates about the human population and food systems. The assumption for the sake of argument will be that Sen is largely correct about the mechanisms relevant to global

74   Mark Budolfson perhaps also reduce our consumption of meat, which would then allow us to feed the world via organic farming methods. Furthermore, this would make the world’s human population healthier on average and would also allow the resources used in animal agriculture to be used for other more productive purposes. Along these lines, it could be argued that a world with dramatically reduced meat consumption and global organic agriculture is a key part of the outcome that is ideally best for the world because it represents the food system that is part of the best possible outcome for humanity given the basic physical constraints of our world. So, instead of resigning ourselves to complicity in the current regrettable system, it could be argued that we should instead aim for this ideally best outcome, which would be much better along every ethically important dimension. But even if we agreed that the ideally best outcome would involve organics heavily in this way, many would insist that nothing immediately follows about what policies we should actually promote. In particular, even if we agree that the ideally best outcome would involve the conjunction of (a) dramatically reducing people’s appetite for meat, (b) dramatically reducing people’s appetite for fossil fuels, and (c) moving our agricultural production heavily toward organics, nonetheless it does not follow that we should actually try to bring about (a), (b), and (c). That is because the predictable effect of a policy portfolio that aims for (a), (b), and (c) is arguably that we will fail to succeed in bringing about both (a) and (b), and so insofar as we do succeed in bringing about (c), that will lead to starvation of the world’s poor while the rich continue to eat meat, as well as increased use of land for agriculture, and thus destruction of ecosystems and an even worse outcome for humans and nonhuman animals with respect to climate change. As a result, adopting such a portfolio of policies does not seem to be what we should actually do, even if we agree that it aims most directly at the ideally best outcome. Many who disagree with the pro-​organics view take this to show that even if we agree that a heavy shift to organics would be part of the outcome that is ideally best, nonetheless we should not favor a heavy shift to organics, at least not over the next fifty years during which the challenge of feeding the world will come to a head.15 As this example shows, assuming that conclusions about what policies to promote follow directly from the facts about what would be ideally best is to be idealistic in a way that can be tragic, since it threatens to lead to catastrophic outcomes for humanity and the rest of the natural world. If it is indeed foreseeable that a pro-​organics approach to policymaking would have these downsides with no realistic upside, such policymaking would then be an example of counterproductive idealism, in which well-​intentioned population and well-​being and that attempting to reduce food demand to match current food supply would be a cure worse than the disease, partly because it would require coercive mechanisms deployed almost exclusively against the global poor when instead a better outcome is available by increasing food production (in the way leading models cited here suggest), in conjunction with non-​coercive population policies (such as merely making birth control readily available). 15  D. Tilman et al. report that “the coming 50 years are likely to be the final period of rapidly expanding, global human environmental impacts” (“Agricultural Sustainability and Intensive Agricultural Practices,” Nature 418 (2002): 671‒677).

Food, Environment, and Global Justice    75 idealism is paired with a lack of serious concern for the empirical facts of the nonideal real world in a way that ensures that policymaking fails to do nearly as much good as could have been done—​and at worst is catastrophically counterproductive. With this in mind, it is easy to see how an intention to engage in effective altruism could actually result in counterproductive idealism if the interventions depend on a misapprehension of the relevant empirical facts.16 To translate these considerations into philosophical terms, many pro-​organics arguments can be interpreted as answering ideal theory questions regarding what should be done conditional on everyone acting in an individually ethically optimal way; however, food policy requires us to answer nonideal theory questions regarding what should actually be done regarding food systems given the actual suboptimal dispositions of the world’s people (and suboptimal existing institutions, etc.). Even if we assume that the pro-​ organics view is correct about what we should do in ideal theory, it not clear that anything similar follows about what policy we should actually promote. In response to these objections based on a concern for feeding the world’s poor, many on the pro-​organics side are inclined to dismiss the problem of feeding the world as “not our problem” on the grounds that it is irrelevant to decisions about what food system we should promote. Instead, many on the pro-​organics side are inclined to see the question of what food system we should promote as a question about what is best for us, where “us” is understood as referring to the members of our very local community or foodshed. This implicitly makes the plight of those outside our foodshed irrelevant to what we should do. But when we critically examine this pro-​organics response, it can seem problematic because in order for the empirical facts about the amount of food needed to feed the world to really be irrelevant in the way that this pro-​organics response assumes, the pro-​organics view must ultimately insist that even if billions would starve, that would still provide insufficient reason to grow more food by more intensive means, even if this would make our way of life and satisfaction of our environmental values within our local foodsheds in the developed world only somewhat worse. To make a connection to the literature on global justice, it is important to see that this pro-​organics response is thus analogous to very strong statist responses to the idea that citizens of rich nations must take steps to aid the citizens of poor nations: the strongest statists simply deny that we have such obligations and adopt the stance that the plight of the world’s poor does not give us sufficient reason to reprioritize our own domestic concerns.17 The pro-​organics view under discussion here can be seen as an instance of this strong statist view: if our domestic concern is to have tastier vegetables and marginally cleaner water, and achieving that goal would mean that billions of poor people starved abroad, then so much the worse for those billions of poor people 16 

As the saying goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. For an overview, see Laura Valentini, “Introduction: The Problem of Global Justice,” in her Justice in a Globalized World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). For a collection of some leading papers, see Thomas Pogge and Darrel Moellendorf, eds., Global Justice (St. Paul, MN: Paragon, 2008). 17 

76   Mark Budolfson who had the misfortune of “losing the lottery of birth” and being born into a different society. If this characterization of the dialectic seems too dramatic, it is worth noting that many of the world’s foremost experts agree that the pro-​organics view is mistaken for exactly these simple and dramatic reasons. For example, Norman Borlaug, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize and to some the most respected food-​systems humanitarian of all time, claims that “we aren’t going to feed 6 billion people with organic fertilizer. If we tried to do it, we would level most of our forest and many of those lands would be productive only for a short period of time.”18 And chemist John Emsley writes that “the greatest catastrophe that the human race could face this century is not global warming but a global conversion to ‘organic farming’—​an estimated two billion people would perish.”19 So the stakes are high in the debate over the pro-​organics view. Much is at stake for the world, especially the global poor, depending on what set of values is correct (strong statism or a more cosmopolitan alternative concerned fundamentally with overall global welfare? deep ecology or a more (anthropocentric?) utilitarian alternative?) and what the relevant empirical facts are about the consequences of a shift to organic agriculture—​which, even if it were confined to the United States, could arguably have disastrous effects on food prices for the global poor. Upon careful reflection, many people would presumably agree that we, the citizens of rich nations, should be willing to make at least some sacrifices of our environment via our food-​systems policies if that is the only way of ensuring that the global poor are able to be properly nourished. This conclusion is especially difficult to resist if the impermissible actions of our society are also the primary cause of the food insecurity of the global poor (which will be increasingly true over time due to climate change—​note the analogy here to Thomas Pogge’s arguments regarding global poverty, which argue that members of our society have a special obligation to help the global poor because we are causing their continued oppression) and if we are most fundamentally all members of one global society in a way that implies that we have standard obligations of distributive justice to the global poor (as, e.g., Charles Beitz and others have argued).20 This suggests that there are questions about global justice and what food system we should have that are structurally similar to, but go far beyond, the question of whether we should merely contribute financial support to food aid programs for the global poor. Taking these additional challenges seriously leads to important objections to the Standard Argument for the pro-​organics view.21

18 

Quoted in Worldwatch Institute, “Can Organic Farming Feed Us All?” 2006, http://​www. worldwatch.org/​node/​4060. 19 Ibid. 20  Thomas Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Polity, 2008); Charles Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations, rev. ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). 21  See the introduction to c ­ hapter 2 of Barnhill et al., Food, Ethics, and Society, for extended discussion of traditional debates over food aid and global food security, and explanation of arguments from Pogge

Food, Environment, and Global Justice    77

Food Sovereignty, the Pro-​Organics View, and Global Justice The pro-​organics view is sometimes (but not always) conjoined with arguments in favor of food sovereignty, which is roughly the view that not only should food be both produced and consumed in local foodsheds (as many versions of the pro-​organic view maintain), but that local populations should also own and control these local food systems. This view rejects the status quo of a globalized food system with enormous power exercised by multinational corporations, along with the underlying so-called “neoliberal global order” and its imposition of institutions of so-​called “free trade”.22 As many critics agree, institutions of global trade actually fall far short of the ideal of free trade and often involve trading rules that are unfair to the global poor and serve to shift power away from the global poor and subsistence farmers and to large corporations and their shareholders in developed nations.23 What distinguishes the food sovereignty view from more mainstream critiques of the actual international trade regime (as that regime is actually realized by global trade institutions such as the WTO and its agreement on agriculture)—​for example, mainstream criticism of those institutions from Nobel Laureates Joseph Stiglitz and Angus Deaton—​is that the food sovereignty movement also rejects the basic goals of free trade (unlike mainstream critics) and instead prioritizes local control and decision-​making over the consequences for well-​being.24 As such, the food sovereignty view fits naturally with the values that are endorsed by many proponents of the pro-​organics view in its prioritization of local values over global welfare, which imply a strong statist view on issues of global justice (which is not to say that these values imply that government should be the primary determinant of food systems, as opposed to the local people themselves). This appears to be the common normative and Beitz and their relevance to those debates; for philosophical discussion of the less-​discussed issues highlighted here, see the introduction to c­ hapter 3 and Helena de Bres, “Local Food: The Moral Case,” both in Barnhill et al., Food, Ethics, and Society. 22 

For a leading discussion of food sovereignty and objections to the international trade and agriculture regime, see William Schanbacher, The Politics of Food (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2010). See also Saturnino Borras and Jennifer Franco, “Food, Justice, and Land,” Bina Agarwal, “Food Security, Productivity, and Gender Inequality,” and Kym Anderson, “Food Price and Trade Policy Biases: Inefficient, Inequitable, Yet Not Inevitable,” all in the Oxford Handbook of Food, Politics, and Society, ed. Ronald J. Herring (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). For influential discussions of food sovereignty in public discourse, see “Declaration of Nyéléni,” https://​nyeleni.org/​spip. php?article290; Raj Patel, Stuffed and Starved (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2012); and Paul Thompson, From Field to Fork (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). 23  See the essay by Madison Powers in this handbook for further discussion “Food, Fairness, and Global Markets”; see also works cited in preceding footnote. 24  Joseph Stiglitz, Making Globalization Work (New York: Norton, 2012); Angus Deaton, The Great Escape (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), ch. 7; Angus Deaton, “Response to Effective Altruism,” Boston Review, 2015, http://​bostonreview.net/​forum/​logic-​effective-​altruism/​ angus-​deaton-​response-​effective-​altruism.

78   Mark Budolfson foundation of both views despite the fact that defenders of those views rarely explicitly theorize the normative foundation for their views. Once this becomes clear, it is less surprising that there is a strong correlation between food-​system commentators who defend the pro-​ organics view and those who defend the food sovereignty view. This also clarifies the structure of numerous possible objections to the food sovereignty view:  many cosmopolitans will reject the prioritization of local community power over global well-​being. And even beyond that basic issue, it may seem that the food sovereignty view prioritizes local ownership and control over the well-​being of even those local people in a way that is unmotivated and implausible: Should a society’s own people remain starving and in poverty rather than cede some control to outsiders? Is it really better to stop trading with the developing world and thereby stunt their development in order to ensure that everything that affects them is entirely their own making?25 How are the values behind food sovereignty different than the protectionist values partially responsible for Brexit and the election of Donald Trump? Might defenders of food sovereignty be attracted to a reply based on nonideal theory: that while free trade is best in ideal theory given that it would then be combined with redistribution to protect the poor and others left behind by globalization, in actuality we should not support free trade because those protective transfers will predictably not be made in the nonideal real world?26 These questions dovetail with more general questions about social policy, the legitimacy and desirability of international institutions, and the “democratic deficit” that arguably exists whereby global elites or at least rich nations control most of these institutions27—​which, consistent with that criticism, might also arguably be the best feasible institutions for promoting geopolitical stability and global well-​being.28 In response, defenders of food sovereignty are apt to insist that free trade does not in fact promote well-​being better than food sovereignty would, and so there is in fact no tension between their view and well-​being in the real world. However, most advocates for food sovereignty do not focus on analyzing the well-​being-​based arguments for global free trade made by leading economists, and instead focus their rejection of trade institutions on the basis of other values described here—​which is the basis for the interpretation of the view here as prioritizing local control and decision-​making over the 25  Relatedly, see Helena de Bres, “Local Food: The Moral Case,” both in Barnhill et al., Food, Ethics, and Society. 26  Such an objection is suggested by Stiglitz, Making Globalization Work, and arguably captures an increasingly politically important objection to free trade regimes. 27  See, e.g., Charles Beitz, “Global Political Justice and the ‘Democratic Deficit,’” in Reasons and Recognition, ed. R. Jay Wallace et al. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 28  Most philosophers do not note that the most fundamental objective of the WTO and its predecessor the GATT as understood by its architects was to promote geopolitical stability, not free trade. This is an important oversight in the philosophical literature because it undermines arguments from premises about the free-​trade suboptimality of the WTO to conclusions that the WTO is suboptimal—​on the contrary, as with the UN Security Council, arguably the best feasible institution for achieving the fundamental goal of geopolitical stability might not be the best feasible institution for promoting some less important instrumental goals that are nonetheless more saliently associated with the institution.

Food, Environment, and Global Justice    79 consequences for well-​being. As this should make clear, the characterization of food sovereignty here is likely to be contested by many of its proponents, just as they contest much of the discourse from those who focus on producing enough food to feed the world. At the same time, it is striking that proponents of food sovereignty rarely engage with many of these objections and questions about the normative foundation of their view, just as it is striking that defenders of the pro-​organics view rarely engage with objections based on feeding the world. To move both debates forward, more explicit engagement is needed with the normative and empirical objections raised here, and with the normative literature on social philosophy and global justice.

Sustainability, Optimality, and Trade-​Offs One important consideration highlighted by the preceding discussion is that feeding future people is arguably one of the most important objectives we should try to achieve, and arguably we should be willing to make trade-​offs along other dimensions that are also of value—​such as promoting a clean and flourishing environment—​in order to achieve the objective of properly nourishing people. This sets the stage in this section for evaluation of arguments that unless we adopt organic agriculture we will be making unsustainable use of the world’s resources. On analogy with the preceding discussion, two important things to consider in response to such an argument are that even if we agree that we are making unsustainable use of resources in some important sense, it does not necessarily follow that we should stop doing so. First of all, trying to move in the direction of ideal sustainability might have the perverse consequence of making things even worse given known nonideal background facts. Second, even if we successfully made progress along a dimension of sustainability (such as sustainable use of groundwater and soil), this might make our broader, more important goals (such as feeding the world and ultimately promoting, say, well-​being) less well achieved than they would be by making sacrifices of sustainability. In other words, it may be better to trade off sustainability for other things that matter more. These questions are particularly pressing for arguments that assume our objective should be to secure sustainability along some particular dimension. For example, in the context of the discussion of organic versus conventional agriculture, although it is possible (but empirically contentious) that shifting heavily to organics would achieve the narrow environmental gains of cleaner water supplies and richer soil, nonetheless if we care more about the broader goals of human welfare and the overall health of the natural world, and if we are beyond the threshold at which narrow environmental gains like improved soil and water can only be purchased at serious cost to our broader goals of human well-​being or the overall health of the natural world (because of the urgent need

80   Mark Budolfson to feed the planet and prevent much more land from being converted to agriculture), then arguably we should not do what would be best along the narrow environmental dimensions of soil and water quality; instead, we should be willing to sacrifice those things—​we should trade them off—​for broader gains that are more important because making those environmental trade-​offs is the best way to promote what ultimately matters most. To dive deeper into the notion of sustainability, note that what we are interested in when we deploy this concept is whether the type of actions we are performing can be sustained into the future—​if so, they are sustainable; if not, they are unsustainable. But what is the relevant action type for us to focus on in answering this question? To begin to illustrate the issues here, note that a very specific action, such as my consuming this particular peanut, is unsustainable in one sense because if I consume this very peanut, I will not be able to consume this very peanut again and again into the future. But we are not concerned with the sustainability of token actions in this way when we deploy the concept of sustainability. Instead, we are apt to think that what really matters is something more like whether continued similar acts of consumption by everyone are perfectly consistent with the continued availability of peanuts, or at least are consistent with continued acts of similar consumption of similar goods into the future. However, the disjunction in this platitude reflects an important ambiguity that remains between three different senses of sustainability that are often discussed in the literature, with important disagreement among commentators about which should be our focus. The first of these competing definitions of sustainability is: whether our use of a particular natural resource x is beyond the (possible) replenishment rate for x; if it is beyond the replenishment rate, we will not be able to continue consuming x at this rate into the future, and so our consumption of x is unsustainable in one clear sense. However, it seems unlikely that it is always wrong to use a particular resource beyond its replenishment rate—​instead, unsustainability in this sense is more like a “warning indicator” that should cause us to carefully evaluate if our use of the resource is warranted, but with the recognition that it might well be warranted. For example, consider a particular resource for which substitutes will be available in the future (historically, our use of oil was a frequently discussed example): it appears that using such a resource beyond its replenishment rate might be perfectly appropriate, with the thought that we will simply substitute other resources insofar as that resource becomes overly scarce.29 From this perspective, a second notion of sustainability is likely to seem more important: whether our use of a general type of resource is beyond the (possible) replenishment rate for that type of resource, where in the literature the relevant “type” of resource is most frequently taken to be the very general type natural capital—​roughly, the sum of all natural resources that are of value. From this perspective, use of one resource (such as oil) beyond the replenishment rate might be unobjectionable if it does not threaten our ability to continue 29  Here I bracket the externalities associated with fossil-​fuel use that now dominate the debate, which are not on point for questions about whether there is something wrong with using a resource beyond its replenishment rate.

Food, Environment, and Global Justice    81 using natural resources at a similar or greater rate into the future (with perhaps other resources being used as substitutes where desirable). Deep ecologists and others who would prioritize ecosystems over humans might reject reliance on this second notion of sustainability, and might argue instead for a version of sustainability in the first sense as a genuine constraint on permissible use of ecosystems: namely, we should not use anything in any ecosystem beyond the rate at which it can be replenished in order to maintain ecologically optimal levels in that ecosystem.30 In contrast, those who self-​identify as “ecological economists” often argue that our objective should be sustainability in the second sense: to ensure that our consumption of natural capital in general is sustainable—​this sort of view is known as strong sustainability.31 Finally, those who self-​identify as more “mainstream” or “environmental economists” tend to reject the idea that strong sustainability is a genuine constraint, and instead defend the importance of only a third notion of sustainability: whether our consumption in general is sustainable, even if it involves consumption of natural capital at levels that themselves cannot be sustained. The idea behind this third idea—​often called weak sustainability—​is that what ultimately matters is whether our ultimate goals themselves can be sustainably achieved. From one mainstream economic perspective, the answer to questions about sustainability in this sense depend on whether (growth rates of) (per capita) consumption can be sustained into the future as a function of technology, labor, and capital—​where, crucially, technology and overall capital might increase even as natural capital decreases, partly because use of natural capital might lead to compensating gains in technology and social capital.32 30 

Note that the italicized phrase makes this constraint more demanding insofar as the ecologically optimal level is higher than what might often be the current ecologically degraded levels caused by human interference (which might nonetheless involve harvesting at a rate that itself can be replenished). Compare Ray Hilborn and Ulrike Hilborn, Overfishing: What Everyone Should Know (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), on the distinction between ecologically optimal yield and maximum sustainable yield for this distinction in the domain of fishing and fishery science. For something like an example of this notion of ecologically optimal yield in policy discourse, Robert Solow quotes a UNESCO document: “Every generation should leave undiminished all the species of animals it found existing on earth.” Solow, a defender of the alternative conception of weak sustainability, summarizes his objection to such a definition on the grounds that “if you define sustainability as an obligation to leave the world as we found it in detail, I think that’s glib but essentially unfeasible. It is, when you think about it, not even desirable” (“Sustainability: An Economist’s Perspective,” 1991, reprinted in Economics of the Environment, 6th ed., ed. Robert Stavins (New York Norton, 2012)). 31  See, e.g., Herman Daly, “Georgescu-​Roegen versus Solow/​Stiglitz,” Ecological Economics 22 (1997): 261–​266; for criticism on behalf of weak sustainability, see the articles in the same issue with the same title by Robert Solow and Joseph Stiglitz (267–​268 and 269–​270, respectively). 32  See Ken Arrow et al., “Are We Consuming Too Much?” Journal of Economic Perspectives 18 (2004): 147‒172, which includes some discussion of whether the “per capita” condition should be added and evaluates whether we are likely overusing resources even from the perspective of weak sustainability. For some important objections to the details of many economists’ specific attempts to define weak sustainability, see Marc Fleurbaey, “On Sustainability and Social Welfare,” Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 71 (2015): 34–​53. A classic defense of weak sustainability is R. Solow, “Sustainability: An Economist’s Perspective,” reprinted in Stavins, ed., Economics of the Environment.

82   Mark Budolfson With this overview in hand, to illustrate how considerations of sustainability and food systems are more complex than they might initially appear, imagine a scenario in which we overharvest our communal fishery (in the sense of exploiting it beyond its replenishment rate), and we use some of the profits to build schools, which increases the education level of our population, thereby increasing technology and social capital, and also thereby decreasing the growth of our population. As a result, this decreases future demand for fish and other natural resources relative to a baseline with higher population growth. This illustrates the way in which it is possible that using one type of natural capital in a way that is unsustainable in some sense could yield returns that, first, decrease our long-​run use of natural capital and could be the current-​period part of an optimal inter-​temporal pattern of use that maximizes the long-​run value of natural capital. And even if we assume that it does not have those benefits for natural capital and instead diminishes our natural capital, mainstream economists will stress that using natural capital beyond its replenishment rate might still be optimal because it could be made sustainable in the short run only by sacrificing other things that are more important, such as increases in other factors of production and (most fundamentally) long-​run human well-​being (in this example illustrated by the sacrifice in education and human development that would be necessary to avoid reducing natural capital). Thus, our society’s consumption might be sustainable in the sense of weak sustainability because it might not result in the reductions in the overall levels of technology or capital, even if it is not sustainable in the sense of strong sustainability because it involves reductions in natural capital. According to mainstream economists, the key is that natural capital is only one among many kinds of assets that can be used to generate well-​being—​ and so if natural capital can be converted into other kinds of assets that can be used to generate well-​being at a greater rate, then the best thing to do can be to make ourselves poorer with respect to natural capital by using it beyond its replenishment rate, in order to secure greater benefits overall.33 The upshot of all of this in the food domain is that it is possible that degrading groundwater, soil, and so on in the short run might be the best way for us to use those resources because it is possible that optimal use might involve some amount of accumulating pollution and degradation over the coming decades until population growth stabilizes, the world becomes richer, and other more pressing threats to global welfare are brought under control, and environmental problems subside.34 According to defenders of weak sustainability, the more general theoretical conclusion to draw is that when we consider arguments that invoke the notion of sustainability, what ultimately matters is not See also the similar definition now favored by the United Nations, according to which, use is sustainable just in case it “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development, Bruntland Commission Report, Our Common Future, 1987). 33 

See Arrow et al. and Solow, cited in the previous note, for this kind of reasoning. Again, D. Tilman et al. report that (partly because of peaking global population and Kuznets curve phenomena) “The coming 50 years are likely to be the final period of rapidly expanding, global human environmental impacts” (“Agricultural Sustainability and Intensive Agricultural Practices,” 671‒677. 34 

Food, Environment, and Global Justice    83 whether our current usage is sustainable in the sense that it does not exceed a replenishment rate, but rather whether our current use is part of an overall inter-​temporal pattern of resource use that avoids dooming any future generation to a worse life than they would have had if we consumed less. Whether one favors strong or weak sustainability, in either case it is no surprise that a serious analysis of sustainability in the context of our modern globally interconnected society often requires an inter-​temporal global integrated assessment. But such an assessment also allows us to ask whether a course of action is optimal, at least insofar as we are prepared to add assumptions about how to correctly make trade-​offs between the things that ultimately matter, as must typically be included in assessments of weak sustainability. This leads to a big-​picture question and reason to doubt that our ultimate focus should be on the concept of sustainability: if we are going to make such an assessment, and if we can also use it to answer questions of optimality, why should we care nearly as much or at all about the answers it gives to questions of sustainability? To illustrate this question, consider a toy example in which well-​being is provided by eating the fruit from a tree that grows next to a complementary plant, where the tree will continue to grow and bear more and more fruit as long as we do not destroy the complementary plant. So, imagine that our well-​being has grown over generations, and so we are now at a point where we clearly have met all of our most basic needs—​which is consistent with our not having everything required for a perfect life, and so future generations can continue to be better off if the tree continues to grow. But now imagine that our generation decides to cut down the complementary plant because by eating its bark our generation can become ever so slightly better off ourselves. This slight benefit for ourselves comes at the expense of future generations because our cutting down the complementary plant ensures that instead of having the ability to continue enjoying increases in their well-​ being by continuing to eat more and more fruit from the tree, future generations are doomed to the same level of well-​being for all time that we enjoy. Nonetheless, our cutting down the complementary plant might be classified as sustainable use, because it does not compromise the ability of future generations to meet their own needs and need not reduce well-​being or capital in the future. However, it seems clear that our destroying this plant, merely to benefit ourselves in a trivial way, which if it continued to exist would create incredible riches for future generations, is not an ethically justifiable use of its resources—​it is far from ethically optimal, and what is optimal seems to be what really matters for deciding what we should do. One might even take this case to be a counterexample to some leading conceptions of strong and weak sustainability, on the grounds that our action of cutting down the plant does not satisfy the core intuitive notion of sustainability, even though those definitions imply that it is sustainable. To see how this generates a purported counterexample to strong sustainability, imagine that the overall effect of cutting down the complementary plant is to freeze overall natural capital at current levels for all future time. Similarly, if sustainability is understood in terms of the ability to sustain a level of growth of well-​being, we can imagine that the rate of growth is increasing, but cutting down the

84   Mark Budolfson complementary plant freezes growth for all time at the current level. On any of these interpretations, it seems that cutting down the tree is not permissible; it may also seem that the act of cutting down the plant does not satisfy the core intuitive notion of sustainability, even though some definitions imply that it is sustainable action. The general upshot of this discussion of sustainability is that while notions of sustainability are generally useful as “warning indicators,” and might be somewhat reliably correlated with impermissible action as one moves farther from the mere replenishment sense and closer to the sense of weak sustainability, nonetheless what ultimately matters is arguably optimality, and the assessments we need to calculate weak sustainability also typically provide the modeling resources we need to assess optimality.35 So, arguably our main focus should be on optimality and not sustainability—​and this is especially true from a philosophical point of view.

Sustainable Intensification and the Goal of Optimal Global Food Systems Given Realistic Constraints on Policy With the desirability of identifying the optimal feasible path forward—​that is, the inter-​temporal course of action open to us in our nonideal world that maximizes what ultimately matters to us most, and thus makes the intra-​and inter-​temporal trade-​offs that we have to make in the best way possible—​and the methodology of integrated assessment as a modeling tool for trying to identify the optimal path, we are now in a good position to describe the widespread defense in food-​systems science of a view called sustainable intensification in agriculture, which aims to identify the optimal feasible path forward in the domain of food, ideally using global integrated assessment. In light of many of the considerations already discussed, the optimal path appears to lie somewhere between the undesirable extremes of, on the one hand, contemporary industrial agriculture and, on the other hand, a move heavily toward organics. At the highest level of abstraction, sustainable intensification is doing whatever is best in the realm of agriculture in our nonideal world to ensure that our ultimate goals are best achieved over the long run. To a very rough first approximation, in practice this is often taken to imply that we must produce enough food to meet demand in a cost-​ effective way without increasing the amount of the Earth devoted to agriculture, and (subject to that constraint) minimize the environmental impacts of so doing. 35 

Some theorists might prefer to put the point another way: there is no indefeasible requirement to act sustainably—​rather, we have at best defeasible reasons to act sustainably.

Food, Environment, and Global Justice    85 In somewhat more detail, given what is known about the relevant empirical issues, sustainable intensification will require a highly diverse array of initiatives that will display substantial variation from region to region and from context to context, depending on facts about the people, cultures, and technology involved as well as facts about the physical landscape. And although it may be best in some locations and with respect to some crops to use almost all of the methods of contemporary industrial agriculture, it will by no means be best generally to use all of those methods. Of particular note, the frequent overuse of soil, groundwater, and chemicals in contemporary industrial agriculture can often be avoided by technologically feasible alternative practices, and in some locations—​often when subsistence farming is the norm—​highly organic methods are best.36 Beyond these general statements, there is no precise agreement about the exact implications of sustainable intensification as a “middle way” between the status quo of contemporary industrial agriculture and a move heavily toward organics, mainly because the empirical and normative questions that must be answered are very difficult—​as they often are in connection with highly complex questions about what we should do about the world’s thorniest problems. Climate change is a good analogy because there is no precise agreement about the exact details of what emissions-​reduction path would be the best response to the problem we have created, even though there is agreement in outline that such reductions must be made. For example, regarding sustainable intensification, one group of distinguished commentators writes: In one sense the answer is simple: crop and livestock production must increase without an increase in the negative environmental impacts associated with agriculture, which means large increases in the efficiency of nitrogen, phosphorus and water use, and integrated pest management that minimizes the need for toxic pesticides. In reality, achieving such a scenario represents one of the greatest scientific challenges facing humankind because of the trade-​offs among competing economic and environmental goals, and inadequate knowledge of the key biological, biogeochemical and ecological processes.37

Nonetheless, there is significant agreement that the best way forward will often require (investments in) private and social entrepreneurship, education, access to information, decentralized decision-​making and collective action by farmers rather than central planning, heavy use of technology beyond improved seed varieties (such as more efficient irrigation-​, pesticide-​, and fertilizer-​application technology), where it is more controversial but often argued that individual farmers should also often own and control the instances of this technology that they use, as well as having ownership and control over their land, along with continued but more efficient use of synthetic fertilizers and 36  T. Garnett et al., “Sustainable Intensification in Agriculture: Premises and Policies,” Science 341 (2013): 33‒34; H. C. J. Godfray et al., “Food Security: The Challenge of Feeding 9 Billion People,” Science 327 (2010): 813. 37  Tilman et al., “Agricultural Sustainability and Intensive Production Practices.”

86   Mark Budolfson pesticides in very many locations (when better organic forms are not easily available), in combination with more traditional conservation agriculture techniques (e.g., no-​till farming, planting cover crops, rotating crops), use of salt water for irrigation in some areas, and so on.38 In addition to these initiatives on farms, it generally agreed that it would also be beneficial to make large increases in investment in research and development of basic agricultural technology. In developed nations, it would be ideal to eliminate farm subsidies and to increase market-​based regulation to force producers and consumers to pay for the real costs of their actions—​but progress along these latter two fronts may be politically infeasible, and so a preferable second-​best approach might be to settle for an increase in more inefficient forms of command and control regulation.39 Furthermore, we need to promote other large-​scale background policies and institutions in and beyond the domain of food, such as promoting the best global climate policy that is politically feasible and investing in climate adaptation to avoid yield loss for many staple crops due to climate change, as well as further investment in basic background institutions that promote law, order, sustainable development, and the capacity for redistributive transfers for those who are vulnerable or who would otherwise be unjustifiably adversely effected by policy.40 Beyond general agreement on these issues, sustainable intensification is more of a framework for how to answer the big-​picture question of what agricultural system we should aim for, rather than a detailed substantive theory of what the answer is, because sustainable intensification is consistent with many different substantive answers to that question that are inconsistent with each other. For example, many proponents of the framework believe we must put more emphasis on the selective use and further development of the tools of industrial agriculture (such as GMOs or more precise application

38 

E. Ostrom, Governing the Commons (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); J. Burney et al., “The Case for Distributed Irrigation as a Development Priority in Sub-​Saharan Africa,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110 (2013): 12513–​12517; M. Herrero et al., “Smart Investments in Sustainable Food Production: Revisiting Mixed Crop-​Livestock Systems,” Science 327 (2010): 822‒825; M. Herrero et al., “Biomass Use, Feed Efficiencies, and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Global Livestock Systems,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110 (2013): 20888‒20893; H. Buffett, Forty Chances (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013); N. V. Fedoroff et al., “Radically Rethinking Agriculture for the 21st Century,” Science 327 (2010): 833–​834. 39  R. Paarlberg, Food Politics, 2d ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Fischer et al., “Cropyields and Global Food Security.” For discussion of important challenges for ideally best market-​ based policy, see N. Muller and R. Mendelsohn, Using Marginal Damages in Environmental Policy (Washington, DC: AEI Press, 2013). 40  United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), “Food Security and Food Production Systems,” in Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability; final draft released March 31, 2014, http://​www.ipcc.ch/​report/​ar5/​wg2; P. Havlik et al., “Climate Change Mitigation through Livestock System Transitions,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111 (2014): 3709–​3714; J. Hanspach et al., “Develop, Then Intensify,” Science 341 (2013): 713. It is important to note that the best response to climate change in our nonideal world may include measures to offset the negative effects of agricultural emissions without necessitating that those emissions are actually reduced—​such as geoengineering via solar radiation management; for discussion, see David Keith, A Case for Climate Engineering, Boston Review Books (Boston: MIT, 2013).

Food, Environment, and Global Justice    87 technologies for irrigation, pesticides, and fertilizer), while many other experts believe that we must instead put more emphasis on agroecological intensification to meet these goals, which includes more tools from organic agriculture such as intercropping (growing two or more crops simultaneously, in a way that allows the crops to complement each other in numerous ways, such as providing nutrients for each other, and providing pest resistance), rotation (growing multiple crops in sequence for similar reasons), agroforestry (growing perennials and annuals together for similar reasons), green manuring (using legumes and other plants as nitrogen fertilizers for soil rather than animal manure), conservation tillage (planting seed directly into the soil rather than tilling it first), and pest control that utilizes natural process whenever possible and at least does not degrade the soil.41 As a result, the former group sees much more of a role for the tools of industrial agriculture in feeding the world, while the latter group sees much more of a role for the tools of organic agriculture, both under the banner of sustainable intensification. But it is crucial to note that most advocates of sustainable intensification see some important role for the tools of both approaches. One worry about sustainable intensification is that for all of its attractive features, the framework may predictably lead to the neglect of some ethically important values if it is used to guide policy. Perhaps most worrisome, arguably it may lead to neglect of the need to reduce food waste or animal consumption, and to neglect of animal welfare in general. That is because a focus only on increasing yields while reducing environmental impacts does not clearly highlight the vast amounts of food waste in the food system (the reduction of which may be part of the best way forward), nor does it address the consumption of animal products, which is arguably largely unnecessary in developed nations and the primary cause of many agricultural challenges. It may also appear to tell in favor of industrial animal agriculture with all of its problematic animal welfare implications, since intensive methods of animal agriculture are arguably the best way of meeting global demand for animal products while minimizing environmental impacts of any given realistic level of global animal product production.42 A focus on sustainable intensification arguably may also lead to neglect of fairness considerations, and insufficient attention to whether there are fair opportunities and benefits for the world’s poorest farmers. This is because a focus only on increasing yields while reducing environmental impacts appears to tell in favor of whatever agricultural system best meets those objectives, which may be one that makes things even worse for the world’s poorest farmers. As some historical evidence that a worry along these lines is important to consider, Gordon Conway argues that the last concerted effort leading to large-​scale global increase in yields—​the Green Revolution of the 1950s, 1960s, and 41 

Gordon Conway and Edward Barbier, After the Green Revolution (New York: Routledge, 1990); J. Pretty et al., “Resource-​Conserving Agriculture Increases Yields in Developing Countries,” Environmental Science & Technology 40 (2006): 1114–​1119; Rebecca Nelson and Richard Coe, “Agroecological Intensification of Smallholder Farms,” in Oxford Handbook of Food, Politics, and Society, ed. Ronald J. Herring (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). 42  Tara Garnett and Charles Godfray, Sustainable Intensification in Agriculture, Food Climate Research Network and Oxford Martin Programme on the Future of Food, University of Oxford, 2012, 34.

88   Mark Budolfson 1970s often associated with the work of agronomists and development researchers such as Norman Borlaug—​had the result that “larger landowners have reaped most of the benefits, while the poor and landless have missed out.”43 More generally, some activists and scholars would argue that sustainable intensification fails to acknowledge the problems with the current neoliberal global order, and even shores up the ideology behind neoliberalism.

Pro-​Vegan Arguments and Empirical and Normative Objections Recall the observation at the beginning of this essay that the harm footprint of an average meal in developed nations is equivalent to dumping thousands of gallons of water down the drain, dumping pollutants into our rivers, killing the creatures that inhabit our ecosystems, and harming other human beings. This point is familiar to those who have studied the environmental harms associated with intensive animal agriculture, which have been extensively documented elsewhere and will not be rehearsed here.44 Partly in response to these facts, many philosophers believe we should promote a vegan food system, based on a belief in the empirical premise that a vegan food system minimizes harm along all of the dimensions we should care about and would also allow us to feed the world most easily by eliminating the inefficient use of crops to feed animals. However, what is less familiar to philosophers is that harms of a similar magnitude are associated with many vegan meals—​such as a familiar vegan meal that combines pasta, quinoa, greens, avocados, berries, fruit, and nuts. The explanation is that contemporary agriculture is surprisingly intensive in terms of the land, water, chemical fertilizers, pesticides, fossil fuels, migrant labor, and other inputs that it requires, where that intensity—​even in the production of vegan staples—​causes serious harms to humans, nonhuman animals, and other aspects of nature. Furthermore, even some vegan staples tend to be delivered via supply chains in which harm, enslavement, and even murder of those who produce those goods is a common occurrence due to the predatory acts of the criminal gangs that control those supply chains.45 And there are also a host of 43 

Gordon Conway, One Billion Hungry (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), 109. See, e.g., Humane Society of the United States, “The Impact of Industrialized Animal Agriculture on the Environment,” http://​www.humanesociety.org/​assets/​pdfs/​farm/​hsus-​the-​impact-​of-​ industrialized-​animal-​agriculture-​on-​the-​environment.pdf; and Pew Foundation, “Putting Meat on the Table: Industrial Animal Production in America,” 2008, http://​www.pewtrusts.org/​~/​media/​legacy/​ uploadedfiles/​wwwpewtrustsorg/​reports/​industrial_​agriculture/​pcifapfinalpdf.pdf. 45  J. De Cordoba, “The Violent Gang Wars behind Your Super Bowl Guacamole,” Wall Street Journal, 2014; S. Holmes, Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2013); Barry Estabrook, Tomatoland (Kansas City, MO: Andrew McMeel, 2012); John Bowe, Nobodies (New York: Random House, 2008); I. M. Waugh, “Examining the Sexual Harassment Experiences of Mexican Immigrant Farmworking Women,” Violence Against Women 16 (2010): 237‒261. 44 

Food, Environment, and Global Justice    89 other potential harms that may lie behind even a vegan meal—​as one recurring example, demand from developed nations for a particular vegan staple might harm humans in lesser developed nations by pricing their hungry citizens out of the market for that nutritious staple, as has allegedly happened with some staples (such as quinoa, although the facts in that case are contested), and other commodities such as corn that are also used in biofuel production.46 In response, pro-​vegan philosophers are apt to assume that the harm footprint of vegan staples is nonetheless better along every dimension than the harm footprint of animal products. If this were correct, then the empirical premise behind the pro-​vegan Standard Argument would still be true. However, when experts quantify the harms of vegan versus animal staples, the results suggest that the truth is far more complicated than the pro-​vegan argument assumes: in a substantial number of cases, vegan staples have a worse harm footprint than some animal products along some dimensions. As a result, it appears that we should reject the idea that being a nutritious vegan food system is anywhere near sufficient for being an optimal food system. To summarize some of the relevant empirical evidence, consider the chart in fi ­ gure 4.1, which is based on numerical estimates of the main kinds of harms that lie behind many kinds of food.47 46 

S. Romero and S. Shahriari, “Quinoa’s Global Success Creates Quandry at Home,” New York Times, 2011; for some critical discussion, see Lisa Hamilton, “The Quinoa Quarrel,” Harpers, 2014; Paarlberg, Food Politics. 47  The spreadsheet that contains the relevant calculations, data sources, and a description of the methodology behind this chart is available at http://​www.budolfson.com/​footprints. In brief, the numbers are based on the best data easily available, including in peer-​reviewed sources, and the cells that do not have numbers are based on my own judgment, which aims for empirical accuracy, which the reader can judge for him-​or herself, perhaps in conjunction with my more detailed explanation of the methodology. The shading based on numbers is done by the default three-​color shading algorithm in Microsoft Excel 2010. Main sources of numerical data are D. Nijdam et al., “The Price of Protein: Review of Land Use and Carbon Footprints from Life Cycle Assessments of Animal Food Products and Their Substitutes,” Food Policy 37 (2012): 760–​770; K. Hamershlag, “What You Eat Matters,” Environmental Working Group, 2011; CleanMetrics greenhouse gas footprint data, accessed at http://​ www.foodemissions.com/​foodemissions/​Calculator.aspx; M. Mekonnen et al., “The Green, Blue, and Grey Water Footprint of Crops and Derived Crop Products,” Hydrology and Earth System Sciences 15 (2011): 1577–​1600; M. Mekonnen et al., “A Global Assessment of the Water Footprint of Farm Animal Products,” Ecosystems 15 (2012): 401‒405; and the USDA National Nutrient Database for Standard Reference. Of particular note, the specific numbers for greenhouse gas footprints that I use from Hamershlag and CleanMetrics are near the median estimates reported in Nijdam, which is a survey of the peer-​reviewed literature on land and greenhouse gas footprints, are also in line with the numbers reported in other peer-​reviewed publications, and the numbers from Hamershlag and Mekonnen et al. are generally used for advancing “anti-​animal products” arguments; so, for all of these reasons, there is no risk that these numbers have a “pro-​animal products” bias. The numbers here are highly aggregated in the sense that they do not distinguish between, e.g., the footprint of navel oranges from Florida versus the footprint of Valencia oranges from Spain, when both are purchased in, e.g., Williston, North Dakota in October. Instead, the numbers here simply report a weighted average for all oranges. Many of the numbers are based on global weighted averages, although I use averages for the United States in many places where reliable data is readily available for that more specific region. Along these lines, it should also be noted that conventional production is essentially the basis for the numbers in the chart,

FOOTPRINT / UNIT OF NUTRITION

Mark Bryant Budolfson

GHG

kg CO2eq / kg protein Beef Lamb Pork Chicken Farmed Salmon Mussels Eggs Milk Cheese Butter Lentils Beans Rice Tomato Potato Broccoli Carrots Oranges Bananas Peaches Strawberries Grapes Apples Almonds Peanuts Cabbage Lettuce

102 160 46 25 54 6 38 60 54 42 10 22 116 125 155 71 33 51 45 45 75 63 135 11 5 25 25

kg CO2eq / 10,000 kcal 93 133 51 29 58 8 31 31 33 3 8 14 24 61 33 59 8 8 6 11 16 6 7 4 2 13 23

Land

Water

sq. meters / kg protein

liters / kg protein 656 120 51 28 7 2 36 34 34 20 20

liters / 10,000 kcal

75969 66985 30231 11925

60645 42348 26104 10316

12468 25270 15843 131091 22767 23590 28960 24318 14208 10106 20968 80000 72477 100000 51791 96508 316154 76099 15403 21875 17426

10951 13049 9789 8669 17125 14562 6000 11889 3727 8382 4756 12174 8876 23333 10844 9075 15808 27798 7009 11200 15800

Other Pollution

Animal Harm

Human Worker Harm

(judgment) / unit of nut.

(judgment) / unit of nut.

(judgment) / unit of nut.

Figure 4.1  Footprints per unit of nutrition for various foods, based on global or national averages

Food, Environment, and Global Justice    91 This chart expresses the harm footprints of various kinds of food in terms of their footprint per unit of nutrition, which paints a much more accurate picture than the presentations favored by pro-​vegan sources in terms of footprint per unit of product, because animal products contain much more nutrition per unit of product than vegan alternatives, and so a presentation of footprints by product weight introduces a highly misleading pro-​vegan bias.48 One upshot is that based on regularities in the harms that lie behind the foods we eat, it appears that we can do much better than simply promoting vegan food systems. Instead, we should consider how to optimize the portfolio of crops that we produce to allow us to meet demand and provide excellent nutrition, and otherwise minimize the overall harm footprint of our food system which promoting our other ultimate goals. As the chart makes clear, even given vegan values, it appears that the optimal portfolio will involve being willing to make some trade-​offs in order to avoid larger harms along other dimensions. In fact, even given vegan values, it is not clear that a vegan food system will ultimately be superior to a non-​vegan food system. For example, even if our only goal was to minimize the animal harm footprint of our food system (and so we did not care at all about human harm, environmental harm, or other kinds of harm), nonetheless vegan staples generally have a worse animal harm footprint than some specific animal products such as mussels (as the chart indicates) because many vegan staples have substantial land and water footprints, which means that they take away land and water from wildlife, which harms those animals. In contrast, mussels have essentially no animal harm footprint at all—​partly because mussels are not conscious and so harvesting them does not involve animal harm that has any important weight, and partly because the land and water footprint of mussels is very small, and much lower than many vegan staples.49 In addition to this kind of worry about the empirical assumptions of pro-​vegan arguments, there is also room for an objection to pro-​vegan arguments based on the distinction between ideal and nonideal theory. The objection is that even if it is true that the ideally best food system is a particular vegan food system (namely, a very particular vegan system carefully tailored in light of the sort of evidence summarized in the chart), as the numbers in the chart are based on an average for all goods of the general type mentioned actually produced, which is dominated by conventional production. For the reasons I have already outlined, many experts would argue that the numbers are worse along many dimensions for organics than conventionals. 48 

It is standard in the peer-​reviewed scientific literature to express footprints of food in per unit of nutrition terms. For example, see Nijdam et al., “The Price of Protein.” 49  Peter Singer and Jim Mason agree that it is permissible to eat mussels and some other sustainably sourced mollusks in The Ethics of What We Eat (Santa Barbara, CA: Rodale, 2007), but beyond this judgment of mere permissibility, they do not seem to appreciate the substantial superiority of mussels and some other animal products to many vegan staples, even on a purely utilitarian view. For different arguments for the same conclusion that animal welfare values do not imply vegan eating is optimal, see Donald Bruckner, “Strict Vegetarianism is Immoral,” in The Moral Complexities of Eating Meat, ed. Ben Bramble and Bob Fischer (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). For more on bivalves, see Christopher Cox, “Consider the Oyster,” Slate, 2010.

92   Mark Budolfson it does not follow that this is the food system we should actually tailor our policy to because in the nonideal real world we will predictably fail to succeed in eliminating people’s appetite for meat, and so the fact that many people will continue to eat meat needs to be taken into account by our actual food-​system policy. So, if there will predictably be some substantial demand for meat, then presumably our actual policy should use information such as that summarized in the chart to decide what specific non-​vegan food system it is best in our nonideal world to promote with actual policy. (The facts in the chart also give rise to important objections to individual-​level pro-​vegan arguments about what individual consumers have reason to do, which I set aside here, but explore in a number of other papers.50) One familiar refrain that is confirmed by the evidence summarized in the chart is that it is worse to meet demand for meat with ruminants (e.g., cows) rather than non-​ ruminants along the specific dimension of climate-​related harm. But beyond this basic observation, there are a number of further important questions that have an ethical dimension and are taken very seriously by many food-​system scientists, but are ignored by philosophers who tend to focus on only ideal theory questions. For example, many experts argue that intensive animal agriculture generates less harm per unit produced than more “free-​range” operations along some environmental dimensions, especially climate-​related dimensions—​and intensive operations also deliver nutrition at the lowest cost, and so keep prices down not only for animal products but also for other vegan commodities by minimizing the amount of feed required per unit of meat output.51 At the same time, intensive operations typically have a higher animal-​harm footprint. What is the correct way of making the trade-​offs involved in this and other cases in our actual nonideal food-​systems policymaking? And how should we take into proper account the benefits of animal agriculture to subsistence farmers in some locations in the developing world, which might not be well suited for alternative crops, and where owning large animals might confer other benefits, such as a more reliable form of money than any feasible alternatives?52 Prior to considering the issues discussed in this section, many philosophers are apt to criticize the sustainable intensification movement as taking increasing global consumption of animal products for granted, and not arguing strongly for a vegan food system. But, at this point, it is easy to see that sustainable intensification is focused on answering

50  See, e.g., Mark Budolfson, “Consumer Ethics, Harm Footprints, and the Empirical Dimensions of Food Choices,” in Philosophy Comes to Dinner, ed. Andrew Chignell et al. (New York: Routledge, 2015). For a different kind of objection to veganism, see the discussion of the inefficacy objection in the introduction to this handbook, and the discussion by Bob Fischer in this handbook, “Arguments for Consuming Animal Products.” I discuss the inefficacy objection in Mark Budolfson, “The Inefficacy Objection to Consequentialism,” forthcoming in Philosophical Studies. 51  See discussion in Tara Garnett and H. Charles Godfray, “Sustainable Intensification in Agriculture,” Oxford Martin School Report, 2012, http://​www.futureoffood.ox.ac.uk/​sites/​futureoffood.ox.ac.uk/​files/​ SI%20report%20-​%20final.pdf. 52  For this possible dynamic, and some puzzles about it, see Orazio Attanasio and Britta Augsburg, “Holy Cows or Cash Cows?” NBER, 2014, http://​www.nber.org/​papers/​w20304.

Food, Environment, and Global Justice    93 the nonideal theory question of what particular food system we should actually build policy around, and what food system we should promote given realistic constraints of feasibility. Sustainable intensification, with a substantial role for animal production, could be the correct answer to that question—​which is arguably the most important question to answer—​even if it is also true that a particular near-​vegan system would be best in the highly counterfactual ideal scenario in which all individuals are disposed to act in a morally perfect way.

Conclusion This essay has outlined a number of important objections to familiar arguments for organic and vegan food systems. First, the empirical premises of these arguments are called into question by the work of experts on the relevant empirical issues. Second, reflection on the relevant empirical facts also calls into question the assumption that there is a single food system that minimizes harms along each and every dimension that matters—​instead, many experts would argue that the essence of the food-​systems challenge is to decide what regrettable trade-​offs it is best to make in food systems so that we can be salvage what matters overall—​where the best overall food system is likely to be worse along some dimensions (including environmental harm) than some feasible alternatives. Finally, in order to answer questions about what food system we should promote with policy, it is arguably necessary to first take the perspective of the entire world and thus the global food system, and first answer questions such as: What global food system is best when everything is taken into proper account, including all of the global consequences for people and the environment of any local change we might make? And in light of this, how should rich and poor nations coordinate their efforts to achieve the optimal food system for the world, given the different capacities of nations, different levels of power in negotiations, and different levels of responsibility for the defects of the current system? What is our society’s place in that optimal system? How exactly do these facts about the complex global system complicate the answer to these and other questions about what we should do in our society? The progression of these questions—​beginning with questions that can seem to have answers that depend only on easily known facts about our society and our local environment, but that ultimately require a complex global empirical and ethical integrated assessment that includes a proper accounting for values of global justice—​is arguably the future of ethical debates about food and the environment, and is also representative of the arc of much of environmental ethics over the past century. This essay has also explained why some food-​science experts believe that a correct global assessment ultimately recommends what is called sustainable intensification of food systems, which involves more elements of contemporary industrial agriculture than are favored by proponents of organic or vegan alternatives. At the same time, this is not equivalent to the idea that sustainability should be our objective. Various leading

94   Mark Budolfson conceptions of sustainability were considered, and none appear to capture the most fundamentally important objective for society.

Acknowledgments Thanks to Henrik Ahlenius, Anne Barnhill, Alexander Berger, Terence Cuneo, Tyler Doggett, Marc Fleurbaey, Blake Francis, Sarah Hannan, Emily Martin, Tristram McPherson, Eliot Michaelson, Ben Miller, Alison Nihart, David Plunkett, and Rob Reich for helpful discussions.

chapter 5

Genetic a l ly Modified Fo od Rachel A. Ankeny and Heather J. Bray

Introduction Genetically modified (GM) organisms are generally defined as those living entities that have had their genes altered by laboratory techniques which remove a gene or change a gene’s function, or by inserting a gene from another organism, in order to create desirable attributes. GM animals for commercial use and consumption have been slow to be developed for both scientific and commercial reasons, although a form of Atlantic salmon genetically engineered for faster growth was approved for human consumption in the United States in late 2015.1 There are a number of GM plants currently available on the commercial market, notably soy, canola, and corn. In the case of food crops, the altered attributes range from making plants more herbicide or pesticide resistant to improving their nutritional or other attributes, or allowing the plants to grow under particular adverse environmental conditions. There are differing views on whether it is morally or ethically acceptable to produce, use, or consume GM organisms particularly in the context of food products. Although our focus in this essay is on GM food, we also explore issues relating to GM technologies more generally as they relate to the question of GM food and its acceptability. GM often is conceptualized as a larger-​scale policy issue, and indeed we review some of the key ethical arguments for and against the use of GM technologies in food and agriculture on this level. But we also contend that decisions about GM food are part of a larger context within which we make critical everyday choices that also have moral content. We explore how we might reconcile these levels with a particular focus on

1 

Andrew Pollack, “Genetically Engineered Salmon Declared Ready for US Plates,” New York Times, November 20, 2015, A1.

96    Rachel Ankeny and Heather Bray participatory and deliberative methods, which are particularly critical in this domain given our personal decisions are so embedded within the larger food system. Even matters that seem to depend on individual choice such as purchase (or avoidance) of particular food products can be restricted within the broader system due to issues relating to availability, budget, retailing strategies, and labeling regimes, to name just a few examples. Finally, context matters for views on GM: it is not just a question of what has been done to the food but who it might harm or affect, or conversely who or what it might benefit. Thus we contend that whether GM foods are good or bad is not the right question to ask: what is most important is to treat GM as part of a larger societal dialogue about what counts as “good” food, particularly given the ongoing debates over whether GM food is safe and what risks might be worth taking as compared to potential benefits of using gene technologies. Thus, we contend that more deliberative engagement on issues associated with GM food is necessary, especially as many locales (including the United States, some parts of Europe, and Australia) currently allow production and sale of GM foods.

Background and History In order to understand the ethics of GM and arguments for and against its use, it is critical to place it in the broader historical and scientific context associated with agricultural breeding and innovation. Humans have manipulated the genomes of animals and plants for thousands of years through domestication and selective breeding. Although little is known about the specific events leading to the development of many of the plants and animals which we currently use for food, archaeological and genetic evidence suggests that Western agriculture (based on growing crops from seeds) developed in the Fertile Crescent about 12,000 years ago with the domestication of wheat and barley.2 Many animals used for food and fiber (such as sheep, goats, cattle, buffalo, and pigs) originated from at least two independent domestication events in east Asia, Europe, or the Near East between 8,000 and 10,000 years ago.3 In the Americas, domestication of food plants such as maize, beans, and potatoes, occurred in the pre-​Columbian period. Whether these processes were directed by humans selecting individual organisms and then breeding them together or were a side effect of saving the best individuals within a generation and allowing them to produce more offspring (rather than consuming them) is difficult to ascertain. Over long periods of time and generations of selection, plants (and animals) became genetically distinct within individual locales (known as 2 

Benjamin Kilian, William Martin, and Francesco Salamini, “Genetic Diversity, Evolution and Domestication of Wheat and Barley in the Fertile Crescent,” in Evolution in Action, ed. Matthias Glaubrecht (Berlin: Springer-​Verlag, 2010), 137–​165. 3  Michael W. Bruford, Daniel G. Bradley, and Gordon Luikart, “DNA Markers Reveal the Complexity of Livestock Domestication,” Nature Reviews Genetics 4 (2003): 900–​910.

Genetically Modified Food   97 “landraces”) that were well adapted to local conditions and uses. As groups of people moved and traded, plants were introduced to new areas and some bred with local ones, creating hybrids. The Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment promoted the idea that if nature could be understood then it could be managed for the benefit of humans, a concept that was controversial at the time and that has resonance with some critiques of GM to be discussed. Knowledge was documented, shared, and even commercialized. By the 1700s, companies (e.g., the Vilmorin Company, which is still in operation in France) were selling seeds and plants.4 The application of science to the development of superior varieties of crops continued through the 1800s as both a commercial and scholarly exercise, with plant-​breeding activities being undertaken by private companies, governments, and universities. As European powers introduced their agriculture to their colonies, plant-​breeding activities went global to ensure that crops were successful in their new homes and many ended up displacing local crops.5 Of course, some plants went the other way, being introduced to the Old World once discovered in the New World. Thus, a very large part of the world’s food supply has been essentially derived from a relatively small number of plant species and their global movements. Variability is essential to effective breeding. A consequence of the laws of inheritance described by Gregor Mendel is that plants and animals can only possess combinations of characteristics from within their pedigree. Over successive generations, characteristics can become lost if particular pieces of genetic information are not passed on, which is why there is still such keen interest in preserving landraces as sources of diversity. Mutations, which are spontaneous changes in characteristics arising from changes in the DNA that can be passed on to subsequent generations, are an exception to Mendel’s laws. Although probably known to farmers and plant breeders much earlier, mutation as a mechanism for creating heritable variability was first described in the scientific literature in 1901 by Hugo de Vries who also suggested that the then newly discovered forms of radiation, X-​ray, and gamma, could be used to artificially induce mutations.6 Twenty years later, research by Thomas Hunt Morgan and others using mutations in Drosophila would dramatically increase the understanding of genes. Work using maize, wheat, and barley occurred concurrently and ultraviolet light was added to the list of mutagens. Mutations using chemical agents had some success in the 1940s with the observation that mustard gas was highly mutagenic and similar to X-​rays in its activity. Since then, a range of chemical agents have been identified that can produce mutagenic activities in a range of organisms. Between 1950 and 1970, several countries took

4 

Jean Gayon and Doris T. Zallen, “The Role of the Vilmorin Company in the Promotion and Diffusion of the Experimental Science of Heredity in France 1840–​1920,” Journal of the History of Biology 31 (1998): 241–​262. 5  For an overview of the history of plant breeding, see Noel Kingsbury, Hybrid: The History and Science of Plant Breeding (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 6  M. C. Kharkwal, “A Brief History of Plant Mutagenesis,” in Plant Mutation Breeding and Biotechnology, ed. Q. Y. Shu et al. (Wallingford, UK: CABI, 2012), 21–​30.

98    Rachel Ankeny and Heather Bray up crop mutagenesis programs;7 mutant-​derived varieties are in the pedigrees of many plants currently in commercial production. More recently, mutagenesis has been used to develop herbicide-​tolerant crops (e.g., the Clearfield® varieties of maize, wheat, rice, oilseed rape or canola, and sunflower).8 Another critical historic episode relates to the Green Revolution, which often is discussed in relation to the use of GM particularly in developing countries. In the 1950s, concerns about population growth and global security led the United States to adopt a foreign policy aimed at increasing the supply of food in poorer countries. Efforts in the 1950s–​1970s to increase yields of wheat in Mexico and India, and rice in the Philippines, came to be known as the “Green Revolution,”9 a term that is contested by some scholars as according to them what occurred was neither a revolution nor particularly “green” according to current usage, given the role that artificial fertilizers and irrigation played in the success of these new varieties. In 1945, Norman Borlaug, an Iowa-​born plant breeder, took over wheat improvement in the Mexican Agricultural program that had been established by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Mexican government. By using some innovative plant breeding strategies to reduce the time it took to develop new varieties, as well as training Mexican scientists and plant breeders, the program enabled Mexico to become a net exporter of wheat by 1958. Borlaug then travelled to India in 1963, and the successful Mexican wheats followed. Working with Monkombu Sambisivan Swaminathan, Borlaug worked on selecting short, high-​yielding varieties that were well-​adapted to Indian conditions, and again worked on developing plant breeding expertise locally. India was effectively self-​sufficient in wheat by 1974. The Green Revolution was not just about producing improved plant varieties; it also involved the use of modern (Western) machinery and practices such as fertilizer use and irrigation, and implementing extension services including farmer education. In 1970, Borlaug was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, as the citation to the prize noted “because, more than any other single person of this age, he has helped to provide bread for a hungry world. We have made this choice in the hope that providing bread will also give the world peace.”10 Developments in molecular biology occurred in parallel to the development of genetics and plant breeding in the twentieth century. The direct manipulation of DNA first began with the discovery of enzymes that could cut (restriction enzymes) and join (ligases) sections of DNA in the late 1960s. In the early 1970s, several scientists recombined sections of DNA using E. coli, bacteriophages, and viruses; by 1973, experiments had demonstrated that foreign DNA could be replicated inside an E. coli host. In 1971,

7 Ibid.

8  Siyuan Tan et al., “Imidazolinone-​Tolerant Crops: History, Current Status and Future,” Pest Management Science 61 (2005): 246–​257. 9  Noel Kingsbury, Hybrid: The History and Science of Plant Breeding (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 10  “The Nobel Peace Prize 1970—​Presentation Speech,” http://​www.nobelprize.org/​nobel_​prizes/​ peace/​laureates/​1970/​press.html.

Genetically Modified Food   99 Janet Mertz, a graduate student of Paul Berg at Stanford University, gave a seminar describing her work combining a potentially cancer-​causing primate virus and E. coli (which is a pathogen of humans). One scientist raised concerns about the risks associated with such experiments with Berg, who eventually came to the conclusion that he could not provide 100% assurance that these experiments posed no risk. Thus in 1974, he and several other scientists published an open letter in the journal Science (what has become known as “the Berg letter”), asking the scientific community to join them in voluntarily stopping recombinant DNA experiments until safety protocols could be developed. After an eighteen-​month voluntary moratorium, a meeting was held in February 1975 in Asilomar with about 140 scientists, plus some lawyers and journalists, who came together to discuss the potential hazards and how to manage them. Guidelines and voluntary codes of conduct for recombinant DNA work followed in most jurisdictions, most of which were based on levels of containment determined according to levels of risk. Although recombinant DNA work began as a tool for understanding the mechanisms of inheritance, scientists soon saw potential for the technology to be used to directly manipulate characteristics of organisms in a way that could not have been done previously. Early applications of the technology included the development of human insulin from recombinant (or GM) E. coli.11 In the case of foods, one of the earliest attempts to increase agricultural productivity and efficiency was the use of GM in strawberries and potatoes to use “ice minus” bacteria to prevent frost damage.12 In 1991, Pamela Dunsmuir and her colleagues developed what was to become one of the most iconic GM foods.13 In an attempt to prevent frost damage to tomatoes, the scientists introduced a synthetic afa3 gene (analogous to that found in the winter flounder) into tobacco and tomato plants, which subsequently produced antifreeze proteins. However, subsequent experiments showed that the protein did not protect the tomato from frost damage and thus the tomato was never commercialized.14 The first GM food to be made commercially available also was a tomato—​called the Flavr Savr—​developed by Calgene and released in the United States in 1994.15 The release was problematic for a range of reasons, and the product quality fell below market expectations as it was very fragile and tasteless; the product was withdrawn from sale in 1996. Another GM tomato with enhanced shelf life was produced by Zeneca and sold in tomato paste produced for

11 

Irving S. Johnson, “Human Insulin from Recombinant DNA Technology,” Science 219 (1983): 632–​637. 12  R. M. Skirvin et al., “The Use of Genetically Engineered Bacteria to Control Frost on Strawberries and Potatoes: Whatever Happened to All of That Research?” Scientia Horticulturae 84 (2000): 179–​189. 13  Robin Hightower et al., “Expression of Antifreeze Proteins in Transgenic Plants,” Plant Molecular Biology 17 (1991): 1013–​1021. 14  Nina Fedoroff and Nancy Marie Brown, Mendel in the Kitchen: A Scientist’s View of Genetically Modified Food (Washington, DC: Joseph Henry Press, 2004). 15  Matthew G. Kramer and Keith Redenbaugh, “Commercialization of a Tomato with an Antisense Polygalactouranase Gene: The FLAVR SAVR Tomato Story,” Euphytica 76 (1994): 293–​297.

100    Rachel Ankeny and Heather Bray the UK supermarket Sainsbury’s; however commercial pressure and community concerns about the safety of GM foods led to this product being withdrawn by 1999. The Monsanto Company has become deeply entangled with debates over GM crops and foods in recent decades. Monsanto set up a molecular biology lab in 1979, and by 1984 they had over one hundred staff working on plant biotechnology. In 1983, Monsanto scientists became one of the first groups to modify plant cells with bacterial genes16 and developed petunia plants tolerant to the herbicide glyphosate in 1986. Herbicide-​tolerance traits have come to dominate available GM crops. A second major GM trait associated with insect resistance also was acquired by Monsanto through a series of company mergers and acquisitions in the 1990s. In recent years, new varieties with “stacked” traits have been quickly adopted, with combinations of insect resistance and herbicide tolerance being the most common. Currently, GM crops are planted on almost 180 million hectares worldwide with the most dominant crops being soybean, maize, and cotton; GM plantings are largest in the United States, Brazil, and Argentina. The current extent and distribution of foods with GM ingredients globally is difficult to ascertain and is complicated by different regimes of labeling and reporting. The development and testing of GM organisms was met with resistance from local communities from the earliest days of their development in the 1970s.17 Anti-​GM sentiment grew during the 1980s and 1990s as research progressed and was not limited to activist groups, such as Greenpeace, but included prominent business people, politicians, academics, and even royalty.18 Resistance to the development of GM crops in Europe and the United States led to activist groups destroying field trials; for instance, in France more than 120 field trials were destroyed between 1999 and 2005.19 The term “Frankenfood” was coined by English professor Paul Lewis in a letter to the editor of the New York Times in 1992.20 The term is particularly evocative both because it evokes images of organisms that have been patched together from others, much like Frankenstein’s monster, but also because the underlying message of Dr. Frankenstein’s story is that meddling with nature can have disastrous consequences. The term resonated with the public, activists, and the media, and is often used as a descriptor for GM foods and organisms, such as the GM Enviropig™, also known as “Frankenswine” by its critics, that was been genetically altered to better digest and process phosphorus, thus

16  Robert T. Fraley et al., “Expression of Bacterial Genes in Plant Cells,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 80 (1983): 4803–​4807. 17  For a description of the protests in Cambridge, Massachusetts, see Sheldon Krimsky, “Research under Community Standards: Three Case Studies,” Science, Technology, & Human Values 11 (1986): 14–​33. 18  Robert Booth, “Charles Warns GM Farming Will End in Ecological Disaster,” The Guardian, August 13, 2008. 19  Christophe Bonneuil, Pierre-​Benoit Joly, and Claire Marris, “Disentrenching Experiment: The Construction of GM–​Crop Field Trials as a Social Problem,” Science, Technology, & Human Values 33 (2008): 201–​229. 20  Paul Lewis, Letter to the Editor, “Mutant Foods Create Risks We Can’t Yet Guess; since Mary Shelley,” New York Times, June 16, 1992, http://​www.nytimes.com/​1992/​06/​16/​opinion/​l-​mutant-​foods-​ create-​risks-​we-​can-​t-​yet-​guess-​since-​mary-​shelley-​332792.html.

Genetically Modified Food   101 causing it to be more environmentally friendly as compared to its non-​GM counterpart, but which never reached the commercial market.21

Public Attitudes toward Genetic Modification Anti-​GM sentiment may have contributed to the interest of governments in monitoring community awareness of and attitudes to GM, particularly GM foods. The Eurobarometer survey has monitored European opinion on biotechnology every three years since 1991. The most recent survey in 201022 shows broadly that opinion toward GM foods in Europe has changed little overall since the introduction of GM crops and foods in the mid-​1990s, with Europeans generally seeing little benefit in GM food and considering them to be unsafe or harmful particularly to consumers and the environment.23 Far less attention has been paid to public attitudes toward GM foods in the United States, despite more GM food being available in the United States than in Europe. The Pew Initiative on Food and Biotechnology found in 2005 that Americans knew little about GM foods and 50% opposed introducing it into the food supply.24 The lower public trust in regulators and recent food scares in Europe seem to have contributed to lower levels of acceptance in the European Union.25 In addition to public monitoring, public attitudes have been examined by scholars, but again with far more intensity in the United Kingdom and continental Europe than in other locales. Acceptance of GM crops and food relies on factors related to the development and purpose of the GM food. In almost all cases, “cisgenic” modifications (where the final organism only contains genes from that organism or a sexually compatible organism) are more accepted than those that are “transgenic” (genetic material from an organism that is not naturally sexually compatible with the organism in which it is inserted).26 In general, the more distant the relationship between the organisms, the less accepted the modification seems to be by 21 

Jeremy Cooke, “GM Pigs: Green Ham with Your Eggs?” BBC News, January 4, 2011, http://​www.bbc. com/​news/​world-​us-​canada-​12113859. 22  Special Eurobarometer 341/​Wave 73.1—​TNS Opinion & Social, http://​ec.europa.eu/​public_​ opinion/​archives/​ebs/​ebs_​341_​en.pdf. 23  George Gaskell, Agnes Allansdottir, Nick Allum, et al. “The 2010 Eurobarometer on the Life Sciences,” Nature Biotechnology 29 (2011): 113–​114. 24  The Mellman Group, Memo to the Pew Trust Initiative on Food and Biotechnology, November 7, 2005, http://​www.pewtrusts.org/​~/​media/​legacy/​uploadedfiles/​wwwpewtrustsorg/​news/​press_​releases/​ food_​and_​biotechnology/​pifbpublicsentimentgmfoods2005pdf.pdf. 25  George Gaskell et al., “Worlds Apart? The Reception of Genetically Modified Food in Europe and the U.S.,” Science 285 (1999): 384–​387; Unni Kjærnes, Mark Harvey, and Alan Warde, Trust in Food: A Comparative and Institutional Analysis (London: Palgrave, 2007). 26  Bjørn K. Myskja, “The Moral Difference between Intragenic and Transgenic Modification of Plants,” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 19 (2006): 225–​238; Henrik Mielby, Peter Sandøe, and Jesper Lassen, “Multiple Aspects of Unnaturalness: Are Cisgenic Crops Perceived as

102    Rachel Ankeny and Heather Bray the general public; for example, incorporation of animal genes in plants has met with considerable resistance. Modifications that aim to increase the nutritional value of the crop are more accepted than those that aim to increase yield or relate to agronomic practices such as herbicide tolerance; exceptions include modifying crops to tolerate harsh environmental conditions or resist diseases, or help with environmental mitigation of polluted areas, especially in developing countries. Issues associated with the “ownership” of agricultural products will be discussed later in this essay. A range of factors that may influence or be related to public attitudes to GM foods include gender, education in science, values, and perception of risk. A general trend found in quantitative studies has been that women and people with less education in science tend to be less accepting of GM foods,27 although these “associations” may be more indicative of the gendering of food attitudes and a narrow view of science education.28 Initial surveys and studies that highlighted a lack of awareness of GM foods, in addition to the actions of activists, led to the initiation of a number of education campaigns run by governments and research institutions around the world, many of which had the acceptance of GM foods by the community as an end goal. Discredited deficit models of science communication,29 which claim that rejection of a technology is due to an information deficit within the intended users/​consumers of that technology, dominated these programs, and there often was little discussion of issues associated with ethics or values. More recently, scholars have focused on attitudes to GM as part of much broader considerations of food attitudes.30 Arguably the key issue underlying public attitudes to GM is that competing arguments are grounded in wildly different understandings and assumptions about a range of issues, notably to whom we owe duties, what counts as evidence (particularly of risk or lack thereof), and how to balance risks and benefits, especially with regard to new innovations. In the next section, we review these ethical arguments in detail. These competing arguments also are part of broader societal discussion about what counts as “good” food, and how GM relates to these values.

Being More Natural and More Acceptable than Transgenic Crops?” Agriculture and Human Values 30 (2013): 471–​480. 27 

See Hester Moerbeek and Gerda Casimir, “Gender Differences in Consumers’ Acceptance of Genetically Modified Foods,” International Journal of Consumer Studies 29 (2005): 308–​318. 28  Rachel A. Ankeny and Heather J. Bray, “‘If We’re Happy to Eat It, Why Wouldn’t We Be Happy to Give It to Our Children?’: Articulating the Complexities Underlying Women’s Ethical Views on Genetically Modified Food,” International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics 9 (2016): 166–​191. 29  Jane Gregory and Steve Miller, Science in Public: Communication, Culture and Credibility (New York: Plenum Press, 1998); Steve Miller, “Deficit Model,” in Encyclopedia of Science and Technology Communication, ed. Susanna Hornig Priest (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2010), 208–​209. 30  Anne C. Bellows, V. Gabriela Alcaraz, and William K. Hallman, “Gender and Food: A Study of Attitudes in the USA towards Organic, Local, U.S. Grown, and GM-​Free Foods,” Appetite 55 (2010): 540–​ 550; Phil Mohr and Sinead Golley, “Community Responses to GM Food Content in Context with Food Integrity Issues: Results from Australian Population Surveys,” New Biotechnology 33 (2016): 91–​98; Ankeny and Bray, “ ‘If we’re happy to eat it.’ ”

Genetically Modified Food   103

Ethical Debates about Genetically Modified Crops and Food A frequently raised ethical concern about GM food (and in some cases use of GM in general) is that these processes are equivalent to “playing God” in the sense that they represent an unethical alteration of nature (or in more religious terms, of God’s creation).31 Those who make these types of arguments emphasize that GM frequently involves the transfer from one species into another in a manner which goes far beyond what could occur naturally (i.e., transgenic modifications). The case of the insertion of a flounder gene in tomatoes in order to create frost tolerance became an iconic example used to support this position in the early GM debates, even though the resulting product was never commercialized.32 Taken in its purest form, this argument would rule out any human interventions in nature more generally and the domestication of plants and animals in particular. Thus, this argument would also extend to other types of agricultural interventions, such as hybridization and similar, which are long-​standing practices as detailed in the historical background. It also would rule out using GM to create life-​ saving medicines and vaccines, a practice which is widely supported. Thus, even many opponents of GM note that this type of argument is too limited and even Luddite. It is not a widely held opinion, and no major organized religions have designated all forms of GM or all GM foods as unacceptable.33 Some critics draw distinctions between the extent of interventions that can be made using traditional breeding and those produced with GM, using an exceptionalist argument to claim that the latter crosses an ethical line or perhaps would initiate a slippery slope toward interventions that are clearly unethical. Thus, they claim that GM is different in some essential way than other forms of human biological or agricultural interventions. However, it is difficult to ascertain precisely which forms of interventions other than GM would be prohibited by these types of arguments. Lower tech breeding and hybridization techniques are still widely utilized, but some have themselves been criticized on ethical grounds, for instance, in the context of animal husbandry where interbreeding for desirable traits has simultaneously created animal health problems (e.g., pedigree dogs with congenital defects). In these cases, some contend that harms clearly have been created for others that we have responsibilities to protect (namely nonhuman animals). Techniques such as chemical and other forms of mutagenesis create targeted mutations that could not be produced without these technologies, and yet seem to

31  Conrad G. Brunk and Harold Coward, eds., Acceptable Genes?: Religious Traditions and Genetically Modified Foods (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009). 32  Nigel Hawkes, “I Say Tomato, You Say Winter Flounder,” Times [London], July 29, 1991. 33  Emmanuel B. Omobowale, Peter A. Singer, and Abdallah S. Daar, “The Three Main Monotheistic Religions and GM Food Technology: An Overview of Perspectives,” BMC International Health and Human Rights 9 (2009): 18.

104    Rachel Ankeny and Heather Bray create less concern than GM technologies, thus making the validity of the exceptionalist stance toward GM difficult to assess. Therefore, it is unclear what the basis of claims is that GM is essentially “different.” The second main ethical argument against genetic modification claims that GM organisms that are released or used have unacceptable and unknowable risks to human and/​or animal health. This argument hinges on the idea that harms might be created as a result of exposures to, treatments by, or consumption of GM organisms, and that the risk of these harms makes use of GM unacceptable and unethical. An early GM product was bovine growth hormone (bovine somatotropin or bST), which allowed increased efficiency of milk production by allowing cows to produce more milk without needing to increase their feed intake. Commentators have noted its possible negative effects including on the welfare of cows,34 as well as negative impacts on human health that they view as having been documented,35 though many of these concerns are associated with use of growth hormone more generally and then are thought to be in some sense compounded by the growth hormone being produced using GM technologies. The most widely recognized GM crops, so-​called Roundup-​Ready® cotton and soybeans, permit more targeted and potentially less herbicide use as only undesirable weeds are affected (and not the crops themselves), but have been noted as having potential human health risks, among other criticisms which will be discussed.36 Others have responded by pointing out that developing that this type of in-​built resistance to weeds (or pests in other cases) could reduce the use of synthetic herbicides (and pesticides), and hence be more ecologically sound than conventional cropping and better for the health of workers and those living in close proximity to farms. Thus, they contend that whether GM should be used is a question of balancing risks and benefits, as we do in many cases including within agriculture; so, for instance, combine harvesters pose significant health and safety risks to both people and animals, but this technology is not typically a target of ethical or other critiques. Another commonly cited example is Bacillus thurengiensis (Bt) corn, which is maize that has been genetically modified using proteins from the bacterium from which it derives its name. These proteins are poisonous to major insect pests (and in fact are widely used in agriculture, including in organic gardening); the modification allows a reduction in use of insecticides. However many have claimed that Bt corn pollen kills the larvae of butterflies that consume it, hence creating major environmental impacts. An additional serious environmental concern is that GM plants will cross with non-​GM relatives and could result in an environmental disaster that could not be controlled if the plants were to become invasive.37 As with other critiques, it is somewhat unclear if this 34 

Gary Comstock, “The Case against bGH,” Agriculture and Human Values 5 (1988): 36–​52. For instance, see Jeffrey M. Smith, Genetic Roulette: The Documented Health Risks of Genetically Engineered Foods (Fairfield, IA: Yes! Books, 2007). 36  Marc Lappé and Britt Bailey, Against the Grain: Biotechnology and the Corporate Takeover of Your Food (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1998). 37  Nuffield Council on Bioethics, “Genetically Modified Crops: The Ethical and Social Issues” (London: Nuffield Council on Bioethics, 2001), http://​www.nuffieldbioethics.org/​gm–crops. 35 

Genetically Modified Food   105 concern is specific to GM organisms or more generally relates to any new species produced in any manner. In ethical terms, all of these arguments rely on a determination that a certain risk—​ either potential or documented—​is too high and thus constitutes a harm to moral others (such as humans, nonhuman animals, and even the environment in some moral philosophies) that we are obligated to prevent. But, of course, in turn these conclusions also rely on a particular conception of how to gauge risk, including whether any level of risk is acceptable. A frequently invoked approach in debates over GM (and encoded in law in the European Union) focuses on the “precautionary principle.”38 If an action, technology, or policy has a suspected risk of causing harm to the public or the environment, in the absence of evidence and scientific consensus that the action, technology, or policy is not harmful, the burden of proof falls to those wish to take the action, use the technology, or enact the policy to show that it in fact is not harmful. From a philosophical point of view, the principle emphasizes that we have a social responsibility to provide protection from harm to the public, the environment, or similar, when at least some risks have been documented. Thus, in the face of uncertainty or lack of scientific consensus, this principle dictates that we must err on the side of caution and because the goods associated with its use tend to be economic. Note also that the normative claims underlying this principle emphasize that human and environmental health must be given precedence over economic or other advantages or benefits including providing food for those in need or improving human health or nutrition, and hence the approach relies on an assumption with which not all might agree, as well as a particular account of who counts as a moral other.39 Others stress that the precautionary principle should only be applied in cases where risks are high and not easy to determine, indicating that use of GM does not fit this description, or that it fails to allow consideration of potential benefits that may exceed the risks. In short, in its strongest formulation, critics of the precautionary principle stress that it is potentially paralytic to progress and human welfare.40 Another domain of typical ethical concerns relates to the effects of GM organisms and crops on farmers’ livelihoods. Arguments about the adverse effects of GM on traditional farmers particularly with regard to seed saving and other agricultural practices hinge

38  For a general overview, see Andy Sterling, “The Precautionary Principle,” in A Companion to the Philosophy of Technology, ed. Jan Kyrre Berg Olsen, Stig Andur Pedersen, and Vincent F. Hendricks (Oxford: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2009), 248–​262; on its application to GM in particular in Europe, see, for instance, Les Levidow, “Precautionary Uncertainty: Regulating GM Crops in Europe,” Social Studies of Science 31 (2001): 842–​874. 39  René von Schomberg, “The Precautionary Principle and Its Normative Challenges,” in Implementing the Precautionary Principle: Perspectives and Prospects, ed. Elizabeth Fisher, Judith Jones, and René von Schomberg (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2006), 19–​42; for additional philosophical criticism, see David Resnik, “Is the Precautionary Principle Unscientific?” Studies in History and Philosophy of the Biological and Biomedical Sciences 34 (2003): 329–​344. 40  Cass R. Sunstein, Laws of Fear: Beyond the Precautionary Principle (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

106    Rachel Ankeny and Heather Bray on notions of fairness and injustice, particularly because some GM products require ongoing purchasing in order to grow crops. The large multinational companies which have developed a number of the highest-​profile GM products such as Monsanto are the key targets of these criticisms. Thus, GM technologies are seen by some as violating fundamental human rights, for instance, to be able to maintain livelihoods. However, restrictions over use and reuse of hybrid plants in many developed countries are not dissimilar; further, as the history indicates, commercialization of hybrid and other plant varieties has been a long-​standing practice. Thus, it is not clear whether the argument from rights holds when taken in isolation. Critiques based on deeper cultural, social, and economic considerations beyond agriculture are much more complex, as they are grounded in considerations of justice and equity, and may have more weight. These include concerns about adverse effects of GM on the rights of indigenous peoples and those in the developing world (given some of the locales in which GM crops are grown), farmers’ livelihoods, biological and cultural diversity, and the promotion of values associated with neoliberalism, globalization, and the commodification of life via intellectual property regimes associated with GM among other factors.41 Arguments based on social equity with regard to agricultural innovation and policy perhaps are more robust: some authors emphasize the adverse effects of GM crops even on farmers in developed countries make their use unethical, as the farmers may well not benefit from increased profits or similar.42 In recent times, there also have been conflicts in developed countries over farms operated in close proximity but which utilize conflicting regimes, such as organic and GM; given the stringent certification standards for organic crops in some locales, it may be impossible to realize the intended advantages from becoming organically certified if GM cropping is occurring nearby, particularly price premiums for organic products.43 It is clear that some harms are created in these sorts of instances (or at least benefits are not being realized), but it is more difficult to ascertain if they are of a kind or amount that renders them different than other types of harms that those working in agriculture (or any other commercialized domains) face in the context of competition and often conflicting regimes of practice, and hence whether the potential or actual harms created are unethical. 41  For example, see Sheila Jasanoff, “Biotechnology and Empire: The Global Power of Seeds and Science,” Osiris 21 (2006): 273–​293; Tomiko Yamaguchi, “Controversy over Genetically Modified Crops in India: Discursive Strategies and Social Identities of Farmers,” Discourse Studies 9 (2007): 87–​107; Elizabeth M. Fitting, The Struggle for Maize: Campesinos, Workers, and Transgenic Corn in the Mexican Countryside (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Joel Wainwright and Kristin L. Mercer, “Transnational Transgenes: The Political Ecology of Maize in Mexico,” in Global Political Ecology, ed. Richard Peet, Paul Robbins, Michael J. Watts (London: Routledge, 2011), 412–​430; and Abby J. Kinchy, Seeds, Science and Struggle: The Global Politics of Transgenic Crops (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012). 42  Gary Comstock, “The Costs and Benefits of bGH May Not Be Distributed Fairly,” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 4 (1991): 121–​130. 43  For instance, see the recent case in Western Australia, Marsh v. Baxter (2014), http://​www. supremecourt.wa.gov.au/​_​files/​Judgment%20Summary%20-​%20Marsh%20v%20Baxter%20(CIV%20 1561%20of%202012)%2028%20May%202014.pdf.

Genetically Modified Food   107 Some advocates of GM claim that its use could result in more environmentally appropriate and sustainable food crops, such as drought-​tolerant or saline-​tolerant wheat, which could thrive in more extreme environments. This argument has been plagued by limited examples of success to date, hence making it difficult to gauge the risks and benefits of such products. However for those who are not opposed to GM in principle (for instance, as a violation of nature), GM products that would promote significant environmental benefits or similar might be considered ethically permissible, though opinions about their use often are closely intertwined with considerations about who stands to profit from such products. GM products to improve health and nutrition are another domain which attract supporters: for the developed world, these products include various crops that can be converted to foods such as GM wheat with greatly increased amylose (or resistant starch) that takes longer to digest and hence allows slower sugar release, which is better for a wide range of health conditions (e.g., diabetes). GM also could be used to produce staples that are more nutritious and have higher levels of particular vitamins, which could assist with widespread deficiencies particularly in the developing world. A key example typically cited in this context is “golden rice,” which has been genetically modified to contain beta-​carotene, a precursor to vitamin A, and a deficiency of which is a major cause of blindness in young children in the developing world.44 However, some focus on the policy implications associated with current GM practices, for instance, arguing that increased research on GM crops may be leading to declines in food aid, as it (wrongly) promotes the idea that a technological fix is within reach.45 More generally, some have argued that if used with appropriate cautions, GM food could represent an important solution to the global food problem and it might provide higher quantities of food crops more efficiently, building on the Green Revolution. However, critics of the argument from food security emphasize that there remains significant scientific debate over crop yield and hence whether GM crops do represent part of the solution to food security.46 However, at this point in time, many of these more positive arguments are viewed as problematic, both because evidence is limited due to the relatively small number of available commercial products and because the most high-​profile major manufacturers of GM crops and foods in fact have been multinational corporations driven by profit motives. Thus, most GM crops have not been created with the developing world as their target market. Exceptions (in addition to golden rice) do exist such as GM bananas 44  For both sides of the Golden Rice debate, see Michael Ruse and David Castle, eds., Genetically Modified Foods: Debating Biotechnology (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2002), 29–​64. 45  Jennifer Clapp, “The Political Economy of Food Aid in an Era of Agricultural Biotechnology,” in Food and Culture: A Reader, ed. Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik (New York: Routledge, 2008), 539–​553. 46  For an excellent overview of scientific concerns about GM not related to human health including discussion of food security issues, see Daniel Hicks and Roberta Millstein, “GMOs: Non-​Health Issues,” in Encyclopedia of Food and Agricultural Ethics, ed. Paul B. Thompson and David M. Kaplan (Dordrecht: Springer, 2016), 1–​11.

108    Rachel Ankeny and Heather Bray fortified with Vitamin A, which are currently in human trials, that were produced by a public research partnership between an Australian university, the Commonwealth-​ sponsored Australian Research Council, and the Gates Foundation together with banana producers.

The Broader Food System Some critics of GM crops and foodstuffs highlight their role in an “industrialized” food system, a system which they feel has contributed to a range of negative social and environmental issues, thus placing these concerns in a broader set of criticisms about contemporary, industrial agriculture. Movies such as Food, Inc. (2009) and the “ethical food movement” as described in popular books have brought critiques of the “corporatization” of food to mainstream audiences.47 For many, the alignment between GM crops and an excess of cheap and unhealthy food containing large amounts of high fructose corn syrup (at least in the United States) is reason enough to reject the technology. This so-​called “neoliberal diet,”48 a result of globalized capitalism and high in refined carbohydrates and fats, is blamed by many for the rising obesity rates in the United States and other Western countries, and disproportionately affects those in lower socioeconomic strata. Thus, as GM foods currently form a significant part of this diet, they are bad and to blame for numerous societal ills. More generally, GM is seen as helping to drive the continued broader intensification and corporatization of agriculture. Many question whether these (and other types of) technologies should be used if the primary goal is to create profit, which is seen by some as highly problematic given that food is a human right, and so distinct from other sorts of consumer goods; these critiques are similar to those raised against commercialized medical care and the pharmaceutical industry. GM also is frequently tied into appraisals of the adverse effects of contemporary globalization, particularly given that the major multinationals involved in developing GM products are often crossing boundaries, particularly into the developing world, which is viewed as especially vulnerable to these incursions. Finally, although there is increased attention to the so-​called sustainable intensification of agriculture, which may include some uses of GM technologies, many are suspect that any form of intensification may cause harms that will be impossible to mitigate; others while concerned about intensification contend that making it sustainable is preferable to alternatives. 47  Notable examples include Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-​American Meal (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2001); Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto (New York: Penguin, 2009). 48  Geraldo Otero et al., “The Neoliberal Diet and Inequality in the United States,” Social Science and Medicine 142 (2015): 47–​55.

Genetically Modified Food   109 Another critical issue within the broader food system relates to the labeling of foodstuffs. Debates over labeling remain in a number of places, notably in the United States.49 The European Union, Australia, New Zealand, and a number of Asian countries have mandatory labeling requirements, which apply when GM ingredients are purposely included, although at least some of these regulatory regimes have some exceptions embedded in their requirements for smaller amounts of GM ingredients, for instance. In contrast, the United States does not have requirements at the federal level for GM labeling (so, for instance, the GM salmon discussed earlier, which will soon be commercially available does not need to be labeled as GM); there have been recent proposals at some state levels to require labeling. The ubiquitous presence of corn, soy, and canola in many foodstuffs produced in the United States means that a majority of American processed foods that are not organically produced contain GM ingredients. Thus, even if consumption of GM foods is understood as a matter of individual choice, it is contestable whether consumers at least in some jurisdictions can consistently avoid GM foods even if they wish to do so.50

Toward Deliberative Food Policy What is notable in much of the dialogue and debate surrounding GM food ethics is that many of the critiques originate from elite actors and groups, particularly in the developed world. GM foods have been the subject of considerable hype by their critics, and there have been limited attempts to engage the broader public, with a few exceptions. One such effort was the 2002–​3 government-​sponsored public debate in the United Kingdom called “GM Nation,” which sought to engage people regarding the potential commercialization of transgenic crops. Although one of the explicit objectives of the undertaking was to engage people at the “grass-​roots level,” this goal proved extremely difficult to meet.51 Evaluation revealed that participants were not representative of the general public either in terms of their attitudes or demographics. In addition, events which were part of the debate were dominated by those who were quite knowledgeable about GM, and hence the terms of engagement occurred at quite a high level, which likely resulted in exclusion of the voices of those less familiar with the issues or the science associated with GM. These difficulties are fairly typically faced in attempting to engage the public, even over issues relating to food, which is presumably of interest to all. 49 

Paul B. Thompson, “Food Biotechnology’s Challenge to Cultural Integrity and Individual Consent,” Hastings Center Report 27, no. 4 (1997): 34–​38. 50  Heather J. Bray and Rachel A. Ankeny, “What Do Food Labels Teach People about Food Ethics?” in Food Pedagogies, ed. Rick Flowers and Elaine Swan (London: Ashgate, 2015), 185–​200. 51  Tom Horlick-​Jones et al., “On Evaluating the GM Nation?: Public Debate about the Commercialization of Transgenic Crops in Britain,” New Genetics and Society 25 (2006): 265–​288.

110    Rachel Ankeny and Heather Bray We contend that there is a clear need for food policymaking, about GM and more generally, to be more deliberative: according to this view, for decisions made in democracies to be legitimate, they must be preceded by genuine deliberation. In truly deliberative processes, people must rely on reasoning that takes into account the values and needs of everyone likely to be affected, hence utilizing a collective sense of the good.52 In the domain of food, what is critical is that everyone not only is a food consumer, but they all are “food citizens”: everyone has (or should have) an interest in creating conditions that permit the development and maintenance of democratic and socially and economically just food systems.53 In order to foster more public involvement in food policy, discussion about the underlying arguments and reasons associated with the values that people hold must be central, and hence articulating mere opinions or purchasing preferences is insufficient.54 As the historical background together with the summary of ethical arguments indicate, opinions on GM are extremely diverse, and our current regimes (which tend toward either allowing most or all forms of GM, or prohibiting most forms) have not fostered useful forms of dialogue.

Conclusions GM foods are part of a much larger food system and also are one among many agricultural options available to farmers increasingly facing a wide range of both lower tech and emerging regimes. In this sense, any ethical considerations about GM crops, animals for food consumption, and food must be considered within this broader context, including not only scientific issues but also sociocultural, political, and economic concerns associated with GM. As we have stressed in this essay, we contend that asking whether GM is good or bad, right or wrong, is not the correct (or most fruitful) question to pose: what is most important is to foster more deliberative engagement on this issue, and therefore consider GM as part of a larger societal dialogue about what counts as “good” food. For

52  Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996); John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); Seyla Benhabib, “Toward a Deliberative Model of Democratic Legitimacy,” in Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, ed. Seyla Benhabib (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 67–​94; Jon Elster, Deliberative Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); and John S. Dryzek, Deliberative Democracy and Beyond: Liberals, Critics, Contestations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 53  For a related discussion, see Jennifer L. Wilkins, “Eating Right Here: Moving from Consumer to Food Citizen,” Agricultural and Human Values 22 (2005): 269–​273. 54  For an extended analysis, see Rachel A. Ankeny, “Inviting Everyone to the Table: Strategies for More Effective and Legitimate Food Policy via Deliberative Approaches,” Journal of Social Philosophy 47 (2016): 10–​24.

Genetically Modified Food   111 many people, the settings in which GM might be used, and who or what might benefit (e.g., multinationals, local farmers, or the environment), are crucial questions to consider, and hence uniform bans or completely open markets do not allow these public concerns to be adequately debated or considered. The future of GM food ethics is in dialogue and debate.

chapter 6

L o cal Fo od Mov e me nts Differing Conceptions of Food, People, and Change Samantha E. Noll and Ian Werkheiser

Introduction The “local food” movement has been growing since at least the mid-​twentieth century with the founding of the Rodale Institute. Since then, local food has increasingly become a goal of food systems. Today, books and articles on local food have become commonplace, with popular authors such as Barbara Kingsolver1 and Michael Pollan2 espousing the virtues of eating locally. Additionally, local food initiatives, such as the “farm-​to-​ fork,” “Buying Local,” and “Slow Food” have gained a strong international following with clearly visible impacts on the food industry and policy. The numbers of local farmers’ markets, community-​supported agriculture projects, and community gardens have been on the rise steadily since 1994.3 Local food is viewed by some as providing an alternative and challenge to the corporate-​led, industrialized, global food system by reconnecting food with environmental health and sustainability, social justice concerns, and the importance of place.4 Proponents of local food often argue that people in industrial agriculture systems

1  Barbara Kingsolver, Camille Kingsolver, and Scott Hopp, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (New York: Harper, 2008). 2  Michael Pollan, A Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto (New York: Penguin Press, 2009). 3  Lacey Arneson McCormack, Melissa Nelson Laska, Nicole Larson, and Mary Story, “Review of the Nutritional Implications of Farmers’ Markets and Community Gardens: A Call for Evaluation and Research Efforts,” Journal of the American Dietetic Association 110, no. 3 (2010): 399–​408; “Farmers Market Growth: 1992‒2012.” United States Department of Agriculture, 2012. https://​www.ams.usda.gov/​ ?template=templates&leftnav=wholesaleandfarmersmarkets&page=wfmfarmersmarketgrowth&descri ption=farmers%20market%20growth. 4  Charles Levkoe, “Towards a Transformative Food Politics,” Local Environment 16, no. 7 (2011): 687‒705.

Local Food Movements    113 (systems that produce food on a large scale for global distribution with the labor of a minimum number of workers) lose control over what they eat to governmental agencies and large corporations.5 The wide range of food choices that individuals could potentially make are effectively reduced to shallow choices concerning brands in a supermarket. Buying food in this type of food system ensures that people lose knowledge of the community and daily aspects of food, such as how to produce and process it and what the ingredients are.6 One way that has been suggested to address these issues is creating alternative food systems, such as those that focus on local production and distribution, those that utilize a shorter supply chain, or those that emphasize community control.7 Many see this as a valuable strategy that could help individuals and communities regain their ability to better understand and have power over the food they eat and the systems that produce it.8 Additionally, some local food supporters argue that creating and supporting local food production systems is a step toward cultivating something larger—​a “regenerative food system”9 of vibrant local communities and ethical relationships between people and the environment, and local and global communities. Local food systems of this sort—​“multidisciplinary, multisectoral and intergenerational, and address[ing] social, political, economic and environmental factors”10—​are envisioned as being a central part of radical social transformation generally. Some critics, on the other hand, are much less hopeful about the local food movement’s progressive possibilities.11 One set of critiques finds local food unable to seriously 5  Laura B. DeLind and Jim Bingen, “Place and Civic Culture: Re-​Thinking the Context for Local Agriculture,” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 21, no. 2 (January 2008): 127–​151; Julie Guthman, “Bringing Good Food to Others: Investigating the Subjects of Alternative Food Practice,” Cultural Geographies 15, no. 4 (January 2008): 431–​447; Julie Guthman, Agrarian Dreams: The Paradox of Organic Farming in California (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004); John H. Vandermeer and Ivette Perfecto, Breakfast of Biodiversity: The Political Ecology of Rain Forest Destruction (Oakland, CA: Food First Books, 2005). 6  Nancy J. Turner and Katherine L. Turner, “‘Where Our Women Used to Get the Food’: Cumulative Effects and Loss of Ethnobotanical Knowledge and Practice,” Botany 86, no. 2 (2008): 103–​115. 7  Kenneth Dahlberg, “Regenerative Food Systems: Broadening the Scope and Agenda of Sustainability,” in Food for the Future: Conditions and Contradictions of Sustainability, ed. Patricia Allen (New York: Wiley, 1993), 75‒103; Laura B. DeLind, “Place, Work, and Civic Agriculture: Common Fields for Cultivation,” Agriculture and Human Values 19, no. 3 (2002): 227‒224; Melanie Dupuis and David Goodman, “Should We Go ‘Home’ to Eat?: Toward a Reflexive Politics of Localism,” Journal of Rural Studies 21, no. 3 (2005): 359–​371. 8  DeLind and Bingen, “Place and Civic Culture”; Phil Mount, “Growing Local Food: Scale and Local Food Systems Governance,” Agriculture and Human Values 29, no. 1 (2011): 107–​121. 9  Dahlberg, “Regenerative Food Systems.” 10  Alethea Harper, Annie Shattuck, Eric Holt-​Gimenez, Alison Alkon, and Frances Lambick, Food Policy Councils: Lessons Learned (Oakland, CA: Food First, 2009), 9. 11  Julian Agyeman and Jesse McEntee, “Moving the Field of Food Justice Forward through the Lens of Urban Political Ecology,” Geography Compass 8, no. 3 (2014): 211–​220; Laura B. DeLind, “Are Local Food and the Local Food Movement Taking Us Where We Want to Go? Or Are We Hitching Our Wagons to the Wrong Stars?” Agriculture and Human Values 28, no. 2 (2010): 273–​283; Levkoe, “Towards a Transformative Food Politics”; Nathan McClintock, “Radical, Reformist, and Garden-​Variety Neoliberal: Coming to Terms with Urban Agriculture’s Contradictions,” Local Environment 19, no. 2 (October 2013): 147–​171.

114    Samantha Noll and Ian Werkheiser challenge or build an alternative to the dominant industrial, capitalist food system. Instead, local food emphasizes individualist and consumerist solutions to problems in the food system.12 As corporations like Walmart embrace “local” as a desirable label, and one that is significantly easier to achieve than “organic,” the local food movement ends up supporting the industrial, capitalist status quo.13 To the extent that local food projects operate outside of the market as charity, such as free food hubs or free community gardens, local food projects can be viewed as being complicit in the erosion of the social contract and safety net, “neoliberal in their outcomes or reformist at best.”14 While liberalism will be discussed in detail later, here “neoliberalism” should be understood as a smaller subset of liberalism that primarily accepts the position that an unregulated market system is the best way to distribute goods.15 Another set of critiques finds local food unable to reform society to be more just or sustainable, as some supporters claim as a goal. If local food activists are working to reform the global food system along lines of social justice, they might actually make international problems of development, poverty, and equity worse by redirecting money and support to local producers at the expense of desperately poor international producers.16 If local food activists are trying to reform the food system to be more environmentally sustainable, there are significant questions about whether “food miles” are the best measure of environmental impact, either because food production can be more ecologically sustainable in a global system, or because the money saved from efficiencies of scale and comparative production advantage would free up more money that could be better spent in addressing environmental problems.17 In these critiques, local food advocates are portrayed as misguided, well meaning, but ultimately selfish consumers who are purchasing the identity of environmental and social justice. This disagreement about the potential of local food movements is an important one to address as those interested in food justice decide how best to be effective given few resources and working against such a deeply entrenched system. As Laura DeLind asks, “Are local food and the local food movement taking us where we want to go? Or are we hitching our wagons to the wrong stars?”18 In this essay, we argue that both advocates and critics of local food are partially correct because while local food is often understood as a unified trend, it is more accurate to see the term signifying various sub-​movements: the 12 

DeLind, “Local Food and the Local Food Movement”; Levkoe, “Towards a Transformative Food Politics” 13  Agyeman and McEntee, “Moving the Field of Food Justice.” 14  McClintock, “Radical, Reformist, and Garden-​Variety Neoliberal,” 1. 15  See Vandermeer and Perfecto’s 2005 book titled Nature’s Matrix: Linking Agriculture, Conservation and Food Sovereignty for a detailed critique of neoliberal impacts to food systems. Additionally, “reformist” here should be understood as the support of gradual reform rather than abolition or revolution. 16  Mark Navin, “Local Food and International Ethics,” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 27, no. 3 (2014): 349–​368. 17  Edward L. Glaeser, Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier (New York: Penguin Press, 2011). 18  DeLind, “Local Food and the Local Food Movement.”

Local Food Movements    115 individual-​focused sub-​movement or IF, the systems-​focused sub-​movement or SF, and the food community-​focused sub-​movement or CF. These movements can be characterized in part by their disparate food-​related goals, including supporting local farmers, providing access to fresh food in urban areas, or supporting democratic ideals in food and food systems. In addition to these goals, people supporting local food movements often hold rich, and differing, conceptualizations of what local food is.19 Many actors within this large umbrella see food as a diet, an economic strategy, a social movement, a fashionable solution to the problems in the industrial food system, or some combination of these and other conceptions of food and locality besides. These different understandings lead to a different understanding of the purpose of local food, different goals, and different values. In this essay, we will explore these sub-​movements and argue that they can be analyzed by the different ways in which members understand people and food. For each sub-​movement, we pay particular attention to connections between conceptions of the self, political structures, and definitions of food, as each of these impact the structure and goals of sub-​movements. Food is intimately bound up in our lives and different sub-​ movements highlight or downplay various connections between self, society, and environment. We also discuss the political implications of each sub-​movement, and then discuss critiques that have been levelled against local food, which we see as best being understood as a critique of one or another of the sub-​movements rather than the movement as a whole. Our hope is that this strategy will help readers better understand the local food movement as a whole and illustrate the individual sub-​movements’ strengths and weaknesses.

Individual-​Focused Sub-​Movement The individual-​focused sub-​movement, or IF, is the most well-​known sub-​movement under the umbrella of “local food.”20 Indeed, this sub-​movement is well-​represented in public discourse and is often considered the “face” of local food. DeLind captures this point eloquently when she states the following concerning the “locavore” phenomenon, which is part of IF: Locavores and would-​ be locavores (theoretically the public-​ at-​ large) are told repeatedly through popular films (e.g., Supersize Me, Fast Food Nation, King Corn, Fresh, Food, Inc.), and books (e.g., Omnivore’s Dilemma, In Defense of Food, Animal,

19 

Ibid.; Paul B. Thompson, From Field to Fork: Food Ethics for Everyone (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). 20  Ian Werkheiser and Samantha Noll, “From Food Justice to a Tool of the Status Quo: Three Sub-​Movements within Local Food,” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 27, no. 2 (2014): 201–​210.

116    Samantha Noll and Ian Werkheiser Vegetable, Miracle) and media features (e.g., PBS, NYT, Yes!, Mother Jones, Business Week) that they—​as individuals—​can effect change one vegetable, one meal, and one family at a time. It suggests that what is wrong with the world (from monocultural practices, to obesity, to global warming) can be addressed through altered personal behavior.21

What sets IF apart from other sub-​movements are a few key concepts. In the IF discourse: (1) food is a product that is purchased; (2) people are individual consumers of food; and (3) change happens when food purchases as individual choices have cumulative impacts on health, lifestyle, environment, animal welfare, farmworkers, the local community, and so on.22 When looked at through the lens of IF, individual food purchasing choices directly translate into the enjoyment of organically raised and freshly picked food, health benefits for family, interactions with farmers and other community members dedicated to local food production and consumption, and a greater understanding of the local environment and seasons. IF is an intersection of local food and “lifestyle” politics, such as the “green living” movement or recycling, as it is built on the shared assumption that the best way to bring about positive change is through economic processes driven by individual consumer choices.23 According to advocates of IF, this sub-​movement has far-​reaching effects, in addition to personal benefits.24 For example, proponents of IF have argued that buying locally can help stem environmental damage, as local food is shipped shorter distances and often grown using less and fewer petrochemicals (if the crops are organic). From an economic standpoint, local food supports smaller, local businesses and growers rather than large corporations, and therefore builds more resilient local economies.25 Socially, local food builds relationships with neighbors through community-​supported agriculture projects and farmers’ markets.26 From the perspective of public health, eating a local diet reduces the amount of processed food eaten and helps people become more mindful of their food choices.27 Consumer choices also impact large retailers, as companies, such as Wal-​Mart, increasingly find it in their best interest to market and sell local produce in their stores.28 IF’s emphasis on the power of consumer choice to be manifested

21 

DeLind, “Local Food and the Local Food Movement,” 276. Ibid.; Pollan, A Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. 23  Werkheiser and Noll, “From Food Justice to a Tool of the Status Quo.” 24  Kingsolver, Kingsolver, and Hopp, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle; Pollan, A Defense of Food; Thompson, From Field to Fork. 25  DeLind, “Local Food and the Local Food Movement.” 26  DeLind, “Place, Work, and Civic Agriculture”; Thomas A. Lyson, Civic Agriculture: Reconnecting Farm, Food, and Community (Medford, MA: Tufts University Press, 2004). 27  Judith V. Anderson, Deborah I. Bybee, Randi M. Brown, Donna F. McLean, Erika M. Garcia, M. Lynn Breer, and Barbara A. Schillo. “5 a Day Fruit and Vegetable Intervention Improves Consumption in a Low Income Population,” Journal of the American Dietetic Association 101, no. 2 (2001): 195–​202. McCormack et al., “Review of the Nutritional Implications of Farmers’ Markets and Community Gardens,” 399–​408. 28 Pollan, A Defense of Food. 22 

Local Food Movements    117 at a local, national, or more global level, allows efforts to be felt at multiple scales. Thus, one can be concerned with self-​interested small choices and at the same time have confidence that there are larger benefits of one’s actions.

Case Study in the Individual-​Focused Sub-​Movement A common example of the IF sub-​movement is the farm-​to-​table (or farm-​to-​fork) phenomenon, as it primarily focuses on bringing about change by “voting with your fork,” or through consumer choice, and thus shares some of the key commitments of IF. Farm-​ to-​table refers to a trend in local food where individuals are ideally concerned with all stages of food production, such as harvesting, processing, packaging, storage, sales, and consumption. Proponents argue that fresh, local food is healthier, better for the environment, and more economically sustainable than food shipped from thousands of miles away. Farm-​to-​table usually manifests itself on the ground in the form of restaurants catering to the demand for local food by purchasing, processing, and delivering local food products to consumers. Such restaurants will often have seasonal menus that showcase crops currently being harvested in the area. They also may be attached to an individual farm or provide customers with a list of the farms they purchase food products from, or host dinners on the farm itself. In this way, the farm-​to-​table trend can be seen as an extension of the local food movement into the food service industry. Indeed, some of the most vocal supporters of the farm-​to-​table phenomena are restaurateurs and chefs, such as Alice Waters, Stephanie Izard, David Kinch, and others.29 This trend can be understood as part of the IF movement in part because advocates of the farm-​to-​table phenomena often cite the works of prominent voices in IF, such as Michael Pollan, when defending their desire to showcase local crops. In addition, this trend accepts the key conceptions of people, food, and change built into the IF. Indeed, the farm-​to-​table trend can be understood as making it easier for people to adopt an IF lifestyle, as the labor-​intensive activities of purchasing, processing, preparing, storing, and serving local produce is now largely performed by the food service industry. In addition, it can be understood as the manifestation of the impact that IF has had on the food industry, as farm-​to-​table chefs have moved away from the “food as art” trend, to instead embrace the philosophy that the flavors of local ingredients should be center stage.30 Generally, farm-​to-​table chefs showcase traditional farmhouse cooking, emphasizing seasonality, the freshness of ingredients, and simple preparations.31

29  “Chef ’s Weigh in on Farm to Table,” Fine Dining Lovers, July 21, 2014, https://​www.finedininglovers. com/​stories/​farm-​to-​table-​chefs-​roundup/​. 30 Ibid. 31  Carlo Petrini, Slow Food: The Case for Taste (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003).

118    Samantha Noll and Ian Werkheiser

Politics in the Individual-​Focused Sub-​Movement In addition to farm-​to-​table’s advocacy of IF, an important reason why this sub-​ movement has been successful has to do with its compatibility with liberalism—​a compatibility largely due to shared commitments and conceptions concerning food, purchasing decisions, and the people making those decisions. Liberal philosophers, such as John Rawls32 and Ronald Dworkin,33 argue that the locus or the appropriate place of justice is the social institution or structure of society. The central questions for liberalism concern whether or not a law or other political authority is justified in limiting a citizen’s personal liberty34 and whether or not goods are being justly distributed.35 Key commitments include the conception of individual people as rational agents36 and the understanding of goods like food as products to be justly distributed.37 It should also be noted that several liberal philosophers accept what is called “the principle of neutrality”—​a principle that mandates that the just distribution of goods needs to be independent from any conception of a good life, such as living a religious life or other lifestyle. Like the IF movement, most liberal political philosophies would conceptualize food as a product and food purchases as individual choices made by autonomous rational agents operating in a market.38 In a liberal framework, the local food movement could be seen as a lifestyle or conception of the good life.39 This compatibility has far-​reaching implications for IF, as liberal ideals form the bedrock of political life in the West, as foundational rights, such as freedom of religion, freedom of the press, free speech, free trade, and private property rights are all supported by liberal ideals.40 This philosophy continues to permeate political life, as fundamental liberal tenets are embedded in Western political structures and debates often 32  John Rawls and Erin Kelly, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). 33  Ronald Dworkin, “Do Liberty and Equality Conflict?” in Living as Equals, ed. Paul Barker (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 39–​59. 34  Gerald Gaus, Shane Courtland, and David Schmidtz, “Liberalism,” Stanford University, 1996, http://​plato.stanford.edu/​entries/​liberalism/​. 35  Rawls and Kelly, Justice as Fairness. 36  Michael J. Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). 37  Samantha Noll, “Liberalism and the Two Directions of the Local Food Movement,” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 27, no. 2 (2013): 211–​224. 38  Rawls and Kelly, Justice as Fairness; Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. 39  DeLind, “Local Food and the Local Food Movement”; Noll, “Liberalism and the Two Directions of the Local Food Movement.” 40  Kathleen G. Donohue, Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Idea of the Consumer (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); Sheldon S. Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).

Local Food Movements    119 focus on (directly or indirectly) answering the central questions posed by liberalism. IF’s compatibility then can at least partially explain why this sub-​movement has been so successful, as initiatives stemming from this movement (such as trade agreements, policy changes, certifications, standards, and the distribution of goods) can be relatively easily incorporated into a political and economic structure that accepts liberal ideals.41 When IF is conceptualized as part of lifestyle politics, this sub-​movement can be understood as one that advocates another conception of the good life that people can choose (or not choose) to live. If they do so, then they need resources (such as food) to realize this vision and thus need a liberal state to ensure that they can obtain these resources.42 For example, if Mary wants to know her farmer, eat only locally produced food, and support community-​supported agriculture projects, then she could be justified in using her money to purchase the resources necessary to live this lifestyle.43 Here, if Mary adopts the local food lifestyle for personal or health reasons, she may not necessarily hold a position that criticizes others for living other lifestyles that support industrial food systems. Having the freedom to choose between lifestyles is part of what it means to live in a state that accepts liberal tenets, such as the principle of neutrality.44 IF’s conception of local food as one lifestyle among many and other shared commitments help to incorporate this sub-​movement into extant political structures.45 IF’s vision of local food is also compatible with extant economic structures, leading to large companies catering to this new consumer base, happy to provide the product of local food, often using labels (such as local, natural, organic, sustainable, etc.) as product attributes. Companies like Stonyfield Organic, Ben and Jerry’s, and Chipotle have used large distribution chains to make their initially locally produced products available to a larger market. IF initiatives thus often use current supply chains, policy structures, and social avenues to advance local food and incorporate it into extant institutions.46

41 

Noll, “Liberalism and the Two Directions of the Local Food Movement.” Will Kymlicka, “Liberal Individualism and Liberal Neutrality,” Ethics 99, no. 4 (1989): 883–​905. 43  Noll, “Liberalism and the Two Directions of the Local Food Movement.” 44  However, the argument primarily focuses on IF as a lifestyle political choice. Other IF supporters could very well hold a more critical view of liberalism, as one could question whether the industrial food system violates tenets of liberal philosophy other than the principle of neutrality and whether effects of the industrial food system, such as environmental impacts, should be addressed prior to questions of just distribution. Mark Michael addresses this latter point concerning environmental impacts in the article “Liberalism, Environmentalism, and the Principle of Neutrality,” Public Affairs Quarterly 14, no. 1 (2000): 39‒56, where he explores whether environmental philosophy is compatible with liberalism and, specifically, the principle of neutrality. 45  However, it should be noted here that compatibility with liberalism does not guarantee that initiatives will be successful, as there are many reasons why movements fail. Compatibility here should be understood as simply one factor that could increase the odds of success. 46  Werkheiser and Noll, “From Food Justice to a Tool of the Status Quo.” 42 

120    Samantha Noll and Ian Werkheiser

Critiques of the Individual-​Focused Sub-​Movement This sub-​movement is not without its critics. Prominent concerns stem from IF’s implied conceptualization of people, food, and the roles that individuals, communities, and political institutions play when trying to bring about change. For example, the conception of people as individual purchase decision-​makers has both positive and negative consequences. As already discussed, the definition has potentially positive consequences, as it helps the IF sub-​movement integrate into existing political structures. However, it can also have the effect of limiting our identities and our options for enacting change. DeLind argues that this definition of people as consumers who want to “vote with their dollars” and who value “choice” does not reflect the robust range of personal identities as “residents, poets, bus-​drivers, grandmothers, and neighborhood activists.”47 Derrick Jensen, writing about a similar sub-​ movement within environmentalism, says that a focus on individual choices of what to consume is problematic because it “fundamentally accepts capitalism’s redefinition of us from citizens to consumers, such that the ‘political acts’ of the simple living ‘activists’ are not the acts of citizens, with all the responsibilities citizenship implies, but are explicitly the acts of consumers.” This redefinition, Jensen argues, “Gravely reduces our range of possible forms of resistance.”48 In other words, the myopic definition of people as individual consumers closes off potential avenues of change that would be made available if we accepted a more robust definition of the self—​a definition that made room for the multifaceted identities of people as neighbors, citizens, and residents of various communities. In addition to limiting our sense of selves, this has the effect of “letting us off the hook” from the difficult work of addressing problems at the system-​wide level, while feeling good that we are changing things literally one meal at a time. These conceptions can be inadequate when addressing some food system issues. For example, lack of access to fresh foods in urban areas, or what is commonly (if inaccurately) known as “food deserts,” could be understood as a consequence of personal choice. Specifically, if people in urban areas do not buy particular items (such as fresh fruit and vegetables), then stores will no longer stock these items. This will result in the lack of these items in the area, and the solution would be consuming better food-​stuffs. However, this would be a profoundly inaccurate analysis,

47 

DeLind, “Local Food and the Local Food Movement,” 276. Derrick Jenson, “Forget Shorter Showers: Why Personal Change Does Not Equal Political Change,” in The Derrick Jensen Reader: Writings on Environmental Revolution, ed. K. Lierre (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2012), 426. 48 

Local Food Movements    121 as it overlooks injustices along racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic lines. In actuality, structural obstacles, such as the lack of supermarkets in areas are “practical impediment[s]‌to healthful food purchase[s] and a symbol of . . . neighborhoods’ social and economic struggles.”49 Wealthier neighborhoods in urban areas have three times more supermarkets than poorer areas and residents without reliable access to transportation are often forced to shop at small stores with limited selections and higher prices.50 In addition to IF’s problematic conceptualization of people as individual consumers, the sub-​movement’s definition of food as a product or commodity to be distributed has also garnered critique.51 While the conception of food as a commodity contributes to the success of IF, critics argue that this definition misses other key aspects of food, such as the role that food plays in building community and strengthening ties between people.52 In addition, “food-​as-​product” can be more easily co-​ opted by dominant groups in the business of distribution and production when labels such as “locally grown,” “natural,” “organic,” and “sustainable” are reduced to selling points.53 This is what DeLind labels the “Walmart Trend,” as large companies use their massive purchasing power to provide “local” produce to their significant consumer base. DeLind54 and other critics argue that this trend is problematic, as it makes local farmers dependent on regional chains, fixes prices that may not be sustainable at the local level, and potentially co-​opts labels. For instance, what does the term “local” signify? Is a local product one that was produced 50 miles away or one produced 250 miles away? Is it one produced in the state where it is being sold, in the region, or in the country? The Walmart trend potentially reduces these labels to commodity attributes, or features used by multinational companies to increase the price of products, and not as designations of particular qualities. The distorting effects of the large purchasers, critics argue, can actually harm local food systems and small-​ scale farmers.55

49  Carolyn C. Cannuscio, Eve E. Weiss, and David A. Asch, “The Contribution of Urban Foodways to Health Disparities,” Journal of Urban Health 87, no. 3 (2010): 381–​393. 50  Kimberly Morland, Steve Wing, Ana Diez Roux, and Charles Poole, “Neighborhood Characteristics Associated with the Location of Food Stores and Food Service Places,” American Journal of Preventive Medicine 22, no. 1 (2002): 23–​29. 51  DeLind, “Local Food and the Local Food Movement,” 276. 52  Here it should be noted here that DeLind makes a distinction between what she calls the “Pollan trend” and the “Walmart trend” when making this critique. While proponents of IF, such as Pollan, often hold the view that food is something that can bring people together, the Walmart trend includes the critique concerning how local food is being commoditized with the express purpose of selling more products. While food “experts” may hold a wide range of views, their popularity increases the demand for “local” products and thus contributes to the rise of the second trend, as locavores looking to eat locally may look for these items in their local grocery store. 53  Werkheiser and Noll, “From Food Justice to a Tool of the Status Quo.” 54 Ibid. 55  DeLind, “Local Food and the Local Food Movement.”

122    Samantha Noll and Ian Werkheiser

The Systems-​Focused Sub-​Movement The systems-​focused sub-​movement (SF) is best captured by those discourses on local food that occur at policy levels, particularly at international organizations such as the FAO and the World Bank. While SF initiatives often focus on a wide range of food-​ related goals, these movements largely focus on bringing about change at the level of policy, rather than the level of the individual. In this discourse, bolstering local food systems are seen as a policy option with many advantages, both by policymakers and activists. The United States has a long history of using policy to support both small-​ scale and large-​scale food systems. Various policy tools, such the US Farm Bill, have historically been justified with the argument that such bolstering will provide local and national benefits, such as providing national food security and economically supporting local farming communities.56 Today, policy and funding priorities include a wide range of goals, such as increasing yield, improving sustainability, combatting climate change, protecting biodiversity, and so on. While all of these priorities are not focused solely on local food systems, many do, and these policies illustrate how change at the policy level is an effective tool to impact food systems. For this reason, SF movements largely focus on working within existing systems to bring about change at the level of policy. Thus, while IF could be understood as the overlap of local food with lifestyle politics, SF can be seen as the overlap of local food initiatives with movements to improve food policy. Some of the most prominent of these campaigns are those that accept the shared goal of increasing food security—​defined as “a situation that exists when all people, at all times, have physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life.”57 For many policymakers and large organizations working on food security, it is considered vital for achieving food security that people be integrated via trade to a global food system because this allows local areas to compensate for local problems such as crop failure or drought. At the same time, local food is also important for food security because it economically supports local farming communities, provides an easily accessed source of culturally appropriate food, and potentially allows local areas to compensate for problems in international trade, such as exchange rate fluctuations or changing markets for cash crops. Note that this can only be achieved (SF proponents would argue) by pursuing policy changes that support and protect local systems of production. Another of the advantages to local food in an SF framework is that it can be a way to get people engaged with food policies and other important political and economic institutions affecting them. Engaging in local food may lead to conversations with the

56  Charles Rosenberg, No Other Gods: On Science and American Social Thought (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). 57  “Trade Reforms and Food Security,” Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 2003, 28, http://​www.fao.org/​3/​a-​y4671e/​y4671e00.htm.

Local Food Movements    123 producer about costs and benefits of the federal organic certification procedure, or to a new concern for the quality of food being served to students in schools, or to an interest in the costs and benefits of trading food between countries, or to activism around environmental damage to the land, or a host of other issues. Thus, for SF, local food both helps to address some of the problems in our food system directly and acts as a kind of boundary object bringing together a host of wider justice concerns that can lead to activism.58 SF, then, is built on the following key conceptions: (1) food is a necessary good produced, distributed, and otherwise impacted by large systems; (2) people are citizens or at least important stakeholders of those systems; and (3) change happens at the level of those systems through political and macroeconomic action around the issues of food. The main differences between SF and IF rest on SF’s definition of food as always embedded in institutions, and the subsequent strategies for handling food-​related issues, as IF largely focuses on change at the individual level and SF focuses on bringing about change at the level of policy.

Systems-​Focused Sub-​Movement Case Studies While perhaps not as prevalent in the popular imagination as IF, SF has had profound impacts on food policies within and between many countries. For example, J. I. Rodale (1898−1971) is commonly considered to be one of the founders of both the local food and the organic farming movements.59 Since the 1940s, the Rodale Institute has provided scientific information used to support the local food movement’s proposals for adopting “non-​chemical” farming methods and resources. In addition, this research was instrumental for SF and organic food advocates to successfully lobby for the Organic Foods Production Act (OFPA) in 1990. The OFPA authorizes the USDA to administer a National Organic Program that now makes it possible for local growers and producers to obtain organic certification and adhere to crop production, livestock, processing, and packaging standards. While these standards (and Rodale’s research) can be applied to both small-​scale and large-​scale production, they provided the political and economic foundation necessary for local food production to increase. Here we see that several important goals for these actors, such as the environmental impacts of organic farming or the increased economic sustainability of farming communities, are pursued by a national policy to promote local food and thereby to change the system. 58  Ian Werkheiser, “Individual and Community Identity in Food Sovereignty: The Possibilities and Pitfalls of Translating a Rural Social Movement,” in Routledge Handbook on Food Ethics, ed. M. Rawlinson (New York: Routledge, 2017). 59  “History of Organic Farming in the United States,” Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education, 2012, http://​www.sare.org/​learning-​center/​bulletins/​transitioning-​to-​organic-​production/​ text-​version/​history-​of-​organic-​farming-​in-​the-​united-​states.

124    Samantha Noll and Ian Werkheiser In an international context, the FAO (Food and Agriculture Association of the United Nations) supports local food systems as a useful component in achieving the goal of food security in various contexts. The FAO does not stress the resiliency and insulation to trade as much as the “wealth multiplier” of investing in agriculture: “The multiplier is most significant where any incremental income generated is spent on labour-​intensive, locally produced non-​tradable goods and services, (for example, where basic food is the main consumer expenditure item) and where production in the commodity generating the increase in income is labour-​intensive.”60 Both the FAO and Rodale examples stress how the SF sub-​movement conceptualizes food as a product that can be bought and sold in a market or distributed by organizations such as the FAO (which engages in famine relief). Either way, food is something always embedded in and impacted by larger institutions.61 For people working in an SF frame, the complexity of institutions makes it difficult to make change unless institutions, policy, and infrastructure are also changed, necessitating an emphasis on advocacy and policy.

Politics in the Systems-​Focused Sub-​Movement Like IF, one could argue that an important reason why this sub-​movement has been so successful has to do with its compatibility with dominant political philosophies, such as liberalism, and with the larger political structure influenced by these philosophies. It would certainly be possible to promote local food using SF’s assumptions about food as public good and people as active members of society while disagreeing with their assumptions about change (Marxism springs to mind as amenable to this approach). However, SF as currently practiced comes from much more mainstream politics; indeed, as pointed out, the primary supporters of this sub-​movement are the large international institutions of the current political structure. Typical goals of local food movement activists include the institution of certification policies (organic, non-​GMO, etc.), farm-​to-​institution programs that bring local food into schools and other large institutional actors, food hubs, and so on. These are often characterized as reforms aimed at improving the current system. Before discussing common critiques of SF, it is important to note that SF is not vulnerable to some of the critiques leveled at IF. This is because as SF promotes advocacy and policy changes, it promotes engagement in political structures rather than simply making better “choices.” As Ian Werkheiser and Samantha Noll argue, “when food is defined as being inherently institutional rather than as a product, companies have 60  “Trade Reforms and Food Security,” Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 2003, section 6.3, http://​www.fao.org/​3/​a-​y4671e/​y4671e00.htm. 61  Werkheiser and Noll, “From Food Justice to a Tool of the Status Quo.”

Local Food Movements    125 a harder time co-​opting the movement. If the intention is to pass laws to make the practices of megamarts illegal, it’s difficult for that to be offered in Wal-​Mart’s grocery aisles.”62 At the same time, a common goal in SF local food movements is to use policy and regulation changes to guard against co-​opting. For example, Rodale Institute has been instrumental in creating specific organic standards that now help to ensure that products labeled “organic” in supermarkets are indeed organically grown.

Critiques of the Systems-​Focused Sub-​Movement Like IF, the SF movement is not without its critics. Given that we are taking SF to be the overlap of local food with reforms to the food system, it is not surprising that most of these critiques argue that one of these two elements is a poor addition to the other. Some people working on local food (particularly from a CF framework, as will be discussed) are concerned with SF’s focus on extant policies and institutions. These critics argue that the strategy of using international institutions and political systems as vehicles for change leads SF advocates of local food to be committed to those systems, and often far too optimistic about reforming their problematic commitments and assumptions. Many of these critics, such as William Schanbacher63 and Hannah Whittman et al.,64 argue that the commitments built into institutions devoted to promoting food security and SF may necessarily undermine actions aimed at alleviating the global food crisis, as well as undermining actions aimed at improving the lives of poor food producers and their communities. Relatedly, if local food initiatives are bound to institutions with the ultimate aim of maximizing food production, as was historically one of the main goals of US food policy and agricultural research, there is also the possible consequence of environmental degradation in addition to the social degradation just discussed. For example, a large-​ scale approach to achieving food security that utilizes local food initiatives to stabilize shortages during market fluctuations may include GMOs, intensive use of chemical fertilizers, and Green Revolution technological developments.65 In this context, even if the quantity of food is increased locally, the overall productivity of land and ecosystems in that context may be harmed. Food policy is only one factor influencing how food is produced and applied in specific contexts. As such, particular policy changes may have unintended environmental consequences. Whether food systems can be 62 Ibid. 63 

William D. Schanbacher, Politics of Food: The Global Conflict between Food Security and Food Sovereignty (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2010). 64  Hannah Whittman, Annette Desmarais, and Nette Wiebe, Food Sovereignty: Reconnecting Food, Nature and Community (Oakland, CA: Food First Books, 2010). 65  Werkheiser and Noll, “From Food Justice to a Tool of the Status Quo.”

126    Samantha Noll and Ian Werkheiser reformed from within by incorporating local food, or will instead blunt or pervert the goals of SF, as critics contend, is an open question. It is at least possible that the larger systems, such as those supporting globalization, may be seen by SF as the means to support local food while at the same time they are erasing local food systems already in place.66 On the other side of this overlay of local food and institutional reform, some people who are motivated to reform the food system through policy changes to make it more just, efficient, environmentally friendly, and so on think that local food is at least insufficient to this task, and perhaps actively harmful. For example, writers like Peter Singer, Jim Mason, and Mark Navin critique local food initiatives for opting out of the international trade that many export food producers in Third World countries now depend on to survive.67 One kind of policy Navin addresses is the promotion of local food via trade barriers and agricultural subsidies. Navin argues that these policies must be constrained by “three duties of international ethics—​ beneficence, repair and fairness”68 and that on these grounds developed nations should not limit the importation of food from less developed countries (with the converse not being true).69 For Navin, food policies can promote development of poor rural societies and thereby improve the lives of people in those countries, and we have several duties to aid them. Thus, efforts to promote local food are permissible only to the extent that they support or at least do not interfere with those duties, something that he believes at least some local food efforts (such as trade embargoes or tariffs) do not meet.

Community-​Focused Sub-​Movement The final sub-​movement discussed in this essay is the community-​focused sub-​ movement (or CF). While CF can be firmly placed under the umbrella of local food, it is markedly distinct from either of the preceding sub-​movements, as CF employs definitions of “food” and “people” that diverge farther from either of the previous sub-​movements than those do from each other.70 In some ways, IF and SF hold similar definitions of these two key concepts. Both accept the view that food is some kind of interchangeable commodity, and people are autonomous individuals acting in a way that is concomitant with liberal political ideals, whether as consumers or citizens. In contrast, CF movements are often directly critical of liberal political theory,

66  Navin, “Local Food and International Ethics”; Peter Singer and Jim Mason, The Ethics of What We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter (Kutztown, PA: Rodale Books, 2007). 67  Navin, “Local Food and International Ethics”; Singer and Mason, The Ethics of What We Eat. 68  Navin, “Local Food and International Ethics,” 350. 69  Ibid., 359‒361. 70  Werkheiser and Noll. “From Food Justice to a Tool of the Status Quo.”

Local Food Movements    127 and their conceptions of food and people reflect this. CF uses the following conceptions: (1) food is an essential part of culture and is co-​constitutive of community and personal identity; (2) people are members of their community, co-​constituted with their community and its practices, particularly those around food; and (3) change happens when communities resist larger institutions oppressing them and build alternatives to those institutions through solidarity and mutual aid with other individuals and communities.71 Where IF can be seen as the overlap of local food with lifestyle politics, and SF can be seen as the overlap of local food with mainstream food system reform campaigns (such a food security initiatives), it is possible to see CF as an overlap of local food with community-​based food justice movements, such as food sovereignty. That term will be discussed more later, but for now it is enough to know that food sovereignty values communities having meaningful control over the food systems that affect them. In this context, food should be understood as a touchstone or rallying point for communities that perceive larger food systems as a threat to cultural identity, traditional practices, and local systems of production and distribution.72 Indeed, this final point is not surprising, as food sovereignty historically grew out of “peasant movements” in South Asian and South American contexts, with the shared aim of protecting local foodways. Given these assumptions, the value of local food is that locality allows communities to have meaningful control over their food practices in a way that strengthens and preserves their community and individual identities. CF movements often grow out of critiques of industrial food production methods, market-​based initiatives, and food security programs. As such, political action, culture, and food are intertwined. Annette Desmarais captures this key aspect: This place-​bound identity, that of “people of the land,” reflects the belief that they have the right to be on the land. They have the right and obligation to produce food. They have the right to be seen as fulfilling an important function in society at large. They have the right to live in viable communities and the obligation to build community. All of the above form essential parts of their distinct identity as peasants.73

CF movements challenge the definitions at the heart of IF and SF and actively create new food systems, such as indigenous rights movements, farming collectives, or small-​ scale guerilla gardening campaigns.74

71  It should be noted here that proponents of IF, such as Kingsolver and Pollan, endorse some CF rhetoric around food. However, their strategies and underlying assumptions differ. For example, Pollan argues that consumers can “vote with their forks” and Kingsolver argues that we should move away from an industrial model of food production, but this is viewed as a choice made by many individuals. Werkheiser, “Individual and Community Identity in Food Sovereignty.” 72  Michel Pimbert, Toward Food Sovereignty (London: National Resources Group, 2008). 73  Annette Aurélie Desmarais, “The Power of Peasants: Reflections on the Meanings of La Vía Campesina,” Journal of Rural Studies 24, no. 2 (2008): 139. 74 Schanbacher, Politics of Food.

128    Samantha Noll and Ian Werkheiser

Community-​Focused Sub-​Movement Case Study Although perhaps the least-​well-​known sub-​movement, CF initiatives are part of the food landscape around the world, and CF has had a profound influence on oppressed and marginalized communities of subsistence food producers and transnational organizations of those communities. For example, Amerindian tribes’ response to the contamination of salmon in the Columbia River is an excellent illustration of how different definitions of food and people can lead to markedly different responses to food-​related issues. For thousands of years, tribes living around the Celilo Falls maintained a special relationship with the salmon in the Columbia River and harvested them for ceremonial, commercial, and subsistence purposes.75 While today tribes in this region continue these practices, the salmon are contaminated by pollutants in the water. According to a study by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the fish contain high levels of dichlorodiphenyldichloroethylene (DDE), polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), and mercury and are thus unsafe to eat, as consuming them will greatly increase a person’s chance of developing cancer.76 Despite these health risks, tribal members have resisted the push to replace the contaminated salmon with processed foods, including canned fish, and many still harvest salmon from the river. If one accepts IF and SF’s commitments concerning food and people, then the substitution of one food commodity with another food commodity of equal nutritional values (wild caught salmon for canned salmon, for example) could be an acceptable way to mitigate the contamination issue. However, the contamination of the Columbia River salmon is more complicated, as humans in this region have a historical relationship to the salmon that cannot be replaced. In this context, the salmon is not simply a commodity but has personal and cultural significance.77 As Catherine O’Neil says: Fish, especially salmon, are necessary for the survival of the native peoples of the Pacific Northwest, both as individuals and as a people. Fish are crucial for native peoples’ sustenance, in the sense of a way to feed oneself and one’s family. Fish are also crucial for subsistence, in the sense of a culture or way of life with economic, spiritual, social, and physical dimensions—​a way to be Yakama, or to be Tulalip.78 75 

Lori Lambert, “Salmon and Contamination in the Columbia River,” Enduring Legacies: Native Case Studies (Olympia, WA: Evergreen State College, 2008), https://​www.evergreen.edu/​tribal/​docs/​salmon and contamination oct 2009.doc; Esme Murdock and Samantha Noll, “Beyond Access: Integrating Food Security and Food Sovereignty Models for Justice,” in Know Your Food: Food Ethics and Innovation, ed. Helena Rocklinsberg and Per Sandin (Wageningen, The Netherlands: Wageningen Academic Publishers, 2015). 76  Lambert, “Salmon and Contamination in the Columbia River.” 77 Ibid. 78  Catherine O’Neill, “Variable Justice: Environmental Standards, Contaminated Fish, and ‘Acceptable’ Risk to Native Peoples,” Stanford Environmental Law Journal 19, no. 3 (2000): 5.

Local Food Movements    129 This is a clear example of how CF’s commitments concerning food transcend the simple characterization of food as product and people as consumers, as, in the case of the Columbia River salmon, personal and cultural identity are intertwined with the processes of harvesting and consuming food. When viewed from this position, the tribal member’s refusal to replace the contaminated fish with canned foods becomes clear. Although they may physically survive (though perhaps with worse nutrition) given the substitute, it would do profound damage to their individual and community identities. At worst, such substitutes risk the survival of the individual but the death of the community, something which many people who value their communities understandably reject as an option.79 In addition, this case study illustrates how the CF sub-​movement addresses food-​ related issues from a holistic perspective, as solutions proposed by the tribes included strategies to mitigate the source of the contamination for the health of the people, river, larger ecosystem, and economic viability of the fisheries. This reinforces William Schanbacher’s claim that food sovereignty movements and thus CF “considers human relationships in terms of mutual dependence, cultural diversity, and respect for the environment” and is, therefore, a key component of these initiatives.80 When faced with food-​related issues, the strategy for CF is strengthening relationships within and between communities and ecosystems by building alternative food systems, rather than changing consumer behavior or working within existing institutional frameworks.

Politics in the Community-​Focused Sub-​Movement As the case study illustrates, CF largely does not share IF and SF’s commitments concerning food and people. For CF, food is not a product, and people are not atomistic individual consumers. Food (and especially food practices) is deeply intertwined with personal, spiritual, and community identity. In addition, while political action can happen at the level of the individual, for CF, change happens at both the community level when a community decides to adopt new practices and at the intra-​community level when oppressive systems are resisted by the creation of new, alternative ones. Thus, CF is the most radical of the local food sub-​movements, as it does not simply want to change individual’s buying habits or the internal workings of governmental institutions and policy tools, but challenges the status quo itself. This radicalism and CF’s commitment to more robust definitions of food and people are two reasons why such initiatives may be incompatible with existing political structures, as their mandates cannot be easily fit 79  Ian Werkheiser, “Food Sovereignty, Health Sovereignty, and Self-​Organised Community Viability,” Interdisciplinary Environmental Review 15, no. 2/​3 (2014): 134. 80 Schanbacher, Politics of Food, 11.

130    Samantha Noll and Ian Werkheiser into the very structures they hope to dismantle, such as the industrial food system and the trade policy and food certifications that make this system possible. This has led to the creation of alternative food systems as an act of political resistance. Much more natural fits for CF than liberalism are subaltern politics such as anti-​colonialism and communal anarchism.

Critiques of the Community-​Focused Sub-​Movement Due to the incompatibility with mainstream political discourse, CF has the potential to bring about the most change but has also had the least impact on the dominant food system. In addition, recommendations coming from CF initiatives are more holistic and thus have a tendency to be (1) vaguer than those coming out of IF and SF, (2) ask more of those involved, and (3) more difficult to achieve, as personal and cultural identity are bound up with food.81 For example, let us look at an accepted definition of “food sovereignty” from the Declaration of Nyéléni. In this document, food sovereignty is defined as follows: Food sovereignty is the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems. It puts the aspirations and needs of those who produce, distribute and consume food at the heart of food systems and policies rather than the demands of markets and corporations. . . . It ensures that the rights to use and manage our lands, territories, waters, seeds, livestock and biodiversity are in the hands of those of us who produce food. Food sovereignty implies new social relations free of oppression and inequality between men and women, peoples, racial groups, social classes and generations.82

This definition of food sovereignty clearly includes a wide array of social justice issues in the broader discussion of food-​related changes and thus asks more of participants and seeks wide-​reaching changes. As Cornelia Flora claims, food sovereignty mandates include a plethora of social justice movements “From the Zapatistas to the women’s movement.”83 Including such a wide array of issues under the umbrella of food sovereignty often make it difficult to determine exactly what specific changes need to be

81 

Werkheiser and Noll, “From Food Justice to a Tool of the Status Quo.” “Declaration of Nyéléni,” Forum for a New World Governance, 2007, http://​www.world-​ governance.org/​article72.html?lang=en. 83  Cornelia Butler Flora, “Schanbacher, William D: The Politics of Food: The Global Conflict between Food Security and Food Sovereignty,” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 24, no. 5 (June 2010): 545. 82 

Local Food Movements    131 made to the existing food structure beyond its dismantling. However, these issues may be inevitable, as culture, personal identity, and food practices are intertwined. For this reason, it is difficult if not impossible to separate food issues from wider social justice issues.84 Nevertheless, while these restructurings may be necessary, such sweeping changes could be difficult to bring about, as food systems, trade policy, food-​related practices, and various political structures are complicated. For example, the process of changing certification practices, such as those aimed at ensuring that food production is more environmentally friendly or sustainable, is often arduous and time-​consuming. These changes coupled with the lofty goal of bringing about “new social relations free of oppression and inequality between men and women, peoples, racial groups, social classes and generations” would be even more difficult to achieve. This is especially the case when CF focuses on creating new structures rather than adopting SF’s strategy of working to bring about change from within institutions. Thus, these wide-​ranging goals coupled with CF’s incompatibility with existing political structures limits the effectiveness of these initiatives to bring about change on the large scale. As CF sub-​movements primarily focus on bringing about just structures at the level of communities, one might think that this problem can be avoided, as change at the local level could eventually impact larger structures. However, to the extent that CF is right about the co-​constituted nature of community and individual identity with food practices, and the concomitant importance of those practices for those communities and individuals, CF’s proposed changes face a sharp hurdle in convincing communities that are not already practicing the goals of food sovereignty to change. As Derrick Jensen says, “If your experience—​far deeper than belief or perception—​is that your food comes from the grocery store (and your water from the tap), from the economic system, from the social system we call civilization, it is to this you will pledge back your life. . . . You will defend this social system to your very death.”85 The same energy that motivates Amerindians along the Columbia River to defend the salmon may motivate their neighbors to defend the industrial agriculture poisoning the river, absent a difficult change to the latter’s community and individual food practices.

Conclusion Local food movements have increasingly become a part of urban and suburban landscapes since at least the mid-​twentieth century and greatly impacted how we produce, process, and consume food today. Organic certification programs, the farm-​to-​table movement, and an increase in urban agriculture hubs are just some of the changes that

84  85 

Werkheiser and Noll, “From Food Justice to a Tool of the Status Quo.” Derrick Jensen, Endgame, vol. 2: Resistance (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2006).

132    Samantha Noll and Ian Werkheiser we have seen to US food systems within the last twenty years. However, all local food movements are not the same. “Local food” should be understood as an umbrella term that encompasses a wide range of social and political initiatives. In this essay, we provided a general analysis of local food movements, specifically separating this complex phenomenon into three distinct sub-​movements. Additionally, we have highlighted how different conceptions of food and people, and the different values of locality and strategies that follow from these conceptions for these sub-​movements. These definitions along with various commitments often determine whether the sub-​movements are compatible with existing political structures and thus their overall impact on both domestic and international food systems. Our hope was not to conclusively argue for one sub-​movement over another, but rather to help readers better understand local food as a whole and illustrate the individual sub-​movements’ strengths and weaknesses. This understanding is important if participants in the broader local food movement are to work together across sub-​movements without, on the one hand, obscuring differences that might lead to confusion, wasted energy, or conflict, or, on the other hand, missing similarities and shared goals that can be pursued in cooperation. None of the sub-​ movements within the sprawling local food movement are going away anytime soon. It is imperative for anyone passionate about food systems, their community, and eating to better understand the unique commitments and concepts employed by other people who share their passions.

Acknowledgments This essay draws on and expands some of the ideas in Ian Werkheiser and Samantha Noll, “From Food Justice to a Tool of the Status Quo: Three Sub-​Movements within Local Food,” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 27, no. 2 (2014): 201–​210.

Bibliography Agyeman, Julian, and Jesse McEntee. “Moving the Field of Food Justice Forward through the Lens of Urban Political Ecology.” Geography Compass 8, no. 3 (2014): 211–​220. Anderson, Judith V., Deborah I. Bybee, Randi M. Brown, Donna F. McLean, Erika M. Garcia, M. Lynn Breer, and Barbara A. Schillo. “5 a Day Fruit and Vegetable Intervention Improves Consumption in a Low Income Population.” Journal of the American Dietetic Association 101, no. 2 (2001): 195–​202. Cannuscio, Carolyn C., Eve E. Weiss, and David A. Asch. “The Contribution of Urban Foodways to Health Disparities.” Journal of Urban Health 87, no. 3 (2010): 381–​393. “Chef ’s Weigh in on Farm to Table.” Fine Dining Lovers, July 21, 2014. https://​www.finedininglovers.com/​stories/​farm-​to-​table-​chefs-​roundup/​. Dahlberg, Kenneth. “Regenerative Food Systems:  Broadening the Scope and Agenda of Sustainability.” In Food for the Future: Conditions and Contradictions of Sustainability, edited by Patricia Allen, 75‒103. New York: Wiley, 1993.

Local Food Movements    133 “Declaration of Nyéléni.” Forum for a New World Governance, 2007. http://​www.world-​ governance.org/​article72.html?lang=en. DeLind, Laura B. “Are Local Food and the Local Food Movement Taking Us Where We Want to Go? Or Are We Hitching Our Wagons to the Wrong Stars?” Agriculture and Human Values 28, no. 2 (2010): 273–​283. —​—​—​. “Place, Work, and Civic Agriculture: Common Fields for Cultivation.” Agriculture and Human Values 19, no. 3 (2002): 227−224. DeLind, Laura B., and Jim Bingen. “Place and Civic Culture:  Re-​Thinking the Context for Local Agriculture.” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 21, no. 2 (January 2007): 127–​151. Desmarais, Annette Aurélie. “The Power of Peasants: Reflections on the Meanings of La Vía Campesina.” Journal of Rural Studies 24, no. 2 (2008): 138–​149. Donohue, Kathleen G. Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Idea of the Consumer. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. Dupuis, E. Melanie, and David Goodman. “Should We Go ‘Home’ to Eat?: Toward a Reflexive Politics of Localism.” Journal of Rural Studies 21, no. 3 (2005): 359–​371. Dworkin, Ronald. “Do Liberty and Equality Conflict?” In Living as Equals, edited by Paul Barker, 39‒59. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Escobar, Arturo. Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995. “Farmers Market Growth: 1992‒2012.” United States Department of Agriculture, 2012. https://​ www.ams.usda.gov/​?template=templates&leftnav=wholesaleandfarmersmarkets&page=wf mfarmersmarketgrowth&description=farmers%20market%20growth. Flora, Cornelia Butler. “Schanbacher, William D: The Politics of Food: The Global Conflict between Food Security and Food Sovereignty.” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 24, no. 5 (June 2010): 545–​547. Gaus, Gerald, Shane Courtland, and David Schmidtz. “Liberalism.” Stanford University, 1996. http://​plato.stanford.edu/​entries/​liberalism/​. Glaeser, Edward L. Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier. New York: Penguin Press, 2011. Guthman, Julie. Agrarian Dreams: The Paradox of Organic Farming in California. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004. —​—​—​. “Bringing Good Food to Others:  Investigating the Subjects of Alternative Food Practice.” Cultural Geographies 15, no. 4 (January 2008): 431–​447. Harper, Alethea, Annie Shattuck, Eric Holt-​Gimenez, Alison Alkon, and Frances Lambick. Food Policy Councils: Lessons Learned. Oakland, CA: Food First, 2009. “History of Organic Farming in the United States—​SARE.” Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education, 2012. http://​www.sare.org/​learning-​center/​bulletins/​transitioning-​to-​ organic-​production/​text-​version/​history-​of-​organic-​farming-​in-​the-​united-​states. Jenson, Derrick. Endgame, vol. 2: Resistance. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2006. —​—​—​. “Forget Shorter Showers: Why Personal Change Does Not Equal Political Change.” In The Derrick Jensen Reader: Writings on Environmental Revolution, edited by K. Lierre, 421–425. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2012. Kingsolver, Barbara, Camille Kingsolver, and Scott Hopp. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. New York: Harper, 2008. Kymlicka, Will. “Liberal Individualism and Liberal Neutrality.” Ethics 99, no. 4 (1989): 883–​905.

134    Samantha Noll and Ian Werkheiser Lambert, Lori. “Salmon and Contamination in the Columbia River.” Enduring Legacies: Native Case Studies. Olympia, WA:  Evergreen State College, 2008. https://​www.evergreen.edu/​ tribal/​docs/​salmon and contamination oct 2009.doc. Levkoe, Charles Zalman. “Towards a Transformative Food Politics.” Local Environment 16, no. 7 (2011): 687–​705. Lyson, Thomas A. Civic Agriculture:  Reconnecting Farm, Food, and Community. Medford, MA: Tufts University Press, 2004. McClintock, Nathan. “Radical, Reformist, and Garden-​ Variety Neoliberal:  Coming to Terms with Urban Agriculture’s Contradictions.” Local Environment 19, no. 2 (October 2013): 147–​171. McCormack, Lacey Arneson, Melissa Nelson Laska, Nicole I. Larson, and Mary Story. “Review of the Nutritional Implications of Farmers’ Markets and Community Gardens: A Call for Evaluation and Research Efforts.” Journal of the American Dietetic Association 110, no. 3 (2010): 399–​408. Michael, Mark. “Liberalism, Environmentalism, and the Principle of Neutrality.” Public Affairs Quarterly 14, no. 1 (2000): 39‒56. Morland, Kimberly, Steve Wing, Ana Diez Roux, and Charles Poole. “Neighborhood Characteristics Associated with the Location of Food Stores and Food Service Places.” American Journal of Preventive Medicine 22, no. 1 (2002): 23–​29. Mount, Phil. “Growing Local Food: Scale and Local Food Systems Governance.” Agriculture and Human Values 29, no. 1 (2011): 107–​121. Murdock, Murdock, and Samantha Noll. “Beyond Access: Integrating Food Security and Food Sovereignty Models for Justice,” in Know Your Food: Food Ethics and Innovation, edited by Helena Rocklinsberg and Per Sandin, 325–​332. Wageningen, The Netherlands: Wageningen Academic Publishers, 2015. Navin, Mark C. “Local Food and International Ethics.” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 27, no. 3 (2014): 349–​368. Noll, Samantha. “Liberalism and the Two Directions of the Local Food Movement.” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 27, no. 2 (2013): 211–​224. O’Neill, Catherine. “Variable Justice:  Environmental Standards, Contaminated Fish, and ‘Acceptable’ Risk to Native Peoples.” Stanford Environmental Law Journal 19, no. 3 (2000): 6–119. Petrini, Carlo. Slow Food: The Case for Taste. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Pimbert, Michel. Toward Food Sovereignty. London: National Resources Group, 2008. Pollan, Michael. A Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. New York: Penguin Press, 2009. Rawls, John, and Erin Kelly. Justice as Fairness:  A Restatement. Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 2001. Rosenberg, Charles. No Other Gods:  On Science and American Social Thought. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. Sandel, Michael J. Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1982. Schanbacher, William D. Politics of Food: The Global Conflict between Food Security and Food Sovereignty. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2010. Shiva, Vandana. Stolen Harvest:  The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2000. Singer, Peter, and Jim Mason. The Ethics of What We Eat:  Why Our Food Choices Matter. Kutztown, PA: Rodale Books, 2007.

Local Food Movements    135 Thompson, Paul B. From Field to Fork: Food Ethics for Everyone. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. “Trade Reforms and Food Security.” Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 2003, 28. http://​www.fao.org/​3/​a-​y4671e/​y4671e00.htm. Turner, Nancy J., and Katherine L. Turner. “‘Where Our Women Used to Get the Food’: Cumulative Effects and Loss of Ethnobotanical Knowledge and Practice.” Botany 86, no. 2 (2008): 103–​115. Vandermeer, John H., and Ivette Perfecto. Breakfast of Biodiversity: The Political Ecology of Rain Forest Destruction. Oakland, CA: Food First Books, 2005. Werkheiser, Ian. “Food Sovereignty, Health Sovereignty, and Self-​Organised Community Viability.” Interdisciplinary Environmental Review 15, no. 2/​3 (2014): 134–146. —​—​—​. “Individual and Community Identity in Food Sovereignty: The Possibilities and Pitfalls of Translating a Rural Social Movement.” In Routledge Handbook on Food Ethics, edited by M. Rawlinson. New York: Routledge, 2017. Werkheiser, Ian, and Samantha Noll. “From Food Justice to a Tool of the Status Quo: Three Sub-​Movements within Local Food.” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 27, no. 2 (2014): 201–​210. Whittman, Hannah, Annette Desmarais, and Nette Wiebe. Food Sovereignty:  Reconnecting Food, Nature and Community. Oakland, CA: Food First Books, 2010. Wolin, Sheldon S. Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006.

Pa rt  I I

ANIMALS

chapter 7

C oncerning  C at t l e Behavioral and Neuroscientific Evidence for Pain, Desire, and Self-​Consciousness Gary Comstock

Should people in developed countries eat beef under normal conditions, that is, the ordinary circumstances of everyday life when one is not in jeopardy of starvation? I am not concerned here with the morality of killing and eating an animal if a hiker gets lost in the woods and believes she must eat meat to survive, nor of eating the carcasses of roadkill or animals that have died of old age. Nor will I address the morality of consuming animal byproducts such as milk and blood, foods that in principle can be obtained without killing.1 I mean only to address the issue of whether one should, as a matter of course, consume the flesh of cattle bred and raised for the purpose of being slaughtered. And the answer to that question will turn on the answer to an even more basic one: What is it like, if anything, to be a cow? What goes on in cattle’s minds, if they have minds? Do they actually experience the bovine contentment we so readily ascribe to them? If cattle can feel pain and pleasure, it will probably be wrong to cause them pain for anything less than a very good reason. However, if they are not sentient, if they are more like robots than like simple-​minded children, then we are probably free to serve ourselves. For, if we discount the pollution costs and other environmental side effects of the cattle industry, beef lovers may maximize value when they enjoy steaks and hamburgers.2 Whether they do may depend upon whether cattle are sentient. 1 

For evidence that dairy products are not obtained without killing, see Varner, “What’s Wrong with Animal By-​Products?” 2  The argument against meat-​eating on environmental grounds is a formidable one and not only because of the well-​known devastating effects of razing rainforests to create pastures. The atmospheric contributions to climate change of methane-​producing cattle raised in industrialized agricultural systems are similarly profound. Raising cattle contributes twice as many greenhouse gases as raising pigs, and thirteen times as many gases as raising vegetable protein sources (Hamerschlag, Meat Eater’s Guide to Climate Change + Health).

140   Gary Comstock In addition to being sentient, do cattle have conscious desires? If there are things the animals want to do in the future, if they consciously care about satisfying their desires, then it is probably wrong to cut their lives short to get their meat. For even if a cow on pasture is conscious only of wanting to prolong her afternoon of reverie, our ending her life harms her by leaving her desires unsatisfied.3 On the other hand, if she lacks conscious desires, then we may not be able to harm her in this way. In the case that a cow has no preferences the satisfaction of which we frustrate by killing her, then we may be permitted to raise cattle for meat if we provide humane conditions, pleasant hours of (apparent) bovine “contentment,” followed by swift painless slaughter. So it matters, too, whether cattle turn out to have conscious desires, a future of their own, as it were. In this essay, I review what is known and not known about cognition in the large domesticated ungulate, Bos taurus, the mammal whose flesh is consumed in the greatest proportions in the United States.4 I argue that the evidence shows cattle experience pain and desire but not self-​consciousness.

Introduction To answer the question whether we are justified in rearing and consuming cattle requires that we examine factual evidence and normative claims. Start with some facts. Humans have killed and eaten nonhuman mammals for more than a million years.5 Apart from the diets prescribed by certain religions (e.g., Jainism, Mahayana Buddhism, some forms of Hinduism), virtually all of the world’s cuisines include red meat as a central element. And, as defenders of meat-​eating are quick to point out, Homo sapiens is an omnivore; our teeth evolved to tear into animal flesh and our digestive systems can derive from it essential nutritional ingredients. Historically speaking, billions of humans have killed and eaten multiple billions of other mammals, a trend that shows little sign of abating. In the United States, a typical consumer ingests on average a dozen cows during one’s lifetime. Given the historical prominence and cultural ubiquity of carnivory, the burden of proof has long been on those morally opposed to eating beef. This brings us to normative claims. Those who oppose cattle slaughter on moral grounds tend to provide either utilitarian or rights-​based arguments. Utilitarians, notably Peter Singer, object to the pain and deprivation caused sentient animals by the practices of modern production agriculture.6 For Singer, the pain caused animals is

3 

While the word “cattle” refers to male and female animals, I occasionally follow colloquial usage and use cow, which technically refers only to females, as a substitute for cattle. I allow the context to indicate my meaning. 4  Davis and Lin, “Factors Affecting U.S. Pork Consumption.” 5  Domínguez-​Rodrigo et al., “Earliest Porotic Hyperostosis on a 1.5-​Million-​Year-​Old Hominin, Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania.” 6 Singer, Practical Ethics.

Concerning Cattle   141 not justified by the pleasures humans derive from meat-​eating. Rights theorists, pre-​ eminently Tom Regan, reject utilitarianism on the grounds that the theory allows the violation of an animal’s rights if the pleasures humans get from the violation outweigh the animals’ pains. For Regan, we should not accept a theory that allows us to maximize the good of humans on the backs of animals.7 Regan notes that utilitarians cannot object to the killing and eating of animals if the animals have a pleasant life, a quick painless death, and quickly are replaced with new animals like them. He insists, to the contrary, that it is wrong to kill animals no matter how humanely raised and dispatched. The reason is that their lives have inherent value, value derived from the fact that animals are, like us, subjects of a life. They have conscious memories, goals, desires, interests, families, and purposes of their own. For animal rights theorists, death harms animals. Except in the rare instance when a human must kill an animal to save their own life, it is wrong to kill animals. Singer’s and Regan’s views have been developed and adapted by themselves and others.8 Their views have also been the subject of important criticisms.9 In this essay, I do not assess the strengths and weaknesses of these arguments but take up instead a question critics on all sides must face: Are individuals of any nonhuman mammalian species capable of suffering pain, being subjects of a life, or having self-​consciousness? When they answer this question, utilitarians argue that all mammals are sentient and rights theorists argue that all mammals are subjective creatures and members of social communities. Thinkers in both traditions rely on the following analogical argument to support their views.10 I know that I feel pain and I am the subject of my life, and I believe that other humans also feel pain and are the subjects of their lives. While I cannot get inside others’ heads or objectively measure their psychological capacities, I witness various kinds of powerful evidence that supports my belief. Behavioral evidence: when others are wounded, their bodies writhe in pain in a way analogous to the way my body writhes in pain. They wince, cry out, and withdraw the injured limb, just as I do. Physiological evidence: when others get scared their eyes get big, they breathe heavily, and they get quiet, just as I do. Anatomical evidence: in school I learn that when children are hugged and kissed, chemicals flood their brains and their neural systems are activated in the same way that my neural system is activated by physical affection. Furthermore, I have no reasons to think that others’ neuroanatomies are relevantly different from mine. By analogy, therefore, if certain kinds of stimuli cause not only physical changes but also specific feelings in me, those same kinds of physical changes caused by the same stimuli in others probably cause the same feelings in others, too.

7 Regan, The Case for Animal Rights.

8 Rachels, Created from Animals; Dombrowski, Babies and Beasts; Varner, In Nature’s Interests?; McMahan, The Ethics of Killing; Steiner, Animals and the Moral Community; Rowlands, Animal Rights. 9  McCloskey, “Moral Rights and Animals”; Frey, Interests and Rights; Cohen, “The Case for the Use of Animals in Biomedical Research”; Carruthers, The Animals Issue; Cockburn, “Human Beings and Giant Squids.” 10  Perrett, “The Analogical Argument for Animal Pain.”

142   Gary Comstock Utilitarians and rights theorists apply the argument by analogy for the existence of other human minds to other mammalian species. There is behavioral evidence: I see a calf being branded with a hot iron. I know that stimulus would cause me to yell and withdraw in pain and fear, and I see the calf bawling and kicking in evident pain and fear. There is physiological evidence: the same sort of odors from burning hair and the appearance of red, inflamed tissue at the injury site in cattle and humans. In addition, there is anatomical evidence: nociceptors in the skin and neural pathways to pain centers in the brain are active in both humans and cattle. So, argue animal defenders, we have strong reasons to think calves actually are in pain when their behavioral repertoire shows pain. The similarities in physiology and neuroanatomy between the human and the calf is simply too great to think otherwise. So goes the analogical argument.11 What are the ethical implications of the analogical argument? That depends on whether one is a utilitarian or rights theorist. For utilitarians, if cattle feel pain (and pleasure) their experiences detract (and add) value to the world, and so their experiences must be taken into account in all calculations of utility. However, if cattle are not sentient—​in spite of all appearances—​their lives will have no traction with utilitarians. For rights theorists, if cattle have sentience and prospective beliefs and conscious desires—​interests they want to satisfy as ongoing subjects of a life—​their rights to life and liberty must be protected. However, if cattle lack interests and do not have things they want to do, perhaps because they lack language or a theory of mind or self-​consciousness, then they lack the psychological capacities arguably necessary to have rights. In that case, animal rights theorists would be wrong to assert, as they do, that a cow has a right to life equal to a human’s right to life. Let me insert a parenthetical remark here in the interest of clarity. While some animal rights theorists, such as Tom Regan, insist that an animal’s right to x is equal in strength to a human right to x, they typically do not claim that animals have the same rights as humans. If Kylee has a right to life, for example, she has a negative right against others that they not kill her as a means to their ends. The scope and strength of this right is the same, at least in Regan’s view, whether the rights holder is a calf or a toddler. However, having a right to life does not imply that one has other rights, such as the right to own property or to vote. One can have a right to life without having any other rights. Furthermore, Regan is clear that in cases when we must choose between honoring an ordinary human’s or an ordinary mammal’s right to life, we ought, all else equal, to honor the human’s right because the harm that death is to an ordinary healthy human is incomparably worse than the harm death is to an ordinary healthy animal. In sum, the question of animal cognition is central to food ethics because the strongest moral arguments against including beef in one’s diet—​setting aside, again, arguments based on environmental considerations—​depend crucially on empirical claims about animal psychology.12 This concludes our brief survey of some of the central normative issues relevant to moral vegetarianism. I turn now to the three psychological 11 Singer, Practical Ethics. 12 

While cattle, pigs, goats, and sheep are all used extensively in food production, I focus here on cows, calves, steers, and bulls because cattle are typically thought to be less intelligent than, for example, hogs.

Concerning Cattle   143 properties most commonly invoked to attack or defend the morality of slaughtering cattle: pain, desire, and self-​consciousness.

Pain In this section, I argue that cattle are sentient. In the first section, I survey the behavioral evidence for thinking that cattle have pleasant and unpleasant phenomenally conscious experiences. In the second section, I describe an important objection, that cattle might have pain information without the actual feelings of pain. In the third section, I rebut this objection by showing that cattle have the same neuroanatomical network that processes the emotions of pain as we do. I conclude that the analogical argument for thinking that cattle feel pain in much the way we do is as strong as philosophical arguments tend to get.

Behavioral Evidence for Pain It is not easy to get a rancher, veterinarian, or a scientist who works with cattle to say the animals cannot feel pain.13 The reason for the overwhelming convergence of opinion has to do with the strength of an argument from analogy. When cattle are hurt, the animals act in the same way we act when we are hurt. It seems contrary to common sense to say the cows are merely acting as if they are in pain. But what does it mean to be in pain? According to one widely accepted account, human pain is an emotional response to noxious stimuli. When our sensory receptors and nervous systems are disturbed, a negative response ensues. This response inevitably includes a feeling. Pain hurts. Indeed, we might wonder what someone means if they refer to pain that does not hurt. The feeling of pain can go away, and sometimes analgesics and anesthetics can relieve it. When we cut a finger or get a headache, our normal activities are interrupted, we grimace, focus on the injury, and try to protect it from further damage. When pain is caused by a physical insult, nociceptors in the skin transmit rapid danger signals up through the central nervous system to the hypothalamic-​pituitary-​adrenocortical axis, a part of the brain activated by stress.14 This axis works in concert with higher brain regions, notably the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), to generate pain-​control responses that are sent back down to one’s muscles through the spinal cord.15 If an animal’s intelligence matters in food ethics, as it does, then the case against eating beef would appear to be more difficult to establish than the case against eating pork. 13 Rollin, The Unheeded Cry; Grandin and Johnson, Animals Make Us Human. 14  15 

Manteuffel, Puppe, and Schön, “Vocalization of Farm Animals as a Measure of Welfare.” Purves et al., Neuroscience.

144   Gary Comstock Cows exhibit pain behaviors. Month-​old calves bawl when separated from their mothers, kick at cowboys trying to brand them, and lick injured areas after being castrated. Incisions become inflamed, plasma cortisol concentrations increase, and heart rates accelerate.16 Cattle subjected to noxious stimuli try to avoid those stimuli in the future, just as humans do. Cattle in pain eat less, engage in fewer social interactions, blast distress calls, just as humans do. Their respiratory and immune systems respond with quickened breathing, cardiovascular change, inflammation, and release of cortisol, just as in humans. Is there, then, any reason to doubt that cattle are sentient? Ranchers, veterinarians, and animal scientists, as I  say, have no doubts. As the Colorado State University animal science professor Temple Grandin asserts, vocalizations in a slaughterhouse are expressions of real distress. As a reason for her claim, she notes that animals make these sounds after aversive events, “such as electric prodding, slipping on the stunning box floor, missed captive bolt stuns, or excessive pressure exerted on the animal’s body by a restraining device powered by pneumatic cylinders.”17 Expert observers, such as Grandin, know pain when they see it. So confident are they in their ability to recognize distress that they have developed objective assessments to grade it. To communicate a steer’s pain after castration, experts devised a four-​point scale: 0, for no signs of pain; 1, for flinching; 2, for kicking with the rear legs; and 3, for defensive struggling motions of the whole body. Seeing calves in pain that exceeds a 3 rating, trained assessors have quickly decided to end experiments ahead of time.18 For example, castration is usually accomplished with a single conventional ring. However, when an experimenter began placing three rings on calves, the animals displayed such agony that the protocol was stopped immediately on humane grounds.19 The observers did not have to debate whether the calves were in “real” pain. Experts skilled in evaluating cattle health apparently have no difficulty seeing an animal’s pain.20 Nevertheless, experts can be fooled, and we must consider that possibility in this case.

16 

Bateson, “Assessment of Pain in Animals.” Grandin, “The Feasibility of Using Vocalization Scoring as an Indicator of Poor Welfare during Cattle Slaughter.” 18  However, assessments of the degree to which cattle feel pain varies among veterinarians between younger and older practitioners (Thomsen et al., “Scandinavian Bovine Practitioners’ Attitudes to the Use of Analgesics in Cattle”) and, perhaps, between men and women (Huxley and Whay, “Current Attitudes of Cattle Practitioners to Pain and the Use of Analgesics in Cattle,” and Raekallio et al., “Pain Alleviation in Animals”—​but cf. Thomsen et al., “Scandinavian Bovine Practitioners’ Attitudes to the Use of Analgesics in Cattle”). 19  Becker et al., “Acute and Chronic Pain in Calves after Different Methods of Rubber-​Ring Castration.” 20  Jamieson, “Science, Knowledge, and Animal Minds.” 17 

Concerning Cattle   145

Objection: Cattle Have Injury Information but Not Pain, and So the Behavioral Evidence Is Inconclusive The behavioral evidence, as strong as it is, does not prove that cattle are feeling pain any more than your behavior would prove that you are in pain. For I could misinterpret your actions as genuine suffering when you are actually feigning pain, and observers could be seeing an animal react to information about noxious stimuli even as the animal is paying those stimuli no mind. Across the animal kingdom, entire phyla of species engage in pain-​like motions but do not, as far as we know, feel anything. Descartes—​ or at least some of Descartes’s followers—​famously held that since nonhuman animals lack language, they cannot feel pain, either.21 Without buying into the general Cartesian skepticism about mammals, we must acknowledge that in many species withdrawal movements are initiated by simple systems of ganglia, systems that almost certainly do not give rise to pain. For example, Gary Varner describes decapitated cockroaches that withdraw their limbs when suspended above an electrified saline bath.22 There is little sense in attributing pain to headless arthropods because the emotional component of pain only arises after bottom-​up neural signals are processed by top-​down brain centers. The higher centers include those noted above, the DLPFC and ACC. If a decapitated roach retained these or analogous structures in their bodies, say in their thoraxes, there might be some reason to wonder whether the headless roach felt pain. However, as invertebrates lack the so-​called higher centers even with their heads intact, there is little anatomical basis to attribute sentiency to roaches. Perhaps all nonhuman animals have “pain” experiences that are, for all purposes of moral evaluation, essentially nonconscious.23 On this view, cattle would be in the curious position of exhibiting pain behaviors without ever actually being in the kind of pain that matters. One might be persuaded to think of cattle pain behaviors as false indicators if cattle lacked the higher parts of the brain responsible for signaling pain back downstream to the muscles. In that case, a calf ’s bawling when branded with a hot iron would not indicate a feeling anything like what we would feel were we branded with a hot iron. But is this a plausible picture? To answer the question it will help to understand how humans process pain and to compare the results with what happens in calves.24 21  MacPhail thinks language is necessary for true consciousness (MacPhail, The Evolution of Consciousness). Donald Davidson and the early Peter Carruthers argue in a similar vein but none of these authors thinks a lack of language or thought entails a lack of sentience. 22 Varner, In Nature’s Interests? 23  Carruthers, “Brute Experience.” 24  Although one might be skeptical about the relevance of scientific evidence. Thomas Nagel argues that objective third-​person empirical investigations cannot inform us about what it is like to have the subjective perspective of a member of another species (Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”). I am not convinced. There is no good reason not to think that if the firing of certain neural networks in humans causes certain kinds of feelings in humans that the firing of those same neural networks in other species, if they have the networks, causes the same feelings in other species (cf. Allen 1995).

146   Gary Comstock

Response: Cattle Have Neuroanatomical Structures for Pain After an injury to our toe, pain signals are sent from nociceptors in the skin through ascending pathways to the spinal cord and, again, up into the cortex. It is important that the cortex is involved, and we know that it is involved for two reasons. First, functional magnetic resonance studies show increased cortical activation when subjects report being in pain. Second, clinical studies show that pain can be reduced by lesions to relevant cortical areas.25 Neurally, humans have two distinct pain pathways. The first, so-​called lateral, pain pathway rises through the spinothalamic tract to the periaqueductal grey matter (PAG), thalamus, and the caudal part of the parieto-​insular cortex. The lateral pathway provides us with information about the injury, telling us where the damage is (e.g., the big toe) and how severe (e.g., on a scale from 1 to 10).26 Activation of this pathway can produce involuntary groans of misery without, as we shall see, causing the subject to report being in pain. The second medial, pathway provides the emotional component of pain. It circumvents the PAG and connects to the brainstem reticular formation, amygdala, and cerebellum, before continuing on to the thalamus and up to the DLPFC and ACC. Activation of these structures supports the unpleasant feeling, the “ouchiness” of pain.27 Scientists think part of the explanation for this fact is that the medial pathway has more opiate receptors than the lateral pathway.28 In any case, the two pathways explain the existence of an odd phenomenon, “asymbolic” pain. On occasion, persons suffering wounds report that they think they should be in pain because they know they are hurt but, curiously, they are not in pain. In asymbolic pain, the parieto-​insular cortex is actively receiving injury information but the DLPFC and ACC are dormant. While we do not fully understand the syndrome, it may be that lesions to these patients’ higher brain structures interfere either with upstream activation of the DLPFC or ACC activation by the limbic system, or disrupt downstream signals from the sensory cortices to the muscles. It is worth examining asymbolic pain in more detail because it bears on the skeptical argument that a calf ’s bawling might show that the animal has information about an injury without having any actual pain. The first reported case of asymbolic pain was a patient who had received lesions to her posterior insula. She showed no signs

25 

Craig, “Mapping Pain in the Brain.” For the curious, the median weight of the adult cattle brain is around 450 grams. For purposes of comparison, the adult human brain is around 1,400g; a two-​year-​old human around 1,100g. Sperm whale = 7,800g; elephant = 4,700g; gorilla = 500g; chimp = 420g; pig = 180g; sheep = 140g; rhesus monkey = 90g; dog = 72g; cat = 30g; and rat = 2g (Chudler, “Brain Facts and Figures”). 27  Craig, “Mapping Pain in the Brain.” 28  Talbot et al., “Multiple Representations of Pain in Human Cerebral Cortex”; Jones et al., “Localization of Responses to Pain in Human Cerebral Cortex.” 26 

Concerning Cattle   147 of withdrawal from or emotional response to stimuli that would throw most of us into agony. By her own report, she claimed to be in pain but did not mind it.29 How should we understand this woman’s mental condition, a condition of which there are now many reported instances? The explanation comes from seeing that the lateral and medial pathways are dissociable. The lateral pathway only tells us where and how severe is the damage. Absent the contributions of the medial pathway, the information does not hurt; it is not accompanied by unpleasant movements or aversive responses. The independence of these two structures makes it possible for patients to report unpleasant sensations emanating from the point of damage while insisting that they feel no need to do anything about it. Further evidence for this theory is found in the fact that morphine works on the medial pathway by blocking its multiple opiate receptors but it does not affect the lateral pathway with its meager number of opiate receptors.30 Could all cattle pain be asymbolic? Certainly, especially if it turns out that cattle have the lateral pathway without the medial pathway. Or if, less plausibly, cattle have both pathways, but somehow the medial pathway never came online in evolutionary history. Or, even less plausibly, if the medial pathway came online in evolutionary history but then was rendered inoperable in all cattle, perhaps as a side effect of selective breeding. If any of these conditions obtained, cattle would receive injury information but not experience the accompanying objectionable feelings.31 Under these assumptions, questionable as they may be on scientific grounds, the following conclusion is possible. Cattle can react to pain information by withdrawing the injured area and wincing or engaging in typical pain behaviors—​cattle can look to trained observers as if they are in pain—​without ever having the negative feelings of pain. This account of cattle psychology is increasingly untenable, for we now know that cattle have all of the physiological parts, chemical functions, and neural connections necessary to support pain. In cattle, as in humans, nociceptors respond to injuries by generating chemical signals that are relayed through a central nervous system upward to the thalamus and on to the parieto-​insular cortex. In cattle, as in humans, the insula is tucked beneath the temporal and frontal lobes bilaterally, a location that creates the so-​ called sylvian fissure in each species.32 The functional role of these structures in cattle, as in humans, is affected by analgesics. Pain in all tested mammalian species is reduced by lesions to the animal’s parieto-​insular cortex, just as it is in humans.33 While such studies have not been conducted on cattle, there is little reason to believe that lesioning the 29  Berthier, Starkstein, and Leiguarda, “Asymbolia for Pain”; Klein, “What Pain Asymbolia Really Shows.” 30  Shriver, “Minding Mammals.” 31  For an assessment of the likelihood of pain in species other than mammals, see Smith and Boyd, Lives in the Balance; Varner, In Nature’s Interests? 32  Schmidt et al., “A Study of the Comparative Anatomy of the Brain of Domestic Ruminants Using Magnetic Resonance Imaging.” 33  Coffeen et al., “Insular Cortex Lesion Diminishes Neuropathic and Inflammatory Pain-​Like Behaviours.”

148   Gary Comstock relevant regions in these animals would not reduce their pain.34 Furthermore, in cattle, as in humans, the medial pathway ends in the prefrontal cortex, which performs executive functions necessary to focus attention on the pain and initiate motor actions to try to inhibit it.35 The modern synthesis of evolutionary biology and genetics seems to have settled the matter of the homology of pain in humans and other mammals.36 At the end of the nineteenth century, at least one comparative anatomist was already wondering why we should deny that homologous structures between cattle and humans do not have analogous functions in both species.37 Now, at the beginning of the twenty-​first century, the burden of proof is on those who would treat cattle as if their expressions of pain are mere pretense. An objective review of cattle behavior and neuroanatomy makes it nigh impossible to believe the deflationary account of cattle pain.38 Indeed, whereas some neo-​ Cartesians argue that animals lack language because they lack concepts and the animals lacking language must also lack morally relevant interests,39 none of them think these alleged facts render the animals insensate. And, on virtually every ethical theory, it is wrong to cause an innocent creature pain unnecessarily simply because pain is a bad thing. Since cows are sentient and since causing pain for no good reason is wrong, slaughtering cows for meat would be permissible only if they were raised

34 

Grandin, “Distress in Animals: Is It Fear, Pain or Physical Stress?”

35 Ibid.

36  Some question the capacity of fish to have pain but there is not much debate about birds. Some now claim that pain is found in the other two non-​mammalian classes of phylum chordata, amphibians and reptiles, but these are all questions for another day. 37  In 1898, Wallace Wood obtained thirty American cattle brains from a New York slaughterhouse. Following the “dry-​process” method pioneered by his teacher, Broca, he prepared them for study, noting that if the ox brain is prepared with medicated glycerin and the human brain with dilute nitric acid, the resulting “two pieces of brain sculpture [are] of about equal size” (italics in original). After his study, he noted that two structures “the ligula and the fusiformis in Homo and Bos taurus are unmistakable homologues.” His questions are instructive. “That such homologies are found need not indeed be a cause of surprise. Hath not an ox eyes and ears? Hath he not a nose and tongue and a manus and pes? Why, then, should he not have an eye gyrus, an ear gyrus, a paracentral lobule, and a Rolandic vortex? That these lines of psychical action will be found upon the bovine brain and every gyrus and lobule identified it appears to me one may reasonably presuppose.” Wood closes by asking, “Do not homologous forms imply analogous functions?” 38  Examination of bovine neural structures also reveals important differences in morphology and cytoarchitecture of parts of the brain shared by mammalian species. For example, one study of the insula shows “substantial variability in shape, extent, and gyral and sulcal patterns, as well as differences in laminar organization, cellular specialization, and structural association with the claustrum. Our observations reveal that the insular cortex is extremely variable among mammals” (Butti and Hof, “The Insular Cortex”). While we should not neglect the fact of these differences, neither should we overestimate their importance. Given the different evolutionary histories of the species, we should expect some differences. The question relevant to ethics is whether the anatomical differences are so great that cattle do not feel pain. The evidence thus far does not support such a claim. 39  Davidson, “Rational Animals”; Frey, Interests and Rights; Carruthers, The Animals Issue.

Concerning Cattle   149 and killed with no unnecessary pain. This, argue utilitarians such as Singer, is practically impossible under conditions of modern industrial agriculture. Therefore, we should not eat beef. The question of cattle pain is central to utilitarian arguments. However, utilitarians cannot object to the raising and killing of cattle painlessly so long as each animal is replaced with another one like it. Rights theorists, on the other hand, object to painless killing and replacement by arguing that cattle consciously want to do things, have intrinsic value and, for this reason, it is seriously wrong to kill them. For killing a cow deprives her of the ability to satisfy desires she might otherwise have satisfied. Or so goes a version of the animal rights argument, an argument that appeals not to cows’ feelings but rather to their conscious desires as subjects of a life.

Desire Behavioral Evidence for Desire But are cattle subjects of a life with conscious desires? On one account, conscious desires are conations of which one is potentially aware, urges that I feel, preferences on which I can concentrate my attention. Conations are mental states in which I look forward in time, anticipate what is to come, and try to organize my future activities so that coming events will go my way. We may call this sort of future an autobiographical future because it looks forward in time to events that are desirable to me in part because of my past decisions. I want to write an article because the circumstances of my life have shaped me into the kind of character who enjoys publishing and publishing brings resources I can set aside for retirement in order to take leisurely walks on the beach with my granddaughter. Such “egoistic” desires are part of my autobiographical future because I desire them, care about them, and initiate actions to bring them into being. There are other events in my future. Someday I suppose I will lose all my hair. However, that event, like my death, is not part of my autobiographical future because I do not care about it, do not desire it and will not initiate actions to bring it about. Do cattle have conscious desires? Conscious desires are conations about one’s autobiographical future. They require that one be able to foresee future possible states, have preferences about which states they wish to try to bring about, and form hypotheses about how best to maximize the chances of achieving the goal. Conscious desires require that one be able rationally to form and choose among hypotheses and to change strategies midstream when the hypothesis one has chosen is not working. This kind of activity demonstrates practical rationality because when one acts on one’s first hypothesis only to find that this hypothesis is not going to succeed in reaching the goal, it is practical rationality that allows one to abandon the first strategy and switch to another. According to one common view, having egoistic ends, multiple strategies for trying to achieve

150   Gary Comstock them, and means-​ends practical reasoning gives one a special moral status, including a basic right to life. However, this claim requires further argument. On one of the most compelling accounts of moral rights, rights are tied to preference interests. To have a right to X you must have a valid preference interest in X. To have a right to a sum of money as your inheritance, for example, you must have a valid interest in that sum of money. There are various ways to establish such an interest, for example, by showing us your mother’s will in which she gives you the money. So, a valid preference interest in an inheritance may come along for free with the fact that you are the offspring of the person who left you the money. But neither my cat nor I have a right to your inheritance unless I can prove that I (or my cat) has some valid interest in it. To have a right to life on this account requires that one be able to take an interest in things in one’s future. One displays such a preference interest, or conscious desire, when one strives to adjust one’s behavior in light of new knowledge. Using working memory, a consciously desiring individual can revise their beliefs about which of several hypotheses is most likely to help them reach their goal and, in light of past failures and novel circumstances, change hypotheses to maximize the chances of attaining the end. One way to test for preference interests is the reversal learning task. Here, subjects form hypotheses about which action will get them what they want, they assess their options with an eye on past performance, and adjust their actions in response to the consequences of prior actions. When five year-​olds, for example, first learn that choosing a green cup over a red cup will bring a reward, they must not only learn the correct pattern (green = reward and red = no reward). They must further figure out how to fix errors they make in discriminating between various shades of green cups (correct) and shades of red (incorrect). “Reversal” occurs in a subsequent trial when the green cup is no longer rewarded and children must learn to choose the red cup. If they change their behavior, they demonstrate the mental flexibility needed to be conscious of their desires. They have preference interests. Do cattle have preference interests? Everyday observation of the animals suggests a positive answer, and many controlled experiments confirm it. In one, for example, Holstein-​Friesian calves had to choose between a small bucket with a feed reward and a large bucket without feed. The speed at which they learned to choose the small bucket varied, but all learned to pass the initial discrimination test within two to five days. When the buckets were replaced with black and white plastic containers and the reward was associated with “white container” rather than “small bucket,” the calves were able to learn the new correct answer more quickly than on the first trial.40 In another experiment, Japanese Black cows learned in one day that a plastic washtub contained the feed reward, and they retained this knowledge for up to a year without reinforcement.41 In another experiment, fifteen five-​day-​old Holstein calves were presented with either a red or a white screen. If the animal touched the screen when 40 

Schaeffer and Sikes, “Discrimination Learning in Dairy Calves.” Hirata and Takeno, “Do Cattle (Bos taurus) Retain an Association of a Visual Cue with a Food Reward for a Year?” 41 

Concerning Cattle   151 the right color, say, white, was presented (a “go” response), they received a reward (milk). If they touched the screen when the wrong color (red) was presented, they heard a loud noise and received a timeout punishment lasting one minute. During the first teaching session, each animal would see twenty positive stimuli and two negative stimuli. The calves successfully learned to respond appropriately to the screens. Subsequent trials increased the difficulty of the task by presenting four positive and six negative stimuli. Of the eight calves raised socially, that is, with other calves and cows, seven animals were able to learn the correct responses after the stimuli were reversed and red was changed from the “stop” to the “go” color. However, only one of the seven calves reared without social contact was able to master reversal learning.42 I will return to this point shortly. In another study, fifteen-​month-​old heifers and cows old enough to have given birth were presented with two feeders placed at opposite sides of an experimental area. Only the left feeder contained food pellets, and animals were allowed only to approach one of the two feeders. After five days of ten-​minute trials conducted twice a day, 95% of the heifers had learned to select the left feeder, and 54% of the cows were making the correct choices. (As the data suggest, younger animals outperform older animals on learning, but the older animals, as we shall see, have better long-​term memory.) Similar results were obtained for reversal learning. When food was moved to the right bunker, 85% of the heifers were able to figure out the new location while only 31% of the cows were able to do so. However, six weeks later the experiment was repeated with somewhat surprising results. After more than a month of not being exposed to the experimental area, 77% of the cows remembered to select the left feeder, whereas only 46% of the calves remembered. As mentioned, calves are better at short-​term learning while mothers outperform them on long-​term memory.43 In both cases, however, the preference interests of cattle reach at least a short distance into the future. The animals have egoistic goals that involve acting on hypotheses that will require several dozen seconds to complete. The animals see a reward at time t1, let us say. They are conscious of the fact that they cannot achieve the reward now but must initiate some action in order to achieve it at some future moment, time t3, let us say. Next, they hypothesize that if they move their bodies in this rather than that direction, they will achieve their goal, get what they want, and wind up in front of the correct feeder, at time t3. So they decide now—​at time t2—​to act on the hypothesis. That their desire is conscious is shown by the fact that they deliberate about the means necessary to achieve their end. If cattle have egoistic interests the satisfaction of which requires deliberation about and the planning of one’s actions for the next short while, how far into the past might bovine memories extend? In one study, six heifers were trained to search for grain in mazes. After they had learned where the grain was stored, they were given three trials to see whether they could remember where to go. The animals could

42  43 

Daros et al., “Individual Housing Impairs Reversal Learning in Dairy Calves.” Kovalčik and Kovalčik, “Learning Ability and Memory Testing in Cattle of Different Ages.”

152   Gary Comstock remember the information for up to eight hours after the trial. Performance declined dramatically after twelve hours.44 Hold on, someone may object. The egoistic interests of persons extend years, even decades into the future. That is one reason, perhaps the main reason, that it is wrong to kill people, because there is so much value in their futures. To deprive me of my future removes a vast amount of good from the world, and, given the nuanced and sensitive nature of a typical adult’s interests, the good lost when an adult dies prematurely is deep, long-​lasting, and complex.45 On the other hand, the egoistic interests of cattle are by comparison shallow, short-​lived, and simple. The good lost when a cow is killed is not nuanced, complex, or significant. The conations of cattle have meager temporal extensions, reaching only a short distance into the future. A cow sees greener grass on the other side of the pasture, encounters a hedge trying to get to it, and figures out a way around it. She eats. End of story. Cattle, the critic might concede, can think about their own future—​there is a good meal in it if only I can get to it—​but this future is so immediate that the plans made to achieve it are easily replicable in “replacement” animals. When a twenty-​three-​year-​old woman makes plans to retire at forty-​five, the hypotheses, decisions, and resolutions required for her to achieve her goal make her life immensely valuable because the plans she has made are nuanced, sophisticated, and unique to her. It would be impossible to replicate them in a “replacement” twenty-​three year old woman. By comparison, the cow’s short future involves comparatively common plans that very likely could be recreated were a similar cow brought into existence. The difference in the quality of human and bovine lives, continues the critic, makes it possible to replace the cow after it is slaughtered. The response to this objection is known as the overlapping species argument; some humans only have short-​term, simple, common egoistic interests and, in this limited way, their lives are cow-​like. Nonetheless, it is seriously wrong to kill simple-​minded humans even if we could replace them. Consider Brooke Greenberg, the severely congenitally cognitively limited twenty-​year-​old woman, whose temporal horizon extended no further than a few seconds into the future.46 Even though her egoistic interests were no more sophisticated than those of cattle, we would not countenance the thought that we were free to kill her because her temporal horizons were brief and she was “replaceable.” According to the principle that we should respond to similar cases in similar ways, we should no more embrace the killing of cattle than we should approve the killing of Ms. Greenberg. But how do we know that cattle are conscious of their short-​term conations? How do we know they are aware of their desires for more succulent grass or less cloudy water?

44 

Bailey et al., “Characteristics of Spatial Memory in Cattle.” See Jeff McMahan’s idea that our lives have lesser or greater value based on where we are in the narrative arc of our lifetime and what McMahan calls our time-​relative interests, the strength of the psychological connections of our present selves to our earlier and future selves. McMahan, The Ethics of Killing. 46  Comstock, “Far-​Persons”; Comstock, “The Cattle in the Long Cedar Springs Draw.” 45 

Concerning Cattle   153 Challenges arise here on two fronts, empirical and philosophical. The empirical challenge is that desire in humans depends crucially on certain brain structures, so we will want to know whether cattle have these structures. Second, to have conscious desires one must have beliefs about how to attain those desires. Toddlers have unconscious desires, but they do not think about how to go about satisfying them; they act without thinking.47 The child has concepts, mental representations of, for example, the spoon it desires to grab, but it cannot consciously desire to grab the spoon until it has the building blocks of language—​words, grammatical constructions, and proto-​propositions—​ necessary to be aware of its beliefs. Do cattle have these linguistic building blocks, the internal words and proto-​propositions necessary to have conscious desires? The objection here is not that cattle cannot produce speech, which they cannot, but rather that they do not have the linguistic resources required for conscious desires.

Objection: Cattle Have Goal-​Directed Behavior but Not Conscious Desire, and So the Behavioral Evidence Is Inconclusive A skeptic may not be convinced a cow is aware of anything when it rejects the sour-​ tasting weed and turns to enjoy sweeter grass. They might hold, rather, that the animal is simply processing information about its body position, the olfactory and gustatory features of what is being ingested, and the direction of its eyes in relation to its goal. One need not deny that animals are capable of reversal learning to hold that animals lacking language perform movements in the same unfeeling way as robots. The view I have in mind denies that cows experience the discomfort of an overfull udder in anything like the way a human mother experiences discomfort from an overfull breast. The mistake, continues the objector, is one of confusing information and awareness. I will refer to this as the AIBO robot objection, taking the name from a mechanical dog manufactured by Sony beginning in 1999. After selling some 150,000 units, Sony admitted after fifteen years of sales that the useful life of the machines was over, and Sony stopped repairing them in March 2014.48 Meanwhile, owners had come to think of the dogs as real pets, with some adults thinking of the machines as their children. When the robots broke, owners mourned profoundly, as if they had lost family members. Bungen Oi, a Kofuku-​hi temple priest, conducted memorial services for the robots. More than a dozen owners attended.49 Now, if we know anything, it is that no AIBO had conations, despite what owners may have imagined. None of the machines wanted to get anything; none felt affection 47 Bermudez, Thinking without Words. 48  49 

“In Japan, Robot Dogs Are for Life—​and Death.” Tamblyn, “The AIBO Dog Is Dead and Japan Is in Mourning.”

154   Gary Comstock for their owners; none were conscious of what they wanted to happen in the next few dozen seconds. Information, no doubt, entered the AIBO’s central processing unit, but not through nociceptors, central nervous systems, prefrontal cortices, or medial or lateral pathways. Is a calf like an AIBO? Does it engage in movements so sophisticated that humans close to it are fooled into thinking, mistakenly, that the calf cares about its short-​term future? Skeptics who think cattle are not desiring creatures may cite two sources for their doubts. Let us examine these two objections in turn. First, skeptics may object on empirical grounds that cattle lack the higher brain structures and connections necessary for consciousness. The structures in question support the top-​down executive functions humans use consciously to process their desires. When we are thinking about how to get what we want from other people we take their perspective, simulate how they are thinking, and draw on our memories to plan our futures. This kind of cognitive work is focused on internal events in our psychology as opposed to external events in our environment, and it is supported by the same anatomical features that are active when we are resting. This is an intricate and complex set of interconnections, the so-​called default mode brain network,50 radiating from the midline of the frontal and parietal cortices out to lateral areas of the parietal and temporal lobes. If cattle lack the hardwiring that humans use for consciousness, says the critic, we should not be surprised when we fail to observe cattle exhibiting the behaviors these structures support in humans. The skeptic might also argue that cattle lack the kinds of neurons necessary for consciousness. According to one author, Von Economo Neurons (VENs), the so-​called spindle neurons, make us uniquely human. Moreover, as recently as 2005, we were being informed that VENs are not found in cattle, “not observed in any . . . other mammalian taxa, and their volume was correlated with brain volume residuals, a measure of encephalization [intelligence].”51 If an animal’s brain must have VENs to have consciousness, and if cattle lack VENs, then cattle must lack conscious desires. Second, skeptics may object on philosophical grounds that cattle lack conscious desires because they lack language. The argument goes like this. To have conscious desires one must have propositional attitudes, for being conscious of one’s desire for sweeter grass, say, requires that one be able to think, “I think I need to move across the pasture in order to find the more desirable patches.” To have propositional attitudes, one must have grammar; and to have grammar, one must have words. But cattle, lacking words and grammar, cannot form the thoughts, much less sentences, necessary to refer to themselves as “I.” Yes, they can vocalize a mental state that means “want sweeter grass,” but they are not conscious of the meaning of this vocalization. They cannot have the urge to vocalize the desire and decide, for example, not to vocalize it. Without the requisite linguistic resources, animals may engage in sophisticated movements that look

50  51 

Buckner, Andrews-​Hanna, and Schacter, “The Brain’s Default Network.” Roth and Dicke, “Evolution of the Brain and Intelligence.”

Concerning Cattle   155 like the expression of desires, but the appearance will be all illusion. Like AIBO, these animals do not consciously feel anything. Rather, their call expressions are always reliably evoked by the specific contexts. If they had language, they would be able to express beliefs and desires independently of the environmental context that causes them. So cattle vocalizations are not words and, without words, cattle cannot have propositional attitudes—​or conscious desires. Or so goes this particular skeptical argument. I turn now to my answers to these two objections.

Response: Cattle Have Neuroanatomical Structures for Conscious Desire, and So the Behavioral Evidence Is Supported by the Anatomical Evidence Neither of the skeptics’ arguments is persuasive. Let’s take them in reverse order. First, propositional attitudes are not necessary for conscious desires if children and neurally diverse adults who lack propositional attitudes have conscious desires, as they do. There is little doubt that toddlers and the radically congenitally cognitively limited consciously want to get things. We need not have a sophisticated cognitive or linguistic superstructure to have conations because even the radically cognitively limited can picture themselves a few minutes into the future getting what they seek.52 Since humans do not have to have propositional attitudes to have conscious desires, the fact that cattle lack propositional attitudes is no bar to their having conscious desires. Second, cattle have the parts of the prefrontal cortex—​the oribitofrontal, insula, and anterior cingulate cortex—​that sponsor feelings of desire, pleasure, and reward in humans. They also have the relevant parts of the mesocorticolimbic system, centering on the amygdala, nucleus accumbens, and ventral pallidum.53 Just as it does in humans, the

52 

Blind movement becomes intentional behavior when an agent understands the movement as an attempt to connect two temporally discrete events; a concurrent recent desire (one that started within the last few seconds or minutes) and a proximal state of affairs in which the agent believes it will have satisfied that desire. When desires are for proximal objects not involving other minds, such as moving to that patch of grass to eat those shoots, the agent may need only understand its role as protagonist in a story that connects events separated by as little as milliseconds, and perhaps, at most, a few hours. When desires are for distant subject objects, such as being satisfied with the reputation one has made with one’s peers in the grass-​choosing skill department, the agent must understand a story that connects events that may be months apart and which involve integrating into one’s own narrative the intentional behaviors and perspectives of other agents. If the temporoparietal juncture (TPJ) is required to have multi-​day and multi-​perspective desires (Lerner et al., “Topographic Mapping of a Hierarchy of Temporal Receptive Windows Using a Narrated Story”; Mantini et al., “Interspecies Activity Correlations Reveal Functional Correspondence between Monkey and Human Brain Areas”), and if a network of structures is necessary to process sentences about minds consisting of the medial prefrontal cortex, the right TPJ, and the precuneus (Knobe, “Do Corporations Have Minds?”), then cattle, lacking this hardware, almost surely do not have such sophisticated desires. And, given the lack of any behavioral evidence that cattle have a theory of mind, there is little reason to hedge one’s bets; cattle lack self-​consciousness. 53  Berridge and Kringelbach, “Pleasure Systems in the Brain.”

156   Gary Comstock central nucleus of the amygdala in cattle supports the critical transition from states of knowledge (e.g., the heifer who knows through Pavlovian conditioning that the reward button is the button on the left) to states of action (e.g., the heifer searches for the button on the left).54 Finally, in 2015, VENs were observed not only in cattle crown gyri but were also seen “ubiquitously distributed throughout the frontopolar cortex.”55 To come to function properly in humans, the structures and networks just mentioned must be exercised in social contexts starting at a young age. This is also true of cows. Like a child raised without social contact, a veal calf tethered in a solitary crate exhibits less behavioral flexibility than one housed with conspecifics. The solitary calf ’s inability to adapt to novel environmental challenges is correlated with, if not caused by, its inability to learn to play with other calves. Without social stimulation, the calf does not develop the intricate cortical connections characteristic of the PFC of socially raised animals.56 In sum, a review of the available empirical evidence supports the claim that cattle have emotions, conscious desires, and egoistic plans for the short-​term future. This is the empirical basis for the claim that cattle are subjects-​of-​a-​life. We have reviewed pain and desire, two of the three bovine psychological capacities invoked by those opposed to beef eating. I turn now to a third capacity.

Self-​C onsciousness Some argue animals cannot have a right to life because they lack self-​consciousness. This view cannot be correct, however, if younger children and elderly patients with dementia who lack self-​consciousness have a right to life, as they do. That said, and in the interest of having a full picture of bovine consciousness, we may still wonder whether cattle are aware of themselves. To be conscious of oneself is to think about oneself as a character in a story, a temporal being with a past, present, and future. It is to have what Varner calls a biographical sense of self, to understand as a narrative the actions and consequences one initiates.57 To understand one’s life as a narrative is to understand events unfolding in time as a plot in which various characters feel various emotions. To have an understanding of narrative, one must understand sentences. To understand sentences, one must understand grammar; and to understand grammar, one must understand words. Do cows have words? The answer may not be as obvious as one might first think. 54 

Mahler and Berridge, “Which Cue to ‘Want?’” Raghanti et al., “Von Economo Neurons.” 56  Gaillard et al., “Social Housing Improves Dairy Calves’ Performance in Two Cognitive Tests.” 57 Varner, Personhood, Ethics, and Animal Cognition: Situating Animals in Hare’s Two-​Level Utilitarianism; Comstock, “Far-​Persons.” 55 

Concerning Cattle   157

Behavioral Evidence for Self-​Consciousness As hard as it is to find a rancher, veterinarian, or scientist who denies cattle feel pain, it is harder yet to find one who affirms that cattle are conscious of themselves as characters in stories. A reason for this convergence of opinion has to do with the strength of another argument from analogy. So far as we know, cattle do not think about the story of their lives, think about themselves as characters engaged in dramas with other players, or recognize themselves in mirrors. Cattle do not understand that conspecifics may have false beliefs, do not work to bring their actions into line with their moral ideals, and do not feel a sense of injustice when they are treated differently from others. There is, in short, no end to the list of behavioral evidence that is lacking for bovine self-​consciousness. Cattle pass no known tests for self-​consciousness. On one theory of cognitive development, consciousness of one’s own mind cannot arise apart from consciousness of the minds of others. According to this view, a theory of mind—​understanding others’ behaviors as motivated by beliefs and desires—​is necessary to understand oneself as having a mind.58 To see that my own behavior is motivated by my beliefs and desires, goes the argument, I need help. I need to see that others’ minds work like mine. If this view is correct, and the evidence suggests that it is, when a toddler begins to understand that others do not see the world from the toddler’s perspective, the toddler is on the brink of understanding herself or himself as a distinct continuing psychological entity.59 If theory of mind is necessary for self-​consciousness, individuals lacking theory of mind cannot be self-​conscious. One of the most widely used tests for theory of mind is the false beliefs test.60 The motivation for the test is that attributing false beliefs to others requires that one know that others use beliefs to represent the state of the world and that others make mistakes and misrepresent the state of the world.61 In the false beliefs test, a child is introduced to Sally, a hand puppet. The child and Sally watch as the experimenter hides a piece of candy under Sally’s stool. After Sally exits the scene, the experimenter moves the candy to a new location under Sally’s bed. The experimenter asks the child where Sally will look for the candy when Sally returns. If the child correctly says under the stool, the child passes the test. The child understands that the world looks different from Sally’s perspective and, consequently, that Sally’s beliefs differ from the child’s beliefs. If the child predicts, mistakenly, that Sally will look under the bed for the candy, the child fails the test. Cattle, lacking the ability to understand human language, cannot pass the Sally test because they cannot take it. Were an experimenter to ask a bull “Where will Sally 58 Carruthers, The Opacity of Mind.

59  Carruthers, “Knowledge of Our Own Thoughts Is Just as Interpretive as Knowledge of the Thoughts of Others.” 60  Suddendorf and Whiten, “Mental Evolution and Development.” 61  Bennett, “Some Remarks about Concepts”; Dennett, “Beliefs about Beliefs”; Harman, “Studying the Chimpanzee’s Theory of Mind.”

158   Gary Comstock look?” we would question the experimenter’s intelligence, not the bull’s. However, cattle are intelligent enough to recognize faces and, as we have seen, they possess a low-​ level proto-​language with which they can form and manipulate hypotheses about, and so become conscious of, their desires. Cattle could not pass a false beliefs test even if we knew how to pose it in their “language” because their proto-​language possesses only simple tools (words) without the higher level tools (propositions and narratives) needed to understand plot twists and character perspectives. The reason bulls cannot pass the false beliefs test is not because they cannot speak, although they cannot, but because they cannot take Sally’s point of view. We have previously examined the idea of cattle language, but it will illuminate cow consciousness to revisit the topic. Suppose cattle had their own language. Could they then pass a false beliefs test given in their language? The question is not nonsensical because cattle have their own “language.” Bovine language does not include grammar or propositions, much less narratives, but it does include concepts and words as cattle vocalizations convey information to conspecifics. Calves as young as three weeks old distinguish their mother’s call from others’ calls.62 They spend more time near speakers playing recordings of their mother’s call than recordings of strange mothers’ calls.63 Cattle have concepts, mental representations used to discriminate individuals (mother, friendly human) from others (strange cows, unfriendly humans).64 Cattle can even tell the difference between photographs of familiar and unfamiliar conspecifics. Apparently, cattle treat 2D images in the same way that we do, interpreting the images as representations of actual, “3D,” individuals.65 Cattle use vocalizations to express dominance status, sex, and receptivity to reproduction.66 But are the sounds “words,” concepts used by a sender to represent and convey information to a receiver? Or are the noises produced simple reflexes, noises caused in a reliable and predictable way by specific environmental stimuli? For cattle do not recombine their sounds into novel strings, do not recursively embed their sounds in other sounds, and do not use auditory representations in different contexts or manipulate these symbols in flexible ways. Nor are the vocalizations “headed,” a technical term from linguistics meaning that the same sound can have different referents in different contexts. For example, the word “city” uttered in one context can generate in the heads of all those who hear it a mental picture of Chicago. However, the same sound can, in a different context, direct the eyes of all who hear it to the point on a map marked Ames. In other contexts, it will evoke a historical idea discussed in eighteenth-​century political philosophy and in another context refer to a vague geographical space demarked from 62 

We do not know whether cows can similarly recognize their calves’ vocalizations. Barfield, Tang-​ Martinez, and Trainer, “Domestic Calves (Bos taurus) Recognize Their Own Mothers by Auditory Cues.” 63 Ibid. 64  de Passillé et al., “Dairy Calves’ Discrimination of People Based on Previous Handling.” 65  Coulon et al., “Cattle Discriminate between Familiar and Unfamiliar Conspecifics by Using Only Head Visual Cues.” 66  Kiley, “The Vocalizations of Ungulates, Their Causation and Function”; Watts and Stookey, “Vocal Behaviour in Cattle”; Schön et al., “Altered Vocalization Rate during the Estrous Cycle in Dairy Cattle.”

Concerning Cattle   159 countryside. There are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of things city can mean. Everything depends on its context of usage, its header. Cattle vocalizations, for all we know, are not headed, but not all of our words are headed, either. I say “male,” and nothing else, to indicate my gender, and “hey!” to assert my sense of my dominance or status. While these vocalizations lack heading, there is no impediment to understanding them as words. A cow’s “moo” often begins with a harmonic chord, proceeds through a phase of stochastic distortion, reaches a crescendo of emphasis, and resolves harmonically.67 The animal can use it in various ways to inform or motivate others. They do not as far as we know, use it to refer to objects outside the immediate context of utterance or combine it with others sounds grammatically. Cows do not string noises together to express propositional attitudes.68 However, it is not necessary to have grammar, much less narrative, in order to have words. So, while cattle lack the linguistic tools needed to understand the false beliefs test, and their vocalizations are not headed, these facts do not mean they lack words. We have been assuming that having narrative and a theory of mind is necessary for self-​consciousness. Suppose that this view is wrong; one can be self-​conscious without understanding that others have minds. In that case, other empirical tests would gain in value as instruments to help determine whether a given animal was self-​conscious. In the mark test, for example, an experimenter surreptitiously places a red smudge on an animal’s forehead. If a primate looking in the mirror moves its hand to the mark when looking in the mirror, this behavior suggests the animal understands the face in the mirror is its face.69 To the best of my knowledge, cattle have not been tested in this way, perhaps because experts hold little hope that cattle would pass it. For only a handful of the most intelligent social mammals have passed it, notably chimpanzees,70 bonobos,71 capuchin monkeys,72 one—​of three tested—​Asian elephant,73 bottlenose dolphins,74 killer whales,75 and orangutans.76 Results with gorillas, surprisingly, are inconclusive.77 67  Schön et al., “Altered Vocalization Rate during the Estrous Cycle in Dairy Cattle”; Padilla de la Torre et al., “Acoustic Analysis of Cattle (Bos taurus) Mother–​Offspring Contact Calls from a Source–​ Filter Theory Perspective.” 68  Watts and Stookey, “Vocal Behaviour in Cattle.” 69  Gallup, “Chimpanzees: Self-​Recognition.” 70  Ibid., 1970; Suarez and Gallup, “Self-​Recognition in Chimpanzees and Orangutans, but Not Gorillas”; de Veer et al., “An 8-​Year Longitudinal Study of Mirror Self-​Recognition in Chimpanzees (Pan Troglodytes).” 71  Westergaard and Hyatt, “The Responses of Bonobos (Pan Paniscus) to Their Mirror Images.” 72  Roma et al., “Mark Tests for Mirror Self-​Recognition in Capuchin Monkeys (Cebus Apella) Trained to Touch Marks.” 73  Plotnik, Waal, and Reiss, “Self-​Recognition in an Asian Elephant.” 74  Reiss and Marino, “Mirror Self-​Recognition in the Bottlenose Dolphin.” 75  Delfour and Marten, “Mirror Image Processing in Three Marine Mammal Species.” 76  Gallup and Povinelli, “Mirror, Mirror on the Wall Which Is the Most Heuristic Theory of Them All? A Response to Mitchell.” 77  Suarez and Gallup, “Self-​Recognition in Chimpanzees and Orangutans, but Not Gorillas.” However, for positive results, see Posada and Colell, “Another Gorilla (Gorilla Gorilla Gorilla) Recognizes Himself in a Mirror”; Allen and Schwartz, “Mirror Self-​Recognition in a Gorilla (Gorilla Gorilla Gorilla).”

160   Gary Comstock If cattle, as I have argued, do not possess a biographical sense of self, what evidence is there that they are self-​aware in the sense required to have conscious desires? For what is required to have conscious desires is that the animal be able not only to look forward in time to the reception of a reward but that they be able to learn how to master tasks to achieve those rewards and take satisfaction in their ability to do so. Heifers evidently are not able to recognize that they are characters in stories, the sorts of individuals who can learn from their mistakes. However, heifers apparently recognize when they have learned something quickly or well, and they seem capable of taking pleasure in this knowledge. If so, cattle are self-​aware even if not self-​conscious. Evidence for cattle self-​ awareness comes from a 2004 study at Cambridge 78 University. Researchers taught one-​year-​old heifers in a control group to hit a button to let them into a long chute at the end of which was a reward. The animals learned which button to push, but they had no control over when the gate would open to let them get the reward. Their behavior as they moved down the chute showed they were interested in the reward but their movements were otherwise unremarkable. In a second experimental group, other heifers were put through the same training procedure but were allowed to exercise control over when the gate would open. As the animal got faster and faster at mastering novel test patterns and hit the right button more and more quickly, the gate would open more and more quickly. Each of the animals in the second group, therefore, had control over its learning environment, control animals in the first group lacked. When heifers are in control of their environment and can see that improving their performance on a learning task leads to faster access to the reward, they respond with signs of pleasure. They are more agitated as they go through the gate; their hearts beat faster, they jump or kick, buck and gallop.79 They seem to take pleasure in their agency, by which I mean their ability to exercise control over their environment by concentrating their attention on their cognitive performance. I make this controversial suggestion for the following reason. The behavioral evidence suggests that the relevant animals not only understood but also took pride in their causal role in a very short story. The short story concerned their being an effective agent able narratively to connect three temporally-​indexed and self-​referenced events: near-​term past events (a standing desire to eat), with proximal behavioral events in current working memory (my having hit the right button even quicker than I have come to hit it in the past) and causal reasoning about the means necessary to achieve short-​term goals (I get to eat sooner as I get better at solving these puzzles). If I  am right, the work of the Cambridge researchers, Kristin Hagen and Donald Broom, suggests both that cows can look at least a few minutes into the past (e.g., comparing their earlier slow trials with their more recent fast trials) and a few dozen seconds into the future (e.g., getting down the race and into position in front of the feeder). This

78 

Hagen and Broom, “Emotional Reactions to Learning in Cattle.”

79 Ibid.

Concerning Cattle   161 is my basis for the claim that cows are self-​aware. Cows can exercise practical reason (e.g., solve the novel challenge about the means required to achieve their ends in reversal trials), can hypothesize about ways to achieve their goals (try this new combination of responses), and can understand that their decisions have causal influence on their environment. If so, then heifers can: (1) differentiate occasions when their choices are causally efficacious and when they are not, (2) be aware of the fact that sometimes they are in control of their circumstances and sometimes they are not, and (3) take pleasure in their role in mastering a new task. Given the Hagen and Broom results, one might be tempted to think cows are conscious of themselves. But this would be a mistake. The results just reported show that calves are self-​aware, meaning that they have proprioceptive abilities to understand where their bodies are, how long it is taking them to finish a task, to exercise control over their movements, and to understand themselves as causes of effects. Cattle can be aware of themselves as agents in narrative chains linking a short-​term past and future, although they would not, of course, be able to express themselves using such concepts. These claims are also true of normally developing twelve-​month-​old human infants. Like cattle, one-​year-​old babies are not self-​conscious, do not recognize themselves in a mirror, and do not have a biographical sense of self. However, they are self-​aware. They understand where their bodies are, what their limbs are doing, which of several hypotheses is the most likely to get the result they desire, and how to right and spatially reorient themselves if acting on their favorite hypothesis ends in failure.

Objection: Absence of Evidence Is Not Evidence of Absence Critics may respond as follows. The fact that we have not yet found reason to believe cattle are self-​conscious does not mean that cattle are not self-​conscious. The mirror test, continues the critic, should not be trusted because it requires a powerful visual sense, which cattle lack. A “smell” test, as Marc Bekoff has suggested, might be a more reliable measure for species with strong olfactory senses. If cattle use scent to recognize themselves, the fact that they fail the mirror test might tell us nothing about their self-​ consciousness. Failing to find evidence for some trait is not finding evidence that the trait is not there.

Response: Promises of Discoveries Are Not Discoveries of Promise The fact that we can imagine alternative universes in which cattle—​with behaviors no different from the behaviors we see in our cattle—​nonetheless are having internal

162   Gary Comstock monologues with themselves, is not a reason to think that such cattle exist. Nor is it a reason to think we simply have failed to discover the truth about bovine psychology. For there is a simpler explanation, an explanation that coheres with the performance of most animals on the mark test. Animals of most species observed fail the mark test, including Hamadryas baboons,80 sea lions,81 giant pandas,82 gibbons,83 capuchin monkeys,84 stump-​tailed macaques,85 and crab-​eating macaques.86 Pigs can use mirrors to locate food hidden behind objects, but no record exists of a pig passing the mark test.87 It is rare for animals other than the Great Apes to exhibit self-​consciousness, a result one might predict on evolutionary grounds insofar as self-​consciousness seems to be a trait that has appeared only recently. Skepticism, it bears saying, works both ways. If one responds to the lack of evidence for some trait by insisting that the trait may still be there, one must also grant that passing a particular test does not prove the existence of the trait. A particular behavior, such as moving one’s hand to a mark on one’s face, does not prove one possesses the concept of self. If the events causing the movement are not integrated with other experiences of the individual, if the movement is in fact nothing more than the result of a computer program responding to selected stimuli by putting into motion a series of mechanical gears, then the signs that purportedly indicate self-​consciousness may be simple illusions. For example, Qbo, a robot, has “learned” to pass the mirror test, but we should not attribute self-​consciousness to Qbo.88 For Qbo does not have a biographical sense of self, no unified memories or anticipations. Skepticism of the “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” sort is certainly valuable, but skepticism must be kept within its proper bounds. If not regulated, skeptical slogans can become excuses for anti-​scientific attitudes and, eventually, blindness to evidence. There is to date no evidence for thinking cattle are conscious of themselves. Unless the experts are wildly wrong in reading the behavioral evidence, cattle cannot be harmed by—​because they cannot have—​thoughts about what is happening to their mental lives or their reputations in the herd. However, the ethical implications of this fact are negligible for, as the argument from overlapping species shows, it is not necessary to have self-​consciousness to have a moral right to life.

80 

Ma et al., “Giant Pandas Failed to Show Mirror Self-​Recognition.” Hill et al., “Can Sea Lions’ (Zalophus Californianus) Use Mirrors to Locate an Object?” 82  Ma et al., “Giant Pandas Failed to Show Mirror Self-​Recognition.” 83  Hyatt, “Responses of Gibbons (Hylobates Lar) to Their Mirror Images.” 84  Roma et al., “Mark Tests for Mirror Self-​Recognition in Capuchin Monkeys (Cebus Apella) Trained to Touch Marks.” 85 Ibid. 86  Ma et al., “Giant Pandas Failed to Show Mirror Self-​Recognition.” 87  Broom, Sena, and Moynihan, “Pigs Learn What a Mirror Image Represents and Use It to Obtain Information.” 88  Ackerman, “Qbo Robot Passes Mirror Test, Is Therefore Self-​Aware.” 81 

Concerning Cattle   163

Conclusion What are the practical implications of cattle cognition for food ethics? The analogical argument for thinking cattle are sentient is virtually unassailable given the behavioral and anatomical evidence. Cattle have behaviors, neuroanatomical physiologies, and brain structures similar to those of humans. In each species, the structures likely evolved in response to similar environmental challenges. In individuals of both species, the same foreign chemicals introduced into wounds cause nociception, which in turn cause physiological changes in the dorsal column of the neural system, the medial and lateral pathways, culminating in increased blood flow in the anterior cingulate cortex. In cattle, the sensory pathway leads upstream to the same caudal part of the ACC as it does in humans. In cattle as in humans, the ACC is in turn networked downstream to subcortical regions, including the amygdala, cerebellum, and striatum, that play a role in pain responses. As do humans, cattle learn from past pain experiences to avoid situations that may lead to pain. These facts may not convince the most hardened neo-​Cartesian critic or the died-​in-​the-​wool skeptic-​about-​other-​minds but, to the rest of us, there is little reason to deny that cattle not only get information about pain but also that they mind it. The question of whether cattle feel pain is as settled as such philosophical questions are likely to get. Furthermore, we are on solid ground in taking cattle pains into account in the moral calculus. Agricultural practices involving cattle should avoid causing them unnecessary pain and frustration. The case that cattle are subjects of a life with conscious desires is similarly strong. It is not true that cattle live entirely “in the moment.” To the contrary, as we have seen, cattle have objectives they want to achieve in the near-​term. They have memories stretching back dozens of minutes if not hours. They have futures of their own and can try different strategies to get what they want to get. Nor is it true that cattle have no cares about the future; they can egoistically desire to perform better than they have performed in the past on an upcoming challenge, such as getting quickly through a gate. Moreover, they can feel good or bad about their ability to learn new skills and overcome novel puzzles. Consequently, it is not true that cattle have no conscious desires that are frustrated when the animal is killed. Finally, the argument for thinking cattle have selves and are conscious of the selves of others is weak. Cattle very likely do not entertain propositional attitudes, have theory of mind, or experience self-​consciousness. If my reading of the empirical evidence is correct, the argument from species overlap becomes compelling. Since we would not kill for food human “far-​persons” (that is, sentient humans with desires who lack propositional attitudes, theory of mind, and self-​consciousness), justice demands that we not kill animals with similar mental states.89 Whether other kinds of animals, such as birds, fish, reptiles, and amphibians, have mental states similar to cows is not a matter we have space to explore here.90 89 

90 

Comstock, “Far-​Persons.” For this, see Varner, In Nature’s Interests?

164   Gary Comstock Perhaps it is too simple to say we should not eat beef, full stop. Given the variety of circumstances in which we find ourselves, other factors will have to be taken into account in an all things considered judgment about the matter. However, to the extent that one lives in a developed agricultural economy and takes facts and reasoned arguments seriously, the shoe is now firmly on the other foot. Eating beef requires a defense that either refutes the data and arguments presented here or gathers new data and arguments to undermine them. Cattle bring value into the world by acting on their desires. We deprive the world of value by killing these animals for their flesh. The arguments are simply too strong to continue to think otherwise.91

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It may be permissible to use animal by-​products obtained by means that do not cause pain or frustration, but current milk-​and egg-​production techniques do not satisfy these criteria. Novel agricultural biotechnologies may result in byproducts that are humanely obtained—​and even in in vitro meat—​but whether the new methods will be economically beneficial for today’s farmers is an open question.

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chapter 8

The New Hu nt e r and L o ca l  Fo od Charles List

Introduction There is a renewed interest in hunting for your own meat fueled in part by the local food and sustainable living movements. This is evident in a handful of recent books and magazine articles. These new hunters, as I shall call them, have in common the belief that hunting should be looked at as a way to improve the quality of one’s food by not relying on big industrial meat producers and the commitment to confront honestly the reality of killing and butchering animals for meat.1 Also, many of these hunters have come to the activity as adults, having never hunted before.2 And, something else that is new: lots of these books come fully loaded with recipes, tasting notes, and elaborate descriptions of feasts served using wild game. This is in marked contrast to more traditional hunting books, which are often more focused on the how-​to and equipment aspects of hunting. Of course, this is a generalization, but the aimed at audience for these new hunting books is not typically other hunters, but those already interested in sustainable living and local food. There is much of philosophical interest in this new hunting literature, especially the widely held belief that if you are going to eat meat, it is more ethical to hunt it yourself.3 1 

Lily Raff McCaulou, Call of the Mild: Learning to Hunt My Own Dinner (New York: Grand Central Pub., 2012). Perhaps the source of much of this new interest in hunting can be traced to Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (New York: Penguin Press, 2006). 2  See Georgia Pellegrini, Girl Hunter: Revolutionizing the Way We Eat, One Hunt at a Time (Boston, MA: Da Capo Lifelong, 2011). This is not true of all of the authors I will discuss. For example, Stephen Rinella has been hunting his whole life, but I include him in this category because his memoire is centrally about the food one obtains from hunting. Steven Rinella, Meat Eater: Adventures from the Life of an American Hunter (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2012). 3  The meaning of “more ethical” here will remain intuitive until the last section of the essay. These new hunters are not philosophers, so their uses of this term do not explicitly align with any one ethical theory.

The New Hunter and Local Food    171 Emma Marris in her Slate article on the phenomenon of the new hunter, “Hipsters Who Hunt: More Liberals are Shooting Their Supper,” expresses this belief as follows: “If you eat meat, eating animals you hunt yourself is a more ethical alternative than eating those from the current industrial agricultural system.”4 This places new hunters squarely in line with members of the locally sourced meat movement who also vehemently reject industrial agriculture. I am interested in the prospects for this union of hunters and locavores. There is a striking overlap in the arguments one finds recited by new hunters and those locavores committed to buying their meat from local producers who raise their animals in a sustainable and humane environment. But I also see problems on the horizon for this relationship, problems that may be surprising to both groups. In the following sections, I will first look critically at some reasons offered for the recent renewed interest in hunting, which are shared by advocates for buying meat and other food locally from known farmers and animal producers. These involve considerations of human health, animal suffering, and transparency or honesty of the process of obtaining meat.5 Second, I  will examine some reasons given for hunting for meat that contrast with and go beyond buying local meat. There is an emphasis among the new hunters on the ethical importance of actually killing and butchering animals oneself, the kind of gratitude and respect this entails, and the do-​it-​yourself virtue of self-​reliance, not typically available to meat buyers.6 Third, I will examine two philosophical criticisms local food rhetoric that also apply to sustenance hunting, that is, that they (1) remain merely personal ethical responses to food systems and (2) continue to endorse an ecologically uninformed concept of “nature” and “wildness.”7 Fourth, I will argue that to overcome these criticisms, new hunters must, as some already do, accept and become part of the broader community of ecologically motivated conservationists.

Hunting and Local Food The new hunters share with locavores a deep distrust of industrial food systems. They reject these systems regarding animal raising and processing because they find them

4  Emma Marris, “Hipsters Who Hunt: More Liberals Are Shooting Their Supper,” Slate, December 5, 2012, http://​www.slate.com/​articles/​health_​and_​science/​science/​2012/​12/​hunting_​by_​liberal_​urban_​ locavores_​is_​a_​trend_​good_​for_​the_​environment.html. 5  Hank Shaw, Hunt, Gather, Cook: Finding the Forgotten Feast (New York: Rodale, 2011), 196. Ronald Sandler identifies and examines many of these arguments in Food Ethics: The Basics (New York: Routledge, 2015). 6  Christie Aschwanden, “Ethical Eating: Why This Tree-​Hugging Former Vegetarian Is Learning to Hunt,” September 21, 2011, http://​www.lastwordonnothing.com/​2011/​09/​21/​ethical-​eating-​why-​this-​ tree-​hugging-​former-​vegetarian-​is-​learning-​to-​hunt/​. 7  I use this term “sustenance hunting” advisedly because it does not mark a kind of hunting but rather reflects a certain attitude and motive on the part of the hunter. See Charles List, “On the Moral Distinctiveness of Sport Hunting,” Environmental Ethics 26, no. 2 (2004): 155–​169.

172   Charles List unhealthy, cruel, intentionally opaque, and environmentally unsustainable. In this section, I will critically examine some of these reasons as well as the supposed ethical superiority sometimes claimed by the new hunters in this regard and conclude that those reasons often cited for obtaining meat from local sources as also good reasons for hunting. But hunting does not attain any superior ethical status on this score.

Humaneness and Suffering As mentioned, one belief shared by the new hunters and locavores is a disdain for standard meat production processes. There is no reason to detail the abundant problems with this system; that will surely be obvious to all reading this. From the hunter’s point of view, and, I think, that of the locavore, one main concern is the kind of life the animals have up to the point they are slaughtered. There is round condemnation of anonymous concentrated animal feeding operations and other confinement practices. In contrast, local meat producers often raise their animals in open, cage-​free environments. On some farms, you can go watch the operation if you please. So hunters and locavores are on the same page here. But, while we might readily agree that procuring meat from local trusted sources and hunting are more humane than the meat production industry, some of the new hunters claim their practice is more humane even than obtaining meat from local trusted sources. For example, one of the new hunters Tovar Cerulli says in The Mindful Carnivore: A Vegetarian’s Hunt for Sustenance: If humaneness was another of my measures, wouldn’t it make sense to shoot a deer who had lived a truly free life than to buy even the happiest, most local, backyard chicken? What meat could be more ethical than fifty or more pounds of venison resulting from a single, quick death?8

So for this past vegan but now “mindful carnivore,” it is even more ethical to eat the meat of deer with a “truly free life” than that of a free-​range chicken. For locavore meat consumers, the value of humaneness of the process is assured by their relationships with meat producers. Hunters, seeking the same humaneness, must hold themselves to this “measure,” as Cerulli says, and bear the responsibility when suffering is caused. So the standard of humaneness is endorsed by both local buyers and hunters, but responsibility for its maintenance shifts from the animal grower to the hunter. Does this measure of personal responsibility reveal a real rift between the ethics of the locavore meat shopper and the hunter? Is hunting on this score morally superior? There are two components of the measure of humaneness that are relevant:  the amount of suffering caused by the slaughter of the animal, whether by the hunter or the 8 

Tovar Cerulli, The Mindful Carnivore: A Vegetarian’s Hunt for Sustenance (New York: Pegasus Books, 2012), 72.

The New Hunter and Local Food    173 farmer, and humaneness of the circumstances under which the animal came to be available as meat. On the humaneness of the death, all hunters know the kill is not always as “clean” as we might hope. Often enough, birds are not dead after they are shot but must be killed by the hunter’s hand. Insofar as suffering can be quantified, the quick chicken slaughter at the hand of a skilled person may in these cases be more humane. Another new hunter, Georgia Pellegrini, in her book Girl Hunter worries about exactly this: “The worst moment in hunting is an imperfect shot. It is hard to prepare for the moment you are responsible for suffering.”9 Also, concerning the life circumstances under which animals come to be available, when Cerulli tags his deer as having a “truly free life,” I just have to wonder what this can possibly mean. It seems to me a tad naïve use the presumed freedom of wild animals as a justification for the uber-​ethicality of hunting. What must be at issue is the lack of confinement for many game animals. But, as we shall see, there are significant counterexamples: deer are often fenced out of areas, like backyard gardens, and they are managed in many other ways too, with the use of feeding plots, and testing for diseases. Above all, there are the constraints imposed by evolution. The ethical significance of this freedom will be examined in a latter section. It is pretty clear that both hunting for one’s meat and buying locally sourced meat are more humane than production of meat at the other extreme of this spectrum. That is not at issue. On the other hand, I am not at all sure that hunting is more humane than buying local meat. Leaving aside the philosophical and practical difficulties involved in quantifying individual suffering, even for humans, what would be needed is a way of measuring the suffering resulting from certain general husbandry practices (i.e., factory farming, local farming, and conscientious hunting).

Transparency Moving away from the animal’s suffering to more human concerns, transparency in food production means that you can see the whole process from planting to eating, or, in the case of meat, from birth to death, and from butcher to food. This, many believe, is ethically better than the standard more opaque alternatives of buying food from far away, transported long distances, to distribution centers and then grocery stores. It is better because, like transparency in other areas of human endeavor such as politics, you want to know whether you agree with the various processes and decisions made to make the product available: the conditions of the animals, pesticide use, the working conditions of laborers, the characters of the owners and producers. These and much more go into the epistemic value of transparency. Once we have this information we can, as we say, make more informed choices about our food, including whether to participate at all.

9 Pellegrini, Girl Hunter, 151.

174   Charles List However, transparency is a metaphor that contrasts with processes that are opaque or intentionally hidden. Transparency implies honesty: “Here’s what we do, you can watch the chickens being slaughtered if you want. You can even help out.” This metaphor is, of course, relative to how much we know and how much we want to know and its value is associated with our ability to make choices to participate or not. The value of transparency has markedly increased regarding food in the last fifty years or so; my mother definitely did not want to know where our food came from, it was enough to know it came from the store in cans or jars. Transparency meant that plastic wrap was better than butcher paper. The current demand for transparency of process does not guarantee the making of good choices, but it at least makes them possible. Hank Shaw, in Hunt, Gather, Cook: Finding the Forgotten Feast, says this: Hunting has given us a sense of self-​sufficiency, a sense of honesty, and clear-​eyed understanding of exactly where our meat comes from. No factory farms, no hormones, antibiotics, and, arguably, no cruelty. Every animal we kill had been living the life God intended until it met us that one fateful day.10

There is seemingly nothing more honest and transparent than shooting that fleeing grouse and then butchering it, cooking it, and eating it. The whole process is right there in front of you. But, is it really that transparent? There are some clouds on the horizon. For instance, if the bird happens to be a pheasant—​a favored first target for the nouveau hunter—​there is the very real possibility that the bird was stocked, especially in the East.11 For hunters who use a fishing rod, this is a much more likely possibility: each spring massive numbers of rainbow, brown, and brook trout are stocked to give anglers that “transparent” experience of eating, or at least catching and releasing, a trout; the same is true of salmon, maybe even more so.12 This opacity is matched in hunting by the dark origins of the tools of the trade, the shotguns, rifles, cartridges, and shells are impregnated with the politics of the companies that make them; hidden meanings are embedded in the camo and boots we wear. There is also a hidden aspect of the apparently transparent food we get from the farm down the road because the seeds or brood stock they use might be from far-​flung corners of the world and so might the equipment used to cultivate and process the food. Even given these clouds, we can surely agree that getting meat locally or hunting it yourself are more transparent than the often intentionally opaque processes of big food. If transparency is a value of the local food movement, it will also be a value of local

10 Rinella, Meat Eater, 196. 11 

Max Watman, Harvest: Field Notes from a Far-​Flung Pursuit of Real Food (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014). Watman first hunts pheasants on a trip to the Dakotas. 12  Paul Greenberg, Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food (New York: Penguin Press, 2010). See also Jim Lichatowich, Salmon, People, and Place: A Biologist’s Search for Salmon Recovery (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2013).

The New Hunter and Local Food    175 hunting. But it is hard on this score to agree that hunting is necessarily more transparent and honest than local meat buying, especially if one really wants to see and know how things are done down on the farm.

Looking Your Food in the Eyes In this section, I will examine some reasons given by the new hunters for their hunting that, unlike the humaneness and transparency measures examined in the previous section, do clearly go beyond those available to locavore meat eaters. Other standard arguments for hunting, such as control of certain animal populations, are less in evidence in the new hunter literature. The new hunter reasons that do go beyond the goods of humanely and transparently obtaining healthy meat and rather center, first, on the emotional experience of killing an animal and, second, the relationship to nature that eating wild game entails.

Responsibility, Killing, and Emotion Let’s look at the feeling often expressed by the new hunters that one needs to “look one’s meat in the eyes before it is really ok to eat it.” This surely sets the hunter off from the locavore meat buyer, unless one pulls a Michael Pollan and participates in the slaughter of one’s chosen pullet.13 Cerulli puts this experience like this: “If I was going to eat flesh foods, I needed to be brought face to face with living, breathing creatures, to look directly at them.”14 This ethical contrast elevates the value of hunting over local meat buying: they are saying if you are going to eat flesh foods, then it is more responsible to kill them yourself face to face. Now, of course, Cerulli is saying that this goes only for him, but it seems to be more general than this. For instance, Lily McCaulou puts this reason for hunting like this: As a lifelong meat eater, I feel a responsibility to see for myself that uncomfortable thing that has always been at the heart of a human diet, since long before meat animals were domesticated and their upbringing industrialized: death.15

This sense of responsibility is shared by all the new hunters.16 Pellegrini, the chef/​hunter, is centering the cross-​hairs of her rifle on a javelina: “ 13 Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma.

14 Cerulli, The Mindful Carnivore, 68. 15 McCaulou, Call of the Mild, 101.

16  See the previous quote from Hank Shaw. Max Watman says: “Perhaps the most natural and self-​evident way to get closer to the food you eat—​the meat you eat, anyway—​is to hunt it yourself ” (Watman, Harvest, 63).

176   Charles List I stare back through the scope of the rifle into its little black eyes and realize I’ve never stared my food in the face before.17

Emma Marris, in her Slate article argues that, as in the case of humaneness, hunting may have the moral high ground even when compared to local meat procurement: Instead of outsourcing their deaths to an underpaid slaughterhouse employee, you do it yourself, which seems somehow most honest. If you can’t pull the trigger, you had better start collecting tempeh recipes.18

Even if those local farm employees are not underpaid—​although they might disagree—​ the deaths are still outsourced in buying local. These comments clearly imply that hunting is even more honest than buying the happy backyard chicken. Why does do-​it-​yourself hunting get higher moral marks than even buying meat locally? What is it about “looking your food in the face before you kill and eat it” that discharges this felt responsibility? One answer concerns the felt need of many of these new hunters to nurture a deep and enduring gratitude for the food they eat. To non-​hunters this may seem strange if not bizarre, but many hunters, past and present, see the eating of the body of an animal as a ritual that reminds them of the importance of eating meat, something too often ignored. As Christie Aschwanden puts it: If I’m going to eat meat, I must be willing to kill it. The act of taking the life that feeds you instills a gratitude and a reverence for the animal—​something that’s missing from the slabs of meat sitting shrink-​wrapped in the grocery store cooler.19

This habituation of gratitude and respect is shared by many of the not-​so-​new hunters as well.20 Jon Jensen, in “The Virtues of Hunting,” argues that hunting has played an important role in human development because it “shaped attitudes of respect, humility, and gratitude.”21 This element of gratitude is expressed by Paul Shepard this way: “The kill is a gift. Its bestowal depends on the conduct of the hunters.”22 A gift is something to be grateful for, and one only gets a gift if one conducts oneself rightly (i.e., with respect). The experience of taking an animal by killing it is, for the new hunters, and many old ones as well, loaded with emotion. In the hunting literature, there are a lot of appeals

17 Pellegrini, Girl Hunter, 44. 18 

Marris, “Hipsters Who Hunt.” Aschwanden, “Ethical Eating.” 20  T. Kerasote, Bloodties: Nature, Culture, and the Hunt (New York: Random House, 1993). 21  J. Jensen, “The Virtues of Hunting,” Philosophy in the Contemporary World 8, no. 2 (Fall‒Winter 2001): 120. See also Charles List, Hunting, Fishing, and Environmental Virtue: Reconnecting Sportsmanship and Conservation (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2013). 22  Paul Shepard, “A Theory of the Value of Hunting,” Transactions of the North American Wildlife Conference, 1959, 509. 19 

The New Hunter and Local Food    177 to the “heart,” that classical target for the emotions.23 I myself distrust these emotional appeals, not because they are not genuine, but because they are not sufficient to fully ground the importance of hunting. Feelings of gratitude, respect, and remorse aimed at the heart are powerfully incited by looking one’s food in the eyes. But, as we shall see, the personal satisfactions of obtaining one’s own food, does little to address broader and more systemic ethical, political, and economic problems. In fact, emotional self-​ satisfaction may actually work against looking these social problems squarely in the eye. However, the emotional experience of killing, butchering, and eating an animal is certainly a feature that sets hunting apart from buying local meat, and therefore may be a reason for thinking that hunting is “more ethical.”

Engaging the Natural Cycle of Life and Death The kill is not only an emotional way of discharging one’s responsibility for the meat one eats; the new hunters claim it also enables an awareness of a wilder, more natural way of life, a way which exceeds that granted to even the locavore meat eater. Cerulli expresses this atavistic sentiment, when, after watching a video depicting an ancient form of hunting still practiced by some hunters, in which a large animal is chased on foot until it no longer can walk, then killed, he says this: In watching that extraordinary segment, I saw the hunt as natural. Despite the artifice of film editing, the piece expressed something elemental, something true. The man was undeniably a part of nature: an intelligent, highly developed predator, to be sure, but only one among many. The moment of the kill—​and the sorrowful respectful moments just after it—​made my heart ache.24

Cerulli links the extreme difficulty of this hunt with both its naturalness and the emotional pull inherent in it. Hunting is “a part of nature.” Pellegrini also gets this glimpse of a different more primitive kind of life after she stabs and kills a wild pig. When I pull back, and watch the river of blood come with me, it is quite simply all over. I have, for the first time, channeled the primitive woman, and for a few fleeting moments recognized what it was once like to be a human—​I recognize the casual way in which nature treats of life and death.25

23 

A. M. Jones, “Heart of the Hunt,” in On Killing: Meditations on the Chase, ed. Robert F. Jones (Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, 1997), 165–​174. T. Kerasote, Heart of Home (New York: Villard, 1997); D. Petersen, Heartsblood: Hunting, Spirituality, and Wildness in America (Washington, DC: Island Press/​ Shearwater Books, 2000); Jim Posewitz, Inherit the Hunt: A Journey into the Heart of American Hunting (Guilford, CT: Falcon, 1999). 24 Cerulli, The Mindful Carnivore, 90. 25 Pellegrini, Girl Hunter, 174.

178   Charles List So together with the emotional connection there is, she claims, a “fleeting” contact with an ancient way of life and the worldview of those people. This worldview, including the casual way nature treats life and death, marks another difference between hunting for one’s food and purchasing local meat, at least in the eyes of the new hunters. There is something powerful and transformative about the primitive experience of hunting and killing an animal. It seems powerful enough to transform your worldview regarding life and death and the place of humans in the cycle of life. This change in perception is no surprise to old hunters; they have been calling attention to this consistently. For instance, Paul Shepard, Aldo Leopold, and José Ortega y Gasset all make similar comments on the connections with the wild entailed by hunting.26 The new hunters acknowledge this debt to the older literature, but feel compelled to detail how the experience affects them. Now some might say at this point: “Well, if it is so important, go and do hunt once or twice. That ought to be enough to give you these emotions and contact with this primitive world.” Paul Shepard, in “A Post-​Historic Primitivism” agrees: The hunt is a pulse of social and personal preparation, address to presences unseen, skills and strategies, festive events and religious participation. We cannot become hunter-​gatherers as a whole economy, but we can recover the ontogenetic moment. . . . the value of the hunt is not in repeated trips but a single leap forward into the heart-​structure of the world, the “game” played to rules that reveal ourselves. What is important is to have hunted. It is like having babies; a little of it goes a long way.27

I am highly skeptical regarding this “single leap forward” in the “ontogenetic moment” because it leads to the idea that one should not be allowed to eat or buy meat unless one had to—​at least once—​kill it oneself. But, the experience of hunting and killing an animal, while emotionally important, is not an ethical certificate. Emma Marris comes close to this in saying that “if you can’t pull the trigger, you had better start collecting tempeh recipes.” This makes it seem that hunting is a badge one can then carry around to show that you know what it is like. This is what I think Pollan famously and unfortunately does in his singleton experience of hunting and killing a pig. However, this “single leap” in Shepard’s phrase is not what the new hunters are advocating; they are encouraging their readers to become hunters, to stick with it, to make it a way of life. If one does stick with it, what kind of worldview does one encounter? Nearly all reflective hunters, old and new, recite the fact that humans for a very long time, survived by hunting and gathering. No one is likely to dispute this, but there is wide disagreement on what it implies. Shepard believes it explains the madness of modernity; Caras believes it 26  P. Shepard, The Tender Carnivore & the Sacred Game (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1973); A. Leopold, A Sand County Almanac with Essays on Conservation from Round River (New York: Ballantine Books, 1966); J. Ortega y Gasset, Meditations on Hunting (Bozeman, WY: Wilderness Adventure Press, 1995). 27  Paul Shepard, “A Post-​Historic Primitivism,” in The Wilderness Condition (San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club Books, 1992), 86.

The New Hunter and Local Food    179 explains the violent and warlike nature of man; Leopold believes it explains the continued popularity of hunting.28 Pellegrini addresses this as follows: We are what we are—​omnivores. We were meant to participate in nature rather than keep it at arm’s length. I see evidence everywhere that we have become so self-​ conscious in nature that we now designate areas where those “wild” traits are allowed to be expressed, to the point that the wilderness has become the last great zoo. And it turns our natural human instincts into an abstract condition, rather than a natural human state. Humans have less potential in these contrived landscapes than they do in places, cultures, and behaviors closer to our evolutionary beginnings. Modern life conceals our need for diverse, wild, natural communities, but does not alter that need.29

Pellegrini’s argument here is that participating in hunting returns us to a “natural state,” which takes account of our natural human instincts and where we satisfy a human need for diverse, wild, and natural communities. As we shall see, this reliance on the concept of “nature” has received some rather damaging critical attention.

Personal Responsibility and Wildness So the two reasons the new hunters think hunting stands above local meat buying are that (1) there are unique and ethically important emotions derived from hunting and that (2) in hunting one encounters a worldview that is ethically and environmentally important. Each of these is open to serious challenges which, interestingly, were originally lodged against the local food movement. First, being emotionally fulfilled by hunting is like “voting with your fork”: it does nothing to correct the injustices of big food. Second, the “natural worldview” glimpsed by hunters fallaciously relies on an ethically loaded and unjustified concept of the natural. In the following section, I will examine these criticisms with an eye to how they might be answered.

Vote with Your Gun One criticism of the local food movement, and by extension the new hunting movement, concerns the political inefficacy of (merely) “voting with your fork” as the slogan goes. The idea, of course, is that we express our dissatisfaction with food systems we do not like

28  Paul Shepard, Nature and Madness (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1982); R. Caras, Death as a Way of Life (Boston, MA: Little Brown, 1970); Leopold, A Sand County Almanac with Essays on Conservation from Round River. 29 Pellegrini, Girl Hunter, 11.

180   Charles List by choosing not to participate in them, if that is possible. We eat local food from people we know, we buy local meat, we grow a garden, and, given the new hunting literature, we hunt and fish for some of our meat. This slogan has been roundly criticized, however, as politically naïve and a distraction from the real problems with our food systems.30 For example, Erinn Gilson, in “Vote with Your Fork? Responsibility for Food Justice,” argues that this idea distracts us from the real culprits: our various “food systems.” Embracing the fork vote, allows us to feel ethical, and less personally guilty about food, if we spread our food dollars around locally. As she says, vote with your fork as a political movement construes the political responsibility of individuals as personal rather than shared, and relatedly, interprets the exercise of responsibility primarily in terms of consumer choice.31

She says this constitutes “a disconnect between the ideal of food citizenship and the way this ideal is realized practically in the citizen-​consumer hybrid.” The ideal of the conscientious food citizen voting with a fork is too personal to practically alter the food systems responsible for many of our problems. I find it hard to fault this skepticism about fork voting when applied to the new hunting literature, if only because there is an undeniable air of self-​congratulatory hubris in some of it, that whole “look at me with my gun, knife, and stacks of meat in my freezer” thing.32 Perhaps I should not be so sensitive, but, having read a lot of hunting literature of the more traditional kind, it does seem to me that these new hunters are missing a larger issue, as are the fork voters. That larger issue has nearly always been apparent to traditional reflective hunters and anglers, and it is perhaps something we can learn from them. One way to put this criticism for hunters is that feeling good about obtaining your own food by hunting is fine and surely well earned, but what about the broader issues of conservation and food justice? Just because I feel good about my wild game meal does nothing to advance the political and environmental conditions that must be in place for me to continue to hunt. Practices like hunting and angling must necessarily involve participants in the public realm. I know this might seem counterintuitive, but, despite the isolation and remoteness of the places we hunt and fish, and our frequent desire for solitude, the very existence of these practices depends on the maintenance of certain social, political, and environmental conditions without which these practices would 30  Before we denigrate this approach too severely, we should note that because of changing consumer food choices, “the top 25 U.S. food and beverage companies have lost an equivalent of $18 billion in market share since 2009.” That’s a lot of forks and big food is trying hard to get back this loss. Beth Kowitt, “The War on Big Food,” Fortune, June 1, 2015. 31  Erinn Gilson, “Vote with Your Fork? Responsibility for Food Justice,” Social Philosophy Today, April 22, 2014, 9–​10. doi:10.5840/​socphiltoday20144215. 32  This impression does not accurately capture all of the new hunters however. See, for instance, McCaulou: “My responsibility as a hunter seems obvious: If I am serious about preserving our nation’s hunting heritage, I must also be serious about protecting the environment” (McCaulou, Call of the Mild, 136).

The New Hunter and Local Food    181 simply disappear. Often these conditions are grouped under the umbrella of “conservation,” and, however one defines this notoriously slippery term, one thing that is certain is that the project includes the development of “citizen-​hunters” that goes far beyond the personal emotional satisfactions involved. As a way of supporting this point, consider the case of the most “off-​the-​grid” hunter imaginable. This person, let us imagine, behaves in a completely ethical manner, respects the animals killed, and feels the appropriate emotions at the right times. However, this person never participates in the broader political issues of conservation and food justice, not caring about the systemic issues I have mentioned. This person, as Gilson says, takes political responsibility as personal and not as shared. However, this person is not off-​the-​political-​grid, regardless of the degree of isolation from nearest neighbors. The animals hunted and the seasons to hunt them are managed by vast state and federal agencies; the land hunted upon is public or private, taxed or not; the very practice of hunting in a particular way has a history and would be very different in other political systems; the very existence of the animals hunted depends on environmental quality of streams, air, and oceans. There is no getting off of this grid.33 The lesson for both new hunters and locavores is clear: feeling good about our food choices, whether purchased or hunted, is never enough, even if it is the beginning of civic responsibility. The goal of a flourishing food community cannot be achieved without civic engagement. This engagement is formed by not merely buying the right food, as Gilson so rightly criticizes, but by being involved in the process, forming relations with farmers and producers of meat, and forming associations with other hunters and anglers to conserve the ecosystems upon which healthy populations of game depend. In the last section, I will detail how this might be achieved.

Wildness, Freedom, and Nature Remember the way game animals are characterized by some of the new hunters: as wild and free from fear and captivity. I don’t know whether this is correct or not, but what I am interested in is that these new hunters think it is and what this means for their belief that hunting is more ethical than other ways of obtaining meat. The issue of animal suffering in captivity is clearly relevant as is the manner in which these wild animals die and are treated after death. There is a certain reverence and respect, as already discussed. McCaulou says this about shooting a goose: Here is what I do know: I bear responsibility for the death of my goose. But I bear responsibility of the entire life and death of my chicken, And one of those scenarios is more bearable to me than the other.34 33  See J. A. Tober, Who Owns the Wildlife? (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981), and Darcy Ingram, Wildlife, Conservation, and Conflict in Quebec, 1840‒1914 (Vancouver, BC: UBC Press, 2013), for an exploration of some of these issues. 34 McCaulou, Call of the Mild, 147.

182   Charles List Clearly, the point she is making is that when one buys and eats a chicken, one is responsible for the whole deal, from egg to roast, because by buying it, you thereby lend your support to the system that provides the chicken. But the goose is wild, how it lived and where are not in the control of anybody. The hunter is just responsible for its death, not any of the other stuff. Steven Rinella agrees with this. After shooting and butchering a deer, he says: The deer was going about its usual routine in its natural habitat; it was part of a healthy and stable population, managed for longevity; it was never held captive or made to be afraid; and its death came from a knowledgeable predator who would utilize its body with respect.

The philosophical objection to an ethical elevation of hunting on this score examines the work done by the concepts of “nature” and “wildness.” Anne Portman, in “Mother Nature Has It Right: Local Food Advocacy and the Appeal to the ‘Natural,’ ” argues that there is an illegitimate reliance on a concept of “nature” used in the local food movement and, I would infer, the new hunting movement.35 Portman says this: Local food advocates are not just appealing to the “natural” as a descriptive tool but rather as normative concept meant to legitimate their moral judgments and political practices. In other words, this cluster of concepts is being used such that the “natural” indicates the good.36

She rightly wonders about this uncritical normative appeal to the notoriously complex concept of the natural, when what is required is an explanation of why local food or hunting is natural and therefore good. To see her point in action, consider this passage from Rohan Anderson’s Whole Larder Love: Grow, Gather, Hunt, Cook: Nature is very clever. It has ways of controlling population numbers without our intervention. . . . It makes sense to take meat from the wild. It is healthy, fresh, and the animals have lived a free and natural existence.37

The terms “wild” and “natural” are obviously doing some heavy normative lifting here, implying health, freshness, animal freedom, and a natural existence. But, to apply Portman’s observation to new hunting, the glare of this sunny side of wild nature unjustifiably blinds us to other considerations: the sicknesses and starvation suffered by game animals, their stocking and management by institutions, the confinement by conditions of weather, drought, floods, and so on. By cherry picking only those sunny aspects of 35 

Anne Portman, “Mother Nature Has It Right: Local Food Advocacy and the Appeal to the ‘Natural,’” Ethics and the Environment 19, no. 1 (March 1, 2014): 1–​30. 36 Ibid., 15. 37  Rohan Anderson, Whole Larder Love: Grow, Gather, Hunt, Cook (Brooklyn, NY: PowerHouse Books, 2012), 71.

The New Hunter and Local Food    183 nature and the wild, such defenses of hunting are indeed subject to the charge that they import unjustified values under the cover of what is “natural.” As examples of what is covered up consider these points. Deer and waterfowl populations are intensely managed by state and national institutions. US Fish and Wildlife determines the dates of the waterfowl seasons, numbers that can be shot and how many are in possession, as well as other rules and regulations. This does not make the geese and ducks any less “free” in the loose sense used by the new hunters, but it does mean they are the responsibility of some agencies, both national and nonprofit. Also, as has already been mentioned, some game animals are stocked, especially fish. To say that a rainbow trout is wild and free ignores its being raised in a concrete tank and fed pellets for some period of time before it is unceremoniously dumped in the stream for anglers to catch. We are responsible for the death of this fish when we kill and eat it, but we are also responsible for its life—​such as it is—​by virtue of our continual demand for “good fishing” measured in numbers of fish caught. We insist that our states continue to stock and maintain these fisheries by our tax dollars and special taxes on hunting and fishing gear. It is also an ecological illusion to think the animal’s life in the wild is without fear, as Rinella says. Any prey animal is by genetic disposition constantly wary and suspicious of its surroundings. I do not know if this is fear, but it is not just a walk in the park either. What I am saying is that there are times and places where the goose and the chicken, the deer and the beef cow, the rainbow trout and the farmed raised salmon are in quite similar circumstances. So it really does not work to think of these “wild” animals as unconfined and free from fear. As I see it, what is needed is a connection between the descriptive content of this “thick” concept of “natural” and the normative component relied upon by new hunters.38 And given the objections to mere personal responsibility in the form of voting with one’s gun, as outlined in the last section, this account will need to move hunters from that justified and real emotional experience of killing and eating one’s own food, to a wider more civic responsibility.

From Food to the Biotic Good Two problems with locavore reasoning and, by extension, new hunting, are (1) that a self-​sufficient voting with your fork or gun is not sufficient to take on the systematic problems that riddle our food systems, and (2) that there is an unwarranted use of the association of wild nature with the good by those who make the case for the rightness of either local food movements or sustenance hunting. An extension of the views of the new hunters is called for, one that deepens political commitments and provides an

38 

Kenneth Shockley, “Thinning the Thicket: Thick Concepts, Context, and Evaluative Frameworks,” Environmental Ethics 34, no. 3 (2012): 227–​246.

184   Charles List ecologically based explanation of natural good. I will outline my view here, but many of the details will be found elsewhere.39 Hunting, to use a classical model, appeals to the heart, the head, and, of course, the stomach. Put another way, the experiences and motives of the hunter are a mixture of emotions, new ways of understanding the world around one, and new ways of eating. There are those heart-​felt feelings of gratitude and reverence, the ever-​expanding awareness of the ecological connections, and the gustatory events and self-​sufficiency provided by the food. Again classically, there is a problem in keeping these in balance: too much emotion leads to lust, too little awareness leads to short-​sighted policies on predators, and too much food—​well we know where that goes. The process of balancing these out is, I would argue, the process of developing virtues, and hunting is a practice which has the capacity to inculcate virtues or excellences in its practitioners. A nice roomy definition of virtue is provided by Linda Zagzebski: A virtue, then, can be defined as a deep and enduring acquired excellence of a person, involving a characteristic motivation to produce a certain desired end and reliable success in bringing about that end.40

Notice that virtues cannot be understood without first identifying an end or ends and also that both right motives and reliable success are necessary for achieving a virtue. Applying this to hunting, we can surely agree that hunting has as an end good healthy food, as the new hunters so rightly express. But there is more than this. We are (perhaps unfortunately) way beyond the stage where we are motivated to hunt merely by the need for food, no matter how good it is. There are also the matters of heart and head, the emotional and intellectual connections so prominent in hunting literature. Which end is desired here? Hunting and angling have long been thought by reflective writers to enable good character as an end, it is just that classical hunting writers often picked out virtues that do not fit very well, things like courage and manliness, traditional male, upper-​crusty items. I believe, on the contrary, that hunting enables environmental virtues if practiced correctly under the right kind of guidance. As Zagzebski’s definition indicates, such virtues must be related to a certain end that explains the particular kinds of capacities we desire. For contemporary hunting and angling the end must, of course, include the end of good food, but supplemented with a broader one: the good of the biotic community from which this food is obtained. Once this new end is accepted, the two problems become less vexing. While detailing the good of the biotic community is a task for another time, we can select several relevant points. First, a biotic community consists of plants and animals, humans included, together 39  See List, Hunting, Fishing, and Environmental Virtue; C. J. List, “The Virtues of Wild Leisure,” Environmental Ethics 27, no. 4 (2005): 355–​373. 40  L. T. Zagzebski, Virtues of the Mind: An Inquiry into the Nature of Virtue and the Ethical Foundations of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 137. See also Heather Battaly, Virtue (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2015), for a complete discussion of the various possible definitions of “virtue.”

The New Hunter and Local Food    185 with the soil and water upon which everything else depends. This holistic system is markedly different from the conception of wilderness and nature: it includes farms and ranches, oceans and streams, cows and deer. There are no conceptual fences allowing what is “wild and free” to be better than what is confined. There is only the recognition that everything needs to work together or the system suffers.41 Second, biotic communities have been severely degraded by our past actions, and so need our intervention in the form of remediation and conservation. This is an obligation for hunters, above all, to participate in the ongoing efforts to preserve and protect the integrity of the biotic communities in which they participate. There is no getting off of this grid of ecological and political connections. This could be what the new hunters arguably mean when they assert that hunting is a more ethical way to obtain meat than even buying it locally. Hunting, because of the intensity of the experiences has a greater capacity to change and challenge one’s preconceived beliefs regarding food and the biotic systems from which it is taken than does buying meat, even local meat. Some of the new hunters seem to be saying exactly this. When Cerulli references the “mindful carnivore” and McCaulou plays on “wild” with “call of the mild,” both memoirists are indicating how hunting has changed their characters, not just what they eat. In a similar way, I believe hunting has the capacity to enrich one’s character in several specific ways. One clear difference between hunting and acquiring meat as a consumer is the requirements of skill. The element of skill is very important in coming to understand the virtues associated with hunting. There is some skill developed in picking out a good chicken to buy but the skill of growing it and turning it into meat was invested by the farmer and the butcher. On the other hand, when you are looking through the scope at a deer, shooting a dodging woodcock, or landing a rainbow trout, there is the absolute necessity of skill development. Skill is involved in simply getting close enough to animals to accomplish these tasks. And there are the subsequent skills necessary to turn the animal into a meal. Skills are also required to grow your own vegetables or raise your own chickens and pigs. Yet killing and butchering are typical of the new hunter. Much of the content of the nouveau hunting books is taken up with a close description of the arduous process of developing various skills that are required to successfully hunt and process animals to bring them to the table. In nearly every new hunting book there are narratives concerning hunter education classes necessary to obtain a hunting license, learning how to shoot a firearm, learning how to clean a bird, pluck feathers, gut a deer, butcher a deer, and so on. These are all skills and they must be practiced over and over before one gets half-​way competent at them. The development of these skills and others, under the right kind of mentorship, will lead hunters to three virtues.42 First, hunters will need a continually expanding 41  Sahotra Sarkar, Environmental Philosophy: From Theory to Practice (Malden, MA: John Wiley, 2012), 35. 42  Mentorship is a recurrent theme in the books by these new hunters. Each of them describes in detail their relationships with the people who taught them.

186   Charles List awareness of the ecological connections necessary for the flourishing of the animals they seek. Second, in addition to this ecological knowledge, hunters develop an emotional sensitivity to the animals they hunt, their environs, and the wonders so frequently encountered in the wild. Third, because hunting is a taking of food, an “art of acquisition” in Plato’s terms, hunters develop the capacity to act as biotic citizens to protect and nurture the members of the biotic community, plants, animals, waters, and lands. These three environmental virtues form the character of the hunter, or will, if, as I have said, hunting is practiced in the right way under the mentorship of the right people. The new hunters know this, although in their understandable zeal to talk about the food, they sometimes get diverted. However, each of them experiences the slow unfolding of environmental connections, and the emotional force of the hunt. For example, Cerulli says The mere fact of living, I had begun to realize, linked me to larger webs of life and death. Regardless of what I did, whether I liked it or not, I had an impact. No matter what I ate animals would be killed.43

What is less evident is the final aspect of virtue: the need to become activists in defense of their biotic communities. This is the “vote with your gun” criticism in a slightly different guise. It is perhaps understandable that these hunting writers are subject to this; they are new hunters after all. But as they become more experienced, as the political and cultural conditions which form the table for their game dinners become more evident, they move beyond personal to civic responsibility. Viewing hunters in terms of their characters also provides an answer to the challenge to explain the frequent appeals to nature or wildness found in hunting and to some extent in the local food narrative. The way to answer this objection is provided by looking in more detail at the cognitive virtue of ecological awareness. Hunters develop their awareness of environmental connections by many routes including mentoring, reading, but most importantly personal experience. They become adept at reading natural signs, whether these are tracks, blood trails, rise forms, or rubs. These signs stand out to hunters and anglers because they point them in the desired direction: closer to the animals hunted. These natural signs form a connected web that determines the biotic community a hunter is a part of. This biotic community is not always sunny and mild, it is sometimes ugly. The experienced hunter will have little sympathy for value-​laden appeals to “nature.” The little tragedies revealed by piles of feathers, by bloated ticks, by belly up fish, take care of this. But this understanding of the biotic community is at least, to use a phrase from Shaw, “clear-​eyed and honest.” It is not merely in the process of turning animals into meat that one experiences this honesty; it is in the whole life of the hunter as part of the biotic community.

43 Cerulli, The Mindful Carnivore, 52.

The New Hunter and Local Food    187 So we must first drain the sanguine values out of nature, and realize that we hunt in real biotic communities. But second, we must accept that there is a good for the biotic communities in which we hunt namely their health and integrity. This is in part a responsibility discharged by keeping certain populations of animals within the carrying capacity of given biotic communities. But this action only applies to deer and other ungulates. It would be decidedly odd for a salmon angler to assert that she was trying to keep the salmon population under control. This convenient and publically popular justification for hunting must be replaced with a full-​blown defense of the biotic communities in which these species are situated.

Conclusion In conclusion, the new hunters are right in embracing the goals of the local food movement. They fit together both in the advocacy for humanness and transparency, but hunting is not better off ethically thereby. On the other hand, hunters do rightly appeal to the value of experiences they have while hunting, which distinguish them from local food buyers, namely the emotional and cognitive growth achieved by looking one’s food in the eyes. However, in order to get beyond voting with your gun and optimistically bending nature to our ethical advantage, the new hunters need to realize that hunting is also a political and an ecological act. This realization is put into action by the slow and careful, development of environmental virtue.

Bibliography Anderson, Rohan. Whole Larder Love: Grow, Gather, Hunt, Cook. Brooklyn, NY: PowerHouse Books, 2012. Aschwanden, Christie. “Ethical Eating:  Why This Tree-​ Hugging Former Vegetarian Is Learning to Hunt.” September 21, 2011. http://​www.lastwordonnothing.com/​2011/​09/​21/​ ethical-​eating-​why-​this-​tree-​hugging-​former-​vegetarian-​is-​learning-​to-​hunt/​. Battaly, Heather. Virtue. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2015. Caras, R. Death as a Way of Life. Boston, MA: Little Brown, 1970. Cerulli, Tovar. The Mindful Carnivore : A Vegetarian’s Hunt for Sustenance. New York: Pegasus Books, 2012. Farrell, Sean Patrick. “The Urban Deerslayer.” New York Times, November 24, 2009. Gilson, Erinn. “Vote with Your Fork? Responsibility for Food Justice.” Social Philosophy Today, April 22, 2014. doi:10.5840/​socphiltoday20144215. Greenberg, Paul. Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food. New York: Penguin Press, 2010. Ingram, Darcy. Wildlife, Conservation, and Conflict in Quebec, 1840‒1914. Vancouver, BC: UBC Press, 2013. Jensen, Jon. “The Virtues of Hunting.” Philosophy in the Contemporary World 8, no. 2, Fall‒Winter (2001): 113–​124. Jones, Robert F., ed. On Killing: Meditations on the Chase. Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, 2001.

188   Charles List Kerasote, T. Bloodties: Nature, Culture, and the Hunt. New York: Random House, 1993. Kowitt, Beth. “The War on Big Food.” Fortune, June 1, 2015. Leopold, A. A Sand County Almanac with Essays on Conservation from Round River. New York: Ballantine Books, 1966. List, Charles. Hunting, Fishing, and Environmental Virtue:  Reconnecting Sportsmanship and Conservation. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2013. —​—​—​. “On the Moral Distinctiveness of Sport Hunting.” Environmental Ethics 26, no. 2 (2004): 155–​169. —​—​—​. “The Virtues of Wild Leisure.” Environmental Ethics 27, no. 4 (2005): 355–​373. Marris, Emma. “Hipsters Who Hunt:  More Liberals Are Shooting Their Supper.” Slate, December 5, 2012. http://​www.slate.com/​articles/​health_​and_​science/​science/​2012/​12/​ hunting_​by_​liberal_​urban_​locavores_​is_​a_​trend_​good_​for_​the_​environment.html. McCaulou, Lily Raff. Call of the Mild : Learning to Hunt My Own Dinner. New York: Grand Central Pub., 2012. Ortega y Gasset, J. Meditations on Hunting. Bozeman, WY: Wilderness Adventure Press, 1995. Pellegrini, Georgia. Girl Hunter: Revolutionizing the Way We Eat, One Hunt at a Time. Boston, MA: Da Capo Lifelong, 2011. Petersen, David. Heartsblood:  Hunting, Spirituality, and Wildness in America. Washington, DC: Island Press/​Shearwater Books, 2000. Pollan, Michael. The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. New York: Penguin Press, 2006. Portman, Anne. “Mother Nature Has It Right:  Local Food Advocacy and the Appeal to the ‘Natural.’” Ethics and the Environment 19, no. 1 (March 1, 2014):  1–​30. doi:10.2979/​ ethicsenviro.19.1.1. Posewitz, Jim. Inherit the Hunt:  A Journey into the Heart of American Hunting. Guilford, CT: Falcon, 1999. Rinella, Steven. Meat Eater: Adventures from the Life of an American Hunter. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2012. Sarkar, Sahotra. Environmental Philosophy:  From Theory to Practice. Malden, MA:  John Wiley, 2012. Shaw, Hank. Hunt, Gather, Cook: Finding the Forgotten Feast. New York: Rodale, 2011. Shepard, Paul. “A Post-​Historic Primitivism.” In The Wilderness Condition, by Paul Shepard, 40–​89. San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club Books, 1992. —​—​—​. The Tender Carnivore & the Sacred Game. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1973. —​—​—​. “A Theory of the Value of Hunting.” Transactions of the North American Wildlife Conference, 1959, 504–​512. Tober, J. A. Who Owns the Wildlife? Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981. Watman, Max. Harvest:  Field Notes from a Far-​Flung Pursuit of Real Food. New  York:  W. W. Norton, 2014. Zagzebski, Linda. Virtues of the Mind: An Inquiry into the Nature of Virtue and the Ethical Foundations of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

chapter 9

Ethics for Fi sh Eliot Michaelson and Andrew Reisner

Introduction Ernest Hemingway in The Old Man and the Sea describes the prolonged struggle of an aging fisherman as he reels in a giant marlin. Eventually, he succeeds and straps the fish to the side of his small boat. There it attracts the attention of sharks, who slowly eat away at it on the return journey. The old man futilely tries to drive the sharks away, but in the end is left, exhausted and depressed, with only a skeleton. The story has elements of a classical tragedy, presenting the fisherman’s struggles as a heroic, if doomed, battle against forces—​the fish, the sea, the sharks, and his own age—​that will inevitably outmatch him. Although most readers of this essay will not have relied on fishing as a necessary source of either income or food, many will have spent early mornings and passed pleasant evenings at a bucolic lake or on a boat at sea, eagerly awaiting the day’s first tug on a fishing line. Others will have seen a marlin itself serving as a kitschy backdrop at a kitschy beachfront bar. And nearly all readers will have at least once eaten fish. Among those who exclude meat gradually from their diets for ethical reasons, fish flesh and fish byproducts are often the last to go. Fish, and fishing, hold a more benign place in our collective conscience than do meat and hunting. Land animals and birds are stalked, often with a cacophony of barking dogs, and shot, often not cleanly enough to ensure a quick or painless death. Dragged out of the forest or spilling blood into a field coat’s game pockets, the death of terrestrial and avian animals naturally arouses the sympathies of many. The story of The Old Man and the Sea, retold as a bowhunting expedition with a Bambi-​like doe as its quarry might excite rather less sympathy for the hunter and rather more for the deer. In this essay, we explore the question of whether there are good grounds for treating fish as a general category of animals differently from terrestrial and avian animals with respect to the degree of moral concern that should be allotted to them and whether our relative indifference to the fate of the marlin has some moral grounding.

190    Eliot Michaelson and Andrew Reisner We begin our study by briefly reviewing some of the main current thinking on the moral permissibility of eating nonhuman animals, although we do not attempt to break new ground. Next, we examine what is potentially ethically different about eating fish from eating land and avian animals with a discussion of what is known about fish psychology and intelligence. We set out three distinctive and ethically salient features of the harvesting and consumption of fish. The first is that they are to a greater degree than any other major animal-​based food source, wild caught. The second is that their wild capture provides both a social and economic foundation for many communities in both the developed and developing world. The third is that it is particularly difficult as an individual to effect changes in how many fish are caught and killed through one’s own consumption choices. We argue that the first and second features raise some distinctive ethical challenges, but that neither of these considerations militates against claims that the harvesting and consumption of fish is prima facie morally impermissible. We conclude with a discussion of how the third problem is only a more challenging case of a general set of problems that arise from the signaling inefficiency of our purchasing and consumption decisions.

Some General Comments on  the Permissibility of Eating Animals Whether it is morally permissible to eat fish depends partially on whether—​and then under what circumstances—​it is morally permissible to eat nonhuman animals in general. Our essay does not aim to contribute anything new to the general discussion about eating animals, but it will be helpful to say something briefly about the matter to set the stage for the specific discussion of fish. Many people have the intuition that there is something of special ethical significance about being human. This intuition might be understood in one of two ways. The first is that the mere fact that we are human has special moral significance. The second is that features possessed, perhaps uniquely, by humans give us special moral significance. The first way of understanding the intuition is an instance of speciesism, which is the view that membership in a particular species is inherently ethically significant. In recent years, serious doubts have been cast on speciesism as a basis for conferring separate moral status on human and nonhuman animals. There are many ways of arguing against speciesism.1 We shall just offer one of them here. Consider two individuals falling into distinct biological groups. Let us say that one belongs to a human population, the genes of which dispose individuals to have five toes on each foot, and the other of whom belongs to a human population, the genes of which dispose individuals to have six toes on each foot. 1 

For a more detailed discussion of this view, see Cavalieri (2001).

Ethics for Fish   191 We can imagine that these individuals live lives that are, as nearly as possible, identical with respect to character, career choice, and dispositions concerning how to treat themselves and others. We may also assume that they hold similar positions in their communities, have similar relationships to their (same sized and aged) families, and so on. It is difficult to see what could possibly justify treating either of these two individuals differently either as moral actors or as bearers of other moral statuses in identical circumstances. By stipulation they have the same character, would act and react the same way, and play comparable roles in the lives of others. The only difference between them is their membership in separate human populations with different genetic dispositions for the number of toes their respective members have on each foot. Claiming there is an ethical difference between them on that basis is absurd. We might pejoratively call someone who discriminated on that view a “toeist.” Mutatis mutandis, we could retell this story about individuals who only differed with respect to biological species.2 Why would it be any less absurd to discriminate on the basis of species than it is on the basis of the number of toes an individual has on each foot? This brings us to the second way of understanding of the intuition that there is something of special ethical significance about humans, that is, that we possess certain features that confer on us special ethical significance. Defenders and opponents of the view that nonhuman animals deserve (more) serious ethical consideration most plausibly are taken to disagree about which features matter for making an individual animal, human or nonhuman, an object of moral concern. They may also disagree about empirical judgments concerning which animals possess which features. Other essays in this volume address the question of which features matter with respect to the moral status of nonhuman animals.3 We take the range of possible features to include at least: possessing intelligence, self-​awareness, an inner emotional life, social connections, emotional attachment to others, the capacity to feel pain, and the ability to plan for the future. We mean to take no stand on which of these features actually matter, but we note in passing that the more rarified a feature one isolates as morally relevant, the more work one leaves to be done in explaining why it is impermissible to treat human beings who individually lack that feature as one advocates treating nonhuman animals lacking that same feature.4 With respect to the empirical questions, in the next section, we offer a brief summary of what is currently known, or at least believed, about the relevant aspects of fish psychology. If there are reasons for according a different moral status to fish than there are to some other animals, then it cannot be on the basis of taxa. Rather it has to be due to some difference in what various fish are like as individual creatures.

2  This is a common theme in science-​fiction films, one developed sympathetically toward the replicants in Blade Runner. 3  See the essays by Gary Comstock, Bob Fischer, and Tristram McPherson, in this volume. 4  For a discussion of these difficulties and one possible solution, see McMahan (1996).

192    Eliot Michaelson and Andrew Reisner

What Science Believes about Fish Psychology and Intelligence Kurt Cobain once assured a generation that it was okay to eat fish, since they do not have any feelings.5 As it turns out, discerning whether fish have feelings has proved rather challenging for three main reasons. First, the environments in which fish live are not ones we can easily control or even interact with, making experimental design more difficult than it is on land. Second, fishes’ behavior is very different from our own, making it significantly more difficult to code that behavior and draw well-​informed conclusions about what sorts of mechanisms stand behind it. Third, and compounding this second issue, fishes’ neurophysiology is rather different from both our own and that of most other land animals, making it difficult to infer from even a combination of behavioral and neurological evidence any firm conclusions about fish psychology. Thankfully, fish scientists remain undeterred by such challenges and have in fact managed to make some real progress on the questions of whether fish can think and feel, and what they might be able to think and feel about. Perhaps the most striking recent result is evidence that giant manta rays are capable of passing the so-​called Mirror Self-​Recognition test, something that is generally held up as the gold standard for demonstrating self-​awareness.6 In essence, when exposed to mirrors, manta rays exhibit a range of behaviors ill-​explained by either the simple presence of a foreign object or the presence of an image they are mistaking for another conspecific. These behaviors, which ethologists tend to call “contingency checking” and “self-​directed,” are akin to those exhibited by dolphins in similar settings. It is worth noting that giant manta rays have the largest and most foliated brains of any known fish species. So even if this evidence is pointing in the right direction, we are not in a position extrapolate that many other fish species are likely to demonstrate significant degree of self-​awareness. On the other hand, these results do offer reason to reject the thought that there is anything inherent in the neurophysiology of fish that prevents them from exhibiting a significant degree of intelligence and even self-​awareness. Whether fish feel pain has received perhaps the most sustained scientific attention of any question regarding the mental capacities of fish.7 What is beyond doubt is that fish possess “nociceptors,” or nerve fibers responsive to noxious stimuli.8 The problem is that not all stimuli of nociceptors ought to be characterized as pain. Certain types of nerve 5 

Nirvana, “Something in the Way.” Cf. Ari and D’Agostino (2016). For more general discussion of the Mirror Self-​Recognition test, see Gallup (1970), Platek and Levin (2004), and Prior et al. (2008). 7  For recent, partisan reviews of the state of the literature, see Braithwaithe (2010), Sneddon (2011), and Rose et al. (2014). See also Allen (2013). 8  The ratios of the different sorts of receptors are rather different than what is commonly found in land mammals, however. Specifically, A-​fibers are relatively common in teleost fish, whereas the C-​fibers common to land mammals are found in much smaller numbers (cf. Roques et al. 2010). 6 

Ethics for Fish   193 blockers, for instance, are administered specifically in order to prevent nociceptor firings from reaching the brain during surgery. This will not prevent nociceptor firing at the local level, but it plausibly does prevent there being any pain associated with the relevant bodily damage, at least during the course of the surgery itself. Some have suggested that fish are essentially always in a state equivalent to a human being under the influence of nerve blockers.9 At least three different, complementary arguments are offered to this end. First, it is argued that fish lack consciousness and that, since it is not felt, unconscious pain is not pain at all.10 The thought seems to be that this sort of neural architecture is not sufficiently complex or developed enough to underwrite pain perception. Second, it is noted that the neural anatomy of fish differs substantially from that of human beings, which are taken to be paradigm pain-​feelers. Of particular note is the fact that the fish pallium is non-​laminated and only diffusely connected.11 Third, a number of specific objections are leveled at the methodology of the numerous extant studies purporting to show that fish demonstrate complex behavioral reactions to bodily harm, reactions that are best explained by appealing to a feeling of pain rather than a low-​level nervous response to pure nociception. We are hardly the best qualified persons to pass judgment on the validity of the data collection methods and statistical analyses to be found in studies on fish pain, nor on the particulars of how best to code fish behavior, and so on. To be clear, some of the particular methodological issues to which fish-​pain skeptics have pointed to do indeed strike us as important.12 Nonetheless, it seems to us that there is a significant body of evidence suggesting that fish are capable of exhibiting fairly complex behavioral responses to bodily harm, responses that are plausibly best explained by the posit that a central processing system is responding to information it is gathering about the state of its body. Whether a central processing system so responding should be considered a conscious system responding to pain is a difficult question, and one that we can hardly hope to settle here. We do not put much stock in the neurophysiological evidence mustered by fish-​pain skeptics, because it primarily relies on differences between human and fish neurology to make its point; we take it as a fairly settled matter that consciousness, whatever it is, is multiply realizable.13 Thus, simply pointing out that fishes’ neuro-​anatomy is different from our own should not in itself make us doubt that they can feel pain; after 9 

Cf. Rose (2002, 2007), Rose et al. (2014), and Key (2016). We would note in passing that this intermediate premise is controversial within philosophy. See, for instance, Palmer (1975). This argument is ineffective in the present context, however: if consciousness is required to feel pain, and if we have good evidence that fish feel pain, then we have good reason to conclude that fish are conscious. Granted, we would have reason to reject one of the premises if the conclusion were known to be false—​but this is simply assumed rather than argued for by proponents of this sort of argument. 11  Cf. Giassi et al. (2012). 12  On the other hand, the demand that a clear line be drawn between reflexive and non-​reflexive behavior—​and that an operational definition be provided such that this line can be tested for—​strikes us as unwarranted (cf. Rose et al. 2014). We are highly skeptical that any such line or definition can ever be provided. 13  Cf. Block and Fodor (1972). 10 

194    Eliot Michaelson and Andrew Reisner all, manta rays are strikingly different from us anatomically, and yet they seem capable of passing the Mirror Self-​Recognition test. What other sorts of arguments might there be either for or against fish consciousness? Arguments in favor of fish consciousness have tended to appeal to members of certain fish species capacities to learn complex behaviors, to respond to their surroundings in complex ways, and to integrate information from various areas of the brain to initiate avoidance behaviors.14 Arguments against tend to note that complex behaviors can be exhibited by sleepwalkers, among others, and that fish seem to exhibit some of these same behaviors even when their frontal cortexes are removed.15 Again, we cannot hope to settle here the issue of what sorts of things, beyond verbal, first-​person reports of which nonhuman animals are for the most part incapable, constitute our best evidence for attributions of consciousness. We would note, however, that fish demonstrate a remarkable range of complex behaviors commonly associated with a high degree of intelligence: not just timed-​responses to feeding routines or the ability to quickly spatially map a location for subsequent recall but also kin recognition, the recognition of individual conspecifics and non-​conspecifics and differentiated behavior toward each, tool-​use, social reconciliation behavior, social learning, and even numeracy.16 Certain fish species even demonstrate complex planning behaviors: cleaner wrasse, who make a living by removing parasites and dead skin from “client” fish can prioritize fish in a queue based on whether these fish are “regulars” who are unlikely to go elsewhere or “transients” who may lose patience and look for a competitor if left to wait.17 While none of this behavior is by any means a dispositive of consciousness, cumulatively it strikes us as lending strong support for the claim that, while certainly not realized in all species, the hardware of fish neuro-​anatomy is capable of exhibiting a high degree of the sorts of intelligent behavior standardly associated with consciousness. Thus, it lends some credence to the hypothesis that at least certain fish are, indeed, conscious beings. Contemporary science offers us ample reason to think that fish are capable of exhibiting a high degree of intelligence. Whether the same general body of evidence supports the claim that these fish are also conscious or that they can feel pain is a more controversial matter. But there is at least some reason to believe that the answer in both cases is “yes.” The evidence at present is far from perfect, and vast neurophysiological differences do indeed obtain between humans and fish. That might lead us to resist thinking of fish as capable of conscious thought on the basis of these neurophysiological differences. But this resistance looks unjustified. The behavioral evidence strongly suggests that at least some fish are remarkably intelligent creatures. If such intelligence is

14 

Cf. Huntingford et al. (2006), Braithwaithe and Boulcott (2007), and Braithwaithe (2010). Cf. Rose et al. (2014) and, on the latter point, Overmier and Papini (1986). 16  Cf. Brown (2015). 17  Cf. Bshary and Wurth (2001). 15 

Ethics for Fish   195 associated with consciousness along one phylogenetic branch, we can see no principled reason to treat such displays of intelligence differently with regard to another. The evidence we have strongly supports the hypothesis that many species of fish are intelligent, highly social creatures. That, in turn, lends limited support to the hypothesis that many species of fish are both conscious and capable of feeling pain. So while the matter is by no means settled, it looks like there is some scientific support for the claim that, whatever moral difference makers there are between fish and human beings, they cannot simply be assumed to be: exhibiting a significant degree of intelligence, sociality, consciousness, or the ability to plan. Nor can it be assumed to be exhibiting the capacity to feel pain. For with respect to each of these traits, there is evidence that at least some fish do indeed exhibit the relevant, potentially morally significant capacity.

Wild Capture The mere fact that an individual belongs to a species of fish (as opposed, for example, to a species of mammal) can only be intrinsically ethically significant if we accept speciesism, or more properly classism. However, there may be extrinsic features that make it all-​ things-​considered permissible to eat fish, when it would not be all-​things-​considered permissible to eat mammals with relevantly similar psychological or social lives.18 One obvious difference between many commonly consumed kinds of fish and similarly commonly consumed kinds of land and avian mammals is in the method of harvest. In developed countries, all but a small fraction of land and avian animal meat is harvested through farming, rather than through hunting and trapping. A significant, though declining, portion of the fish eaten in developed countries is wildly harvested. Perhaps this difference is ethically significant. To develop this possibility, it will be helpful to offer two versions of the harvesting non-​ parity principle: The harvesting intrinsic non-​parity principle (HINP): For any two possible methods of harvesting an individual nonhuman animal for food, there can be an ethically relevant difference even if the effects of the harvest itself on the animal are the same. The harvesting extrinsic non-​parity principle (HENP): For any two possible methods of harvesting an individual nonhuman animal for food, there can only be an ethically relevant difference if the effects of the harvest on the animal are different. To make an argument for assigning differential moral status to eating fish on the basis of HINP, we would need to identify something about the farming of animals that is 18 

“Relevantly similar” means something like “with features of the same ethical significance for moral patienthood.”

196    Eliot Michaelson and Andrew Reisner intrinsically more morally objectionable than would be their wild capture, assuming that the animals’ welfare was not affected differently. One approach to defending HINP might be to draw a parallel with ordinary death and killing. Consider two possible histories for the same population of humans. In each history, all individuals live the same length of life and have the same quality of life with respect to well-​being. In the first possible history, a particular individual in the population’s life ends when it does in a sudden, painless, and natural death. In the other history, that same individual’s life ends suddenly and painlessly, and at the same time, but due to murder. At least some people have the intuition that the second history is worse than the first history.19 There is a special harm, or perhaps welfare-​affecting wrong, associated with killing. Explaining this intuition may be difficult, so let us accept it unexplained for the sake of argument. Might there be something similar at work in the putative moral difference between death and suffering caused to an animal in virtue of its being farmed and death and suffering caused to an animal in virtue of its being hunted or trapped? If there is a difference, it is, of course, not due to one case being an instance of killing and the other an instance of mere death. Both are instances of killing. Instead, the difference would have to come from the bringing of an animal into existence with the intent to harvest it for food and then killing it versus killing an animal that was not brought into existence for that purpose. Something about the intent (or lack thereof) behind an animal’s creation in combination with its actually being killed for food would need to be morally significant. We wish to set aside most of the interesting moral questions that arise here. The importance of intentions and the difference in the character of the type of action between farming and hunting or trapping deserve attention, but the right way to treat these differences depends to some degree on which normative ethical theory turns out to be correct. We are not in a position to address that issue in this essay. However, there is one important issue that we do wish to take up. That is to what extent the fact that predator‒prey relationships exist in nature makes acting as a predator, rather than a farmer, different with respect to ethical status. There is a line of thought that circulates among some of the folk that sees fishing as a way of being close to nature.20 This is in part due to the physical proximity of the fisherman to nature, for example, on a boat in the ocean or sitting at the shores of a lake. The other is that it brings one closer in some sense to a premodern, or at least preagricultural, way of life. While there are important traditions of thought that view going back to the land, or to the sea, as being more in touch with nature—​sometimes understood as living an earlier human lifestyle—​it is unclear how this could be an ethical good for its own sake. There are many premodern and preagricultural practices that seem

19 

20 

See McMahan (2003) and Broome (2004). See Charles List’s chapter in this volume.

Ethics for Fish   197 clearly wrong to pursue in circumstances in which they can be avoided, and which do not seem to gain any added positive moral significance from having been widespread in the past. For example, in the great majority of hunter-​gatherer societies,21 there was a quite significant social and political power asymmetry between men and women. This neither vindicates the history of oppression of women in later times nor is it a reason to favor reversing the still-​incomplete political and social gains of women today. In addition, whatever the status of nonhuman animals as moral patients (that is, as bearers of moral status), much of the animal kingdom is occupied by creatures who are neither moral agents nor otherwise in a position to make choices about what to eat on ethical grounds due to limited dietary flexibility. This puts omnivorous, agential humans in a very different moral position to that of nonhuman animals with respect to our choices about what we eat and how we harvest it. Whatever might be said in favor of treating farming, on the one hand, and hunting or trapping, on the other, differently from a moral point of view, it is not on account of the latter’s being more natural than the former.22 This brings us to HENP and the question of whether there are contingent features of hunting and trapping that might have an effect on the moral permissibility of eating wild-​caught fish. The answer to this question brings us back to the first section of this essay: How does hunting or trapping fish affect their well-​being differently from farming them? Unfortunately, it is difficult to offer accurate generalizations regarding fish welfare in farmed systems. That is because the conditions of these systems vary drastically. In some, fish are highly stressed and subject to other welfare concerns, like disease and parasites.23 But other controlled environments have been designed to minimize stressors and disease. It is yet more difficult to offer generalizations regarding the welfare effects of catching fish in the wild, in part because it is very difficult to study the stress effects of actually catching fish in the wild. However, the effects of contemporary wild catching practices on whole fish populations are much more apparent: severe and ongoing depletion of

21  This seems to have been true even in notably egalitarian cultures, like the pre-​Western contact culture in Vanuatu. See Wrangham (2010). 22  A more nuanced version of this thought might run as follows: “It is simply in the nature of certain animals to be eaten by other animals. If it is in the nature of some animal to be eaten by other animals, then there might be no sense in which it is wrong for that animal to be eaten; those animals are simply fulfilling their nature.” While we are skeptical of the strong teleological outlook required in order to support this sort of objection, we are willing to spot such assumptions for the sake of argument. Still, we think, this objection fails. For the relevant question is not whether these creatures should be eaten by their natural predators, but rather by us, by human beings equipped with all manner of artifice, be that fishing lines or trawlers. We are unable to see how anything short of a divine creation-​type story would allow one to posit that fish have it in their nature to be caught and eaten by creatures like us. At the very least, some explanation of how this might be possible would be required to take this sort of view seriously. 23  Cf. Conte (2004).

198    Eliot Michaelson and Andrew Reisner fish stocks. A recent United Nations report estimates that, as of 2013, 31.4% of fisheries were either overexploited or depleted.24 Even more worryingly, some now estimate that wild fish stocks will completely collapse by 2048.25 Even if this proves to be overly pessimistic, it seems safe to say that current wild capture practices can hardly be thought to constitute anything other than a disaster for fish welfare, considered at the population level. So to conclude concerning the question of wild capture, whether it makes a difference to the moral permissibility of eating fish in the actual world seems to depend more on what we say about HINP rather than HENP, at least when the alternative food sources are plant-​based. With respect to HINP, back-​to-​nature arguments do not appear to lend the principle much support, but it remains an open question as to whether farming might be inherently morally worse than hunting and trapping, given otherwise equal effects on its victims.

Fishing Communities and Cultural Practices Fishing communities and farming communities differ in at least one interesting way. Many farming communities (although perhaps not ranching communities) could in principle maintain many important aspects of their lifestyle by switching what they farm from livestock to plants. On the other hand, if it proves morally impermissible to wild-​harvest fish, the lifestyle of many traditional and modern communities would be lost. Perhaps the moral benefit of preserving these communities and lifestyles outweighs the harm of at least certain kinds of fishing, or perhaps the harm of harvesting certain kinds of fish. There are pitfalls in trying to defend this line of argument that must be avoided, so we shall begin by trying to avoid them. The first is committing to too strong of a moral principle. Let us call the too-​strong principle the “absolute principle of cultural preservation”: The absolute principle of cultural preservation (ACP):  The fact that P is a long-​ standing cultural practice, central to a community’s way of life, makes preserving P the overriding moral consideration. It is not at all difficult to see what is wrong with ACP, which would provide overriding justification for the continuation of chattel slavery, serfdom, the systematic oppression of women, and many other deeply morally objectionable practices. 24 

25 

The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture (2016). Accessed at Worm et al. (2006).

Ethics for Fish   199 To avoid the obvious problems that arise from ACP, we can try an alternative principle: The weaker principle of cultural preservation (WCP): The fact that P is a long-​standing cultural practice, central to a community’s way of life, makes preserving P a moral consideration to be non-​minimally26 weighed against other moral considerations. WCP is clearly more plausible than ACP. All things considered, societies with chattel slavery ought to change their laws, members of cultures that oppress women ought to change their practices, and so on. However, even WCP is problematic, at least in forms that would help the case for making fishing, and the eating of fish that pays for it, be morally permissible. To see why, let us consider its consequences. If the fact that a particular practice is central to community’s way of life is some non-​minimally weighted moral reason to preserve that practice, then at least sometimes it must be able to outweigh, or at least balance against, another non-​minimally weighted moral reason. Fishing kills a great many fish and also marine mammals (as an unintended consequence). Suppose that we assign a low moral weight to the suffering and death of each of these animals individually. Presumably over the history of the practice of fishing, eventually the amount of moral badness created is equivalent to that created by the killing of a single human individual. Now let us suppose that there is culture with the following practice. Each year a handful of sand is thrown on the roof of every home occupied by just a single person. Let us also suppose that those homes are always occupied by a single person, with a new one moving in when the previous occupant partners off or otherwise leaves. Let us suppose that eventually, over the course of many decades, one of the roofs will collapse, killing the home’s occupant. At that time, all the sand is removed from other roofs and used to fill in the collapsed house as a ceremonial grave. We might suppose that this practice exists for a reason of sorts. The community for its own safety has to move sand away from one side of the village, where the village food supply is grown, to keep it from mixing in with the soil. When the village was originally founded, it was too difficult to move the sand much beyond the village, and this practice of removal to single villagers’ roofs had the benefit of not impeding cart traffic in the streets with big piles of sand. With modern technology, the village could over a period of several years safely transition to moving the sand all the way to the other side of the village. But the villagers choose not to, in part because a way of life will be lost. The threat of collapsing roofs is an important part of the process of partnering off, as it motivates single persons to marry, and it plays a critical role in regulating the real estate market. Even though this practice only kills one person every several decades and serves further cultural and economic purposes in the community, it is difficult to see the case for

26 

The “non-​minimal” clause is to ensure that the considerations are not treated so weakly as to be always morally outweighed by other considerations.

200    Eliot Michaelson and Andrew Reisner preserving its existence. Its moral costs are in the scheme of things not very high, but the trade-​off between maintaining the culture and killing someone unnecessarily seem to work against the former and in favor of the latter.27 It seems likely that someone who is attracted to the cultural practice argument will be willing to bite the bullet on cases like this one.28 It is our suspicion that increasing the number of innocents who are involuntarily harmed by the cultural practices will eventually make biting the bullet too difficult, even for those attracted to the cultural practices argument. The actual harm done by traditional fishing is often higher than might be expected. Commercial fishing, one of the bedrock traditional cultures of upper New England, is rated by the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health as the most dangerous profession in America. Many Maine fisherman work in the most dangerous sub-​industry, which is fishing for scallops (from 2000 to 2009 deaths occurred at a rate of 425 per 100,000 full-​time fisherman annually, or 26 total deaths during that period) and groundfish (at a rate of 600 deaths annually per 100,000 full time fisherman, or 44 total deaths, during the same period) in the Atlantic.29 It is at least plausible to assume that alternative economies could be developed with safer primary sources of employment. Perhaps the most plausible cultural preservation principle would be one like this: The moral principle of cultural preservation (MCP): The fact that P is a long-​standing cultural practice, central to a community’s way of life, makes preserving P a moral good in virtue of being a cultural practice if and only if P is not morally bad independently of being a cultural practice. This principle’s plausibility strikes us as difficult to explain beyond appeal to the folk’s intuitions. People are quick to appeal to cultural practice as a good reason for doing something, as long as the tradition is seen as central to a particular culture and is not thought to be excessively harmful. We ourselves are not confident that the folk’s intuitions are correct in this case, but that is a separate discussion.30 While MCP may be correct, it is difficult to see what role it could play in an argument for the moral permissibility for the consumption of fish as a means to supporting fishing communities. In order for MCP to do work, it would already have to have been determined that fishing is not morally bad. There is some ambiguity in the “morally bad” 27  Tyler Doggett helpfully noted to us that there are many cultural practices that cause unnecessary deaths, but against which there is no serious public outcry. Some of these practices, for example, alpinism practiced by informed and consenting adults, may fall within the range of those activities which are unwise but permissible. In those cases where consent cannot be given, for example, for dangerous activities that might be required of children in schools, it would seem that the lack of public outcry is a moral failing. 28  Mark Budolfson helpfully suggested this point to us. 29  See Center for Disease Control and Prevention (2010). https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/ mmwrhtml/mm5927a2.htm. 30  For a wide-​ranging discussion of the problems of among other things assigning much moral weight to a practice because it is a cultural tradition, see Cudd (2006).

Ethics for Fish   201 clause in MCP. It is difficult to see how, supposing we afford any moral weight to the welfare of marine life (the fish being fished for or the marine mammals being harmed as a side effect), fishing could fail to be at least pro tanto bad. On the other hand, if the clause is read as morally bad all things considered, then MCP does no extra work in determining the all things considered goodness or badness of fishing. This does leave open one possibility for the distinctive role that fishing plays in fishing communities to matter. That possibility depends on how much harm will accrue to the individuals of the community if they can no longer sell their fish. If eating fish is required for selling fish, and the failure to sell fish will result in significant harms to the fishing community, then the harms to the victims of fishing must be weighed against the harms from the cessation of fishing to the members of the fishing community.31 What the final assessment of these considerations should be is both a theoretical and an empirical question. But even if the immediate cessation of fishing, or of eating fish, would be morally wrong, it remains an open question as to whether particular communities or individuals are morally required to begin the transition process to a different lifestyle. Without the cultural preservation principles, and contingent on the feasibility of doing so, we cannot see any argument against many fishing communities being morally required to effect a transition to a different economy.

Two Collective Action Problems Fishing raises a number of tricky issues pertaining to how we ought to act together—​ both as human beings in general and as specifically political groups—​and what that means for how we ought to act individually. We shall focus here on two: first, how should fishing be regulated, given that it largely takes place in environments which are difficult to monitor and where rules are difficult, if not impossible, to enforce? Second, what should one do, as an individual, given the arguments concerning both fish and fishing considered earlier in this essay? As we shall see, these questions are not unrelated. Fisheries are, in a sense, the world’s last great common resource. Many fisheries are, of course, located within national waters, but a great many are located well beyond these boundaries. Supposing for the moment that we accept that we ought, collectively, to allow for industrial-​scale fishing, how ought we to manage fishing stocks, and in particular those stocks which lie beyond the bounds of any national border? One common proposal is that we ought to harvest fish “sustainably,” where this is taken to mean something like “maintaining a yield of X tonnes of a particular species 31  Tyler Doggett helpfully pointed out that similar arguments may arise with respect to free-​range farming: if these farms are less efficient, and that decrease in efficiency is not made up for via increased prices, then farmers will be harmed by switching to free-​range methods. That harm would thus need to be weighed against the benefit to the animals involved.

202    Eliot Michaelson and Andrew Reisner indefinitely while not grossly degrading the surrounding oceanic environment.” One might attempt to achieve this goal in a number of different ways, but one common thought is that some nongovernmental or supra-​governmental body ought to distribute permits to catch a certain amount of fish in line with experts’ projections for the particular fishery in question.32 This, in turn, raises the question of how these permits should be distributed, and how their trade should subsequently be regulated. We take this question of what this initial distribution should look like to be a very hard problem. It might initially seem that these permits should be primarily given to fisherpeople from poorer regions, since this would effectively serve as a wealth-​transfer scheme to those regions. But note that fisherpeople from poorer regions may well have more incentive to cheat if they can, since greater profit is likely to disproportionately improve the lives of people in very poor areas. What is more, anti-​cheating regimes (via inspections) and technologies (e.g., GPS transmitters) are expensive and may pose an undue burden on fisherpeople from poorer regions. On the other hand, distributing permits to fisherpeople from rich countries looks very much like rewarding these people for already being wealthy. All this suggests that there may be no easy answer to the question of how, regardless of what sort of agency might be set up to control fishing in international waters, permissions to fish in those waters ought to be distributed. Even if a fair distribution scheme were to be implemented, one would have to expect illegal fishing in international waters to continue well into the future. All this might make it tempting to shift the burden of regulating fishing from the body politic to the consumer: if consumers were to demand that the fish they eat be certified in some reliable manner, or if they were to refrain from eating fish at all, wouldn’t that resolve this problem of regulating the world’s ocean commons? Unfortunately, there is reason to worry that it might not. This brings us to our second question regarding collective action and fish: as an individual, should one expect to have any effect on fish welfare by choosing not to purchase and eat fish? Sadly, we suspect not. The system of fish production is highly complex and waste-​tolerant, meaning that the signals generated by individuals’ purchases (or lack thereof) are likely to get drowned out in the noise of the overall system.33 This threatens to undermine one common motivation for not eating fish: the hope that one’s individual actions will directly result, via the transmission of an economic signal, in increased fish welfare. Analogous reasoning should lead one to expect that one’s signal regarding a particular certification scheme will be drowned out by the noise of the overall system of fish production. Of course, this problem is not at all unique to the question of whether it is permissible to eat fish; analogous problems arise with respect to any sort of land or avian animal we might consider eating.34 While we cannot hope to deal with this problem in full here, we shall offer a few initial thoughts on why this observation does not support the view 32 

See, for instance, Hilbourn (2012). See Budolfson (forthcoming) for the terrestrial analog of this argument. 34  See the essays by Julia Nefsky, Bob Fischer, and Tristram McPherson, in this volume. 33 

Ethics for Fish   203 that it is prima facie morally permissible to eat fish, or likewise to purchase fish without regard to their sustainability. Our basic strategy of response will be of the “partners in crime” variety. That is, we think that this sort of worry can be used to generate an apparent reason not to ϕ in instances where one clearly ought to ϕ. So we reject the thought that inefficacy undermines one’s reasons to ϕ in any general sense. That, of course, leaves unresolved the question of whether inefficacy worries undermine one’s reasons not to eat fish in particular. So how does this sort of inefficacy objection threaten to over-​generate? Consider a situation in which you live in a slave-​holding society. You do not yourself own slaves, yet you face the following choice: either you can speak out in opposition of slavery and face moderately unpleasant social repercussions, or you can stay quiet and suffer no such repercussions. Either way, you should expect that your actions will have no effect on the welfare of the enslaved population around you. We can further stipulate that you are right in this expectation; your actions either way will have absolutely no effect on any slave’s well-​being. Ought you speak out against slavery and suffer the moderately unpleasant social repercussions? We submit that the answer is very clearly “yes.” This shows that the mere fact that an action requires a small personal sacrifice but is likely to be causally inefficacious is not a clear objection to that action’s rightness. We further contend that the minor harms one might suffer by not eating fish—​some lack of possible gustatory pleasure—​ are less significant than the moderate social harms of our imagined scenario.35 The slavery example makes it easy to see that problems of collective action occur in many ethical contexts, from voting to taking actions to protect the environment. These collective action problems relate closely to cooperative behavior problems in ethics and to the problem of redundant causation in ethical action. At present, how to explain why problems like these, including the slavery problem, arise is controversial. It is much less controversial, however, to hold that one in fact has obligations even in cases where one’s individual actions are inefficacious in part because others do not take similar actions. Thus, we tentatively conclude that basic inefficacy concerns do not yet serve to undermine arguments to the effect that we should not eat fish. And, to whatever extent one is unconvinced by those arguments, we do not think that these arguments undermine the thought that, in eating fish, one should attend to the sustainability and average environmental impact of the sort of fish one is eating. In order for these sorts of arguments to constitute a clear justification for the permissibility of eating fish, more would need to be done to demonstrate that the present case is unlike the case of the ineffective abolitionist

35  We assume for the sake of argument that one can obtain all the necessary nutrients for a healthy life by eating sea vegetables rather than fish. The prime suspect for concern is Omega 3 fatty acids, which accumulate in fish flesh via their consumption of seaweeds containing those fatty acids, seaweeds from which these fatty acids can, in fact, be directly extracted. If this assumption proves to be wrong—​that is, if there prove to be certain nutrients that can only be obtained by eating fish flesh—​that might change the calculation here slightly, depending on the particular ill-​effects of failing to consume these nutrients.

204    Eliot Michaelson and Andrew Reisner we have just considered, as well as being different to many other ethical issues that run into closely related efficacy challenges besides.36

Conclusion Empirical ignorance and lack of empathy have often led to poor ethical decision-​ making. In 2012, a weak year for international fisheries, the total fish catch for the world was 90 million tonnes. It is difficult to estimate how many total fish that includes, but even if we cautiously estimated the average fish size at 200 lbs., this would mean that 900 million individuals were caught and killed. This does not include all the fish and other sea organisms killed collaterally in the fishing process. If humans are collectively making a moral mistake in eating many popular kinds of fish, then we are making a massive moral mistake. This raises the question of how likely we are to be making a massive collective moral mistake. New and innovative research into fish intelligence and psychology has started to suggest that many of our naïve assumptions regarding the sophistication of many species of fish and about their capacity to feel pain and to suffer are simply false. This is in keeping with the general trend of learning through study that many species of animals possess intelligence and psychological capacities that were often not readily apparent to us on account of their inability to report their own interior lives. The inscrutability of fish to us does little to generate empathy for them. It is easier to discount the suffering of creatures who cannot make the nature and intensity of their suffering known to us in a way that evokes an emotional response. For both this reason and because we have likely been underestimating the degree to which they possess morally salient psychological features, it now seems likely that we collectively have been acting wrongly with respect to eating fish on account of the harm caused by harvesting them. At the same time, distinctive features of the harvesting of fish—​that they are wild caught and that they support distinctive ways of life—​appear unlikely to weigh heavily enough in the moral calculus to tip the moral scales toward the permissibility of our collectively harvesting and eating fish. Best we can tell then, we are likely to be making a massive moral mistake when it comes to the way that we, collectively, interact with fish. Fish would seem to be worthy of moral consideration such that we should think twice about killing them for food,

36 

Of course, we do not mean to rule out the possibility that inefficacy can serve to undermine one’s reasons to ϕ in the right circumstances. For instance, the fact that a certain charity is ineffective can be an excellent reason for me to give to a different charity instead. What is more, we take it that there are likely to be cases where the fact that ϕ-​ing is likely to be ineffective matters quite a bit to whether one ought to ϕ: for instance, cases where ϕ-​ing also brings with it a significant risk of self-​harm. We cannot see how the question of whether to eat fish could be seriously taken (by those in our likely audience’s circumstances) to constitute a case like this, however.

Ethics for Fish   205 particularly when there are other options available to us. Even if the evidence in favor of fishes’ moral standing was less compelling, we still think that a principle of caution would favor a massive shift in our attitudes toward fish. Suppose that I am only 50% confident that this is a priceless Ming vase as opposed to a fake: I still have excellent reason to be extremely careful with the vase. Why? One natural thought is that the cost of being wrong here would be extremely high. If we are going to kill nearly a billion individuals each year in order to feed ourselves, we should hope to be extremely confident that these individuals lack any claim on us not to kill and eat them. But, as we have seen, we lack anything like this sort of confidence when it comes to the case of fish.

Acknowledgments We would like to thank Alexander Szorkovszsky for his invaluable help in navigating the literature on fish psychology and intelligence, and Simon Rosenqvist, who provided us with many valuable comments, in particular, for his contribution to improving the “Fishing Communities and Cultural Practices” section. We would also like to thank the editors of this volume for valuable feedback and discussion. Any and all errors are, of course, our own.

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206    Eliot Michaelson and Andrew Reisner Gallup, G. G. 1970. “Chimpanzees: Self-​Recognition.” Science 167:86–​87. Giassi, A. C. C., W. Ellis, and L. Maler. 2012. “Organization of the Gymnotiform Fish Pallium in Relation to Learning and Memory: III. Intrinsic Connections.” Journal of Comparative Neurology 520:3369–​3394. Hilbourn, R. 2012. Overfishing: What Everyone Needs to Know. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Huntingford, F.  A., C. Adams, V.  A. Braithwaite, S. Kadri, T. G. Pottingers, P. Sandoe, and J. F. Turnbull. 2006. “Current Issues in Fish Welfare.” Journal of Fish Biology 68:332–​372. Key, B. 2016. “Why Fish Do Not Feel Pain.” Animal Sentience 3. http://​animalstudiesrepository. org/​animsent/​vol1/​iss3/​1/​. McMahan, J. 1996. “Cognitive Disability, Misfortunate, and Justice.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 25:3–​35. —​—​—​. 2003. The Ethics of Killing: Problems at the Margins of Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Overmier, J. B., and M. R. Papini. 1986. “Factors Modulating the Effects of Teleost Telencephalon Ablation on Retention, Relearning and Extinction of Instrumental Avoidance Behavior.” Behavioral Neuroscience 100:190–​199. Palmer, D. 1975. “Unfelt Pains.” American Philosophical Quarterly 12:289–​298. Platek, S. M., and S. L. Levin. 2004. “Monkeys, Mirrors, Mark Tests, and Minds.” Trends in Ecology & Evolution 19:406–​407. Prior, H., A. Schwarz, and O. Güntürkün. 2008. “Mirror-​Induced Behavior in the Magpie (Pica pica): Evidence of Self-​Recognition.” PLoS Biology 6:e202. doi:10.1371/​journal.pbio.0060202. Roques, J. A. C., W. Abbink, F. Geurds, H. Vis, and G. Flik. 2010. “Tailfin Clipping, a Painful Procedure: Studies on Nile Tilapia and Common Carp.” Physiology & Behavior 101:533–​540. Rose, J. D. 2002. “The Neurobehavioral Nature of Fishes and the Question of Awareness and Pain.” Reviews in Fisheries Science 10:1–​38. —​—​—​. 2007. “Anthropomorphism and ‘Mental Welfare’ of Fishes.” Diseases of Aquatic Organisms 75:139–​154. Rose, J. D., R. Arlinghaus, S. J. Cooke, B. K. Diggles, W. Sawynok, E. D. Stevens, and C. D. L. Wynne. 2014. “Can Fish Really Feel Pain?” Fish & Fisheries 15:97–​133. Sneddon, L. U. 2011. “Pain Perception in Fish: Evidence and Implications for the Use of Fish.” Journal of Consciousness Studies 18:209–​229. Worm, B., E. B. Barbier, N. Beaumont, J. E. Duffy, C. Folke, B. S. Halpern, J. B. C. Jackson, H. K. Lotze, F. Micheli, S. R. Palumbi, E. Sala, K. A. Selkoe, J. J. Stachowicz, and R. Watson. 2006. “Impacts of Biodiversity Loss on Ecosystem Services.” Science 314:787–​790. Wrangham, R. 2010. Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. London: Profile Books.

Pa rt  I I I

C ON SUM P T ION

chapter 10

The Ethica l Basi s for Vega ni sm Tristram McPherson

Introduction On one natural gloss, veganism is a pattern of living: roughly, to be vegan is to avoid eating or otherwise using products made from or by animals. At least in our cultural context, few people are likely to just find themselves becoming vegans, in the way that one might find oneself eating too much saturated fat, or possessing an alarming quantity of paisley clothing. Rather, people are likely to become vegan as a result of (more or less explicit) ethical reflection. This chapter examines the ethical case that can be mounted for veganism. While I take the ethical case for veganism to be very promising, my aim in this chapter is not polemical. Because there has been comparatively little discussion in ethics focused directly on veganism, my central hope in this chapter is instead to help foster substantive progress in that discussion. I aim to do this by: (1) orienting readers to (some of) the most important literature relevant to the topic, (2) providing a clear explanation of the current state of the ethical case for veganism, and (3) focusing attention on the most important outstanding or underexplored questions in this domain. I begin by examining and organizing the range of positions that deserve to be called ethical veganism. I then discuss (some of) the range of types of reasons that philosophers can potentially appeal to in making a case for veganism. In my view, the most promising case for veganism begins by arguing directly for the wrongness of making animals suffer and die. There are several important and different potential strategies for connecting this conclusion to the defense of a vegan lifestyle. Here I consider three such strategies, which appeal respectively to the ethical significance of the effects of individual use of animal products, of group efficacy, and of complicity with wrongdoing. I conclude by examining several relatively neglected complications facing the ethical case for veganism.

210   Tristram McPherson

What Is Ethical Veganism? I began by glossing veganism as a kind of lifestyle: one that rejects the use of products made from or by animals (hereinafter animal products). It is worth noting that one might also think of veganism as a commitment to this sort of lifestyle: this would permit us to understand someone with such a commitment, who occasionally succumbed to omnivorous temptation, as a weak-​willed vegan. Ethical veganism is the class of ethical views that ascribe some positive ethical evaluation to that lifestyle. In what follows, I will understand ethical evaluation quite broadly, for example, I will take self-​interest to be an ethical consideration. In order to focus on what is distinctive of ethical veganism, it is useful to contrast it with two paradigmatically contrasting views. Ethical vegetarianism makes a strong distinction between using products made from animals (e.g., meat), and products made by animals (e.g., milk), characteristically objecting to use of the former but not the latter. Ethical omnivorism permits the use of some animal products, but restricts the acceptable sources of such products, to those that satisfy some ethical criterion. There are many possible versions of ethical veganism. To begin, it will be useful to consider a very strong version: Broad Absolutist Veganism: It is always wrong to use any product made from or by any member of the animal kingdom. Broad Absolutist Veganism contrasts with vegetarianism and omnivorism, but it is also implausible, for several reasons. One reason is its absolutism: the claim that it is always wrong to use animal products. This entails that it would be wrong to press a leather button, even if doing so were necessary in order to avert global nuclear war. A second reason is the broad scope of this principle across the animal kingdom, which entails that it is wrong to use sponges (members of the animal kingdom which wholly lack a nervous system). The thesis can be modified to avoid each of these problems. The scope problem is especially potent because many arguments for veganism appeal to properties—​such as the ability to suffer—​that are not shared by all animals. It is not clear whether there are any ethically significant properties that are shared by all members of the animal kingdom but not by plants.1 It is thus natural to restrict ethical veganism to focus on those animals that have the proposed ethically relevant property or properties. Ethical veganism could also be restricted in other ways, for example, one can imagine a thesis that prohibits dietary consumption of animal products, as opposed to their use more broadly. In what follows, I will in general neglect this latter sort of restriction. 1 

For a useful discussion of this issue, see Pluhar, “Who Can Be Obligated,” 191–​193.

The Ethical Basis for Veganism    211 The implausibility that arises from absolutism can be avoided by a defeasible form of ethical veganism, which allows that there are circumstances in which using animal products is permissible. A  defeasible veganism might suggest that the ethical objection to using animal products can be outweighed by competing ethical considerations. Several philosophers have argued that ethical principles can also be defeasible in another way: by having exceptions in which they do not count at all against a relevant action.2 For example, one might think that if there is an ethical requirement not to use animal products, it simply does not apply to consuming human breastmilk with the consent of the producer. Elsewhere3 I defend a form of restricted and defeasible veganism that I call: Modest Ethical Veganism: It is typically wrong to use products made from or by a range of animals that includes: cats, dogs, cows, pigs, deer, and chickens. This is a defeasible form of veganism because it explicitly signals that using animal products is only typically wrong. It is also restricted, governing our use of only some animals. In virtue of these features, Modest Ethical Veganism will be much easier to defend than Broad Absolutist Veganism. However, it is also strong enough to be a recognizably vegan thesis. For example, in typical circumstances, it rules out the use of products made from or by the most commonly farmed animals. Weakening the thesis further (e.g., by prohibiting only the use of great apes, or claiming that using animal products was only occasionally wrong) would arguably result in a thesis too weak to deserve the name veganism. One could weaken the vegan’s thesis in a different way, by replacing the core idea that failure to be vegan is wrong. For example, it could be argued that practicing veganism is ordinarily virtuous but supererogatory: above and beyond the call of ethical duty.4 Notice, however, that if combined with the view that vegetarianism or ethical omnivorism is obligatory, it might seem odd to call this view a version of ethical veganism. Alternatively, one could argue that veganism is a required aspiration, as opposed to a required practice.5 Another dimension along which ethical theses concerning veganism can vary might be glossed as their modal fragility. For example, one can imagine an argument for veganism which claimed that using animal products is essentially wrong. This sort of argument would entail that using animal products could not have easily been typically permissible. By contrast, imagine a case for ethical veganism that

2 

See, e.g., Lance and Little, “Where the Laws Are”; McKeever and Ridge, Principled Ethics; Robinson, “Moral Holism”; and Väyrynen, “Hedged Moral Principles.” 3  McPherson, “Case for Ethical Veganism”; McPherson, “Why I Am a Vegan”; McPherson, “How to Argue.” 4  For a related idea, compare Harman, “Eating Meat.” 5  See Gruen and Jones, “Veganism as an Aspiration.”

212   Tristram McPherson grounded the requirement to be vegan crucially in putatively unjust FDA policies. The requirement to be vegan would be modally fragile on the second view: using animal products could easily be permissible, on this view, if the FDA were to change its policies. This dimension of the issue is rarely discussed, and I will largely ignore it in what follows. The principles discussed so far focus on the use of animal products. While we have some grip on this notion, a rigorous characterization of veganism would need to make precise which relationships to animals counted as use in the ethically significant sense. However, one might think that however use is understood, characterizing ethical veganism solely in terms of use is objectionably limited: one might claim that the core ethical concerns that mitigate against using animal products should also orient our lives as social and political beings. One way into the social dimension of this issue begins by noting that when someone knowingly and freely performs an action that we judge to be wrong—​especially as a consistent pattern—​we typically take it to be appropriate to blame that agent, and to feel various negative emotions toward them. We also typically take it to be appropriate to curtail our interactions with such agents in various ways. If eating meat is typically wrong, we might also expect it to be blameworthy. And this raises the question of whether vegans should refuse to be friends with omnivores, or otherwise share their lives with them.6 Veganism also raises important questions in political philosophy. Generally, we can ask: Should the status of nonhuman animals be a central dimension by which we evaluate polities?7 In the context of ideal theory, we can ask: Would the use of nonhuman animals be absent from, outlawed, or punished in an ideal polity?8 Or are certain uses of nonhuman animals examples of ethically objectionable behavior that should nonetheless be tolerated in a well-​functioning society characterized by reasonable ethical disagreement? In our nonideal circumstances, we can ask whether various forms of conventional or radical political action on behalf of animals are required or supererogatory on the basis of the considerations that support veganism.9 This section has surveyed a range of dimensions on which variants of ethical veganism might be organized. No one of these views is the obvious candidate to be the privileged characterization of ethical veganism. Because of this, keeping the range of possible variants of the view in mind is important: some of the issues raised by differences between these views are badly in need of careful exploration. Further, these views vary widely in plausibility, and very different sorts of arguments would be required to support or rebut them. 6 

For a vivid depiction of someone struggling with this question, see Coetzee, Lives of Animals.

7 Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice, 325–​407; Plunkett, “Methodology of Political Philosophy.” 8 

Zamir, “Veganism,” 368–​369. For discussion of some of these social and political questions, see Donaldson and Kymlicka, Zoopolis; Michaelson, “Accommodator’s Dilemma”; Rowlands, Animals Like Us, ch. 10. 9 

The Ethical Basis for Veganism    213

Arguing for Veganism: Resources One might argue for veganism in a wide variety of ways. In order to orient the reader, I  begin by sketching a rough taxonomy of the sorts of reasons that a vegan might appeal to.

Self-​Interested Reasons Adopting a vegan lifestyle can potentially impose significant burdens on an individual, ranging from inconvenience, to being cut off from valuable traditions, to the risk of ostracism or malnutrition. Nonetheless, it is possible to mount a prudential case that many of us should adopt a vegan diet. The core reason is this: the overwhelming majority of North Americans have diets that are unhealthy in large part because they involve eating too many calories and too much saturated fat, and too few vegetables and whole grains.10 One reason to choose a vegan diet is that it will tend to be a much healthier alternative to this status quo. Of course, one can be an unhealthy vegan. However, many of the most problematic foods in the North American diet are ruled out by veganism. This way of supporting veganism appears to face three limitations. First, it at best supports adopting a vegan diet. It does nothing to rule out non-​dietary uses of animal products (wearing a leather jacket is not going to clog anyone’s arteries). Second, it is most clearly a case for preferring a vegan diet to currently typical diets. It is not obviously a case for preferring a vegan diet over (for example) a largely plant-​based diet that includes modest amounts of lean meat. This issue is controversial. For example, T. Colin Campbell and Thomas Campbell claim that the nutritional evidence provides some support for completely eliminating animal products from one’s diet.11 However, even Campbell and Campbell grant that they have a very modest case for the superiority of eliminating consumption of animal products entirely, as opposed to substantially limiting it. The significance of this issue likely depends in part on one’s capacity for self-​control. For some people, the case for going vegan on health grounds, rather than attempting a healthy omnivorous diet, may be analogous to the alcoholic’s reasons to quit “cold turkey” rather than attempting to drink moderately. For others, however, a healthy omnivorous diet, like moderate drinking, may be easily implemented. And others may even find that making infrequent exceptions is crucial to maintaining their motivation to remain vegan the rest of the time.12 Third, it is likely that even if these sorts of prudential considerations can provide reasons to become a vegan, they cannot support the deontic claim that eating animal

10 

E.g., Walker et al., “Public Health Implications.” Campbell and Campbell, China Study, 242. 12  Singer and Mason, The Way We Eat, 282–​283. 11 

214   Tristram McPherson products is wrong. Compare: most of us have good reasons to get more exercise, but it is implausible that we act wrongly when we fail to do so.13

Environmental Reasons Another important way of arguing for veganism appeals to the environmental consequences of animal agriculture. This sort of argument could be developed anthropocentrically, focusing on environmental consequences that affect human beings generally. Or it could appeal to the intrinsic ethical significance of, for example, species or ecosystems. The starting point for such arguments is the idea that the vegan lifestyle and diet makes fewer demands upon our shared environmental resources than the typical North American diet. Consider three points. First, it typically takes far more arable land and water to produce grain to feed to nonhuman animals to produce a calorie of meat than it does to produce a calorie of plant-​based food. Animal agriculture thus puts pressure on increasingly scarce and vulnerable cropland and water resources. Second, economic pressures on animal agriculture have led to increasingly industrialized farming practices. This has increased the amount of environmentally toxic byproducts generated by farming, which in turn further damages land and water systems.14 Of course, these dynamics apply to the production of vegan foods as well. This consideration thus supports a vegan diet only in conjunction with the first point. Third, animal agriculture is a significant contributor to global warming, which is arguably the most dramatic environmental threat we now face.15 These environmental considerations support a slightly broader conclusion than the self-​interested reasons.16 For example, if the environmental cost of animal agriculture gives us reasons to stop eating animal products, it also gives us reasons to avoid using animal products in other ways. A central complication facing such environmentally based arguments, however, is that it is implausible that all animal agriculture is environmentally damaging. For example, farm animal manure can increase the agricultural productivity of farmland without the use of industrially produced fertilizers, and animals can forage on land that

13  However, for an argument that human health-​based considerations can play an important role in utilitarian arguments for vegetarianism, see Garrett, “Utilitarianism, Vegetarianism, and Human Health.” 14  Walker et al., “Public Health Implications.” 15  Estimates of the climate impact of animal agriculture range wildly, from between a twentieth and a half of all anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. See Goodland and Anhang, “Livestock and Climate Change”; Fairlie, Benign Extravagance, ch. 13; and Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, “Role of Livestock,” for competing estimates of the climate effects of animal agriculture. Assessing which of these competing estimates is relevant for ethical purposes requires complex empirical and ethical argument. 16  For a case for vegetarianism that appeals centrally to such considerations, see Fox, “Vegetarianism and Planetary Health.”

The Ethical Basis for Veganism    215 is not otherwise agriculturally productive. Considerations like these could be used to argue that there is a nonzero level of animal agriculture that is optimal (at least from the point of view of overall human well-​being).17 This suggests several complications for an environmental case for veganism. This is especially true if the relevant foil is a lifestyle that significantly reduces, but does not eliminate, the use of animal products, or one which focuses on supporting farms that use animal products in environmentally friendlier ways.

Religious Reasons Religious traditions provide ethical guidance for many people. It is possible to develop arguments for veganism that appeal to the distinctive ethical resources of certain religious traditions. The most straightforward way of making such arguments would appeal directly to religious prescriptions. For example, Jainism and some variants of Buddhism enjoin some version of vegetarianism. In most cases, however, religiously based arguments for veganism will have to address significant arguments against ethical veganism from within their religious tradition and will not have such direct doctrinal support. Here, the metaphysical principles of a religion can be relevant, for example, the Buddhist doctrine of transmigration entails that humans and animals all have souls and, indeed, that many animals were humans in past lives.18 This metaphysical thesis makes the case for ethical similarity between humans and animals easier to argue for, compared to views on which humans are distinctive among animals in having souls.19 The Christian tradition is similar in this respect. Would-​be ethical vegans have an uphill battle against explicit biblical discussion of food. But they can also appeal to the ethical significance of certain ethical precepts that are widely accepted within the Christian tradition. For example, one might seek to make a case for ethical veganism that appealed centrally to the ethical importance of reverence, mercy, or stewardship.20 This, of course, only scratches the surface of potential avenues for religiously based arguments in food ethics.21

Animal-​Focused Arguments Each of the classes of considerations just briefly sketched is potentially important, and each might be developed to make a case that we have reasons to move in the direction

17  See Fairlie, Benign Extravagance, ch. 4, for defense of this idea; Wenz’s “Ecological Argument” is an environmentally based argument for vegetarianism that is concessive on this front. 18  Goodman, “Indian and Tibetan Buddhism,” sec. 5. 19 Harvey, Buddhist Ethics, 156, 163. 20  Cf. Linzey, Animal Theology; Halteman, Compassionate Eating. 21  For a useful discussion, see Doggett and Halteman, “Food Ethics and Religion.”

216   Tristram McPherson of a vegan lifestyle. However, they leave out what I take to be the most significant reasons to become vegan: reasons that focus on nonhuman animals themselves, rather than focusing on human interests, considered either individually or collectively. The range of relevant animal-​focused arguments in the literature is vast,22 and I will not do it justice.

Theoretical Commitment and Naïveté One central division among arguments in animal ethics is whether the author presupposes a systematic normative ethical theory or hopes to proceed without one. Approaches that begin from commitment to a systematic normative ethics are legion. For example, there are discussions of animal ethics that are embedded within utilitarian, Kantian, virtue theoretic, and various contractarian and contractualist theoretical structures.23 One influential and powerful example of the theoretically committed approach is Tom Regan’s case for animal rights.24 Regan argues that individuals possess various moral rights, which directly reflect the inherent moral worth of those individuals. By proposing to ground rights directly in moral worth, Regan raises a pressing question. On any plausible view of rights, some things (e.g., you and I) possess moral rights (and hence inherent moral worth), while others (e.g., a shard of broken plastic) do not. What explains the difference? Regan argues that many initially plausible answers to this question are indefensible. For example, consider the idea that inherent moral worth requires capacities for ethical agency or sophisticated rational thought. This would entail that nonhuman animals lack rights. However, it would also entail that many humans (e.g., young children and severely mentally handicapped adults) lack rights. And this is implausible. Or consider the idea that having moral worth requires being a member of the species Homo sapiens. This avoids the problems facing the rational capacity idea, but it looks like an attempt to explain a fundamental ethical property by appeal to something ethically irrelevant. To see this, imagine that we discovered an alien species with capacities to think, feel, love, and act that are very like our own. Mere difference in their genetic code surely cannot deprive them of rights. According to Regan, the only defensible alternative is that a sufficient criterion for having intrinsic worth is being 22  For a useful but incomplete bibliography, see “Vegetarianism and Animals,” The Philosophy of Food Project, http://​www.food.unt.edu/​bibliography/​#16. 23  For an explicit discussion of utilitarianism and vegetarianism, see Singer, “Utilitarianism and Vegetarianism.” Many other important discussions make the most sense if we presuppose the utilitarian framework that their authors accept, although they do not explicitly presuppose utilitarianism; see Singer, Animal Liberation; Norcross, “Puppies, Pigs, and People”; and S. Rachels, “Vegetarianism.” For Kantianism, see, e.g., Wood, “Kant on Duties”; Korsgaard, “Fellow Creatures”; and Calhoun, “But What about the Animals?” For virtue theory, see Hursthouse, “Applying Virtue Ethics.” For various contract approaches, see Baxter, People or Penguins; Rowlands, Animals Like Us, ch. 3; and Talbert, “Contractualism and Our Duties.” 24 Regan, Case for Animal Rights. The exegesis in this paragraph largely follows that in McPherson, “Moorean Defense?”

The Ethical Basis for Veganism    217 the experiencing subject of a life.25 Since many of the animals that humans eat and otherwise use are experiencing subjects of lives, Regan concludes that these animals have moral rights that are just as strong as ours.26 Just as farming humans would violate our rights, so, on this view, animal agriculture violates the rights of nonhuman animals. Arguments like Regan’s make an important contribution to the ethical evaluation of veganism. At the very least, such arguments can help us to better understand some of the implications of promising systematic views in ethics. However, the strategy of appealing to a systematic ethical theory faces at least two significant limitations. The first is that there is an ongoing fierce and reasonable dispute between proponents of various systematic options to normative ethics. The second limitation—​obscured by my breezy exposition of Regan’s view—​is that each of the central organizing ideas in systematic normative ethics can be implemented in many ways. The forest of structural options is perhaps most familiar from discussions of consequentialism, but the issue generalizes.27 Together, these points may limit how confident we can reasonably be in any systematic ethical theory determinate enough to guide our thinking about veganism. The alternative to such approaches is to offer a theoretically naïve argument for veganism. On this approach, one appeals to intuitively compelling judgments about clear cases and seeks to construct local ethical principles capable of explaining the truth of those judgments, without appeal to systematic normative theory.28 Even for philosophers committed to a systematic normative theory, exploring the issue from a theoretically naïve perspective may be illuminating, as it may help to reveal issues that will make a given theoretically committed approach more or less plausible or dialectically compelling.

The Naïve Argument from Suffering Jeremy Bentham famously said of animals that “the question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?”29 The line of argument for ethical veganism that I find most plausible begins from this question, answering that—​at least for a wide range of animals—​the answer is: Yes, they can suffer.30

25 Regan, Case for Animal Rights, sec. 7.5.

26  Certain elements of Regan’s total view complicate this conclusion. See Pluhar, “Who Can Be Obligated,” 193–​197. 27  For a superb introduction to many of the choice points facing some of the major approaches to systematic normative ethics, see Kagan, Normative Ethics. 28  This approach to animal ethics is widespread; two exemplary instances are J. Rachels, “Moral Argument,” and DeGrazia, “Moral Vegetarianism.” I take this approach in McPherson, “Why I Am a Vegan.” 29 Bentham, Works, XVII.IV n. 1, emphasis in original. 30  For an argument against beginning the case for ethical vegetarianism by appeal to this sort of idea, see Diamond, “Eating Meat.” Diamond suggests that such arguments are too abstract and disconnected from the texture of our lived relationships with animals to form apt bases for ethical arguments.

218   Tristram McPherson The first virtue of this approach is that it seems evident to almost everyone that many nonhuman animals can suffer. There are many phenomena that might be grouped together under the heading “suffering.” Two examples of what I have in mind are intense pain, such as a piglet experiences when castrated without anesthetic, and intense distress, such as a cow or a sow experiences when separated from her young. The second virtue of the approach is that the following ethical principle appears hard to reasonably resist: Suffering: Other things being equal, it is wrong to cause suffering. The plausibility of Suffering can be brought out in several ways.31 First, it seems true when restricted to humans. So to claim that it is not wrong to cause suffering to animals may seem like a case of ethically objectionable speciesism. Second, many cases of causing suffering to nonhuman animals seem obviously wrong. For example, it would be wrong to catch a stray rabbit, take it home, and torture it with electric shocks. Third, in many cases like this one, the wrongness of the action seems directly explained by the fact that it is a case of causing suffering to an animal. Fourth, Suffering is modest, in at least two respects. First, Suffering is a defeasible principle, so it does not imply that causing suffering to nonhuman animals is always wrong. Second, Suffering does not imply parity between the moral significance of human and nonhuman suffering. It is compatible with there being many reasons why it is typically wrong to cause suffering to an adult human being that do not apply to nonhuman animals. (For example, causing an adult human to suffer may express disrespect for their autonomy.) Most arguments for veganism (especially those which seek less modally fragile conclusions) will defend a further principle prohibiting the killing of animals, such as: Killing: Other things being equal, it is wrong to kill an animal. This principle, however, is not as immediately intuitive as Suffering. The intuitive contrast is well-​expressed by Michael Tooley: It seems plausible to say it is worse to kill an adult human being than it is to torture him for an hour. In contrast, it seems to me that while it is not seriously wrong to kill a newborn kitten, it is seriously wrong to torture one for an hour.32

Tooley’s wording is careful here: his claim is cast in terms of what “seems plausible” about “serious wrongness.” We can helpfully distinguish two ways of making the suggested ethical claim more precise. Weak Asymmetry is the view that, other things being equal, causing substantial suffering to an animal is more seriously wrong than killing 31 

32 

For one way of developing these points, see McPherson, “Why I Am a Vegan.” Tooley, “Abortion and Infanticide,” 40.

The Ethical Basis for Veganism    219 that animal. Strong Asymmetry is the view that other things being equal it is wrong to cause animals to suffer and not wrong to kill them. Strong Asymmetry has sometimes been endorsed.33 However, I suspect that its appeal does not survive reflection. In evaluating Strong Asymmetry, it is crucial to screen off cases in which other relevant things may not be equal. For example, there are many ordinary cases of killing animals for (at least arguably) ethically legitimate reasons. Think, for example, of overburdened animal shelters euthanizing some of their wards, or of culling a deer population to a level that its food sources can support. By contrast, there are very few ordinary cases in which there are good ethical reasons to torture an animal. These facts can potentially mislead us when we consider principles like this one; we may unconsciously “fill in” extraneous assumptions about the motives or character of the agents involved, and these assumptions may then guide our judgments about the cases.34 In light of this point, consider a case in which, simply for the sake of doing so, someone catches a healthy stray kitten, takes it home, and then kills it by adding a fast-​ acting and painless poison to its meal. This seems clearly wrong, which casts substantial doubt on Strong Asymmetry. What about Weak Asymmetry? Here again, it is important to screen off distracting assumptions about the agent’s motivations. So consider a case where we screen off these distractions. Suppose that you are given a terrible choice at gunpoint: Kill this kitten with a painless drug or torture it for an hour. Suppose further that you somehow know that if you torture the kitten, it will go on to live a long and happy cat life. It would certainly be easier for a decent person to kill the kitten than to make herself torture the kitten. But it is hard to see why torturing is not the ethically better of two awful options. After all, it seems plausible that torturing the kitten in this case would be better overall for the kitten. Focusing only on the kitten’s welfare, this case is not much different from that of someone administering a painful lifesaving medical treatment to an animal, which seems obviously okay, if doing so is the only way to allow the animal to have a long and flourishing life. In light of points like these, it is not surprising that several philosophers have argued against Tooley-​style asymmetry claims.35 It is worth emphasizing that rejecting Weak Asymmetry is compatible with granting that killing humans is ordinarily much more seriously wrong than killing nonhuman animals. The best explanation of why torturing the kitten is ethically preferable to killing it adverts to something like the ethical significance of well-​being or of the value of an entity’s future.36 Such considerations are surely important in thinking about killing humans.37 If human lives are typically far richer than nonhuman animal lives, an 33 

E.g., by Pollan, Omnivore’s Dilemma, ch. 17. This is inspired by the analogous point about our judgments about killing and letting die in J. Rachels, “Active and Passive Euthanasia.” 35  Compare McMahan, “Eating Animals”; DeGrazia, “Moral Vegetarianism,” 160–​164; Harman, “Moral Significance of Animal Pain”; Norcross, “Significance of Death”; and McPherson, “Why I Am a Vegan.” 36  In the sense discussed in Nagel, “Death,” and Marquis, “Why Abortion Is Immoral.” 37  Compare Lippert-​Rasmussen, “Two Puzzles.” 34 

220   Tristram McPherson account of the wrongness of killing that appealed to the value of futures would partially explain why it is ordinarily worse to kill humans. Further, in many cases of killing humans other considerations—​especially considerations grounded in the agent’s autonomy—​may also be significant, or even paramount. For example, consider a version of the gunpoint dilemma with a human victim. Here—​as Tooley’s quote suggests—​ torturing would ordinarily seem like the lesser evil. But now suppose that the victim requests—​on the basis of substantively reasonable and reflectively stable values—​that you kill him rather than torture him. In this case, respecting his autonomous preference may be ethically more important than maximizing his net expected welfare. One might object to the line of argument proposed in this section by arguing that the ethical asymmetry between humans and nonhuman animals runs deeper than I have granted thus far. The most familiar way to develop this objection would appeal to the explanatory role of moral status. For example, it might be claimed that the core explanation of why it is wrong to make a human suffer needs to appeal to humans’ distinctive moral status as well as what human suffering is like. Animals, it might be insisted, lack moral status (or have some sort of second-​class moral status), and so the badness of their suffering cannot render wrongful an action that makes them suffer. This objection should be rejected.38 To begin, notice that the objection threatens to deprive us of the most natural explanation of the wrongness of torturing nonhuman animals. A theoretical argument would need to be extremely powerful to warrant this. But the idea that animals lack moral status is most plausible if we understand moral status as the bundle of ethical powers and protections characteristically possessed by adult humans (in a helpful introduction to moral status, Agnieszka Jaworska and Julie Tannenbaum call this “full moral status”).39 A two-​year-​old child lacks full moral status:  she has no right to self-​government, for example, or political participation. But I still owe it directly to such a child that I not torture her. It is natural to assume that the wrongness of making the child suffer is grounded in her individual capacities. But if so, then the objection collapses, because many nonhuman animals have similar capacities. One could repair the objection, for example, by insisting that the child has moral status simply in virtue of being human.40 But it is deeply puzzling why bare genetic facts like this one should have such striking ethical significance. Supposing that it is sound, the case for the wrongness of killing animals and making them suffer has profound ethical consequences. Consider the institutions most directly involved in raising and slaughtering animals for use in making animal products: the farms, animal factories, feedlots and slaughterhouses. These institutions inflict extraordinary amounts of suffering, and then very early death, on the billions of animals they raise and kill.41 If killing animals and making them suffer is wrong, then these institutions (or the 38 

For related skepticism about the usefulness of “moral status” talk, see Zamir, Ethics and the Beast, ch. 2. 39  Jaworska and Tannenbaum, “Grounds of Moral Status.” 40  Compare Cohen, “Critique,” 162. 41  For some of the literally gory details, see Mason and Singer, Animal Factories.

The Ethical Basis for Veganism    221 people who compose them) act wrongly on a truly horrifying scale. Stuart Rachels gives us a sense of the scope of the issue, estimating the amount of suffering inflicted by these institutions as orders of magnitude greater than that inflicted by the holocaust.42 Further, our governments arguably act wrongly as well, in virtue of creating a legal and regulatory framework within which these institutions are permitted to treat animals wrongfully, and in virtue of providing economic incentives—​and in many cases direct subsidies43—​for these institutions to harm animals. However, the case for the wrongness of killing animals and causing them to suffer does not yet constitute an argument for veganism. The next section explains the gap remaining in the argument, and explores how it might be filled.

Completing the Naïve Argument for Veganism: Some Options One could grant that it is wrong to kill animals or to make them suffer, but deny that this gives one reasons to be vegan. After all—​as is vividly obvious in the contemporary world—​eating animal products does not require that one kill animals or cause them to suffer. As a defense of omnivorism, this may initially smack of rationalization. However, facing it squarely helps to illuminate several of the most difficult challenges for constructing a rigorous ethical argument for veganism. We can begin by schematically representing the gap left by the argument of the preceding section, as follows: 1. The institutions that produce our animal products act wrongly in a massive and systematic way. 2. Veganism bears relation R to those institutions. 3. It is typically wrong (or . . .) to fail to bear R to those institutions. C. It is typically wrong (or . . .) to fail to be vegan. The parenthetical possibilities in premise 3 and the conclusion are intended to remind readers of the range of possible forms ethical veganism might take (discussed in the first section). Different arguments will, of course, be required to support weaker or stronger vegan theses. The central question is whether there is some relation that we can substitute for variable R to produce a sound version of the schematic argument just given. This section discusses some important possibilities. 42 

S. Rachels, “Vegetarianism.” For example, according to the Environmental Working Group, direct US subsidies to dairy and livestock totaled nearly $10 billion in 1995–​2012. Other, much larger subsidies—​such as on grain used for feed—​serve to indirectly subsidize US animal agriculture. “Farm Subsidy Database,” Environmental Working Group, http://​farm.ewg.org/​. 43 

222   Tristram McPherson One might claim that the gap suggested by this argument is easily filled. For example, Rosalind Hursthouse suggests that a truly compassionate person could not be aware of the cruelty of contemporary animal agriculture and continue to be “party” to such cruelty by eating meat.44 Such self-​aware omnivorism may indeed feel uncomfortable:  witness Michael Pollan’s description of reading Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation in a steakhouse.45 At best, however, this reply appears to support a very weak form of ethical veganism, according to which omnivorism is some sort of ethical imperfection. But even this is not so clear. Absent further argument of the sort to be considered, it is not clear that one must lack compassion to any degree if, for example, one followed the Buddhist teaching that permits a monk to eat meat, provided that he does not suspect the relevant animal has been killed specifically to feed him.46 This section focuses on three candidate proposals for explaining how ethical requirements on individuals can be generated indirectly, in virtue of relations between their actions and some other bad or wrongful act or state of affairs. These proposals appeal, respectively, to individual value-​promotion, group efficacy, and complicity. The aim is to assess whether these proposals can provide intrinsically plausible principles that—​ when combined with the naïve argument of the preceding section—​support some form of ethical veganism. The proposals that I discuss are far from exhaustive, but they strike me as the most promising.47 For simplicity, I treat these proposals as ways of completing the preceding naïve argument. However, these proposals have broader theoretical significance for the ethics of veganism. For example, many broadly environmental arguments for veganism (briefly discussed in the second section) will face the same sort of gap as the argument just sketched: they are most directly arguments from the wrongness of status quo animal agriculture, not for the wrongness of individual acts of using animals. In light of this, most attempts to defend ethical veganism will need to appeal to some theory like the ones to be considered here, that propose ethical links between individuals’ use of animal products and the objectionable practices that create those products.

Individual Efficacy I begin by considering the attempt to cross the gap by appeal to the idea that the individual vegan can promote something ethically important: expected animal welfare. The canonical presentation of this idea by Peter Singer begins by granting that it is highly unlikely that one’s own food choices will ever make a difference to actual animal 44 

Hursthouse, “Applying Virtue Ethics,” 141–​142.

45 Pollan, Omnivore’s Dilemma, 650. 46 Harvey, Buddhist Ethics, 159. 47 

For criticism of some of the other options, see Budolfson, “Inefficacy Objection to Deontology,” sec. 3–​4.

The Ethical Basis for Veganism    223 welfare.48 However, Singer suggests this is not the end of the story. He suggests there must be some (unknown) threshold, at which, for example, increased numbers of vegetarians or vegans will reduce demand for chicken sufficiently to reduce the number of chickens made to suffer in factory farms. For example, “Perhaps for every 10,000 vegetarians there is one fewer 20,000 bird chicken unit than there would otherwise be.”49 However, we are ignorant of where the relevant threshold is. Perhaps we are away from the threshold, in which case the individual vegan makes no difference to the chicken suffering. But given our ignorance of where the threshold is, we should take there to be a 1/​10,000 chance that we are at the threshold. And if we are at the threshold, an individual vegan’s refraining from consuming chicken will save 20,000 chickens from a short life of suffering.50 The expected utility of this chance for each vegan is the same as the expected utility of certainty that one will save two chickens from suffering. In a slogan: it is vanishingly unlikely that one will make a difference by being vegan, but if one does, it will be a correspondingly massive difference. One might then argue that this is enough to entail that one is required to be vegan.51 This sort of argument faces several types of objection. Some of these are empirical in nature.52 For example, some have argued that we have empirical reasons for believing that we are more than proportionally likely to be stably between thresholds of the imagined sort. Others have argued that we should be skeptical of the ability of individual buying decisions to produce any economic signals whatsoever in a large market. Another type of objection begins by querying the trajectory of aggregate demand for animal products. Assume for simplicity that aggregate demand trends are stable, without a lot of random variation. Suppose first that demand is stably increasing. Other things being equal, this will lead to rising prices and (eventually) to new animal factories being built, as increased supply becomes profitable. My veganism cannot prevent a broiler factory from being built, under such assumptions. At best, it might conceivably delay its construction. But for how long? Seconds? Minutes?53 Or suppose that aggregate demand is stably decreasing. Then prices will typically fall, and with it production. Again, at very unlikely best, lack of my demand could hurry closure of a broiler factory by a few minutes. The only (artificially stable) scenario in which my becoming a vegan could make a more marked difference is if aggregate demand is, independent of my choice, stably exactly at a threshold. Only here could my buying behavior possibly make a more than a momentary difference to the welfare of animals. But our credence that we are stably at such a threshold should be much smaller than Singer’s heuristic estimate. 48 

Singer, “Utilitarianism and Vegetarianism.” Singer, “Utilitarianism and Vegetarianism,” 335. 50  Broilers spend around six weeks in the chicken unit before being transported for slaughter. Mason and Singer, Animal Factories, 7. 51  For very similar arguments, see Matheny, “Expected Utility”; Norcross, “Puppies, Pigs, and People”; and Kagan, “Do I Make a Difference?” 52  See Frey, Rights, Killing, and Suffering; Frey, “Utilitarianism and Vegetarianism Again”; Chartier, “Threshold Argument”; and Budolfson, “Inefficacy Objection to Consequentialism.” 53  Compare Chartier, “Threshold Argument,” 240ff. 49 

224   Tristram McPherson It might thus be expected that the expected benefit to animal welfare of my becoming vegan is likely to be extremely small. The Singer-​style argument also makes at least three important assumptions about ethical theory. One (highly plausible) assumption is that welfare outcomes are ethically significant. The second assumption is more controversial: this is that the expected value of consequences plays a role in determining right and wrong. This assumption is controversial because many philosophers think that the actual—​as opposed to expected—​ value of consequences is what contributes to determining right and wrong.54 The expected value assumption is crucial to Singer’s reasoning. For example, in Singer’s stylized example, it is extremely likely that no one actually makes an objective difference to animal welfare by being vegan. For on Singer’s account, it is very likely that aggregate demand is in fact stably away from a threshold. And this means that for each consumer C, the counterfactual: if C were to be vegan, animal welfare would be improved is very likely false. The third crucial assumption of Singer’s argument is that the negative expected value of an option can explain why that action is wrong. Notice that this is a stronger claim than the idea that facts about expected value matter ethically. This issue can be illustrated by a familiar style of case: I can choose to either spend $1,000 on a vacation, or to donate this money to the Against Malaria Foundation. The expected value of the donation is saving at least one person from miserable sickness and early death due to malaria, which obviously outweighs the direct and indirect expected benefits of my vacation. It is plausible that this makes donating the money morally better than going on vacation, but it is controversial whether it entails that I would act wrongly by going on vacation.55 Even if this sort of objection is sound, evaluating the empirical challenges to the Singer-​style reasoning might be quite broadly important to the ethics of veganism. On the one hand, it might provide a direct way to argue that veganism is at least ordinarily supererogatory. On the other, some sort of efficacy might be argued to be a necessary—​ even if not a sufficient—​condition for veganism to be required. The worry is that absent a plausible case for efficacy, one’s concern not to eat wrongfully produced meat amounts to an ethically dubious desire to avoid a kind of “moral taint.”56

Group Efficacy As we have seen, it is not trivial to establish that an individual omnivore has any effect on animal welfare. By contrast, it is obvious that all of the consumers of animal products together make a difference: their aggregate demand is the raison d’être of the animal agriculture industry. If demand for animal products declined to zero, wrongful farming 54 

For discussion, see, e.g., Feldman, “Actual Utility.” For relevant discussion, see, e.g., Singer, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality”; and Cullity, Moral Demands. 56  For relevant discussion, see Appiah, “Racism and Moral Pollution.” 55 

The Ethical Basis for Veganism    225 of animals would likewise decline precipitously. In light of this, one might suggest that the argument for veganism should appeal to the ethical significance of the relationship that an individual vegan bears to this group. For example, one might complete the schematic argument imagined at the beginning of this section in the following way: 1. The institutions that produce our animal products act wrongly in a massive and systematic way. 2. The group consumers of animal products together act wrongly by making the wrongful treatment of animals mentioned in (1) persist. 3. It is typically wrong (or . . .) to be a part of a group that together acts wrongly. C. It is typically wrong (or . . .) to consume animal products (i.e., to fail to be vegan). As in the schematic argument, the “(or . . .)” marks the fact that one might argue for a variety of ethical statuses for veganism. Premises 2 and 3 of this argument introduce important and controversial ethical ideas. Premise 3 is a general claim about the individual ethical significance of group wrongdoing. Premise 2 is an instance of a principle that tells us that groups can acts wrongly in virtue of making bad things happen. Consider a case that might help to motivate the relevant general claims. Suppose there are two communities along a river: Upstream and Downstream. The river is the only source of water for both communities. Members of Upstream also dispose of their sewage in the river. (This is not a town policy; it is just the prevailing and accepted practice in Upstream.) As a result, members of Downstream are very often painfully and dangerously ill from drinking the polluted water. Suppose, however, that no individual’s sewage from Upstream makes a difference: the river is so uniformly polluted by Upstream sewage that removing one person’s sewage from the river will make no difference to the number or severity of the painful illnesses suffered in Downstream. Suppose finally that the members of Upstream know about their effects on Downstream and could (either individually or collectively) safely dispose of their sewage elsewhere, at modest cost. It is plausible that the members of Upstream are, collectively, responsible for wrongfully harming the members of Downstream. It may seem plausible that, in virtue of this, an individual member of Upstream acts wrongly by disposing of her sewage in the river, despite the fact that this action produces no marginal harm. This argumentative strategy takes on several burdens.57 First, some philosophers think that only individuals can act wrongly. This view must be defeated if the group-​ mediated account is to work. Second, we can usefully adopt Margaret Gilbert’s useful distinction between “collectives”—​like families or sports teams—​from looser “aggregates.”58 It is arguably more plausible that collectives can act wrongfully than mere aggregates. This is relevant because the group consumers of animal products does not coordinate in the systematic ways characteristic of collectives. Third, even if an account 57 

58 

For a helpful introduction to relevant debates, see Smiley, “Collective Responsibility.” Gilbert, “Who’s to Blame?”

226   Tristram McPherson of responsibility that applies to aggregates is developed,59 a clear mapping from group to individual wrongdoing still needs to be provided. Even if these theoretical questions can be adequately addressed in a way friendly to the argument,60 one might wonder whether the group-​mediated approach supports veganism over certain alternative responses to the evils of animal agriculture. To see the challenge, focus on an individual in Upstream. Suppose she knows that for a modest cost she could install a safe and effective septic system, and thus cease to contribute to polluting Downstream’s drinking water. However, she knows that if she instead donated the same amount of money to help provide water filters in Downstream, this would actually help to prevent some Downstream residents from getting sick. It seems plausible that she has much stronger reasons to donate than to eliminate her own pollution.61 By analogy, if we suppose that an individual’s being vegan involves some cost to that individual and negligible benefit to animals, it might seem that this cost would be more constructively borne to support direct assistance to animals (human or non-​) rather than one’s veganism.

Benefit and Complicity The group-​mediated approach focuses on the relationship between the individual and the consumers of animal products. But this may seem like an implausibly indirect relationship to focus on. After all, as I noted at the end of the previous section, the individuals and institutions most directly responsible for the massive pattern of wrongful treatment of animals are the farms, animal factories, feedlots, and slaughterhouses. So we might want to focus on the relationship of the individual vegan or omnivore to these institutions or wrongful patterns. Besides making a difference to the extent of the wrongful pattern (the issue we discussed under “Individual Efficacy”), there are at least two ethically relevant relationships that we might want to focus on. First, the omnivore benefits from this wrongdoing: the food she chooses to consume is a product of this wrongdoing and would not be available—​or at least, it would be available only in much smaller quantities at much higher prices—​absent such wrongdoing.62 Second, the omnivore is complicit with the wrongdoing, in the sense of cooperating with the wrongful plans of the more immediate 59 

E.g., Held, “Random Collection”; Bjornsson, “Joint Responsibility”; and Pinkert, “What We Together.” 60  E.g., McGary, “Morality and Collective Liability.” 61  For a parallel case, see Björnsson, “Joint Responsibility,” 108. For relevant discussion, see also Zimmerman, Concept of Moral Obligation, ch. 9. 62  One complication is that—​as mentioned in the discussion of self-​interested reasons to be vegan—​ the omnivore’s dietary choices might in fact be overall bad for her, suggesting a straightforward sense in which they do not benefit her. However, the omnivore—​at least immediately—​gets what she wants in eating animal products. And I suspect that the argument will be similarly plausible if we simply stipulate that this counts as a benefit.

The Ethical Basis for Veganism    227 wrongdoers. I will briefly explore the prospects of appealing to the ethical significance of one or both of these relationships in defending ethical veganism. Consider first benefiting. Several philosophers have argued that one can acquire ethical obligations in virtue of benefiting from injustice.63 One might think that some of these arguments generalize to benefiting from significant wrongdoing of other types. The knowing omnivore chooses to consume products that result from the wrongdoing of the animal industry. This is relevant because it is much easier to motivate the idea of obligations in virtue of voluntarily received benefits.64 Our central topic here, however, is not the obligations that omnivores might take on in virtue of their behavior (itself an interesting question). Rather, our question is whether omnivorism is itself wrong in virtue of being an instance of voluntary benefit from wrongdoing. One might take such voluntary benefiting to constitute the ethical analogue of the legal status of being an accessory after the fact.65 However, the ethical significance of such pure benefiting—​when shorn of other ethical features—​is not clear. For example, suppose that it is wrong to kill deer in your context. And suppose that you witness a reckless driver hit and kill a deer, then leave the scene. If you then take, dress, and ultimately eat what can be salvaged from the abandoned deer carcass, you are benefiting from the driver’s wrongful killing of the deer. But it is far from clear that what you do in this case is wrong.66 Even this case involves a kind of active receipt of goods. By contrast, suppose that the wrongful killing kept the deer from grazing on your garden. Surely you do not act wrongly by merely receiving this benefit with a wrongful genesis. Recalling the variety of forms of ethical veganism, one might argue within a virtue-​ theoretic framework that the willingness to voluntarily benefit from wrongdoing is a significant vice. However, if we again consider the case of the deer salvager, it is again not clear that this willingness is any kind of vice, if limited to the sort of case described. One might insist that virtue in part consists in a way of seeing animals that takes them to be not to be eaten.67 But one might suspect that this sort of perception is (relatively) virtuous only assuming the inability to make relevantly fine-​grained distinctions between more and less ethically problematic cases, and that the perfectly virtuous person could regret the death but salvage and enjoy the resulting food. It is useful to contrast the case just considered with one where someone intentionally kills a deer in order to sell it, and then sells you some of the resulting venison. In this sort of case, there is not merely wrongful action (as in the recklessness version of the case), but (we will assume) a wrongful plan of action. Further, you are not merely benefiting from that plan (as in the case where killing the deer saves your garden). Rather, you are playing a key role in the execution of the plan: the hunter’s plan requires someone to play the role of venison 63 

Thomson, “Preferential Hiring,” 383; Butt, “On Benefitting.” Pasternak, “Voluntary Benefits.” 65  Goodin and Barry, “Benefitting from Wrongdoing,” 2. 66  For further discussion of cases like this one, compare Bruckner, “Strict Vegetarianism.” 67  E.g., Diamond, “Eating Meat,” sec. 3. 64 

228   Tristram McPherson buyer, and you are voluntarily playing that role. This case seems strikingly ethically different from the case of salvaging venison. Call knowingly and voluntarily fulfilling a role that needs to be fulfilled in order for a wrongful plan to work being complicit with the plan. One might suggest the following principle: Complicity:  Other things being equal, it is wrong to be complicit with others’ wrongful plans. This principle could be used to complete the schematic argument in the following way: 1. The institutions that produce our animal products have a wrongful plan. 2. Individual consumers of animal products (non-​vegans) are typically complicit with that plan. 3. Other things being equal, it is wrong (or . . .) to be complicit with others’ wrongful plans (Complicity). C. It is typically wrong (or . . .) to fail to be vegan. As in the schematic argument, the “(or . . .)” marks the fact that one might argue for a variety of ethical statuses for veganism. The controversial core of this argument is Complicity. In order for Complicity to help complete a case for ethical veganism, it would need to be refined in several nontrivial ways. Consider two examples. First, the set of roles relevant to counting as complicit would need to be somehow restricted. For example, it is presumably essential to the success of the hunter’s plan that he not be caught in a Heffalump trap or otherwise prevented from hunting. But failing to take such steps to foil a plan seems different from the sort of active complicity described. As this case brings out, there seems to be a crucial contrast between cooperating with a plan and merely not interfering with it.68 Second, the contemporary production of animal products is largely implemented by a highly complex system of corporations. The initial model of an individual and his or her plan will need to be extended, to apply to the complex way that plans (or something like them) can be ascribed to corporations, or even loose collections thereof.69 Third, relatively few consumers purchase meat directly from the corporations that produce the meat. So the argument will need to support some sort of iterability: it will have to be claimed that the consumer is wrongfully complicit with the retailer who is wrongfully complicit with the wholesaler, and so on. 68 

Making this distinction well is far from trivial. For example, if one had a standing obligation to prevent hunting (e.g., one was the local game warden, etc.), then merely turning a blind eye to the hunting would seem objectionable. Or suppose the hunter held you in such esteem that you could prevent the hunt with a single gentle word, perhaps here again you have a duty. Perhaps failing to prevent the hunt in these cases does not count as complicity, but is objectionable on other grounds. 69  For an introduction to collective intentionality, see Schweikard and Schmid, “Collective Intentionality.”

The Ethical Basis for Veganism    229 It is also important to clarify how Complicity interacts with questions of individual efficacy. On the one hand, individual efficacy arguably makes the ethical significance of complicity clearer. My complicity with your evil plan may seem especially objectionable where it promotes the success of that plan.70 However, it seems objectionable even absent this: suppose you know that the hunter in our example always has buyers for his venison; if you don’t buy the venison, someone else will. I find it plausible that complicity with the hunter via buying his venison is wrong even here.71 Compare a parallel case: the more familiar duty of fair play: this requires that I not benefit from successful cooperative institutions without making a fair contribution to them (i.e., that I not free ride).72 In many cases, free riding will not harm anyone, and yet it appears wrong (other things being equal) in these cases. Of course, duties of fair play are controversial, and some of the controversy surrounds just this question of efficacy.73 As the discussion of this section makes clear, it is far from trivial to explain how to complete the schematic “naïve” argument for veganism sketched at the end of the previous section. Clarifying these issues is thus an important task as we seek to make progress on understanding the ethical status of veganism.

Complications Facing Arguments for Veganism In this section, I discuss a series of important complications facing arguments for veganism that have not been addressed in this chapter so far. Satisfactory resolution of these issues is crucial to developing a full-​fledged case for veganism. This section briefly considers complications arising from considerations of aggregation, the demandingness of the principles needed to argue for the claim that veganism is obligatory, the defeasibility of the ethical principles that support veganism, the specificity of the response required of vegans, and methodological objections to typical “intuitive” arguments for

70  For an intermediate position, see Lepora and Goodin, Complicity and Compromise, sec. 4.1.1, which appeals to a notion of “potential essentiality,” according to which a relatively weak possibility of difference-​making is necessary for complicity. 71  Mark Budolfson, “The Inefficacy Objection to Deontology,” has argued for a further important variant of a complicity view. He proposes that how essential the wrongness of the production of a product is can affect how wrong it is to consume it. For example, it is worse to purchase the archetypal Nazi-​made soap than it is to purchase a watch made in a concentration camp because the fact that the soap is made from human fat makes the wrongful character of its production more essential than the wrongful character of the production of the watch was. This sort of idea might be used to defend the idea that it is wrong to eat beef, where wrongful treatment of animals is relatively essential, but not wrong to drink milk, because while the wrongful treatment of dairy cows is ubiquitous, it is inessential to the production of milk. 72 Klosko, Principle of Fairness. 73  E.g., Smith, “Prima Facie Obligation.” For a reply, see Dagger, Civic Virtues, 71.

230   Tristram McPherson veganism. I begin by considering challenges to the ethical significance of animal suffering and death.

How Bad Is Animal Suffering and Death? The naïve argument assumed that animals can suffer. However, this assumption has been challenged. In order to properly assess this challenge, we would need to examine several complex questions about the nature and ethical significance of pain and suffering. One way to develop the challenge begins by noting that it is the qualitative nature of suffering—​what it is like for the sufferer—​that seems most clearly ethically significant.74 For example, if we built a robot that was behaviorally very similar to a cat, but which had no phenomenal experiences, it is very unclear whether there would be anything intrinsically wrong with treating the robot in ways that elicited very strong aversive behavioral responses. (Of course, that someone would choose to do this to the robot would be disturbing, but it would be disturbing in roughly the way it would be disturbing for someone to choose to play a video game in which their avatar graphically tortured cats.) The thesis that ethically significant suffering is a phenomenal state entails significant epistemic difficulties for supporting the claim that nonhuman animals can suffer. First, there is no agreement about what phenomenal experience consists in (is it irreducible, or can it be given a functional characterization, for example?). An empirically informed methodology here will seek to identify functional, evolutionary, and neurological correlates for phenomenal states. But there are many interesting functional and neurological similarities and differences between humans and nonhuman animals. This makes the “problem of nonhuman animals’ minds” an empirically and philosophically complex issue. Some philosophers have argued on this basis that it is a mistake to think that animals can suffer.75 However, it is worth noting that this sort of argument can only be as plausible as the underlying philosophical theory of phenomenal consciousness, which at very least counsels caution. If we set aside these challenges, we confront a less radical challenge: the strongest case for the possibility of animal suffering is presumably in those animals that are biologically and evolutionarily closest to humans (i.e., mammals). The question of whether other animals—​most saliently birds and fish—​can suffer is deeply complicated.76 This may leave a version of veganism restricted to mammals in a significantly stronger position that those which range more broadly across the animal kingdom. If we suppose that (certain) animals can suffer, this does not settle how bad that suffering is. Imagine your shoulder is aching. How bad this is for you is in large part a function of its meaning for you: experienced as a reminder of a vigorous workout, it will 74 

For a case for potentially ethically significant animal mental states that do not involve phenomenal consciousness, see Carruthers, “Suffering without Subjectivity.” 75  E.g., Dennett, Brainchildren, 161–​168. 76  For an introduction to the study of animal consciousness, see Allen and Trestman, “Animal Consciousness.”

The Ethical Basis for Veganism    231 seem much less unpleasant and significant than if it is understood as a symptom of your developing arthritis. It is difficult to know whether animals can experience their suffering as meaningful in anything like these ways. This might tend to reduce the significance of animal suffering.77 If animal suffering were systematically not that bad, this might attenuate the badness of contemporary animal agriculture. However, this is not very plausible, for at least two reasons. First, some nonhuman animals do appear to attribute significance to their experiences: witness the extended distress of cows or sows separated early from their young. Second, the idea that perceived meaning affects the badness of pain is perhaps most plausible for relatively mild pains: it is characteristic of agony that it crowds out all such reflective perspective on one’s state. The naïve argument for the wrongness of killing animals appealed in part to the value of an animal’s future if it were not killed. One might challenge this argument by appealing to philosophical theories about personal identity, or (more broadly) the conditions for ethically significant survival. On a leading cluster of accounts, certain relations of psychological continuity are required for ethically significant survival.78 On this view, we need to ask:  Do many nonhuman animals have rich enough psychological connections to underwrite the intuitive thought that a given cow, for example, is the same moral patient over (much of) its biological lifetime? If not, this view might entail that for ethical purposes, a cow should be treated as constituted by a succession of distinct ethically significant beings. This would in turn mean that painlessly killing the cow would not be depriving it of a significant valuable future, but rather preventing the existence of its many successors. Because many philosophers are skeptical that we have any weighty duties to bring valuable lives into existence, this conclusion would undercut what is otherwise the most plausible argument for the wrongness of killing nonhuman animals. As with the preceding challenge, I am cautiously optimistic that this challenge can be met, at least in many cases. For example, many animals appear capable of various forms of memory.79 However, as with questions about animal pain and suffering, answers here are likely to vary substantially across species in ways that require careful empirical work to tease out. Further, as with the case of suffering, this argument takes controversial philosophical theory as an essential premise. For example, on accounts which make continuity of brain or organism essential to ethically significant survival, this objection fails immediately.

Aggregation? It is often insisted that persons are ethically separate.80 While it usually seems reasonable for me to impose a cost on myself now in order to attain a greater benefit later, it can 77 

For an argument that it can also make it worse, see Akhtar, “Animal Pain and Welfare.” For discussion, see Olson, “Personal Identity,” esp. sec. 4. 79  Allen and Trestman, “Animal Consciousness,” sec. 7.4. 80  E.g., Rawls, Theory of Justice, sec. 5–​6. 78 

232   Tristram McPherson seem objectionable to impose a cost on one person in order to benefit others more. The force of this idea is perhaps best dramatized in Judith Thomson’s transplant case, where we are asked to imagine that a doctor could carve up a healthy patient and distribute his organs to five others needing transplants, thereby saving five lives but killing the initial patient.81 The view that carving up the patient would be very wrong is widely shared. But similar cases involving nonhuman animals are much less clear. Imagine the relevant case: your roving high-​tech veterinary clinic finds five young deer in need of organs. The deer population around here is stable, and you know these deer would live a long and happy life if saved from imminent organ failure. As it turns out, you find a sixth, healthy deer with the requisite biological compatibilities to be the “donor.” Would it be wrong to carve this deer up to save the other five? It is at least unclear whether it is. If this point generalizes, it might suggest that there is no “separateness of nonhuman animals”: that there is no moral objection to harming or killing one animal as a means to bringing about an outcome that is best overall.82 The idea that animal ethics should focus on aggregate effects would have significant implications. For example, consider culling populations of animals that would otherwise—​in the absence of nonhuman predators—​predictably go through cycles of population explosion and starvation. The most obvious objection to this policy is that it harms the animals culled, but if the culling is best for the population in aggregate, the anti-​separateness thesis would undercut the objection. Returning to veganism, if the culling is legitimate, objections to then eating or otherwise using the culled animals will be harder to develop.83

Demandingness? Several philosophers have reported to me that they accept the soundness of arguments for veganism but have not become vegan.84 One explanation for this phenomenon is that—​at least for many people—​it is very difficult to become vegan: doing so would require abandoning cherished foods, coping with new inconveniences, developing new 81 

Thomson, “Trolley Problem,” 1396. For relevant discussion of this hypothesis, see Nozick Anarchy, State and Utopia, 35–​42. 83  The ethical legitimacy of aggregation might also seem to support a controversial objection to veganism: that widespread veganism would tend to lead to the existence of far fewer cows, pigs, chickens, etc. If we assume (controversially) that these animals currently tend to have lives that are worth living, this would entail that veganism was worse overall for animals. And aggregation might seem to bolster this argument. This argument faces severe further difficulties, however. Here are two: first, reduced numbers of farm animals will likely be accompanied by increased numbers of wild animals; second, this argument likely require controversial views about the ethical significance of bringing entities with valuable lives into existence (for the classic discussion of this issue, see Parfit, Reasons and Persons, Part Four). 84  For non-​anecdotal evidence that philosophers’ failing to act on their belief that they should be vegetarian is widespread, see Schwitzgebel and Rust, “Moral Behavior.” 82 

The Ethical Basis for Veganism    233 tastes and learning new skills, not to mention potentially creating conflict in our relationships. While the thesis that veganism is obligatory is thus arguably quite demanding, it may also be that the arguments needed to defend a requirement to be vegan have implications that are far more demanding. Consider two examples that may help to illustrate this idea. First, the appeal to individual causal efficacy is most straightforwardly developed into a case for veganism when combined with a principle that prohibits selecting options that will promote something very bad happening. But—​as we saw in the example of choosing between a vacation and a charitable donation—​such principles might be otherwise quite demanding, requiring us to sacrifice many pleasures in order to help others avert terrible fates. Or consider the appeal to a complicity principle, also discussed in the previous section. Thomas Pogge has argued that the causal interconnections in the world are so dense and complex that an ordinary affluent person has likely been involved both in transactions that caused deaths and ones that saved lives.85 Because it is plausible that many of the nodes in this web of transactions involve unjust rules and wrongful actions, one might worry that one cannot help but be complicit with wrongdoing. If these sketchy examples reflect a general pattern, then an obligation to be vegan may only be defensible as part of a highly demanding overall ethic. If such demandingness renders an ethical theory implausible, this would in turn pose a clear and relatively neglected challenge to any claim that veganism is more than supererogatory.86

Defeasibility? As I noted in the first section, plausible forms of ethical veganism will be defeasible: that is, they will allow that there are a range of possible circumstances in which it is permissible to use animal products. One might argue that demandingness itself can constitute a relevant defeating condition. For example, in many cases, animal products are an essential element of the only available nutritionally adequate human diets. This is true for many hunter-​gatherer cultures as well as for many subsistence farmers, for whom having a cow—​or even a handful of chickens—​can offer crucial protection against certain forms of malnutrition. Ideally, the proponent of an obligation to be vegan would seek a principled account of defeasibility conditions that (a) granted permissibility in these sorts of cases, and (b) applied more generally, in a way that reduced the force of the demandingness challenge, but (c) did not permit the difficulties involved in becoming vegan to defeat the obligation more generally. It is an open question whether such an account can be developed. If it cannot, the proponent of an obligation to be vegan may be further committed to implausible demandingness in light of too-​limited defeating conditions.

85 

86 

Pogge, “Severe Poverty,” 17. For a related worry, see Gruen and Jones, “Veganism as an Aspiration.”

234   Tristram McPherson

Specificity? The core of veganism involves eschewing use of animal products. As we saw in the first section, one might think that our relationships to nonhuman animals have other ethical implications: implications for how our political lives should be organized, for what our political priorities should be, and for how we interact with other humans. One possibility is that the best case for veganism entails obligations of all of these types. This conclusion would suggest a further way in which arguments for ethical veganism might be highly demanding. One natural way of mitigating the demandingness of an ethical desideratum is to permit agents options as to how they respond to it. On this sort of view, it might be argued that while the massive wrongdoing in animal agriculture demands some response from each of us, a range of such responses might be permissible. For example, consider someone who reasonably believes that transitioning to veganism would involve significant sacrifices to her well-​being. Suppose that this person instead practiced ethical omnivorism, while simultaneously dedicating a significant portion of her political and financial resources to supporting organizations that she reasonably believed would best help to promote animal welfare. Absent a highly demanding ethical theory, it might be argued that such a person would count as meeting her ethical obligations.87

The Methodological Burdens of Revisionism An important question about demandingness objections concerns whether they should centrally be understood as targeting the demandingness of a candidate theory, or the fact that the particular demands in question fly in the face of common sense. To see the contrast, consider the claim that one might be required to endure great sacrifices to save one’s child or that a soldier can be required to sacrifice his life for his country. These are theses that make ethics very demanding, at least in certain contexts. But it is not clear that having such implications counts significantly against an ethical theory: intuitively, they simply show that sometimes it is hard to do the right thing. This might suggest that demandingness per se is not a problem. Rather, being demanding in certain respects might simply be one way in which an ethical theory can fly in the face of common sense. Any argument for an obligation to be vegan will arguably be a philosophical argument against common sense. Influential Moorean views in epistemology claim that such arguments are quite generally dubious.88 87  For relevant discussion taking Peter Singer as its foil, see Frey, Rights, Killing and Suffering, ch. 16. It is illuminating here that the Animal Liberation Front—​a radical group that advocates direct and often illegal action in defense of animals—​requires only vegetarianism, and not veganism, as a minimal requirement for association. “Credo and Guidelines,” Animal Liberation Front, http://​www. animalliberationfront.com/​ALFront/​alf_​credo.htm. 88  For discussion, see McPherson, “Moorean Arguments” and “Moorean Defense?”

The Ethical Basis for Veganism    235 One might think that such skepticism is especially powerful against the sorts of arguments for veganism discussed in this chapter, for two reasons. First, as that discussion illustrates, any fully developed ethical argument for an obligation to be vegan will be quite complex. Second, the central arguments discussed were methodologically naïve: they appeal centrally to clear intuitive judgments. But if the permissibility of eating a cheeseburger is also commonsensical, then one might think that the best such arguments can hope to show is that a certain complicated set of our intuitive judgments is inconsistent. One might wonder why, in this case, one should be confident that the permissibility of eating a cheeseburger is the judgment that should be abandoned.89 One task for the ethical vegan is to rebut such arguments. If this is not possible, one possible way to reply involves being epistemically—​but not practically—​concessive. For example, one might grant that it is unclear whether the best arguments for veganism put us in a position to know that veganism is obligatory. The epistemically concessive vegan might argue that nonetheless, the arguments are at least strong enough to entail that we ought to suspend judgment concerning the thesis that veganism is obligatory. And here they might advocate an ethical precautionary principle: if we cannot tell whether doing A is wrong, then we ought, other things being equal to refrain from doing A. This is a quite different way of thinking about ethical veganism: on this gloss, we can know that the lifestyle is required, not in virtue of the first-​order ethical facts, but as an ethical response to reasonable ethical uncertainty.90 Another way of replying is to grant that naïve theorizing might not be enough to establish ethical veganism. Perhaps naïve arguments need to be supplemented by methodological arguments that can rebut the Moorean strategy here and provide a principled means of explaining why the permissibility of eating a cheeseburger does not survive the putative conflict imagined.91

Conclusions Ethical veganism can be initially motivated by compelling insights: that animals matter ethically, that our collective treatment of nonhuman animals is one of the great contemporary horrors, and that these facts make an ethical demand on each of us. This chapter has sought to illuminate the dialectic that arises when one attempts to develop these and other motivations into a philosophically careful argument. As I have sought to make clear, there are many possible species of ethical veganism worth investigating, there are many philosophical resources that can be levied into arguments for one or another 89 

McPherson, “Case for Ethical Veganism,” sec. 3. For contrasting assessments of the underlying precautionary idea, see, on the one hand, Guererro, “Don’t Know, Don’t Kill”; and Moller, “Abortion and Moral Risk”; and, on the other, Weatherson, “Running Risks Morally.” 91  McPherson, “Moorean Defense?” and “Case for Ethical Veganism.” 90 

236   Tristram McPherson vegan thesis, and there are many deep challenges facing these arguments. I have argued that there is a powerful core case for veganism, but that this case is in several important respects incomplete or poorly developed. I hope that this chapter will enable and encourage others to rigorously address these topics, thereby allowing us all to better understand the ethics of veganism, and—​more broadly—​the ethics of our relationships to nonhuman animals and to what we consume.92

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92  I am indebted to the editors of this volume for wonderful feedback on a draft of this chapter. Portions of this chapter draw significantly on my previous work on this topic, including “A Case for Ethical Veganism”; “How to Argue”; “A Moorean Defense”; and “Why I Am a Vegan.”

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chapter 11

Argum e nts for C onsumi ng A nimal Produ c ts Bob Fischer

Introduction If you ask the man on the street to justify his meat consumption, he’ll probably say that it’s necessary for health reasons; and if he doesn’t say that, he’ll probably say either that it’s natural, nice, or normal. At least, that’s what you’d expect based on a recent study, which found that 91% of respondents offered one of these answers.1 Of course, they aren’t particularly good answers. Rather than meat being necessary, it seems that the opposite is true: for most people, there are health benefits associated with well-​planned vegetarian and vegan diets.2 Meat-​eating is, of course, about as natural as anything else that humans do, but so are many other behaviors that we’d be loath to defend, likewise for what’s normal. Finally, the “niceness” in question is gustatory, which we may as well acknowledge. But that’s hardly much of a defense: not paying your tab is also very pleasant, but that doesn’t settle whether you may. We could, of course, be more charitable to the man on the street. However, given all we know—​or ought to know—​about the ugliness of animal agriculture, it isn’t clear that charity is due.3 These are pat answers, and if we’re going to defend eating animals, we need better ones. 1 

Jared Piazza et al., “Rationalizing Meat Consumption: The 4Ns,” Appetite 91 (2015): 114–​128. For an overview of the evidence, see Kate Marsh, Carol Zeuschner, and Angela Saunders, “Health Implications of a Vegetarian Diet: A Review,” American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine 6, no. 3 (2012): 250–​267. Of course, this isn’t to suggest that limited meat consumption has no health benefits; on this, see Vaclav Smil, Should We Eat Meat? Evolution and Consequences of Modern Carnivory (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2013). 3  On industrial animal agriculture, see Dan Imhoff, The CAFO Reader: The Tragedy of Industrial Animal Factories (Healdsburg, CA: Watershed Media, 2010). On small-​scale and backyard operations, see James McWilliams, The Modern Savage (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2015). 2 

242   Bob Fischer So what can be said in favor of consuming animal products? (This includes meat, of course, as well as all the products derived from animals: eggs, milk, gelatin, etc.) In what follows, I survey the options. You can sort these arguments in a few ways. First, some purport to show that we ought to consume (at least some) animal products, though most want the weaker claim that we may. Second, you can divide up the argument based on the practices that they aim to justify. I’m aware of only two arguments for the status quo in animal agriculture—​namely, Peter Carruthers’s and Timothy Hsiao’s defenses of factory farming4—​but there are many other ways to secure meat, dairy, and eggs. Most philosophers focus on small-​scale, “animal-​friendly” agriculture, the face of which is often Joel Salatin’s Polyface Farms, made famous by Michael Pollan.5 But there are, in addition, defenses of eating insects, oysters, roadkill, and wild animals, as well as many offhand remarks about the permissibility of consuming food that would otherwise go to waste.6 Third, you can categorize arguments based on whether the empirical assumptions they employ—​e.g., whether animals have certain morally interesting capacities, or whether “animal-​friendly” agriculture is environmentally sustainable (by some standard or other). Finally, you can divvy up arguments based on their moral form: consequentialist, rights-​based, contractarian, biocentric, and so on. There are practical advantages and disadvantages to each of these taxonomies. Here, I divvy things up using the last strategy—​moral form—​since that’s probably the most intuitive for the likely readership of this volume. Still, we shouldn’t forget these other taxonomies. They’re particularly useful for thinking through the challenges facing a broad case for consuming animal products—​that is, one that might earn respect from those in a variety of moral camps. I’ll conclude by trying to make just such a case.

Arguments for Consuming Animal Products Utilitarians and rights-​theorists have been the most vocal animal advocates. It might be surprising, then, to learn that most defenses of eating animals have drawn on utilitarian or rights-​based considerations. But it shouldn’t be: a good way to criticize pro-​vegetarian or 4  Peter Carruthers, The Animals Issue: Moral Theory in Practice (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Timothy Hsiao, “Industrial Farming Is Not Cruel to Animals,” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 30 (2017): 37–​54. 5  Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (New York: Penguin Press, 2006). 6  C. D. Meyers, “Why It Is Morally Good to Eat (Certain Kinds of) Meat: The Case for Entomophagy,” Southwest Philosophy Review 29 (2013): 119–​126. Christopher Cox, “Consider the Oyster,” Slate, April 7, 2010, http://​www.slate.com/​articles/​life/​food/​2010/​04/​consider_​the_​oyster.html. Donald Bruckner, “Strict Vegetarianism Is Immoral,” in The Moral Complexities of Eating Meat, ed. Ben Bramble and Bob Fischer (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 30–​47. Roger Scruton, Animal Rights and Wrongs (London: Continuum, 2006).

Arguments for Consuming Animal Products    243 pro-​vegan arguments is to show that they lead elsewhere, as some philosophers have contended. After devoting sections to these two frameworks, I’ll discuss alternative approaches.

Utilitarian Arguments There seems to be a strong utilitarian argument against eating animals. We get pleasure from eating them, but the pleasure is not nearly as much as the pain they suffer in the process. They live in miserable conditions, die more slowly and painfully than we might like to think, and outnumber us roughly thirty-​three to one. (In the United States, roughly ten billion land animals die each year to feed just over three hundred million people.) Moreover, the environmental costs of animal agriculture are staggering, which affect both humans and animals in all sorts of ways.7 So if this is a numbers game, it looks like you should be eating veggies instead.8 An initial problem is that this argument focuses on animal agriculture and so seems not to apply to wild animals. Indeed, some hunters—​such as Roger Scruton—​think that utilitarianism actually favors their practices.9 And even if they’re wrong, that may only be because of the particular animals they hunt. Joel MacClellan points out that it’s an empirical question as to whether there is an animal such that utility is maximized by killing and eating it. But, he suggests, “It is intuitively plausible . . . that a whale fits [this profile]. Indeed, it would be rather surprising if the pleasure resulting from eating whale meat did not yield higher overall utility than the suffering inflicted on the whale.”10 But as most people depend on farmed animals for their animal products, let’s set these concerns aside. Still, there are problems. The first involves jumping from claims about the ills of complex institutions to a claim about an individual consumer’s obligation. That is, it may well be true that it’s wrong to raise and slaughter animals in ways that involve massive amounts of suffering, but it doesn’t immediately follow that it’s wrong for a middleman to

7 

For details, see Lisa Kemmerer, Eating Earth: Environmental Ethics and Dietary Choice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). The worst environmental consequences are due to factory farming, and the impacts of industrial operations aren’t controversial. However, the debate about small-​ scale operations is very much alive. Kemmerer is critical based on concerns about methane production as well as land and water use. However, there are those who maintain that there are environmental benefits to raising animals, such as reversing desertification. For an overview, see Judith Schwartz, Cows Save the Planet and Other Improbable Ways of Restoring Soil to Heal the Earth (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2013). 8  I’m assuming that plants aren’t sentient. Michael Marder rejects this, arguing that research on plants suggests the opposite; see his Plant-​Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013). On this basis, he claims that we should rethink the ethics of eating generally as the process of developing respectful eating practices. Here’s hoping he’s wrong. 9 Scruton, Animal Rights and Wrongs. 10  Joel MacClellan, “Animal Size, Contributory Causation, and Ethical Vegetarianism.” Journal of Animal Ethics 3 (2013): 61. MacClellan overlooks the impact of whaling on the many, many animals that would otherwise feed on whale carcasses, which might tilt the balance in favor of having humans abstain.

244   Bob Fischer purchase the products derived from those processes, nor that it’s wrong for a consumer to purchase a can of Spam that has passed through any number intermediaries before landing on the local grocery store’s shelf. A natural way to criticize the middleman is to observe that if he reduced his demand, the slaughterhouse would reduce its supply. Unfortunately, it isn’t clear that this is so: if Middleman 1 buys less, Middlemen 2 to 10 may well take up the slack. But even if we ignore this issue, we don’t yet have an argument for the wrongness of what the individual consumer does. A grocery store can’t get a single can of Spam from its warehouse; it has to request boxes or maybe entire pallets. The warehouse’s supplier doesn’t deliver individual boxes or pallets but only truckloads. And the supplier’s supplier—​which may not be the meat-​packing plant itself, but let’s suppose it is—​has a strong incentive to produce as much as anyone might buy. Indeed, the people in charge of every link in the supply chain tolerate waste for this reason: they all overbuy (or overproduce) to ensure that they’re always able to sell. What’s more, it would be irrational for them to be sensitive to small fluctuations in the market, since they know that those are inevitable, statistically speaking. Given as much, it’s implausible that our criticism of Middleman 1 will work against the consumer, whose purchase probably doesn’t make any difference to whether some future animal suffers and dies. Moreover, all the noise in the supply chain makes it unclear whether the consumer’s purchases over the course of his or her life make a difference. The consumer’s actions don’t affect the supply chain cumulatively but rather individually. So if no particular purchase makes a difference, then those purchases don’t make a difference collectively either. It also isn’t clear that, in actual fact, buying a can of Spam makes a difference in tandem with others, so that the consumer would be at least partially responsible for causing future animal suffering. Granted, the market is sensitive to the behavior of large groups, and there is some threshold at which the number of abstainers would influence what happens on the farm. But it isn’t sufficient to have the numbers just anywhere. As John Harris and Richard Galvin point out, you also need these consumers to be both simultaneous and geographically proximate, lest each purchase be lost in the noise of a (temporally or spatially) different supply chain.11 This, in a nutshell, is the causal impotence problem.12 We can make it worse by inverting an argument due to Jeremy Garrett.13 Very roughly, Garrett argues that despite the causal impotence problem, you can be obliged to abstain from animal products thanks to the health benefits of a vegetarian diet. He contends that the extra pleasures you’d have in a life made healthier and longer by a vegetarian diet outweigh any additional gustatory pleasures you might gain by eating animals and their 11 

John Richard Harris and Richard Galvin, “‘Pass the Cocoamone, Please’: Causal Impotence, Opportunistic Vegetarianism and Act-​Utilitarianism,” Ethics, Policy and Environment 15 (2012): 368–​383. 12  For a fuller statement of the causal impotence problem, see Mark Budolfson, “Is It Wrong to Eat Meat from Factory Farms? If So, Why?” in The Moral Complexities of Eating Meat, ed. Ben Bramble and Bob Fischer (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 30–​47. 13  Jeremy Garrett, “Utilitarianism, Vegetarianism, and Human Health: A Response to the Causal Impotence Objection,” Journal of Applied Philosophy 24 (2007): 223–​237.

Arguments for Consuming Animal Products    245 byproducts. So, you should eat a vegetarian diet. However, the evidence only shows that a predominantly vegetarian diet is superior to comparably balanced omnivorous diet in terms of health and longevity. The studies don’t show that a strict vegetarian diet beats a predominantly vegetarian one. Indeed, the occasional consumption of lean meats is probably good for you, and many people clearly enjoy them. Given these benefits, and assuming that the actions of individual consumers make no difference to whether future animals suffer and are slaughtered, the causal impotence problem might not just support the permissibility of eating animal-​based foods, but some obligation to be a moderate consumer—​what R. M. Hare calls a “demi-​vegetarian.”14 We’ve been considering one problem with the simple utilitarian argument for abstaining from animal products that are derived from agricultural operations. A second serious problem is that the argument ignores the differences between industrial and “animal-​friendly” agriculture. You might grant that the suffering in factory farms can’t be justified by the pleasure we gain from eating what emerges from them. But it doesn’t follow that substantially less suffering—​say, just what’s involved in slaughter—​can’t be justified by our pleasure.15 This is the basic thought behind the Replaceability Argument, which Peter Singer first offered.16 The ambitious version goes like this: total welfare isn’t affected by one animal’s death as long as we bring another into existence, and total welfare would be increased insofar as meat-​eating benefits us; so, we ought to eat happy animals. An older argument of a similar stripe is “the Logic of the Larder”—​so-​named by Henry Salt—​according to which we do animals a favor by bringing them into existence to be slaughtered for our purposes, since they wouldn’t exist otherwise, and coming into existence is a benefit (at least as long we give them good lives).17 The merits of these arguments depend, in part, on hard questions about whether and how the welfare of merely possible beings counts in the utilitarian calculus, as well as whether merely possible beings have levels of welfare at all. If these issues can be finessed in ways that favor the Replaceability Argument or the Logic of the Larder, 14 

R. M. Hare, “Why I Am Only a Demi-​Vegetarian,” in Essays on Bioethics, by R. M. Hare (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 219–​236. 15  The easiest way to see this involves considering welfare footprint arguments, discussed in most detail in Krzysztof Saja, “The Moral Footprint of Animal Products,” Agriculture and Human Values 30 (2013): 193–​202. 16  Peter Singer, Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals (New York: HarperCollins, 1975). For extensive discussion of this argument, see Tatjana Višak, Killing Happy Animals: Explorations in Utilitarian Ethics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 17  The Replaceability Argument doesn’t assume that existence is a benefit, and the Logic of the Larder doesn’t assume that sentient beings are replaceable. So they’re clearly distinct arguments. Still, it’s often very hard to know which of these arguments someone has in mind, as remarks along these lines tend to be made rather quickly. You can find arguments in this ballpark in R. G. Frey, Rights, Killing, and Suffering: Moral Vegetarianism and Applied Ethics (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1983); Roger Crisp, “Utilitarianism and Vegetarianism,” International Journal of Applied Philosophy 4 (1983): 41–​49; Hare, “Why I Am Only a Demi-​Vegetarian”; Roger Scruton, “The Conscientious Carnivore,” in Food for Thought: The Debate over Eating Meat, ed. Steve Sapontzis (Amherst, MA: Prometheus Books, 2004), 81–​91; Christopher Belshaw, “Meat,” in The Moral Complexities of Eating Meat, ed. Ben Bramble and Bob Fischer (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 9–​29—​among many, many others.

246   Bob Fischer then there remains the charge of speciesism. Suppose, for example, that we were to apply the same line of reasoning to humans. Those with severe cognitive disabilities may well be replaceable in whatever sense a healthy pig is replaceable. What follows? Likewise, may we bring infants into existence as organ donors—​as long as their short lives are pleasant—​since they wouldn’t exist otherwise, and coming into existence is a benefit? However the utilitarian handles such challenges, empirical problems remain. First, those who run these arguments rarely factor in the environmental costs of animal agriculture. Second, there are worries about the inefficiency of animal agriculture, which ties up resources that could be devoted to other projects (such as, e.g., famine relief).18 Finally, even if there are farms where animals do live good lives, it’s unclear whether ordinary consumers are in a position to determine as much. It should come as no surprise that products marketed as humane often aren’t, even from seemingly reputable suppliers. (Whole Foods comes to mind.) If consumers aren’t in a position to make such determinations, it isn’t clear whether these arguments justify their animal product consumption. It may be better, then, to press a third objection to the simple utilitarian argument. Consider, for example, Steven Davis’s observation that we’ve overlooked certain harms involved in a vegan diet: namely, the harms to animals that are associated with growing plants for food.19 Some of these harms are intentional, as when farmers shoot woodchucks and rabbits to prevent them from nibbling on their produce; others are unintentional, as when mice are caught in combines, poisoned by pesticides, and so on. Davis goes on to argue that we ought not to be vegans if we want to minimize harm. (This means that Davis isn’t offering a squarely utilitarian argument, of course, but it could be reworked as one.) He estimates that, if the US population were to go vegan, 1.8 billion animals would still die each year as a result of our agricultural practices. But if we were to supplement our diet with cows that forage on open pastures (read: living nice lives), then that number might fall as low as 1.35 billion. Why? Because raising large ruminants on the pasture-​forage model is likely to result in fewer animal deaths per hectare.20 Gaverick Matheny raises some worries about Davis’s math (moral and otherwise); Andy Lamey questions how Davis estimates the harm to wild animals that live in and around farms.21 But as Lamey points out, these problems show that one particular 18 

Not everyone is impressed by the inefficiency argument for abstaining from animal products. For a thoroughgoing critique, see Simon Fairlie, Meat: A Benign Extravagance (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2011). It’s worth noting that Fairlie still supports reducing animal product consumption dramatically. Moreover, the consumption he does defend is partly based on backyard agriculture—​an unrealistic option for most people. 19  Steven Davis, “The Least Harm Principle May Require that Humans Consume a Diet Containing Large Herbivores, Not a Vegan Diet,” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 16 (2003): 387–​394. 20  For a parallel argument in an Australian context, see Michael Archer, “Ordering the Vegetarian Meal? There’s More Animal Blood on Your Hands,” The Conversation, December 15, 2011, http://​ theconversation.edu.au/​ordering-​the-​vegetarian-​meal-t​ heres-m ​ ore-a​ nimal-b ​ lood-o ​ n-y​ our-h ​ ands-4​ 659. 21  Gaverick Matheny, “Least Harm: A Defense of Vegetarianism from Steven Davis’s Omnivorous Proposal,” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 16 (2003): 505–​511; Andy Lamey, “Food Fight! Davis versus Regan on the Ethics of Eating Beef,” Journal of Social Philosophy 38 (2007): 331–​348.

Arguments for Consuming Animal Products    247 argument fails, not that Davis’s strategy is a bad one. Vegans—​who maintain that it’s wrong to consume animals or animal byproducts—​indeed care about minimizing harm to animals. So if the best way to achieve that goal involves eating meat, they have some explaining to do. One of the major problems with Davis’s argument is that it rests on dubious empirical claims about how many wild animals are currently harmed by plant production, as well as how many wild animals would be harmed under a different regime. However, no one disputes that some wild animals are currently harmed. And this opens the door for a different sort of anti-​vegan argument. Suppose we can find a source of meat that isn’t a direct or indirect product of our agricultural practices, and suppose that meat will be wasted if we don’t consume it. Now, might we be obligated to supplement our diet with that meat, thereby reducing our dependence on plant agriculture, and thus reducing the number of wild animals harmed in plant production? Donald Bruckner thinks so: he contends that we ought to eat roadkill—​specifically, large, intact, and recently killed animals.22 (Think of the deer that wasn’t laid out by the side of the road when you went to the grocery store, but is there now.) To reach this conclusion, he appeals to a principle that David DeGrazia defends, according to which it “is wrong (knowingly) to cause, or support practices that cause extensive, unnecessary harm to animals.”23 By eating a strict vegan diet, we support practices that cause extensive, unnecessary harm to animals—​namely, those in plant agriculture. So, we shouldn’t be strict vegans. What’s the alternative? Well, by scavenging, we cause no harm whatever: the claim isn’t that we should try to hit animals with our cars; the claim is that we shouldn’t let potential food sources go to waste. Scavenging is also no riskier than eating meat from hunted game. As long as it’s fresh, it’s lean, healthy meat. It’s also free, and you can learn how to prepare it by watching a few YouTube videos. So, we should scavenge. (Bruckner’s argument seems to support freegan practices generally—​i.e., scavenging from dumpsters as well as highways—​but he doesn’t make that point. Also, note that if scavenging is a practical impossibility for certain individuals, then his argument implies that they should still be willing to consume scavenged products when they’re made available to us, as they are at the West Virginia Roadkill Cook-​off—​an annual celebration of meats sourced from the open road.)24 22 

Bruckner, “Strict Vegetarianism Is Immoral.” Bruckner just argues for a conditional: if we accept DeGrazia’s principle, then we ought to collect and consume roadkill. For ease of exposition, though, I’m assuming the conditional’s antecedent, as Bruckner in fact does. And yes: he follows through on the conditional’s consequent. 23  David DeGrazia, “Moral Vegetarianism from a Very Broad Basis,” Journal of Moral Philosophy 6 (2009): 159. Again, this isn’t a utilitarian argument, both because of the support clause—​which can but needn’t be glossed in utilitarian terms—​and because of the restriction to extensive harm. But if there’s a solution to the causal impotence problem, then support can be glossed in utilitarian terms and the argument will go through. If there isn’t, then utilitarian considerations may still support roadkill consumption; recall the inverted version of Garrett’s argument. In any case, DeGrazia’s principle is supposed to be acceptable to those from different moral perspectives, utilitarians included. 24  Again, Bruckner is only arguing for a conditional: if we accept DeGrazia’s principle, then we ought to collect and consume roadkill. You might worry that if the principle has this implication, then it surely

248   Bob Fischer We could get another striking conclusion by reworking C.  D. Meyers’s argument for entomophagy—​eating insects.25 He focuses on the environmental benefits of consuming bugs. But as long as insects aren’t sentient—​the jury’s out, but it doesn’t look good for many of them—​you can make the same points about entomophagy being a way to reduce our dependence on plant agriculture. In fact, there are several reasons to think that insects are actually preferable to roadkill. First, anyone can raise and prepare insects. Mealworms and crickets, for example, are readily available from your local pet store, and with the help of a fish tank, some food scraps, and a water source, both species will multiply like mad. Second, they’re easy to process and prepare without any food safety concerns: you just need boiling water, and then your culinary options are open. Third, they’re very good for you: crickets, for example, are a complete protein source that’s low in fat; they’re also high in iron and potassium. Fourth, they’re environmentally friendly: they will take products that would otherwise go to waste and convert them—​ very efficiently—​into nutrient-​rich food. In any case, we could extend Christopher Cox’s brief for eating oysters26 with a similar, Bruckner-​inspired argument. (There is nothing special about oysters. Cox’s reasoning applies equally well to some other bivalves, such as scallops and clams.) We could do the same to bolster G. Owen Schaefer and Julian Savulescu’s defense of consuming in vitro meat.27 You might even go so far as to extend the argument to “disenhanced” animals. Adam Shriver, for example, contends that we ought to replace current livestock with genetically engineered animals who lack the affective dimension of pain.28 He doesn’t argue that it’s permissible to eat such animals; he just argues that it’s better than the status quo. But if these animals don’t suffer, and by eating them we could opt out of supporting some plant agriculture, then the same sort of argument might be available. (Whether it is, of course, will depend on empirical details about the mental lives of disenhanced animals, as well as how, exactly, we’re supposed to understand the notion of “welfare.”)29 has others, for example, that we shouldn’t be driving (since cars harm animals). I tend to think that this is a mark in favor of the principle rather than a mark against it. 25 

Meyers, “Why It Is Morally Good to Eat (Certain Kinds of) Meat: The Case for Entomophagy.” Cox, “Consider the Oyster.” Strict vegans will probably balk at eating insects and oysters based on some sort of precautionary principle. However, it’s likely that precautionary arguments actually support eating insects and oysters. For details, see my “Bugging the Strict Vegan,” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 29 (2016): 255–​263. 27  G. Owen Schaefer and Julian Savulescu, “The Ethics of Producing In Vitro Meat,” Journal of Applied Philosophy 31 (2014): 188–​202. 28  Adam Shriver, “Knocking Out Pain in Livestock: Can Technology Succeed Where Morality Has Stalled?” Neuroethics 2 (2013): 115–​124. 29  Mark Budolfson also argues that we’ve overlooked some of the harms involved in plant agriculture, though not the ones with which Davis is concerned; see his “Consumer Ethics, Harm Footprints, and the Empirical Dimensions of Food Choices,” in Philosophy Comes to Dinner: Arguments over the Ethics of Eating, ed. Matthew C. Halteman, Terence Cuneo, and Andrew Chignell (New York: Routledge, 2015), 163–​181. Suppose our concern is to have the diet with the smallest welfare footprint—​or, at least, the one that falls below some threshold. Then, we should note that not every vegan meal beats every meal that includes animal products, since some plant products—​such as quinoa, avocados, blueberries—​are 26 

Arguments for Consuming Animal Products    249

Rights Of course, nothing is sacred to utilitarians, so it’s hardly shocking that they might sanction some animal product consumption. It is surprising, however, to find arguments for consuming animal products that concede rights to animals. One such argument is based on Tom Regan’s version of the rights view. According to Regan, all “subjects of a life” have inherent value, and we “are to treat those individuals who have inherent value in ways that respect their inherent value.”30 However, Regan qualifies his view with the so-​called “liberty principle,” which is designed, inter alia, to handle lifeboat cases: Provided that all those involved are treated with respect, and assuming that no special considerations obtain, any innocent individual has the right to act to avoid being made worse-​off even if doing so harms other innocents.31

On this basis, Hugh Lehman argues that we can raise and slaughter animals, since many of us are in a lifeboat (proverbially, if not literally): Humans need a diet which includes a certain range of proteins. For many people, these proteins are obtained by killing and eating animals. Equipping current food production systems to produce vegetarian foods in sufficient quantities would be a massive undertaking as would educating all human beings about alternative sources of nutrients. Until the alternative foods were produced and the education was provided, people would have to continue to eat meat or face death or illness resulting from malnutrition.32

Kathryn Paxton George is more specific about who’s exempt from the general requirement to abstain from animal products, and the list is long: (1) infants and children, (2) gestating and lactating women, (3) older women and some older men, (4)  allergic individuals and individuals who are predisposed to either associated with environmental harms, or expensive in terms of land or water use, or are harvested in ways that tend to involve the exploitation of migrant labor. This is a fair point, but until we set the relevant threshold, it isn’t clear why that isn’t simply an argument for abstaining from quinoa, avocados, and blueberries. Moreover, if we privilege human interests over those of animals, as Budolfson says we should, then it’s worth noting that there are huge human costs in animal agriculture too. Workers in slaughterhouses often suffer serious injuries, slaughterhouses too exploit migrant labor, and crime rates increase when slaughterhouses are open (on this last point, see Amy Fitzgerald, Linda Kalof, and Thomas Dietz, “Slaughterhouses and Increased Crime Rates: An Empirical Analysis of the Spillover from ‘the Jungle’ into the Surrounding Community,” Organization & Environment 22 (2009): 158–​184). 30 

Tom Regan, The Case for Animal Rights (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983), 248. 31  Ibid., 331. See 351–​353 for the application to lifeboat cases specifically. 32  Hugh Lehman, “On the Moral Acceptability of Killing Animals,” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 1 (1988): 161.

250   Bob Fischer vitamin and/​or mineral deficiencies, (5) undereducated individuals, (6) poor individuals, including people living in countries where selection of food is narrow and erratic, and (7) people who are genetically not predisposed for vegetarianism.33

These arguments only work if raising and slaughtering animals is compatible with treating them with respect, which is an essential clause in the liberty principle. Frankly, I don’t see how slaughtering an animal is consistent with respecting it. But that aside, those who think they can reconcile these two acts should conceded that these arguments don’t license factory farming, or many practices that are standard even in small-​scale agriculture, such as shipping cows without food or water to slaughterhouses, where they arrive dehydrated, weak from hunger, and often with broken bones from their time on the truck. Whatever respect involves, much animal agriculture doesn’t display it. Moreover, it’s also worth noting that these arguments rest on dubious empirical assumptions about human health, and both Lehman and George seem to present some of the challenges involved in transitioning to a vegan diet as though they were problems with the diet itself. Ultimately, though, the biggest issue has to do with what the liberty principle isn’t—​namely, the sum total of morality. Granted, I may be within my moral rights to consume animal products in some circumstances, as the liberty principle implies. But that doesn’t show that I should consume them, or even that I may, depending on what other moral considerations are in play. It might be selfish—​and so wrong—​ for me to consume an animal’s body even though I wouldn’t violate anyone’s rights by consuming it. So Lehman and George won’t get their conclusions without making further assumptions about the other sorts of moral considerations that are relevant to our dietary choices. Enter Terence Cuneo. He’s prepared to grant that animals have rights, but argues that they don’t clearly have the right “not to be killed 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 In part, this is because he denies that we can infer that animals have this right from the more basic right not to be killed just for the pleasure of eating them. The suggestion, I take it, is that there may be limits on the burdens that your rights can make others bear, and demanding that people sacrifice nourishment, gustatory pleasure, valued social practices, and a viable alternative to factory farming may be to demand too much. 33  Kathryn Paxton George, “So Animal a Human . . . , or the Moral Relevance of Being an Omnivore,” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 3 (1990): 175. For more, see her Animal, Vegetable, or Woman? A Feminist Critique of Ethical Vegetarianism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000). 34  Terence Cuneo, “Conscientious Omnivorism,” in Philosophy Comes to Dinner: Arguments over the Ethics of Eating, ed. Matthew C. Halteman, Terence Cuneo, and Andrew Chignell (New York: Routledge, 2015), 34. The sense of “viability” matters here. If it’s economic viability, then some small-​scale operations might make the grade, though it’s very difficult to pull off without welfare compromises. For details, see F. Bailey Norwood and Jayson Lusk, Compassion, by the Pound: The Economics of Farm Animal Welfare (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011) and McWilliams, The Modern Savage.

Arguments for Consuming Animal Products    251 Additionally, Cuneo offers a historical thought experiment: Imagine [that the Native Americans who lived in the United States one hundred fifty years ago] were offered the following choice (perhaps by others of their tribe): You may either continue your way of life or stop killing animals and become farmers or merchants. . . . If these people were to take the former option, I take it that their justification for doing so would be very similar to the one offered by conscientious omnivores when asked to justify their position. By killing animals, the native Americans would say, they thereby provide their people with nourishing and delicious food—​ these activities being at the center of a deeply entrenched and valued way of life. The question to ask is whether they would be wronging the animals they kill if they were to take the first option. It is not apparent that they would.35

Of course, it’s hard to imagine similar statements being made about the rights of human beings. Those who favor rights-​based ethics are unlikely to think that as long as (a) slaves live excellent lives and (b) having slaves makes possible a deeply entrenched and valued way of life, it’s permissible to own other human beings. So we need some story about why the rights of animals function differently than the rights of humans. If this gap can be filled, then Cuneo might be wise to join forces with George. If we aren’t violating animals’ rights, then we can combine George’s observations about the nutritional needs of infants and children (for example) with the context that Cuneo imagines. So, it might be permissible for infants and children to consume nourishing and tasty animal products, at least if they’re sourced in ways that sustain valued social practices, provide a viable alternative to factory farming, and give animals excellent lives. And crucially, it would be much harder to argue that either they or their parents are vulnerable to the charge of selfishness, eliminating an important challenge to rights-​ based defenses of eating animals. Of course, many philosophers deny that animals have rights. Carl Cohen, for example, maintains that if animals had rights, then we would have an obligation to stop lions from killing gazelles. However, we have no such obligation, so they don’t have rights.36 There have been various replies to this objection. Singer, for example, claims that we shouldn’t intervene to save wild animals because this may cause more harm than good.37 But at best, this explains why we shouldn’t engage in systematic manipulations of wild 35 

Cuneo, “Conscientious Omnivorism,” 35. Carl Cohen, “A Critique of the Alleged Moral Basis of Vegetarianism,” in Food for Thought: The Debate over Eating Meat, ed. Steve Sapontzis (Amherst, MA: Prometheus Books, 2004), 152–​166. Peter Alward offers an argument that sounds similar but is much less interesting. He argues that if it’s wrong for us to eat meat, then predation is wrong; predation isn’t wrong, so it’s permissible for us to eat meat. See his “The Naïve Argument against Moral Vegetarianism,” Environmental Values 9 (2000): 81–​89. This argument founders on the distinction between moral agents and moral patients; see David Benatar, “Why the Naïve Argument against Moral Vegetarianism Really Is Naïve,” Environmental Values 10 (2001):103–​112. 37  Peter Singer, Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals, 3d ed. (New York: HarperCollins, 1975), 226. 36 

252   Bob Fischer environments—​it doesn’t explain why we shouldn’t, say, shoot a fox that’s chasing a rabbit, or even more modestly, shoo a cat away from a bird’s nest. These obligations might not strike us as implausible, but it remains the case that it’s hard to postulate animal rights without accepting various more dramatic implications, such as a ban on all non-​ therapeutic animal experimentation, acknowledging animal property rights (thus seriously curtailing human land use), and perhaps even an obligation to make reparations. These problems come up because of assumptions about what grounds a being’s moral status (i.e., its right to moral consideration). Both Singer and Regan maintain that the correct status-​grounding property is one that is both empirically accessible (i.e., you can’t appeal to souls) and underwrites our considered judgments about what it isn’t permissible to do to human beings. Additionally, they think that the property should explain the wrongness of wrongful acts directly. While they disagree about what the correct property is—​Singer thinks that it’s sentience; Regan, being a subject of a life—​they both insist that it’s hard to find a property that both meets these conditions and isn’t shared by animals. Peter Carruthers rejects the demand for direct explanation.38 That demand is designed to preclude indirect duty views of our obligations to animals. On such views, when it’s wrong to harm animals (and it isn’t always), it isn’t because of some property they have. Instead, it’s because in so doing we either violate the rights of those who own those animals, or deform our characters, or otherwise negatively affect a being that’s a rights-​bearer. (Singer and Regan agree that insofar as it’s wrong to harm an animal, it’s primarily because of what it does to the animal—​not for one of these other reasons.) So without that demand, Carruthers can develop a form of contractualism that denies direct moral standing to animals.39 And if we assume that no animal is a rational agent, then it isn’t hard to see why animals wouldn’t have moral standing, since morality just is the set of rules that self-​interested and rational agents would accept when reasoning together under idealized conditions. No agent is going to agree to a set of rules on which she has no right to moral consideration, so every agent will have standing. The question then is whether agents have something to gain by granting the same right to animals. Since they probably don’t, they probably wouldn’t. The trick is to explain why agents would agree that every human should have moral standing, even when the human in question isn’t an agent. Carruthers has several things to say about this. First, the rules have to be psychologically supportable: that is, agents have to be able to endorse them without coercion. And agents probably won’t be able to endorse rules that don’t grant moral status to infants, or those with severe cognitive disabilities, even if self-​interest might be served by excluding such individuals. Our sympathies for these beings are too strong. Second, self-​interest will lead them to protect 38 Carruthers, The Animals Issue; see too his “Animal Mentality: Its Character, Extent, and

Moral Significance,” in The Oxford Handbook of Animal Ethics, ed. Tom Beauchamp and R. G. Frey (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 373–​406. 39  Not every version of contractualism does this; see, e.g., Mark Rowlands, Animal Rights: Moral Theory and Practice (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

Arguments for Consuming Animal Products    253 the senile and comatose and brain damaged, given that this may well become their fate. And third, contractors have reason to endorse rules that promote virtue in themselves and others, at least insofar as virtue serves the end of the contract process: namely, establishing rules that lead to a stable society. So, there will be a strong presumption in favor of including beings like us, since we’re most likely to become desensitized to harms to one group of humans if we tolerate harms to another group. Carruthers grants that agents might not agree to rules that grant standing to absolutely every human being, but he thinks that the rare exceptions will be tolerable, such as anencephalic infants. The upshot is that (nearly all) humans have the right to moral consideration, no animal has that right, and our obligations to animals are severely limited. In fact, he goes so far as to argue that even factory farming is permissible, since it can’t be ruled out by considerations of character. He claims that “almost any legitimate, non-​trivial motive is sufficient to make [an] action separable from a generally cruel or insensitive disposition,” which means that the desire to make a living can excuse factory farmworkers for many of their cruel actions.40 Presumably, the same point applies to consumers’ desires to be sated by tasty and nutritious animal products, to preserve familial and cultural traditions, and to do so conveniently and inexpensively. Perhaps the most serious objections to Carruthers’s defense of factory farming are empirical. First, there does seem to be a link between cruelty to animals and cruelty to humans.41 Second, contractors are bound to consider the environmental costs of industrial animal agriculture. I  doubt that these considerations would lead contractors to grant animals rights, but the odds are good that they’ll endorse rules that are much more animal-​friendly than Carruthers indicates. So I would expect that roadkill, oysters, and insects would be in, as well as hunted animals and some small-​scale agriculture.42

The New Speciesism, Environmentalism, and Human Goods At this juncture, it becomes harder to batch arguments. In broadest outline, we can say that the other arguments for consuming animal products reject certain assumptions

40 Carruthers, The Animals Issue, 159.

41  Andrew Linzey, ed., The Link between Animal Abuse and Human Violence (Eastbourne, UK: Sussex Academic Press, 2009). 42  Carruthers is also known for denying that animals are phenomenally conscious, which interacts in interesting ways with his contractualism. For an overview, see his Carruthers, “Animal Mentality”; for the details, see his Consciousness: Essays from a Higher-​Order Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). For a different form of contractualism that allows for some animal consumption, see John Zeis “A Rawlsian Pro-​Life Argument against Vegetarianism,” International Philosophical Quarterly 53 (2013): 63–​7 1. On his view, contractors produce three sets of moral rules depending on what’s bracketed behind the veil of ignorance: one for rational individuals, one for sentient individuals, and one for living individuals. The rules are binding in that order, so that your obligations to beings qua sentient beings can’t trump your obligations to beings qua rational.

254   Bob Fischer common to utilitarian and rights-​based discussions of animals. First, some philosophers grant that animals have moral standing, but insist that dramatic conclusions don’t follow. This is because they take species membership to be (or to be coextensive with) a morally relevant property. Second, some philosophers approach animal ethics from broadly environmentalist or agrarian perspectives. Finally, some insist that utilitarian and rights-​based defenses of animals overlook significant human goods that can stem from hunting and animal husbandry—​goods valuable enough to justify ending the lives of animals.

The New Speciesism There are several defenses of “the new speciesism” now available.43 These defenses vary widely, and “the new speciesism” label is somewhat misleading. Some reject the assumption that moral reasons are agent-​neutral, insisting that privileging species membership is akin to privileging family or friends; just as we have no reason to take up perspectives that would undermine the partiality we show them, we have no reason to take up perspectives that would undermine the partiality we show other humans.44 Others posit properties that all and only humans have, arguing that they ground our special moral status.45 Neither position fits with the classic definition of speciesism, which goes back to Richard Ryder, but is best known thanks to Singer’s Animal Liberation. As Ryder and Singer use the term, speciesism is privileging human interests in a morally arbitrary way, in the same way that racists privilege the interests of members of one race in a morally arbitrary way. The new speciesists aren’t defending that position, but since they’ve chosen the “speciesist” label, I’ll follow their lead. There are two kinds of challenges for the new speciesism. The first is familiar from the problem of marginal cases: either it isn’t plausible that all and only humans have the property in question, or it isn’t plausible that the property grounds a special moral status. However it goes, privileging human beings begins to look like racism and sexism. But the second challenge is the more serious, at least insofar as defenses of preferential treatment for humans are supposed to fend off arguments for either the reform or abolition of animal use. The problem is that it isn’t clear what, exactly, speciesism is supposed to imply. In Singer’s case, by contrast, it’s clear what the rejection of speciesism is supposed to imply—​namely, the failure of one challenge (“But they’re just animals!”) to his use of the 43 

Jennifer Welchman, “Xenografting, Species Loyalty, and Human Solidarity,” Journal of Social Philosophy 34 (2003): 244–​255; Bernard Williams, “The Human Prejudice,” in Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline, ed. A. W. Moore (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 135–​152; Logi Gunnarsson, “The Great Apes and the Severely Disabled: Moral Status and Thick Evaluative Concepts,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 11 (2008): 305–​326; S. Matthew Liao, “The Basis of Human Moral Status,” Journal of Moral Philosophy 7 (2010): 159–​179; Douglas MacLean, “Is ‘Being Human’ a Moral Concept?” Philosophy and Public Policy Quarterly 30 (2010): 16–​20; Timothy Chappell, “On the Very Idea of Criteria for Personhood,” Southern Journal of Philosophy 49 (2010): 1–​27; Hsiao, “In Defense of Eating Meat.” 44  Williams, “The Human Prejudice”; MacLean, “Is ‘Being Human’ a Moral Concept?” 45  Liao, “The Basis of Human Moral Status”; Hsaio, “In Defense of Eating Meat.”

Arguments for Consuming Animal Products    255 principle of equal consideration of interests. However, Singer doesn’t need anything so strong to get abstinence from animal products: animals could matter much less than humans, but still enough that we can’t justify how poorly we treat them. The upshot is that absent additional moral principles, speciesism doesn’t tell us anything about whether it’s permissible to consume animal products. It merely tells us that we get to give extra weight (though no one ever says how much) to human interests because they’re human. Timothy Hsaio is one of the few who tries to supply the crucial link. He argues as follows: 1. Moral welfare interests trump nonmoral welfare interests. 2. Human consumption of meat for the sake of nutrition is a moral welfare interest. 3. The interests of nonhuman animals in not feeling pain is a nonmoral welfare interest. 4. Therefore, human consumption of meat for the sake of nutrition trumps the interests of nonhuman animals.46 Let’s grant the second premise, focusing on the third instead. The argument for it is straightforward. The moral community is composed of those beings with “the root capacity for rational agency.”47 Animals lack this root capacity, so they aren’t included in the moral community. Harms to those outside the moral community are bad for them, but not morally bad. So, while animals have an interest in not being harmed, theirs is a nonmoral interest. The payoff? Hsaio’s speciesism implies that any human nutritional interest outweighs all interests that nonhuman animals have in not feeling pain. Factory farming is back on the table. There are at least four problems with this view. First, Hsaio maintains that all and only humans have the root capacity for rational agency, and it isn’t supposed to be a potentiality account. Instead, it rests on a metaphysical assumption—​a variety of essentialism. But essentialism in biology has had a rough time after Darwin. Second, in arguing this way Hsaio abandons the project of looking for an empirically accessible status-​grounding property. It may well be the case that his metaphysical theory is true, and that the permissibility of animal consumption falls out of it. But since it’s hard enough to secure agreement in ethics without adding in our metaphysical differences, there should be little hope of securing agreement once we do. Third, since nutritional considerations seem to favor well-​planned vegan diets, Hsaio’s conclusion may be beside the point. What we need is a defense of our gustatory interests, not our nutritional ones. Finally, the payoff of Hsaio’s view is implausible on its face. Suppose that I would be ever so slightly better nourished by eating a diet containing meat rather than a vegan diet. Suppose that I would feel the same either way, and the difference wouldn’t appreciably affect my long-​term health, perhaps because it’s swamped by other factors. Still, in such circumstances I have a nutritional

46 

Hsaio, “In Defense of Eating Meat,” 280.

47 Ibid., 286.

256   Bob Fischer interest in eating meat. Could I justify causing extensive animal suffering for such trivial gains? Presumably not. And yet on Hsaio’s view, I can.

Environmentalism and Agrarianism Let’s set the new speciesism aside. We get a very different defense of animal consumption from environmentalists and agrarians. For the former, this is often based on rejecting the view that moral standing is an intrinsic property, offering extrinsic, relational accounts instead. Aldo Leopold (1949), for example, famously claimed that a “thing is right when it preserves the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community.” Here, the biotic community is what matters first and foremost, so it’s no surprise that killing and eating animals can be morally permissible—​even morally good—​since it’s often in the interest of the biotic community that those animals die. Whatever a biotic community is supposed to be, it’s plain that predation sustains a good deal of it. (Indeed, Ned Hettinger argues that bans on animal consumption are incompatible with the environmentalist outlook, since they’re incompatible with regarding predation as good. This probably isn’t true, as Jennifer Everett shows, but it’s indicative of what matters by the environmentalist’s lights.48) The main problem for naïve versions of biocentricism is that they run the risk of ecofascism. From the perspective of the biotic community, it may well be the case that humans are a scourge on the earth. Does it then follow that most humans ought to be killed? J. Baird Callicott tries to solve this problem by subsuming biocentricism within a larger, communitarian ethic. This view is “paradigmatically monistic (duties and obligations are generated by community membership) and practically pluralistic (we are simultaneously members of multiple communities—​ familial, municipal, national, global, mixed, biotic—​and so are importuned by multiple and often conflicting duties and obligations, which we are obliged to prioritize for purposes of coherent moral action).”49 According to Callicott, the communities in which we’re most deeply embedded usually deserve our loyalties first, and more distant spheres of moral obligation trump the more immediate only when the stakes are high. So while there may be a general obligation not to support factory farms, there may also be circumstances in which honoring a host’s hospitality requires eating the factory-​farmed meat that he prepared.50

48  Ned Hettinger, “Bambi Lovers versus Tree Huggers,” in Food for Thought: The Debate over Eating Meat, ed. Steve Sapontzis (Amherst, MA: Prometheus Books, 2004), 294–​301; Jennifer Everett, “Vegetarianism, Predation, and Respect for Nature,” in Food for Thought: The Debate over Eating Meat, ed. Steve Sapontzis (Amherst, MA: Prometheus Books, 2004), 302–​314. 49  J. Baird Callicott, “The Environmental Omnivore’s Dilemma,” in The Moral Complexities of Eating Meat, ed. Ben Bramble and Bob Fischer (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 61. 50  Julio Rubio develops another version of this view: “The tragedy of human existence does not allow for a clean conscience. Instead, we have to be content with our always partial efforts to do less evil and more good. In the case of meat-​eating, though the choice seems simple when considered from an individual perspective, when placed in the context of family and community it is far more complex. . . . While very few people ‘need’ to eat meat, families and community are fundamental human

Arguments for Consuming Animal Products    257 However, I suspect that the main trouble with this theory, at least when it comes to animal ethics, is the difficulty in seeing what follows from it. True enough, there may be a general-​though-​defeasible obligation not to support factory farms, and a particular obligation to eat the products that come from them—​but we could equally well appeal to community membership to defend extreme positions: for instance, the regular consumption of animal products (“Eating at Cracker Barrel is a family tradition”) and always rejecting hospitality (“As part of the animal advocacy movement, I should always abstain”). Leopold and Callicott are attempting to offer comprehensive moral frameworks, but some within the environmentalist tradition don’t have such ambitions. We find a less systemic approach in the work of Benjamin Lipscolm, who tries to draw together the threads of Wendell Berry’s agrarianism.51 Agrarianism is a “back to the land” philosophy (in the popular sense of “philosophy”). It’s an outlook that stresses the virtues involved in coaxing sustenance from the earth, in living in small communities, in the handmade, in understanding—​and entering—​the rhythm of a particular place. Moreover, Lipscomb notes, this view offers an approach to raising and killing animals on which it can be virtuous: We can only live by taking life, and [we might] try to reorient our thinking about this. . . . [Some] believe, or seem to believe, that the order by which coyotes prey upon prairie dogs and rabbits and such is a horrific one, one we should abstain from and perhaps even interrupt. It is a temptation . . . to regard the death by which the world lives with mere horror—​as not the way things are supposed to be. But to think thus is to be alienated in one’s thinking from the order Darwin uncovered—​the order in and by which we live. [We] might try to learn to see our condition, not as a merely fallen, but as one we can inhabit with gratitude.52

According to Berry, we do have obligations to animals—​lots of them, in fact. But those obligations don’t preclude living in intimate, life-​taking and life-​giving relationships with them. Indeed, animal husbandry emerges as a kind of spiritual practice, a way of embracing the natural order of things.53

Human Goods I don’t see why the virtues so dear to agrarians wouldn’t be enhanced by having less violent relationships with animals. After all, we can benefit from animals without killing goods. Our realization of basic human goods is always partial because they so often conflict, and inevitably we will have to choose: For whom will we have the most compassion today? Sometimes it will be animals but other times it may the teenager who would enjoy some time with the family if it included chicken pot pie” (“Animals, Evil, and Family Meals,” Journal of Moral Theology 3 [2014]: 52). 51  Benjamin Lipscomb, “‘Eat Responsibly’: Agrarianism and Meat,” in Philosophy Comes to Dinner: Arguments over the Ethics of Eating, ed. Matthew C. Halteman, Terence Cuneo, and Andrew Chignell (New York: Routledge), 56–​72. 52  Lipscomb, “Eat Responsibly,” 70. 53  For similar sorts of views, see Scruton, Animal Rights and Wrongs and Cerulli, The Mindful Carnivore: A Vegetarian’s Hunt for Sustenance (New York: Pegasus Books, 2012).

258   Bob Fischer them—​as we do when we eat eggs from hens that have good lives (assuming we can address concerns about the all-​too-​expendable male chickens, as well as what happens to those hens when they stop laying). In a sense, this is Tzachi Zamir’s basic insight.54 He argues that, insofar as veganism is based on a rejection of animal use, it also rules out having pets. However, he points out that pet ownership is good for us and for animals, and there’s a difference between use and exploitation. So, we should reject a total ban on animal use, prohibiting only animal exploitation. This means that if we can find non-​exploitative methods of animal husbandry, we may consume the products derived from it.55 Zamir concedes that killing is out, and thus lacto-​ovo vegetarianism emerges as the right ideal. We can promote gratitude to animals—​or God, or what have you—​without a system that says “Thanks” for a chicken’s life some fifteen years before its time. Still, Berry’s agrarianism—​and Callicott’s communitarianism, and Cuneo’s view about the limits of animal rights—​raise questions about the costs of giving up meat. This topic hasn’t been much explored, and I suppose it’s possible that there are virtues that can’t be developed without slaughter. If so, it’s worth considering whether this is because some virtues are bound up with particular identities. This could be one way to reply to Christopher Ciocchetti’s fascinating examination of identity-​based defenses of meat consumption, where he considers the possibility that our identities provide us with special reasons to act.56 Ciocchetti concludes that our identities are often more flexible than we think, and we can breathe new life into traditions when we bring them in line with our moral convictions, so identity-​based defenses aren’t successful.57 (Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals is an excellent example of this: essentially, the entire book is an attempt to explain why he won’t eat his grandmother’s chicken and carrots, which is at the heart of his family’s gatherings, and then to refashion an identity that’s compatible with opting out.58) In the face of Ciocchetti’s work, the task for agrarians is to be more precise about why slaughter is essential to the virtue(s) they value. Suppose there aren’t any virtues that only slaughter makes available. Still, there certainly are pleasures that are hard to secure without slaughter. This is Loren Lomasky’s concern: he insists that “eating meat contributes to a very great good for human beings

54 

Tzachi Zamir, “Veganism,” Journal of Social Philosophy 35 (2004): 367–​379. Zamir goes a bit farther, arguing that actual circumstances don’t make it impermissible to purchase and consume products from humane farmers. This isn’t because they meet the ideal of non-​exploitative animal husbandry, but because they approximate it, and we can encourage even better agricultural practices by supporting “animal-​friendly” farms over their industrial competitors. 56  Christopher Ciocchetti, “Veganism and Living Well,” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 25 (2012): 405–​417. 57   . . . which is compatible with there being some loss. Of course, morality asks people to give up various racist traditions, such as flying the Confederate flag and telling black jokes at family gatherings. But surely we have no particular reason to mourn that loss. 58  Ultimately, it isn’t clear that he succeeds, as he changes the subject from Grandma’s chicken and carrots to the Thanksgiving turkey. Moreover, he never says how, exactly, he navigates his relationships with the people that his abstinence offends. 55 

Arguments for Consuming Animal Products    259 without impermissibly impinging on animal well-​being.”59 The “very great good” here is the aesthetic-​cum-​gustatory pleasure associated with meat consumption and its associated traditions. And he maintains that this can be had without impermissibly impinging on animal well-​being because (a) he thinks that we couldn’t get this very great good any other way, (b) he denies that animals have rights, so we aren’t infringing them, and (c) he thinks we just don’t know whether animals suffer very much, so welfare considerations don’t trump our interests. At least where factory farming is concerned—​and Lomasky thinks the point may apply even there—​the last claim is false. Slaughterhouse videos have taught us that much. And while there are indeed pleasures distinct to meat-​consumption, it isn’t clear that they’re qualitatively superior, which is what Lomasky needs. Lomasky tries to address the latter problem by appealing to Mill’s competent judge test, insisting that, in general, those who’ve tried both vegetarian and omnivorous diets acknowledge the superiority of the latter. “All across the globe the same phenomenon is observed: as incomes increase so does the amount of meat in people’s diets.”60 Michael Gill objects that we shouldn’t take members of the general population to be competent judges, since they haven’t experienced the best that vegetarian cooking can offer.61 However, I’m inclined to concede this point to Lomasky. There are gustatory costs to giving up animal products62—​which, of course, is different from saying that there are moral costs, or that they aren’t ones we should be bear.

Defending Some Animal Product Consumption What can we borrow from the previous sections to assemble a reasonably coherent case for consuming some animal products? The most important points, I think, are these: 1. We can’t ignore the harms involved in conventional plant agriculture.63 This consideration alone doesn’t support eating grass-​fed beef, pace Stephen Davis. Still, if we aim to minimize harm—​or avoid supporting practices that cause extensive and unnecessary harm, or respect the rights of every experiencing subject-​of-​a-​life—​ then we have to factor in the costs of eating plants. 59 

Loren Lomasky, “Is It Wrong to Eat Animals?” Social Philosophy and Policy 30 (2013): 178. On the value of gustatory pleasure, see too Jean Kazez, “The Taste Question in Animal Ethics,” Journal of Applied Philosophy, forthcoming. 60 Ibid., 185. 61  Michael B. Gill, “On Eating Animals,” Social Philosophy and Policy 30 (2013): 201–​207. 62  Not everyone agrees. I once had a conversation with Carol Adams during which she insisted that there are no costs whatever to giving up animal products. I don’t know if that’s her considered view, but she seemed quite adamant about it at the time. 63  There are, of course, alternatives to conventional plant agriculture. The standard one is veganic agriculture, which attempts not to harm any animals whatever. Unfortunately, it faces significant

260   Bob Fischer 2. Any case for consuming animal products shouldn’t focus exclusively on traditional animal products—​meat, dairy, eggs, and fish—​or even on animal husbandry. In addition, we need to consider insects, mollusks, animals that die either accidentally or naturally, in vitro meat, animal products that will be discarded if they aren’t consumed, and so on. This means that even if it isn’t possible to defend many traditional animal products, veganism doesn’t follow (either de facto or as an ideal). 3. We need to acknowledge the environmental costs of animal agriculture, especially of the industrial variety. Some animal products may be hard to justify on this basis alone. 4. Even if we grant that animals have rights, it takes further argument to show that those rights rule out any particular activity. Of course, a right’s implications often seem to be straightforward: the right to bodily integrity probably implies the right not to have your tail docked or beak trimmed, and it probably follows that people have an obligation not to place pigs and chickens in circumstances where tail-​ docking and debeaking seem like good ideas. But consider a parallel: the right to bodily integrity probably implies the right not to be spayed or neutered, and it probably follows that people have an obligation not to place animals in circumstances where spaying and neutering seem like good ideas. PETA, for example, advocates for both the right to bodily integrity and the importance of spaying and neutering, so I presume that its leadership sees no tension there. If not, then its leadership must concede that we may do some things to an animal that aren’t directly in its interests.64 The interesting question concerns the limits of that permission. 5. Though ahimsa—​the virtue of nonviolence—​is valuable if anything is, we need to grapple with the possibility that it can be virtuous to embrace your role in the harm you cause (or in which you participate). It seems to me that agrarians and their ilk overstate this point, as I don’t see the value in embracing your role in easily preventable harm. Still, it’s an open question as to what we can virtuously intend when we’re bound to benefit from some harm or other, and we should recall that it’s often hard to settle what is and isn’t virtuous without considering whether there’s a way of life that makes sense of a particular character trait. 6. We must be careful to distinguish—​as Zamir does—​between use and exploitation. At the same time, we shouldn’t rule out the possibility that nearly all actual use is exploitative, even if there is a distinction to be drawn in principle. There are, of course, other interesting moves in the material I’ve canvassed. However, most of the others involve more contentious theoretical assumptions than the ones I’ve practical hurdles; see Cerulli, The Mindful Carnivore. Moreover, even if these can be cleared, veganic agriculture is so uncommon that those who want to source their food this way will probably have to become agriculturists themselves, thus dramatically increasing the burden of going vegan. 64 

For more on this, see David Boonin, “Robbing PETA to Spay Paul: Do Animal Rights Include Reproductive Rights?” Between the Species 13 (2003): 1–​8.

Arguments for Consuming Animal Products    261 identified here, and they’re less valuable for that reason. Insofar as the aim is to justify some animal product consumption to a wide philosophical audience, we should avoid unnecessary assumptions about, say, existence being a benefit (as the Logic of the Larder assumes), or the moral legitimacy of giving preferential treatment to a particular species, or contractualism being the best moral theory. Given these points, I  think the best case for consuming some animal products excludes standard fare—​that is, the flesh of cows, chickens, and pigs that were raised to be slaughtered for it long before they’d otherwise die, as well eggs and dairy products that are bound up with the meat industry (more on these qualifications shortly). All the normal concerns apply here: animal welfare, rights violations, huge environmental consequences, the wastefulness of these products, and so on. Indeed, I suspect that welfare concerns condemn many small farms in the United States, partly because so many of them still use regular slaughterhouses instead of mobile slaughter units (MSUs), and so don’t avoid the suffering that comes with transporting animals (broken limbs, dehydration, etc.) or the agonies of industrial slaughter. (MSUs have their own problems, but not these ones.) More important, though, it’s hard to see how small farms evade the charge of exploiting animals, no matter how well they treat them. Animal agriculture involves death on a schedule, and one that serves human interests, not those of the animals killed. Instead, then, I think the best case for consuming animal products is a defense of eating unusually. Recall Bruckner’s argument. If there’s an available alternative, we shouldn’t support practices that cause extensive and unnecessary harm to animals. By eating a strict vegan diet, we support practices that cause extensive and unnecessary harm to animals—​namely, plant agriculture—​when eating roadkill is an available alternative. So, we shouldn’t be strict vegans. Bruckner’s argument generalizes. As far as I can see, the best reason not to eat insects and various bivalves is based on a precautionary principle: even though the evidence suggests that they aren’t sentient, but they might be; since we might be, and the cost of being wrong would be significant, we shouldn’t harm them unnecessarily. But we need to weigh the odds of insect and bivalve sentience against the known costs to animals involved in plant agriculture. Granted, it would be very bad if we were wrong about insects and bivalves, and we then began raising them for food.65 However, it would be equally bad if we were wrong about plant sentience, and yet we rightly accept this risk: the evidence for plant sentience is weak, and the considerations that tell against positing it are strong. Likewise for the creatures in question. The upshot is that we should weigh the risk of making a mistake in the line-​drawing problem (i.e., excluding insects and bivalves when they ought to be included) against the harms to those creatures that

65  Although Meyers questions even this: “Unlike cattle, pigs, or chickens—​and unlike even crabs, lobsters, or shrimp—​most insects actually prefer to live in crowded, hot, and filthy conditions. The kinds of livestock environments that the profit demand encourages would actually be one that insects would most prefer. As long as they could be slaughtered humanely, we would have an inexpensive and nutritious, karma free source of meat that is good for the environment and could help prevent massive world hunger” (“Why It Is Morally Good to Eat (Certain Kinds of) Meat,” 124).

262   Bob Fischer are clearly one side of the divide (e.g., the rabbits and field mice that are harmed in crop production). The aim isn’t to limit our moral concern, but to balance moral caution against the moral imperative to respond to plant agriculture’s costs.66 The same points apply to in vitro meat, and they may also apply to animal products that will be discarded if they aren’t consumed (your roommate’s leftover Kung Pao chicken, which is low-​hanging fruit for a freegan). A reasonable reservation about the latter concerns your ability (a) to limit yourself to eating such products just when they really would be thrown away and (b) to influence others to adopt more animal-​friendly diets. These are questions to which there are no general answers. Some people have the willpower to opt out based on the provenance of the food; others don’t. Those who do may eat; those who don’t probably shouldn’t. Likewise, some people will be willing and able to explain to those nearby why they’re consuming animal products, turning the occasion into an opportunity to advocate for animals. They’re willing to communicate with words what vegans signal by their abstinence. And, of course, others either won’t be willing or won’t be able to have those conversations, and so should think twice before saving leftovers from the trash. Someone might worry that eating food that will be thrown out is disrespectful to the animal whose body it was. There are two things to say here. First, it seems equally plausible that not eating leftover animal products is disrespectful to animals that will be harmed in plant agriculture. Second, we aren’t obliged to show respect for animals the way we show respect for humans. It’s a contingent fact about us that we show respect for human beings by not eating their dead bodies. I’ll be the last to object to this state of affairs. Nevertheless, we should recognize that we needn’t have the same practices for animals. Members of many species seem not to be terribly concerned about the dead bodies of their kith and kin, and I see no reason to think that animals care about how their own dead bodies are treated. So, we aren’t violating the interests of surviving or dead animals by consuming those products, which makes it hard to see why eating them has to be disrespectful. Finally, I think we can defend very limited animal husbandry. I once had a student whose family ran a chicken sanctuary where they took in birds that Austinites no longer wanted. (Backyard chicken farming isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.) The family fed and protected the chickens well, they allowed the birds to live out their natural lives, and they ate some of the eggs that the hens laid. Crucially, this family operates outside the meat industry: there are no concerns about exploiting animals for meat, since they aren’t shortening the chickens’ lives to get access to their bodies. Moreover, there are no concerns about where the male chicks went, as the family couldn’t have prevented their deaths. It seems to me that if there are any examples of use without exploitation, then this is one. And if it is, then it’s permissible. Finally, I can’t see any reason why they shouldn’t sell those eggs to neighbors—​at least as long they’re able to resist any temptation to make welfare compromises—​since there’s nothing wrong with selling something that it’s permissible to own (assuming that the selling doesn’t lead to other harms).

66 

For a more detailed defense of this line, see my “Bugging the Strict Vegan.”

Arguments for Consuming Animal Products    263

Conclusion There is, I think, a good case for eating some animal products, albeit not most of the ones you’ll find at your local restaurant or grocery store. Instead, there appear to be good reasons to eat roadkill, bugs, bivalves, in vitro meat, animal products that will be wasted, and the bodies and byproducts of animals that live full, pleasant lives—​that is, it seems we have good reason to eat unusually. What’s more, we can justify such consumption without ignoring the welfare and respect-​based concerns that have long motivated those who advocate for animals. I don’t eat unusually, and I don’t want to start. You might be in the same boat. But I also think that animals matter, recognize the harms involved in plant agriculture, and care about the environment. I think I’ve got some explaining to do.

Acknowledgments Thanks to the editors of this volume for very helpful comments on earlier drafts of this chapter.

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264   Bob Fischer Carruthers, Peter. “Animal Mentality: Its Character, Extent, and Moral Significance.” In The Oxford Handbook of Animal Ethics, edited by Tom Beauchamp and R. G. Frey, 373–​406. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. —​—​—​. The Animals Issue: Moral Theory in Practice. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. —​—​—​. Consciousness: Essays from a Higher-​Order Perspective. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Cerulli, Tovar. The Mindful Carnivore: A Vegetarian’s Hunt for Sustenance. New York: Pegasus Books, 2012. Chappell, Timothy. “On the Very Idea of Criteria for Personhood.” Southern Journal of Philosophy 49 (2011): 1–​27. Ciocchetti, Christopher. “Veganism and Living Well.” Journal of Agricultural and Environ­ mental Ethics 25 (2012): 405–​417. Cohen, Carl. “A Critique of the Alleged Moral Basis of Vegetarianism.” In Food for Thought: The Debate over Eating Meat, edited by Steve Sapontzis, 152–​166. Amherst, MA:  Prometheus Books, 2004. Cox, Christopher. “Consider the Oyster.” Slate, April 7, 2010. http://​www.slate.com/​articles/​ life/​food/​2010/​04/​consider_​the_​oyster.html. Crisp, Roger. “Utilitarianism and Vegetarianism.” International Journal of Applied Philosophy 4 (1988): 41–​49. Cuneo, Terence. “Conscientious Omnivorism.” In Philosophy Comes to Dinner: Arguments over the Ethics of Eating, edited by Matthew C. Halteman, Terence Cuneo, and Andrew Chignell, 21–​38. New York: Routledge, 2015. Davis, Steven L. “The Least Harm Principle May Require that Humans Consume a Diet Containing Large Herbivores, Not a Vegan Diet.” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 16 (2003): 387–​394. DeGrazia, David. “Moral Vegetarianism from a Very Broad Basis.” Journal of Moral Philosophy 6 (2009): 143–​165. Fairlie, Simon. Meat:  A Benign Extravagance. White River Junction, VT:  Chelsea Green Publishing, 2011. Ferré, Frederick. “Moderation, Morals, and Meat.” Inquiry 29 (1986): 391–​406. Fischer, Bob. “Bugging the Strict Vegan.” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 29 (2016): 255–​263. Fitzgerald, Amy J., Linda Kalof, and Thomas Dietz. “Slaughterhouses and Increased Crime Rates: An Empirical Analysis of the Spillover from ‘the Jungle’ into the Surrounding Community.” Organization & Environment 22 (2009): 158–​184. Frey, R. G. Rights, Killing, and Suffering: Moral Vegetarianism and Applied Ethics. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1983. Garrett, Jeremy R. “Utilitarianism, Vegetarianism, and Human Health:  A Response to the Causal Impotence Objection.” Journal of Applied Philosophy 24 (2007): 223–​237. George, Kathryn Paxton. Animal, Vegetable, or Woman? A  Feminist Critique of Ethical Vegetarianism. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000. —​—​—​. “So Animal a Human . . ., or the Moral Relevance of Being an Omnivore.” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 3 (1990): 172–​186. Gill, Michael B. “On Eating Animals.” Social Philosophy and Policy 30 (2013): 201–​207. Gunnarsson, Logi. “The Great Apes and the Severely Disabled:  Moral Status and Thick Evaluative Concepts.” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 11 (2008): 305–​326.

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266   Bob Fischer Pollan, Michael. The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. New York: Penguin Press, 2006. Regan, Tom. The Case for Animal Rights. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983. Rowlands, Mark. Animal Rights: Moral Theory and Practice. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Rubio, Julie Hanlon. “Animals, Evil, and Family Meals.” Journal of Moral Theology 3 (2014): 35–​53. Saja, Krzysztof. “The Moral Footprint of Animal Products.” Agriculture and Human Values 30 (2013): 193–​202. Schaefer, G. Owen, and Julian Savulescu. “The Ethics of Producing In Vitro Meat.” Journal of Applied Philosophy 31 (2014): 188–​202. Schedler, George. “Does Ethical Meat Eating Maximize Utility?” Social Theory and Practice 31 (2005): 499–​511. Schwartz, Judith. Cows Save the Planet and Other Improbable Ways of Restoring Soil to Heal the Earth. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2013. Scruton, Roger. Animal Rights and Wrongs. London: Continuum, 2006. —​—​—​. “The Conscientious Carnivore.” In Food for Thought:  The Debate over Eating Meat, edited by Steve Sapontzis, 81–​91. Amherst, MA: Prometheus Books, 2004. Shriver, Adam. “Knocking Out Pain in Livestock: Can Technology Succeed Where Morality has Stalled?” Neuroethics 2 (2009): 115–​124. Singer, Peter. Animal Liberation:  A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals. New  York: HarperCollins, 1975. —​—​—​. Animal Liberation:  A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals. 3d ed. New  York: HarperCollins, 2002. Smil, Vaclav. Should We Eat Meat? Evolution and Consequences of Modern Carnivory. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2013. Višak, Tatjana. Killing Happy Animals: Explorations in Utilitarian Ethics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Warren, Mary Anne. Moral Status: Obligations to Persons and Other Living Things. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Weir, Jack. “Unnecessary Pain, Nutrition, and Vegetarianism.” Between the Species 7 (1991): 13–​26. Welchman, Jennifer. “Xenografting, Species Loyalty, and Human Solidarity.” Journal of Social Philosophy 34 (2003): 244–​255. Williams, Bernard. “The Human Prejudice.” In Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline, edited by A. W. Moore, 135–​152. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006. Zamir, Tzachi. “Veganism.” Journal of Social Philosophy 35 (2004): 367–​379. Zeis, John. “A Rawlsian Pro-​Life Argument against Vegetarianism.” International Philosophical Quarterly 53 (2013): 63–​7 1.

chapter 12

C onsum er C h oi c e and C ollecti v e  I mpac t Julia Nefsky

Introduction It is 10 p.m. and you are channel surfing. You settle on Beans of Darkness, a documentary about injustice in the coffee industry. You learn about grueling working conditions, exploitative wage systems that keep farmers living in poverty and debt, and the use of child and slave labor. The movie ends with a message about our power as consumers to change the situation: by demanding fair trade coffee—​it says—​we can put an end to these injustices. On your way to work the next morning, you stop at your usual coffee shop. Normally you order the Broadway Blend, but today you study the options. There is one coffee labeled “fair trade.” You order it. It is decent, but not nearly as good as the Broadway. The following morning, back at the coffee shop, you find yourself unable to motivate ordering the fair trade coffee again. It is not that you no longer care about the lives of coffee farmers. It is that it now seems naïve to think that buying a cup of fair trade coffee could do anything to help them. You are a mere speck in a sea of coffee drinkers. Realistically, nothing in the industry is going to go differently depending on which cup of coffee you buy. What, then, is the point in forgoing the tastier coffee? Many of us encounter similar barriers when we direct ourselves to make ethically conscious food choices. Taken collectively, our food choices are the driving factor behind what players in the industry do to compete and gain our business. Thus, collectively, they have major consequences for human lives, animal lives and the environment. But it is far from clear what this fact about our collective food choices tells us about any individual choice. When you learn about the suffering inflicted on animals on factory farms, or about the exploitation of farmworkers throughout the world, or about devastating effects of industrial farming or food processing on the environment, what should you conclude about what you ought, or ought not, to eat for dinner tonight?

268   Julia Nefsky One major problem in answering this question is that it is often difficult to determine which large-​scale consumer patterns would result in changes for the better. Determining what the actual effects would be of various large shifts in consumer demand is a complex matter.1 But even supposing that we do know which large-​scale consumer patterns would be better, a problem arises in trying to move from these facts to conclusions about what one ought, individually, to do. Suppose we know that grave harms or injustices could be prevented if enough people stop buying Xs. Intuitively, in such a scenario, morality should yield that each of us ought or, at least, has good moral reason to refrain from buying Xs. But the trouble is: typically, in such scenarios, it is doubtful that it will make a difference whether or not I purchase an X on any given occasion. Most present-​ day food companies operate at too large a scale for a single purchase to have an effect on what they do. And if this is right, then for each of us, it is unclear what point there is in refraining. Each individual can argue, “My purchase won’t make a difference, so I’m not doing anything wrong.” It is this second problem that I am concerned with in this essay. Call it, “the problem of collective impact.”2 Many of our food choices face this problem in one way or another. For another example, take meat consumption. People often move immediately from the fact that tremendous suffering is inflicted on animals on factory farms, or that factory farming causes serious environmental damage, to the conclusion that it is wrong to purchase meat. But this ignores a major complication: it is highly doubtful that my purchasing some factory-​farmed meat will make a difference with respect to animal suffering or environmental damage.3 For my purchase to make a difference with respect to these things, it must make a difference to what happens on the factory farm. And while the factory farm may need to adjust production if there is a large shift in demand, a single purchase more or less is surely not going to affect what they do. For example, in the 2013 fiscal year Tyson produced an average of 40.9 million chickens per week.4 They are not going to adjust production in virtue of the fact that one, or two, or twenty fewer chickens were purchased than usual. It is important to see that the “my purchase won’t make a difference” claim challenges not only the thought that I am obligated all-​things-​considered to refrain from consuming meat but also, and more deeply, the thought that there is any moral point at all in refraining (or, more precisely, any moral point having to do with animal suffering, or the

1  There is disagreement, for instance, about the effectiveness of the Fair Trade certification program at reducing poverty among coffee farmers. In this essay, I will assume, for the sake of discussion, that a widespread shift in demand to fair trade coffee would be overall better for farmworkers, but I note here that this may not be true. 2  In previous work, I have called this “the problem of collective harm,” but this new terminology better captures the nature of the problem. I am grateful to Andrew Franklin-​Hall for this suggestion. 3  There is a third issue with factory farming: its implications for public health. Factory farming spreads viruses and antibiotic-​resistant bacteria (Anomaly 2015). The problem of collective impact arises with respect to this issue too. 4  Tyson Foods, Inc., Fiscal 2013 Fact Book, http://​s1.q4cdn.com/​900108309/​files/​doc_​downloads/​ Tyson%202013%20Fact%20Book.pdf.

Consumer Choice and Collective Impact    269 environment). If my purchase will not make a difference with respect to animal suffering, this means that things will be exactly the same for animals give or take my purchase. And if that is true, it is not clear how the suffering of animals on factory farms could give me any reason, or presumptive moral obligation, not to purchase it, let alone an all-​ things-​considered obligation.5 The problem of collective impact is not unique to food choices. It arises in any context in which by acting in a certain way, we collectively can have a major impact, but in which no individual seems to make a difference.6 But, my focus here is on the problem as it arises in the context of food choices. Whether one is coming at this from a general interest in the problem of collective impact or from an interest in the ethics of food choices, it is important to think through how the problem plays out in this domain. In this essay, I discuss a number of responses to the problem. I do not attempt to cover every potentially promising response. Rather, I focus on a selection of responses that seem to me to be particularly salient in food choices cases. In the next section, I consider two attempts to solve the problem by denying the “it won’t make a difference” claim. In the following section, I discuss appeals to what I call “non-​instrumental” moral reasons: reasons that do not have to do with making a significant instrumental contribution. And there I explore a phenomenon that suggests that many people think of the morality of food choices in a not-​purely-​instrumental way: many people who are vegetarian (for moral reasons) will not eat meat even when they know it would otherwise simply go to waste. I explore whether thinking about the motivations of such vegetarians might help solve our problem. In the concluding section of the essay, I briefly explain my own view about where the solution to the problem lies. Before proceeding, a clarification: not just any moral reason or requirement is a candidate solution. Suppose you argue that there is something intrinsically wrong with eating animals, separate from anything to do with animal suffering or environmental damage. This would be a story about why one ought not to eat meat, but it is not even a candidate to solve the problem of collective impact that arises with respect to meat consumption. The problem of collective impact is a problem specifically about the fact 5 

While I am going to focus on individual purchases, the same problem arises if we ask whether one should adopt a personal food policy. For example, it is doubtful that your becoming vegetarian will make a difference to the suffering of animals. Suppose you would buy four chickens each month, were you not vegetarian. If you live for sixty more years from the time you become vegetarian, this means 2,880 fewer chickens are purchased in virtue of your being vegetarian. But you cannot figure out whether your being a vegetarian makes a difference by asking, “would the factory farm change production if 2,880 fewer chickens were purchased?” As Russ Shafer-​Landau says, “The fact that one has spent ten thousand dollars over a lifetime does not entail that one has exercised during one’s lifetime the causal influence attainable by a one-​time ten thousand dollar purchase” (Shafer-​Landau 1994, 89). Perhaps the factory farm looks at data about sales on a monthly basis and decides whether to alter production. A difference in sales of four purchases in a month surely will not affect their production decisions. But if that is so, then your being vegetarian does not make a difference to what they do. 6  A classic example is voting in a large national election: if enough of us vote for the better candidate, we together can bring it about that she is elected; but your individual vote, you can be sure, is not going to make a difference.

270   Julia Nefsky that our food choices, taken collectively, can have a major influence on certain morally important outcomes (e.g., animal suffering, worker exploitation, environmental damage). It seems that this should mean that each of us has strong moral reason to make certain sorts of food choices rather than others, but it is not clear how this can work given the apparent instrumental insignificance of any individual choice. We cannot address this problem by invoking moral considerations that have nothing to do with those outcomes. That would be to just change the topic. I will not always be explicit about this. I will often use “moral reason” as short for “moral reason that has to do with the outcome of concern.”

You Can Make a Difference One common reaction to the “my purchase won’t make a difference” claim is to try to deny its truth. If it is not true that it will not make a difference then, presumably, the problem is dissolved. In this section, I consider what seem to be the two most promising ways to take this approach.

Making a Difference Indirectly If one is trying to show that a single purchase actually can make a difference, a natural place to look is the influence one’s own actions can have on other people. If my purchase influences others to buy as I do, then whether or not I make a difference does not depend only on whether my choice directly effects a relevant change in production levels or business practices. I will have made a difference if the combination of my choice and the choices of those I influence, taken together, results in a change. Once we take this into account—​the claim goes—​we see that I very well could make a difference.7 There is definitely an important point in this response: we should not forget about the ways our decisions can influence others. This can affect what one should do. However, this will not work as a solution to the problem. The most obvious issue is that it does not apply generally enough. First, for most of us, our individual everyday purchases do not usually influence others to act similarly. More often than not, what I buy in the grocery store is not noticed by anyone; let alone causing anyone to make similar choices. Second, even when a purchase does influence others, unless one is a particularly “watched” person (a celebrity, politician, etc.), it probably does not influence enough others for this influence to provide grounds for thinking that the act made a difference. If my mom and brother are influenced by my decision to eat lentils rather than chicken at the restaurant 7 

Lane (forthcoming) advances an approach of this sort in discussing the problem of collective impact that arises with respect to climate change.

Consumer Choice and Collective Impact    271 tonight, and they do the same, it seems just as doubtful that this will make a difference to production on factory farms as the case in which they are not influenced. There is at least one way in which an “ordinary” person’s purchase could make a difference via its influence. Occasionally, not only does one person influence others, but those people influence further others, and so on. If your influence compounds in this way, it is plausible that the outcome would have been relevantly different had you not acted as you did.8 We should take this possibility into account. But we also should not overestimate our ability to have this sort of compounding influence. For most of us, most of our purchases do not set off any such chain reactions. Now, what if one says: “I see that you were hoping that there would be a solution that applies to everyone, at all times. But there isn’t. The best we have is that morality tells us to make the choices in question when one could have a substantial influence.” This reply means accepting that many of us have no moral reason, much of the time, to make the choices in question, and that is the main reason to be dissatisfied with it. But it is also worth noticing what this entails for the content of the indirect difference-​making reason itself. Suppose that Beyoncé is spotted purchasing a cup of fair trade coffee, and this leads thousands of people to start choosing fair trade. Their taking it that Beyoncé thinks buying fair trade is morally important makes thousands of fans think so too and thus follow suit. If indirect difference-​making were the only answer to the problem of collective impact, then—​unlike Beyoncé—​most of these fans have no moral reason to choose the fair trade coffee, since most do not have the relevant kind of influence. But this would mean that what the proposal says is that the moral reason Beyoncé had to purchase fair trade was, essentially, that by doing so she could fool people into doing something that morality does not recommend that they do—​something morally pointless. This is highly unintuitive. It is far from what most of us have in mind when we think of influential people as having moral reason to make certain choices because of their power of influence. Intuitively, what someone like Beyoncé has moral reason to do is use her influence to get others acting in morally good ways—​not to fool them into doing things that are pointless. This intuitive conception implicitly relies on there being a separate solution to the problem of collective impact. We already have enough reason to be unsatisfied with the indirect difference-​making proposal. However, there is a more basic issue with it—​one that sheds light on the search for a solution more generally. To bring this out: imagine that we live in a world in which most people do have the influencing potential necessary for their everyday purchases to frequently make an indirect difference. Even in such a world, I do not think we should be satisfied with the indirect difference-​making proposal. In such a world, our influencing potential would give each of us moral reason, or a presumptive moral obligation, not to eat meat, to buy ethically produced coffee, and so on. But it would only do so because of an empirical contingency that is not necessitated or made true by the conditions that 8  Norcross (2004, 233) makes this point, but his main argument is the one I will discuss in the “Expected Utility” section. Glover (1975, 179–​181) discusses a slightly different version of compounding influence.

272   Julia Nefsky give rise to the problem. Such a consideration does not address what is at issue in the problem. The problem of collective impact is that it seems that (A) The fact that if enough of us make certain readily available food choices rather than others, grave harms or injustices would be prevented or reduced should be enough empirically for morality to yield that (B) Each of us has a (presumptive) moral obligation, or at least good moral reason, to make those choices. But it is unclear how this can work, given that (C)  What one does individually does not seem to make a difference. A moral reason that depends on empirical contingencies besides either (A) or the conditions that give rise to (A) does not address that problem. Or, to put it another way: if such a reason is your answer, then you are really biting the bullet on the issue. You are accepting that despite (A), it could very well be that each of us has no moral reason to make the relevant choices. You are accepting, in other words, that unless certain additional things happen to be true, there would be no moral reason for individuals to refrain from eating factory-​farmed meat or to buy fair trade coffee, and so on, even though if enough of us do so we could prevent tremendous suffering or injustice. I am not ruling out that biting that bullet could be the right way to go. But we certainly should thoroughly explore non-​ bullet-​biting solutions before we accept such a conclusion.

Expected Utility A popular approach to the problem among philosophers is to appeal to chances of making a difference. Those who take this approach argue that in the cases in question, there is always at least some chance of making a difference. Now, merely showing that there is some chance of making a difference is not enough. If my eating factory-​farmed meat has only a miniscule chance of making a difference for the worse, it is still going to be unclear why morality would require or recommend refraining. After all, almost any action you could perform has at least a miniscule chance of going awry and causing some negative outcome. But what these philosophers argue is that given what we can know about the chances of making a difference, we can see that a calculation of expected utility will yield the moral verdicts we are looking for. Shelly Kagan, Alastair Norcross, and Peter Singer each give arguments of this sort in the case of purchasing factory-​farmed chicken.9 Their specific presentations vary, but their core argument is the same. Here it is. 9 

See Singer 1980, Norcross 2004, and Kagan 2011.

Consumer Choice and Collective Impact    273 Suppose the executives of a factory farm review their numbers—​sales, profits, and so on—​on a monthly basis. While the company is not going to adjust production depending on whether one or two fewer chickens were sold this month than projected, there must be some point at which a shortfall in sales would lead them to decrease production. Let us suppose that quantity is 1,000 chickens. That is, 1,000 chickens is the “unit” that they make decisions in terms of. For every shortfall of 1,000 chickens in a given month, the factory farm will respond by cutting production by 1,000 chickens the next month. In this case, each consumer has a 1/​1,000 chance of saving 1,000 chickens from a life of suffering on the factory farm. Why a 1/​1,000 chance? Because this—​the claim goes—​is the chance that the shortfall in a given month is an exact multiple of 1,000, and one’s refraining from buying a chicken makes a difference if and only if the shortfall is an exact multiple of 1,000. To illustrate the latter claim: suppose the shortfall is exactly 2,000, and thus that there is a decrease in production the next month by 2,000 chickens. In this case, had you purchased a chicken, the shortfall would have been 1,999, and the decline in production that would have resulted would have only been 1,000. So, your refraining made the difference between 1,000 more chickens suffering and not. In contrast, if the shortfall is anything other than a multiple of 1,000, then your refraining made no difference at all to chicken production. The final step of the argument is to show that this 1/​1,000 chance, while small, is enough for the expected utility to come out against purchasing a chicken. This is straightforward. A 1/​1,000 chance of preventing 1,000 chickens from lives of suffering is an expected utility equivalent to a 100% chance of saving a single chicken from that life. By the highly plausible assumption that the benefits obtained by my purchasing a chicken are less substantial than the harms caused to a chicken on a factory farm, it follows that the expected utility of refraining is higher than the expected utility of purchasing a chicken, and thus that—​on the expected utility model—​I ought to refrain. As those who advance this argument emphasize, the particular number chosen (in my case, 1,000) does not matter. What the argument relies on, though, are the following two claims: (1) There is some number N, such that for each shortfall in sales of N chickens, the company will decrease production by a corresponding N chickens.10 (2)  The probability that the shortfall will be an exact multiple of N is 1/​N. 10 

It is not strictly speaking true that their argument relies on (1). What it relies on is that there are thresholds at which a decline in sales will trigger a decrease in production, and that the decrease in production triggered will match (or roughly match) the size of the threshold decline in sales. The numbers do not have to be as neat as their actual arguments suggest, and so do not need to be as neat as in (1). But just as their arguments do not strictly speaking depend on the numbers being as neat as they have them, my objection here does not depend on it. So, there is no loss of generality in putting my critique in terms of (1).

274   Julia Nefsky The chief problem with the argument is that these claims need not be true, or even close to true. Regarding (1): there is no reason to assume that the decrease in production triggered by a shortfall will match the size of the shortfall.11 The intuition that they must match comes from the thought that the factory farm will want supply to match demand. But there are many strategies a factory farm could take to bring supply in alignment with demand, including marketing campaigns, searching for new buyers within the market, finding new markets to sell to, and so on. So, even if they take a shortfall of N or higher to indicate that demand has dropped far enough to warrant a decrease in production, they need not take it to warrant or require a decrease by a corresponding N or more chickens. They could, instead, take a “mixed” strategy, for example, some decrease in production (much less than N) and some expansion into new markets. Since this could very well be how things go, there is no a priori reason to think that the expected utility model will yield that you ought not to purchase a chicken. It could easily come out the opposite. Things are much worse for the expected utility argument than that. Mark Budolfson has persuasively argued that claim (2) not only need not be true, but is demonstrably false in the world we live in.12 His argument is roughly as follows. First, we know that massive companies like factory farms, and the businesses they sell to, have large “buffers” built in—​practices and pricing strategies that ensure that the farm will not have to adjust production based on smallish deviations in sales. What this means is that the size that a shortfall in sales would have to reach (“N”) for the response to be a decrease in production is going to be large. For example, perhaps for every 5% shortfall in overall sales, the factory farm will decrease production.13 For Tyson in 2013, this would be an N equal to approximately 8 million chickens. But once we know that we are talking about numbers like this, we know that the chance of making a difference is not going to be anywhere close to 1/​N. The chance of making a difference is 1/​N only if we assume that any size shortfall is equally likely as any other. But not all consumer behavior is equally likely; it is much more likely that consumers will behave close to how the company projects, and for it to be as much as 8 million purchases off is extremely unlikely. What this means is that the probability of being in the vicinity of a threshold at which they would decrease production is very low, and the probability of hitting one of these thresholds 11 

I make this point in Nefsky 2011, 369–​371. You might think there is a more basic issue: Are there really precise numbers at which the executives would make different production decisions give or take a single purchase? I argue in Nefsky 2011 against the claim that in all collective impact cases there must be sharp thresholds like this. But it would not be worth pressing that line here because I think that most (though, not necessarily all) food choice cases do contain sharp thresholds (though they will typically be unknown and might vary from moment to moment). 12  Budolfson, forthcoming. 13  While writing this essay, I had the opportunity to speak to an executive at a large agricultural company (who prefers to remain anonymous), and my conversation with him suggested that, at least for some companies, 5% is not even high enough. I asked him about whether the current gluten-​free diet trend resulted in a decrease in wheat production in his company, and he said “no.” He explained that this trend only resulted in a “5% hit in the market,” and that that small of a decline “doesn’t really matter to them.”

Consumer Choice and Collective Impact    275 exactly, such that a single purchase makes a difference, is “nearly infinitesimal.”14 It is going to be, in other words, nowhere near what it would need to be for the expected utility model to yield that one ought not to purchase a chicken.

Conclusion So Far It is doubtful that we can solve the problem of collective impact in food-​choice cases by rejecting the “it won’t make a difference” claim: in many of these cases, for many people, one’s purchases effectively will not make a difference. A natural place to turn at this point is to what I call “non-​instrumental” moral reasons: moral considerations that do not have to do with playing a significant instrumental role in preventing the relevant harms or injustices, and instead concern other ways one’s choice can relate to those outcomes. In the next section, I discuss this strategy, focusing in on two such proposals.

Non-​Instrumental Reasons Consider two kinds of vegetarians: those who would eat already purchased meat if they knew that it would otherwise simply go to waste, and those who would not. If we are looking for non-​instrumental moral reasons to refrain from consuming meat, it seems worthwhile to think about the second kind of vegetarian. A vegetarian of the first kind might just be mistakenly assuming that her refusing to eat meat in “normal” cases will actually do something to prevent animal suffering. The second kind of vegetarian, on the other hand, clearly has other sorts of reasons in mind. To make this concrete, take the following case: Leftovers: You are housesitting for your Aunt Neta, who left town this morning. In her fridge you find some very tasty-​looking leftover chicken. You know that these are leftovers from her dinner last night, and thus that they would be safe to eat. But you know that were this food to wait until she came back, it would be spoiled. You are the only one who could eat it. It will merely go to waste if you don’t eat it. Many, though not all, vegetarians would not eat the leftovers in this case. Some would not eat them because of “non-​moral” reasons: for instance, they think it would be unhealthy, or they have no desire to eat it. But I take it that there are vegetarians who would not eat it for moral reasons, and in particular, reasons having to do with the suffering animals undergo on factory farms. If there are such moral considerations speaking against

14 

Budolfson, forthcoming, 11.

276   Julia Nefsky eating meat in Leftovers, it seems these should be able to provide a relevant answer as to why we should not consume meat in the normal case. Here is one explanation, though, for not eating the meat in Leftovers that doesn’t fit that bill: “If I eat meat in this context, this might lead me to be tempted to do so at other times, when it won’t merely go to waste.” This story for why I ought not to eat meat in Leftovers only works if (a) it is really true that doing so might lead me to eat meat at other times, and (b) it is really true that I ought not to eat it at those other times. Whether (a) is true will vary individual-​by-​ individual. Whether (b) is true depends on whether there is a solution to the problem of collective impact. This explanation, thus, presupposes rather than provides an answer to the problem. But perhaps other moral reasons for not eating meat in Leftovers will do better.

Benefiting from Wrongdoing One answer is that eating the meat would amount to benefiting from someone else’s wrongdoing, and this is something one ought not to do. Factory farms wrongfully torture the animals they raise for slaughter. If Aunt Neta’s chicken was produced on a factory farm, then if you eat it, you would be voluntarily enjoying a product of this morally abhorrent behavior. This is something you ought not to do. If this can explain why you ought not to eat the meat in Leftovers, it should work in normal cases of consuming factory-​farmed meat too.15 This proposal has some intuitive appeal, but I do not think it works. First, I do not think it is true that the mere fact that one is benefiting from wrongdoing makes one’s action wrong. Consider this case from Christian Barry and David Wiens: Terrorist Bombing: “A terrorist sets off a bomb, which grievously injures several people. To avoid the explosion, Bill retreats to a nearby café, where he meets Susan. Their chance meeting eventually gives rise to an extremely lucrative business partnership.”16

In engaging in this partnership, Bill and Susan are benefiting from wrongdoing: they would not have met, and thus could not have started this business, had the bombing not occurred. But clearly, in doing so, Bill and Susan are doing nothing wrong.17 Or, at least, the fact that they would be benefiting from someone else’s wrongdoing does nothing to make their engaging in it wrong. (It could be wrong for other reasons.) This, at first pass, shows that benefiting from wrongdoing is not in itself wrongful. 15  Holly Lawford-​Smith gives this proposal (2015, 317–​318), but it is not her main proposal. I discuss her main proposal below in note 22. Note that the “benefiting from wrongdoing” proposal is an example of a candidate solution that seems available in food-​choice cases, but not in various others in which the problem of collective impact arises. It clearly could not work, for instance, to explain why one should vote in the national election: you are not benefiting from someone else’s wrongdoing by not voting. 16  Barry and Wiens, 2016, 3. 17  Barry and Wiens use the case to show that a closely related but distinct view is mistaken: namely, the view that those who benefit from wrongdoing owe special duties of compensation to the victims of that wrongdoing.

Consumer Choice and Collective Impact    277 Some might reply, though, that this is not a counterexample to the view they have in mind because Bill and Susan are not benefiting from wrongdoing in the relevant sense. Bill and Susan’s benefiting is only an incidental consequence of the wrongdoing: it was a mere coincidence that the bombing lead to their meeting. To count as “benefiting from wrongdoing” in the relevant sense—​they could say—​there must be a non-​incidental connection between the wrongdoing and the benefiting.18 But even on this narrower conception, I do not think it is true that the mere fact that one is benefiting from wrongdoing is enough to make one’s act wrong. Consider: Medical Treatment: Beth receives a medical treatment, which saves her life. The discovery of this treatment is owed ultimately to a discovery made by Nazi experiments on concentration camp victims. Here the connection between the wrongdoing and the benefiting is non-​incidental: the Nazi experiments were aimed specifically at advancement in medical treatments. But even if she knew the history of the discovery of the treatment, it seems clear to me that Beth did nothing wrong in accepting the treatment, and thus in (knowingly) benefiting from wrongdoing. Some, however, might have different intuitions. They might think that there is something at least pro tanto wrong with using such a treatment, but that perhaps in serious enough situations (like Beth’s life-​and-​death situation) the pro tanto wrongness is outweighed by the benefits of using the treatment. But even if this is correct, would it be the mere fact that Beth is benefiting from the Nazi’s wrongdoing that makes it pro tanto wrong? There are other more plausible explanations. For instance: perhaps if people like Beth are willing to use this treatment, this could set a risky precedent, potentially encouraging current researchers to violate codes of ethics when they think the payoffs will be high. This could make it pro tanto wrong to use the treatment.19 In general, it seems to me that when benefiting from someone else’s past wrongdoing is wrong, there is some other or further consideration that makes it wrong.20 But suppose I am incorrect about this, and the mere fact that one is benefiting from someone else’s past wrongdoing can make one’s act wrong. Even if so, I do not think the “benefiting from wrongdoing” proposal works as a solution to the problem of collective impact. This is because, as with the indirect difference-​making proposal, it depends for its application on empirical contingencies that need not hold as far as the conditions that give rise to the problem are concerned. First, it is not always true that by buying or consuming a product 18 

Thanks to Mark Budolfson, Tyler Doggett, and Sergio Tenenbaum for raising this point. Thanks to Wayne Sumner for a helpful discussion of this point. 20  One thing I have heard people say to try to support the idea that it is really the benefiting from wrongdoing that makes it pro tanto wrong for Beth to accept the treatment is that learning about the history of the treatment should have an emotional effect on Beth. She should feel disturbed by the fact that the treatment that she will or might take was discovered in this way. But I do not think this in any way shows that using the treatment is pro tanto wrong. We can fully understand why Beth should have a response like that without supposing that there is anything morally wrong with accepting the treatment. 19 

278   Julia Nefsky one is benefiting. Imagine that you buy some factory-​farmed meat, but then throw it out because you end up finding it repulsive. In this case, you are clearly not benefiting from this purchase.21 Indeed, we can imagine cases in which someone chooses to buy factory-​ farmed meat without even having the aim or expectation of benefiting from doing so. Imagine that you predict in advance that you will be repulsed by the meat and that you will just throw it out; you do not expect to benefit from your purchase. Deciding to purchase meat in this case certainly seems very odd, and maybe even irrational, but it is still possible. And the “benefiting from wrongdoing” proposal has nothing to say against it. This is unacceptable as far as solving the problem of collective impact is concerned. A solution should be able to explain why there is moral reason not to make such consumer choices, regardless of whether or not one will, or expects to, benefit from doing so. Perhaps advocates of the proposal would reply by claiming that they mean to be using “benefit” in a technical sense, such that any use or purchase of a product counts as “benefiting.” The proposal then becomes just: “using or purchasing the products of wrongdoing is wrong.” But even if they can make that move, this does not fully remove the trouble. This is because the problem of collective impact can arise in food choice cases even if there has not already been a wrong committed. Imagine, for instance, that there is very good reason to expect that if demand for a certain product gets high enough, the company that produces it will switch its production strategy (in order to accommodate the increase in demand) from one that is environmentally friendly and humane to one that will result in serious harm to the environment, workers, or animals. Suppose that given the growing popularity of this product, there is good reason to be concerned that this will happen. Given this serious risk of harm, it seems that we should be able to explain why individuals ought, or at least have good reason, to refrain from buying this product. So, the problem of collective impact arises here. But the revised “benefiting from wrongdoing” proposal does not apply in this case, because it is not be true that if you buy the product you are buying a product of wrongdoing. The company has not yet done anything wrong. Thus, similar to the indirect difference-​making proposal, the “benefiting from wrongdoing” proposal effectively bites the bullet on the problem of collective impact, rather than solving it. As far as the proposal is concerned, unless certain sorts of contingent factors happen to hold (namely, there is past wrongdoing, and one would be benefiting from it), there is no moral reason for consumers to refrain from making purchases that are likely to collectively result in great harm or injustice.

Expressive Reasons Perhaps a different non-​instrumental proposal will work better. A different answer to the question of what moral point there is in refraining from eating meat in “mere waste”

21 

Thanks to Tyler Doggett for this example.

Consumer Choice and Collective Impact    279 cases like Leftovers is that our food choices have symbolic or expressive significance, independent of any causal influence they might have. By choosing not to eat Aunt Neta’s leftover chicken, despite how tasty it looks, one expresses, even if only to oneself, one’s commitment to animal welfare and disapproval of factory farming. The same goes in normal cases of deciding whether to purchase and eat meat. Even if your purchase of a chicken will not have any effect on what happens on the factory farm, by refraining you express your disapproval of the chicken industry and your concern for animal welfare. This—​the claim goes—​is something you ought to do. On the other hand, if you purchase factory-​farmed meat, in the knowledge of the horrendous treatment of animals on these farms, this expresses support for that horrendous treatment, and this is something you ought, or have reason, not to do. Now, one way the expressive power of an action can give you reason to do it is if, through this expressive power, you can influence others to act similarly. But this falls under the “indirect difference-​making” approach we already discussed.22 For the proposal here to be distinct, the idea has to be that what your act expresses matters morally in itself, even if it has no potential influence on the conduct of others. In other words, the reason has to be purely expressive.23 One question is whether we really think there are moral reasons of a purely expressive variety. I will not take a stand on this here, and will instead simply assume for the sake of discussion that there are. A second question is: Even if we do have purely expressive moral reasons, are these going to be able to support any sort of moral requirement to avoid purchasing factory-​farmed meat, to purchase fair trade coffee, and so on? Christopher Kutz, who appeals to purely expressive reasons, does not think so and concludes from this that they are only a partial solution to the problem. He writes: It is doubtful whether any plausible construction of morality could require outcome-​ independent self-​sacrifice. . . . Like other supererogatory actions, symbolic actions

22  Lawford-​Smith’s main proposal falls in this category. According to Lawford-​Smith, one ought to buy ethically sourced products because this can be a way of signaling one’s willingness to form with others a collective agent that will work toward stopping the relevant harms or injustices. She claims that signaling one’s willingness to cooperate, through buying certain products rather than others, “prevents others from believing that their own cooperative actions would be futile, and sends the message that collective action is possible” (2015, 322). This, she argues, is an important step toward actually forming such a collective. This proposal is a version of the indirect difference-​making proposal. As Lawford-​ Smith says, it is “a consequentialist justification to actions that are normally taken to have mere expressive value” (2015, 325). Lawford-​Smith is pointing out something important in arguing that our purchasing decisions can, in certain contexts, play this sort of role. But, for the same reasons as those discussed in considering the indirect difference-​making strategy, this proposal cannot satisfactorily solve the problem of collective impact. 23  The idea that our acts can have moral value purely in virtue of what they express has been advanced by Adams (1999) and Hill (1979). Kutz (2000) advocates for the expressive proposal as a partial solution to the problem of collective impact (see ch. 6), as does Lane (forthcoming). The expressive proposal also has been prominent as a reply in the case of voting and various other political activities (e.g., attending a large political protest). See, for instance, Benn 1979 and Brennan and Lomasky 1989, 1993.

280   Julia Nefsky fit awkwardly with a pure ethics of obligation. Nonetheless they have a firm place within a broader ethics of value.24

However, if one really accepts the idea that what one’s act expresses matters morally in itself, it is not clear why one should rule out that there can be obligations coming purely from expressive considerations. In particular, at least insofar as the reasons you have to want to consume factory-​farmed meat, or drink unethically produced coffee, are relatively weak matters of personal preference (e.g., the taste or wanting to spend less money so that you have more for entertainment), why not think that the expressive considerations outweigh those reasons, and thus obligate you? To use an example from Russ Shafer-​Landau, we might think that one acts wrongly if one voices “support for a racist dictator overseas,” and we might think this “even if one’s expression has no causal impact whatever on the treatment of the oppressed.”25 Similarly, we might think one acts wrongly if one voices support for factory farming, even if one’s expression will not have a causal impact. But there is a much more decisive, internal problem for the expressive approach. The problem is: even if it is true that we have purely expressive moral reasons, these will only be reasons to do the things we are talking about—​to refrain from eating factory-​farmed meat, to choose fair trade, and so on—​if those choices will have the expressive significance in question. But they do not necessarily have that significance, and when we think about what needs to be true for them to have it, we find that expressive reasons cannot be said to solve the problem of collective impact. Consider the following two cases. Lisa: Lisa is out for dinner. She orders the vegetable lasagna, rather than a meat option, because she feels like it, and not because of anything to do with animal welfare. In this case, at least insofar as her reasons for choosing the lasagna are clear to her and those around her, Lisa’s choice does not seem to express concern for animals or disapproval of factory farming. Ben: Ben is out for dinner. He orders the Cajun chicken rather than a vegetarian option because he loves the taste of Cajun chicken and because he justifiably and correctly believes that his ordering it will not make any difference for the worse to animals. He cares a great deal about the well-​being of animals, and if he had any reason to believe that his ordering this chicken could negatively affect animals, he would have chosen a vegetarian option. At first pass, at least insofar as his motivations are clear to him and those around him, Ben’s choice does not express disregard for animals or approval of factory farming. He

24  25 

Kutz 2000, 191. Shafer-​Landau 1994, 96.

Consumer Choice and Collective Impact    281 has no such attitudes: he cares about animal welfare, and he disapproves of factory farming. And his choice does not express otherwise because it is clear to everyone that he is only making it because he justifiably believes it will not have any negative impact on animals.26 As we will see, these initial verdicts about Ben and Lisa could turn out to be false depending on certain further factors. But what these initial verdicts bring out is that just because a product was made in an unethical way, or by an industry that has caused or will cause serious harms, this is not by itself enough to entail that your choice to consume it expresses an attitude of approval of those unethical practices, or of disregard for those who were or will be harmed. And it is not enough to entail that your choice to refrain from consuming it expresses an attitude of disapproval of those practices, or of concern for those who were or will be harmed. How could these choices reliably gain the expressive significances in question? Here is one way: if there is an independent solution to the problem of collective impact, and we either know or should know it. By “independent solution,” I mean a solution that does not appeal to expressive reasons—​so, some other morally relevant consideration that explains why individuals should make the choices in question. Suppose that there is such a moral consideration, R. So, R would be a moral consideration against purchasing factory-​farmed meat, and one that has to do with the suffering of animals on factory farms. If I know this, or even just should know it, then if I go ahead and purchase a factory-​farmed chicken anyway, this does express disregard for animals. It expresses disregard because in making this choice I am ignoring or failing to see the reason that their suffering gives me. Conversely, if you refuse to eat chicken because of R, then your refusal expresses disapproval of animal suffering and factory-​farming practices.27 If the food choices in question gain expressive significance via an independent solution, then expressive reasons can provide additional grounds for making the right choices. But these expressive reasons would not be solving the problem of collective impact. The expressive reasons only apply here in virtue of the fact that there is a prior solution.28 What this means is that to see if expressive considerations could solve the problem, we need to consider how the choices in question could carry the relevant expressive significances if there is no expressive-​independent solution. So, suppose that if there is a relevant moral story as to why individuals should refrain from purchasing factory-​ farmed meat, or should buy fair trade coffee, and so on, it will have to be one that appeals to purely expressive considerations. All other options have been correctly ruled out.

26 

For a related point, see Driver 2015, 74–​75. Note the asymmetry: with a known independent solution to the problem, the choice to go ahead and eat meat can express disregard, even if the person is not doing it for any “anti-​animal” reasons. In contrast, the choice to refrain from eating meat would not automatically carry the “positive” expressive significance. For it to have that significance, you need—​I think—​to make the choice for those reasons, or at least under the appearance that those are your reasons. 28  The same point holds if the choice gains expressive significance because we falsely believe there is an independent solution. 27 

282   Julia Nefsky Recall Ben: it seemed initially that he does not express any bad attitude toward animals when he chooses the chicken for dinner. He is only making this choice because he knows this will not make any difference for the worse to animals. We have already seen that this was too quick: if there is another independent moral story as to why he ought not to eat it, and one having to do with animal suffering on factory farms, and if he does or at least should know this, then his choice would still express disregard. But if there is no relevant non-​expressive story as to why eating meat is wrong, and if everyone knows this, how can we say he is expressing disregard by making that choice? There is one way: Ben’s action could express disregard for animals if there is a societal convention that imbues this sort of choice with that expressive significance. Wearing green clothes on Earth Day can symbolize one’s commitment to the environment. Wearing a shirt with the Confederate Flag on it expresses racism, or a lack of concern for those who have been victims of racism. These acts carry the expressive significance they do because of some process by which society imbued them with that meaning, and not through the fact that there is an independent moral story about why one ought to wear all green on April 22, or refrain from wearing a red shirt with a blue “X” with white stars on it. Our individual food choices could acquire expressive significance in a similar way. Perhaps, then, the act of purchasing a chicken symbolizes by way of societal convention29 a lack of concern for animal welfare, whereas purchasing lentils symbolizes the opposite. If our food choices did carry expressive significance through societal convention, then if there are the purely expressive moral reasons in question, these will indeed be reasons to refrain from eating meat, to buy fair trade coffee, and so on. But even if all of this is so, this does not solve our problem. The very fact that we can imagine a society in which the problem of collective impact arises, and in just the same way as it does in our society, but in which there are no such expressive conventions in place, shows this. The issue here is again the same as with the indirect difference-​making proposal. The expressive reasons would only apply in virtue of an empirical contingency (in this case: a contingent expressive convention) that is not necessitated or made true by any of the conditions that give rise to the problem. Such reasons do not address the theoretical puzzle at issue. And practically speaking: they do not give a stable, secure answer to the question of why individuals should refrain from making choices that will collectively result in tremendous harm and injustice. They just tell us why insofar as there are certain contingent conventions, individuals should refrain from such choices. That is a tenuous position to be in.30 29 

I am using the term “convention” only in a weak sense: just to mean that these choices were imbued, to some extent arbitrarily, with these meanings by some sort of social process. I do not mean to commit to any particular view about how something (an action, a word) can be imbued with meaning in a society. In this weak sense of “convention,” all word meaning is conventional, regardless of one’s theory about how words acquire meaning. (See the introduction to section 7 of Rescorla 2015.) Thank you to Olivia Sultanescu for drawing my attention to the need to clarify this. 30  It is worth saying that I am doubtful that there are expressive conventions like these in our society at present. I think we can see this with the example of Ben. If there were a societal convention that makes ordering chicken an expression of disregard for animal suffering, then his “it won’t make a difference to animal suffering” justification would do nothing in our ears to remove the expressive significance,

Consumer Choice and Collective Impact    283 Before moving on, I should mention that there is a final way one’s choice could carry the relevant expressive significance:  one could personally imbue it with that significance. I could declare, “I choose the vegetable lasagna to symbolize my disapproval of factory farming.” But while I might have moral reason to express this attitude, and while this would be one way of doing it, in the absence of either an independent solution or a symbolic convention, there would be nothing morally requiring or recommending that I express it in that way. In other words, even if there is a moral reason to express my disapproval of factory farming, in the absence of an expressive convention or an independent solution, this would not give me reason specifically to refrain from eating meat. In such a world, I could just as well express my views by wearing a T-​shirt with “Factory Farms are Evil!” printed on it. So, pointing out that I could imbue my choice with this significance cannot explain why individuals have moral reason specifically to make the food choices in question, and thus is a nonstarter when it comes to the problem of collective impact. In summary: expressive considerations do not work to solve the problem. They might provide a moral reason or even a requirement to (specifically) make the choices in question, but whether they have the potential to do so depends on whether there is an independent solution to the problem of collective impact or a relevant sort of expressive convention. Either way, they cannot do the work of solving the problem.

Instrumental Contribution and Difference-​M aking At the end of the second section, we took on board the conclusion that for many food choices, what one does individually will not make a difference with respect to the harms and injustices perpetrated by the food industry. From there, we turned to discuss some candidate “non-​instrumental” solutions. Our search there was not successful. In this final section, I will suggest that the reason for that lack of success is not that we did not look hard enough in that area, but rather that it is the wrong place to look. Return to Leftovers. Does it make sense for a vegetarian to refuse on moral grounds, and specifically, grounds having to do with animal suffering, to eat meat in a case like this? I think it could. There are at least two explanations that could work. One is the temptation story mentioned earlier: if it is true of you that eating this chicken would

just as someone who wears confederate-​flag pajamas in the privacy of their own home cannot remove the expressive complaint in virtue of the fact that they are only doing so because they know that it will not make a difference for the worse to anyone. I do not mean to suggest that in our society, acts of purchasing meat do not express disregard for animal suffering, or that they do not do so for people with Ben’s motivations. As explained, such acts could still express those attitudes if there is an expressive-​ independent solution to the problem, or even if some people just believe that there is. And the latter is surely the case. The point is just that these expressive significances do not seem to be coming from societal convention.

284   Julia Nefsky weaken your resolve in “normal” cases of deciding what to eat, this could give you moral reason, or a requirement, not to eat it. As we said, this only goes through if there is a prior solution to the problem of collective impact: an answer as to why you normally ought not to consume meat, even though it seems it won’t make a difference. But if there is such a solution, this story can make sense. The second story is an expressive one. I think it is easy—​almost automatic—​for a vegetarian to personally imbue her refusal in a case like Leftovers with expressive significance. She need not make any declaration like, “I am not going to eat this as a symbol of my disapproval of factory farms.” Rather, she can simply not eat it because she is vegetarian. By not eating it because she is vegetarian, she makes her choice symbolic of her commitment to vegetarianism, and thus of the concerns that lead her to become vegetarian. So, if she became vegetarian because of concerns about animal suffering, her refusal to eat the meat in Leftovers expresses those concerns. If there are moral reasons to express these things, this would be a good way of responding to those reasons. But notice: this story also presupposes a prior solution to the problem of collective impact. It operates by way of the assumption that concerns about animal suffering support being vegetarian in the first place.31 It thus seems that the best explanations for why it can make sense for a vegetarian to refuse, on moral grounds, to eat meat in cases like Leftovers involve presupposing that there is a solution to the problem of collective impact. When there is moral reason not to eat meat in “mere waste” cases, this is often derivate on an answer as to why in regular cases one ought not to consume it. This suggests that we are not going to solve the problem of collective impact by treating regular cases of purchasing factory-​farmed meat, fair trade coffee, and so on—​the cases in which the problem arises—​as morally the same as “mere waste” cases. The temptation to treat them similarly comes from what the “it won’t make a difference” claim does. What this claim does, insofar as we accept it, is make ordinary cases of purchasing meat, conventional coffee, and so on, seem instrumentally on par with eating Aunt Neta’s chicken in Leftovers. If it will not make a difference whether or not I buy meat—​if things will be the same with respect to the harms in question either way—​this seems to mean that my decision is instrumentally insignificant or inert. It gives the impression that it will not do any good for me to refrain, and that it will not do any harm for me to go ahead, just like in “mere waste” cases. I do not think we can solve the problem of collective impact by accepting this picture and turning to non-​instrumental considerations. Instead, we need to resist it. We need to show that your decision typically does matter instrumentally.32 31 

Note that neither of these two stories implies that a vegetarian who chooses to eat meat in “mere waste” cases does anything wrong. 32  One might think that another option is to identify a moral difference between normal cases and “mere waste” cases, while accepting that they are instrumentally on par. Driver (2015) takes this approach, arguing that in normal cases one is complicit in wrongdoing if one purchases meat, even if one’s purchase is instrumentally insignificant, while in mere waste cases one is not complicit. In Nefsky 2015, I discuss proposals of this sort, and argue that they cannot work as solutions to the problem. In particular, when it comes to complicity (or, participation in wrongdoing), I argue that for an appeal

Consumer Choice and Collective Impact    285 This is not to say that I think we can solve the problem, after all, by showing that one’s individual purchases typically can make a difference. For the reasons discussed in the second section, I am doubtful that will work. In my view, the answer lies, rather, in seeing that one can make a significant instrumental contribution even if one cannot make a difference. If my purchasing a cup of fair trade coffee will not make a difference to the lives of coffee farmers, this tells me that no farmers’ lives are going to go differently depending on whether I go with the fair trade option. But even if that is true, does it follow that in opting for the fair trade option I am not doing anything instrumentally useful toward improving the lives of coffee farmers? I think the answer is “no.” Notice that the solutions that we considered in the third section did not really utilize an important feature of the problem of collective impact: the fact that by making certain food choices going forward, we together could make a big difference for the better. I think a reply needs to capitalize on this fact. Now, consider: What does this fact tell us about what you individually can do? In the case of meat consumption, if very many people refrain, going forward, from buying factory-​farmed meat, this will force the meat industry to change or scale-​back. What this tells us is that if I refrain from buying factory-​farmed meat, I will be doing precisely what many individuals must do if this possibility is to be actualized. That is, I will be doing something that someone must do—​and someone else, and someone else, and so on—​if this shift in consumer demand is to occur and thus, if this viable route to preventing grave harms is to be taken. Doing such a thing is making instrumental progress. You are not by yourself changing the outcome, but you are taking a significant step toward change. I do not pretend, though, that it is easy to see how this amounts to making instrumental progress. Much more needs to be said to make this precise, and to debunk the impression that difference-​making is required.33 In my view, the core answer as to why I have moral reason to make the food choices in question is the naïve, simple one: doing so makes real progress toward preventing grave harms or injustices. But what is hard is seeing how this could be true when one’s doing so will not make a difference.

Acknowledgments I am very grateful to Mark Budolfson and Tyler Doggett for detailed comments on an earlier draft of this chapter. For helpful comments and discussion, I  would also like to thank Jonathan Anomaly, Andrew Franklin-​ Hall, Chris Melenovsky, Hamish Russell, Walter Sinnott-​Armstrong, Olivia Sultanescu, Wayne Sumner, Sergio Tenenbaum, and audiences at the University of North Carolina‒Chapel Hill Political Theory Workshop, the Workshop in Law, Philosophy and Political Theory at the University of California Berkeley, York University, and the Centre for Ethics at the University of Toronto.

to complicity to address the problem, it needs to be that one is complicit in a sense that involves real instrumental contribution. 33 

I develop this proposal in Nefsky 2016.

286   Julia Nefsky

Bibliography Adams, Robert. 1999. Finite and Infinite Goods: A Framework for Ethics. New York: Oxford University Press. Anomaly, Jonathan. 2015. “What’s Wrong with Factory Farming?” Public Health Ethics 8(3): 246–​254. Barry, Christian, and David Wiens. 2016. “Benefiting from Wrongdoing and Sustaining Wrongful Harm.” Journal of Moral Philosophy 13(5): 530–​552. Benn, Stanley. 1979. “The Problematic Rationality of Political Participation.” In Philosophy, Politics, and Society, Fifth Series, edited by Peter Laslett and James Fishkin, 291‒312. Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell. Brennan, Geoffrey, and Loren Lomasky. 1989. “Large Numbers, Small Costs:  The Uneasy Foundation of Democratic Rule.” In Politics and Process: New Essays in Democratic Thought, edited by Geoffrey Brennan and Loren Lomasky, 42–​57. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brennan, Geoffrey, and Loren Lomasky. 1993. Democracy and Decision:  the Pure Theory of Electoral Preference. New York: Cambridge University Press. Budolfson, Mark. Forthcoming. “The Inefficacy Objection to Consequentialism and the Problem with the Expected Consequences Response.” Philosophical Studies. Driver, Julia. 2015. “Individual Consumption and Moral Complicity.” In The Moral Complexities of Eating Meat, edited by Ben Bramble and Bob Fischer, 67–​79. New  York:  Oxford University Press. Glover, Jonathan. 1975. “It Makes No Difference Whether or Not I Do It.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 49:171–​190. Hill, Thomas E. 1979. “Symbolic Protest and Calculated Silence.” Philosophy & Public Affairs 9(1): 83–​102. Kagan, Shelly. 2011. “Do I Make a Difference?” Philosophy & Public Affairs 39(2): 105–​141. Kutz, Christopher. 2000. Complicity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lane, Melissa. Forthcoming. “Uncertainty, Action and Politics: The Problem of Negligibility.” In Political Thought and the Environment, edited by K. Forrester and S. Smith. Cambridge University Press. Lawford-​Smith, Holly. 2015. “Unethical Consumption and Obligations to Signal.” Ethics & International Affairs 29(3): 315–​330. Nefsky, Julia. 2011. “Consequentialism and the Problem of Collective Harm: A Reply to Kagan.” Philosophy & Public Affairs 39: 364–​395. —​—​—​. 2015. “Fairness, Participation, and the Real Problem of Collective Harm.” Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics 5: 245–​271. —​—​—​. 2016. “How You Can Help, Without Making a Difference.” Philosophical Studies. doi:10.1007/​s11098-​016-​0808-​y. Norcross, Alastair. 2004. “Puppies, Pigs, and People:  Eating Meat and Marginal Cases.” Philosophical Perspectives 18:229–​245. Rescorla, Michael. 2015. “Convention,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta. http://​plato.stanford.edu/​archives/​sum2015/​entries/​convention/​. Shafer-​Landau, Russ. 1994. “Vegetarianism, Causation and Ethical Theory.” Public Affairs Quarterly 8(1): 85–​100. Singer, Peter. 1980. “Utilitarianism and Vegetarianism.” Philosophy & Public Affairs 9(4): 325–​337.

chapter 13

Religiou s Di eta ry Pr actices and Se c u l a r F o od Ethics ; or, H ow to Hope that You r F o od Choices Ma ke a Dif ference Ev e n W h e n You REASONAB LY Be l i ev e That They D on’ t Andrew Chignell

Where hope is, is in fact religion. —​Ernst Bloch

Religion and Food Norms There are, by some measures, approximately six billion religious people on earth, and every one of them eats.1 For the vast majority, the way they live—​and how they eat—​is guided in some way by sacred texts, traditions, rituals, or other religious authorities. Specific guidelines diverge widely across traditions, of course. Nevertheless, there is some commonality at the meta-​ethical level: in many religious contexts, the will of 1 

A 2010 survey by Pew Forum (http://​www.pewforum.org/​2012/​12/​18/​global-​religious-​landscape-​ unaffiliated/​) identified 84% of the world’s population as religious and 16% as “religiously unaffiliated.”

288   Andrew Chignell a supernatural or Supreme Being is taken to be sufficient to make an action morally required. In some traditions, it is also necessary: all and only the actions God commands are required, and all and only the actions God proscribes are forbidden. The command or proscription is what makes an action required or forbidden.2 Moral philosophers call this general framework “theological voluntarism” or “divine command theory.”3 Here is a very early argument for it by the Chinese philosopher Mozi (ca. 470‒391 b.c.e.): Then what could be the Law for the world? Imagining the parents as the Law, is that good? There are few virtuous (Ren) among so many parents. If we regard the parents as the Law, it is not a good law. A bad law cannot be the Law. Imagining the teachers as the Law, is that good? There are few virtuous among so many teachers. Then what could be the Law? It would be better to [follow the Sage-​kings and] regard Heaven as the Law. . . . If we regard Heaven as the Law, then what we do must be according to Heaven. Do what Heaven wills; don’t do what Heaven does not will. (Mozi [Wang] 1984, 23‒24; qtd. in Li 2004, 237–238.)

Mozi is focused on right and wrong here, but there are also religious ways of thinking about good and bad. To take just a couple: “divine desire” theorists hold that the good is what the gods (God) desire or prefer. “Participation” or “resemblance” theorists say that the good is what resembles transcendent Goodness in some salient way.4 Here is Mozi again: Then, what does Heaven will or not will? It must be that Heaven wills people to love each other and profit each other; that Heaven does not will people to hate each other 2  In some traditions, there is a distinction between commands that apply to everyone and commands that apply only to members of the tradition. According to Maimonides, for instance, the seven Noahic laws apply to every human being, whereas the remaining 606 laws of the Torah (including food regulations) apply only to Jews. 3  This is not the only way to think about the relationship between religion and ethics. Plenty of religious people (and religious philosophers: Augustine, Spinoza, and Leibniz, for example) happily grant that some actions are right or wrong independently of God’s commands or preferences. A middle way here is “modified divine command” theory according to which a loving God’s command is what makes an action morally right, but if God had not commanded us to do that, then it would have been right for other reasons. Put in terms of wrongness: if God’s command had not made it wrong, then an action’s wrongness would have consisted in something other than being proscribed by a loving God (see Stout 1978; Adams 1979b; Kavka and Rashkover 2004; Zagzebski 2007; Hare 2015). 4  One version of this kind of view says that something is good because God prefers it. Another says that God prefers it because it is good—​its goodness is independent of God’s desiring it. Some religious value theorists who accept the second option will then let the explanation bottom out in a resemblance thesis: something is good, and God prefers it, because it resembles Godself in some salient way. But why is whatever resembles God in some salient way good? That is often where explanation stops. (Leibniz seems to have this sort of picture.) But if you are going to let explanation bottom out somewhere, a nice place to do it is in the essential properties of a necessary being. For a contemporary version of the divine resemblance theory of the good, see Adams 1999. Adams suggests, for instance, that a gourmet meal is good because it resembles God in some salient way (he quotes the Psalmist, only half-​jokingly, as evidence: “Taste and see that the Lord is good”).

Religious Dietary Practices    289 or hurt each other. How do we know that? Because he/​she [Heaven] loves us all and profits us all. And still how do we know his/​her universal love and universal profit? Because he/​she possesses us all and feeds us all. (ibid. 24; qtd. in Li 2004, 238.)5

Here Mozi suggests that because Heaven loves and feeds us all, it is good to love and profit others. The focus is more on cultivating divine love and becoming like Heaven than on following commands. But Mozi clearly regards this theory of the good as compatible with a divine command theory of the right: Heaven wills that we do as Heaven itself does (i.e., love and feed others), and that is what makes doing it Law. Someone who rejects the idea that divine command is what makes an action right might still accept some other religious theory of the good, and then say that what is morally required is to promote the good so understood. But what does all this have to do with food? Eating-​related behavior is, by biological necessity, a central part of human life. It is also a major focus of both industry and culture. Institutions that successfully regulate how large numbers of people collect, prepare, consume, dispose, and teach their children about food will have immense significance; and religions have not hesitated in this regard. There are kashrut and halal laws, ceremonial food practices, maxims regarding the sharing of food with strangers and neighbors, religious vegetarianisms, guidelines about liturgical eating and fasting, rules about offering food to the dead or to idols, teachings about the symbolic character of certain foods, principles regarding the handling of consecrated food, and so on.6 Some religious authorities (texts, creeds, rituals, and individual leaders) explicitly invoke divine commands to motivate food regulations: Adonai said to Moshe and Aharon, “Tell the people of Isra’el, ‘These are the living creatures which you may eat among all the land animals: any that has a separate hoof which is completely divided and chews the cud—​these animals you may eat.’ ” (Leviticus 11:1‒3)7 Prohibited to you are dead animals, blood, the flesh of swine, and that which has been dedicated to other than Allah, and [those animals] killed by strangling or by a violent blow or by a head-​long fall or by the goring of horns, and those from which a wild animal has eaten, except what you [are able to] slaughter [before its death], and those which are sacrificed on stone altars. (Qur’an 5:3)8

Other authorities focus less on commands and more on how eating in a certain way—​or the properly prepared food itself—​pleases God, or divinizes the eater, or keeps faith with 5 

For a close examination of this passage, see Li 2006. Thanks to Yong Li for discussion here. For an overview of the approaches that scholars of religion take toward studying foodways and eating practices in particular traditions, see Norman 2012. 7  Complete Jewish Bible, translated David H. Stern (Messianic Jewish Publishers, 1998). All Bible citations are from this version. 8  Qur’an (Arabic Text with Corresponding English Meaning) (Saheeh International, 1997). 6 

290   Andrew Chignell the ancestors, or benefits qi, or resembles transcendent Goodness, and that this is what gives it value. The second chapter of the Daoist text Taishang Lingbao Wufuxu (ca. 400 ce) comprises seventy recipes that, if followed meticulously, promise divinization and immortality. A recipe for Solomon’s Seal, for instance, says that If you ingest and eat this herb, you can live as long as Heaven and Earth. The multitude of gods will convene together and Taiyi will be expecting and will welcome you. You will ascend and be promoted to Officer of Heaven. You will be able to travel to Kunlun and witness the beginning and end of Heaven and Earth . . . . The stalk and leaves are close to pure. Their juice can be made into a broth to liberate your inner parts and benefit your qi . . . and you will become a spirit immortal. Among dietary practices, only this one will make you prosperous. (recipe 27a; qtd. in Arthur 2013, 129)

Other ways in which religious authorities underwrite food principles is by claiming that they improve the health of the individual or strengthen the bonds of the in-​community: The food must be kosher. Literal food must not mix meat and milk, nor be of an animal type forbidden by Torah; sexuality must not be adulterous, money must not be acquired by theft, etc. In a more general sense, kosher also means healthy. The Torah forbids us from doing anything that damages our bodies. This includes eating amounts or types of foods that are literally kosher but nevertheless unhealthy. (Schneider 1996, 22) You [the chosen people] are not to eat any animal that dies naturally; although you may let a stranger staying with you eat it, or sell it to a foreigner; because you are a holy people for Adonai your God. (Deuteronomy 14:21)

Yet another way to motivate food regulations appeals to the tradition’s broader vision of the cosmos and humanity’s place within it. In reference to eating animals, in particular, Lisa Kemmerer quotes two scholars of indigenous religion: For indigenous [Native American] peoples, nature is often viewed as a “temple, and within this sanctuary [people ought to show] great respect to every form, function, and power. . . . Reverence for nature and for life is central to their religion” (J. Brown, 37). . . . The West African term Nyam refers to “an enduring power and energy” that is within all life forms, such that “all forms of life are deemed to possess certain rights, which cannot be violated” (Riley, 479). (Kemmerer 2011, 22)9

Viewing all of living nature as having moral standing in this way does not prevent indigenous peoples from eating some forms of life. However, as Kemmerer goes on to point out, it does affect how they do it.10 9 

Kemmerer is quoting from Brown 1991 and Riley 2003. Compare Lévi-​Strauss on indigenous cooking regulations: “[N]‌ot only does cooking mark the transition from nature to culture, but through it and by means of it, the human state can be defined with all its attributes, even those that, like mortality, might seem to be the most unquestionably natural” (1969, 164). 10 

Religious Dietary Practices    291 I do not have the skill or space to consider the highly textured and situated ways in which specific religious traditions conceive of food regulations. Instead, while fully acknowledging the risk involved in philosophical abstraction like this, I will focus on what I will call a broadly religious approach to fasting and other forms of dietary regulation.11 Central to this approach are two complementary ideas: 1. The beneficial effects of intentional dietary regulation (fasting and other forms of abstinence) can extend well beyond its likely observable results, and 2. Focusing on this possibility can help maintain one’s resolve to follow the regulation. I do not claim that this approach is shared by every religious eater, or that it is adequate to every tradition. But it is clear that for many people of faith, fasting is not primarily about its likely observable outcomes: saving food, cleansing the alimentary tract, pushing the body into starvation mode, hallucinating, and so on. For some, it is about forging an identity, or earning points with peers, or showing solidarity with the poor, or improving resistance to temptation. But for others—​especially more traditional believers—​fasting seems to be primarily about unobservable aspects of the act: pleasing God, petitioning, earning spiritual or karmic rewards, acquiring special insight, manifesting ahimsa, working toward shalom, and so on. Such people may regard the observable aspects of the act (what they do and do not do with their bodies) and the likely observable results (hunger, weight loss)as means to these other ends, or as foreseeable side-​effects, but they are not the main point of the practice. My goal here is to bring this broadly religious approach to food regulations to bear (implausibly, perhaps) on a very contemporary problem in food ethics. The problem arises from the fact that the size and complexity of our industrial food system—​the insensitivity of many of its supply chains—​makes it extremely unlikely that an individual consumer’s choices will have any positive or negative effect on that system. In particular, it will not improve (or worsen) the welfare of any worker or animal in that system, and it will not lead to fewer (or more) rights violations. Mark Bryant Budolfson (2016) and others have pointed out that this result is particularly troublesome for act consequentialists who think that we morally ought to refrain from consuming products of objectionable aspects of the industrial food system. That is because act consequentialism (which I will just call “consequentialism” here) says that, in order for an act to be immoral, it must have overall consequences that are worse than those of some other readily available act. So if a choice to consume food that is wrongfully produced does not lead to any additional negatives and does lead to the goods of pleasure and nourishment, then consuming such food cannot be morally wrong. It might even be morally required! For those who still think that it is wrong, at least sometimes, this will function as an objection to consequentialism. Budolfson calls it the inefficacy objection. 11 

In what follows, I use “fasting” and “abstinence” as terms of art that refer not only to actual fasting but also to dietary rituals and regulations generally.

292   Andrew Chignell Elliot Michaelson (2016b) joins Budolfson (unpublished) in arguing that the inefficacy objection applies to some forms of deontology, too. For example, it applies to a view on which only acts that lead to new rights violations can count as morally wrong. Other non-​ consequentialisms (divine command theory, virtue theory, some versions of Kantianism), however, are clearly able to avoid this form of the objection. An action might still be divinely ordained, virtuous, or categorically rational regardless of its outcomes. But—​and this is my main point here—​even if abstaining from purchasing the products of a morally objectionable system is the right thing to do regardless of outcomes, an average person’s commitment to doing so will be threatened by awareness of inefficacy. In other words, for all but the most stoical among us, the fact that our individual choices to abstain from the products of a bad system are almost certainly inefficacious poses a psychological threat to our ongoing moral commitment. Here is another way to put this point. The original inefficacy objection is conceptual: it starts with the idea that a given action is wrong, and then shows that some ethical theories (consequentialism, in particular) imply the opposite in circumstances where individual choices have no negative effects. The inefficacy problem that I want to consider here, by contrast, is moral-​psychological: it, too, starts with a commitment to the idea that a given action is wrong, and then shows that we will often be too psychologically demoralized to resist performing it in circumstances where our individual choices appear to be inefficacious. After further describing this kind of inefficacy problem in the next section, I go on in the third section to consider ways in which the broadly religious approach just sketched helps many religious people handle it. Even if they cannot see or measure the outcomes, these practitioners take themselves to have religious grounds for faith (or at least motivation-​ sustaining hope) that some good will result from their dietary practices. As we have already seen, in many cases these grounds invoke what I will call a supersensible mechanism12: God, the gods, Heaven, karmic principles, reincarnation patterns, and so on. I then turn to an examination of the structure of a Kantian “moral argument”—​the sort that Kant himself uses to argue for God’s existence—​in order to see whether an analogue of that argument can take us from an obligation to abstain from certain products to a commitment to the existence of some such mechanism. In the final section, I conclude that it cannot—​not without lapsing into bad faith. Still, I do think there is a version of the broadly religious approach that can play a role in a naturalistic, secular responses to the psychological inefficacy problem.

Inefficacy and Double Demoralization Many of the industrial systems in which we are inevitably entwined (food, coffee, leather, water, energy, furniture, fabrics, and so on) have supply chains that seem to 12  Many cases, but not all. In some religious views, the relevant mechanism may not be fully supersensible or outside of nature (and, of course, a lot hangs on what we mean by “sensible” and “nature”). I will continue to use this (Kantian) term here for lack of a better one.

Religious Dietary Practices    293 be full of slack and buffers, designed to absorb a certain amount of waste in order to achieve economy of scale and, as a result, deeply insensitive to slight changes in demand. If the industrial food system is in fact this way,13 then an individual’s occasional choice to consume (or not) its products is very unlikely to change conditions for the workers or animals involved in the system, or the environment and wildlife affected by it. This is particularly true of choices made in private, where no one else is there to witness or be influenced. Let’s grant that some of the massive supply chains in the real-​world food system are “lumpy” rather than linear: supply responds to demand in large lots or “lumps” rather than in one-​by-​one orders. Now consider, for example, a regional fast-​food company that has a policy of ordering 100,000 chickens a month from its suppliers in order to meet an average demand just shy of 2 million chicken sandwiches (I am guessing, without any expert justification, that a chicken sandwich contains around 1/​20th of the edible parts of a chicken). If the demand in a given month is between 1,900,000 and 2 million sandwiches, then the company will not change its usual order. The managers are prepared to throw out that much meat over the course of a week as long as they think that the average demand will continue to be around 2 million sandwiches-​worth. But they also have a policy according to which, if the number of sandwich orders in a given month goes below 1,900,000, that will trigger a “lump” reduction in their order for at least the following week. They will order 95,000 chickens instead of 100,000 from the supplier. So now suppose that someone who is morally opposed to the industrial chicken system comes up to the counter and is trying to decide what to order. It looks as though, if the number of other chicken sandwich orders during that period is anywhere between 1,899,999 and 2 million—​as it almost always is—​then her order will not make a difference to the number of actual chickens processed. And if the number is below 1,899,999 but above 1,799,999, then her order also will not make a difference. And so on. It is only if she happens to be at the restaurant during a week in which the number of other sandwich orders happens to be precisely 1,899,999 (or 1,799,999, or 1,699,999, etc.) that her order will have any effect at all. But if she is at such a pivot point, and if she orders something other than a chicken sandwich, then her action will trigger the lump reduction and lead to 5,000 fewer chickens being ordered from the industrial animal agriculture system.14 The consequentialist might try to respond here by saying that even if this does describe the real-​world situation, we cannot possibly know when we are at a pivot point, and so the thing to do is to equate the expected effect of an individual choice with the average effect of all the choices between thresholds. If the “lump” order is 5,000 chickens, 13 

For a discussion of the extent to which the causal inefficacy objection hangs on contingent facts about the actual food supply, see Michaelson 2016a. For an economist’s doubts about how much insensitivity there really is, see Halteman and McMullen, unpublished. 14  This is essentially a large-​scale version of the “Three-​in-​a-​Boat” game (named after a J. K. Jerome short story): If only one of us rows, the boat goes in a circle; if the two of you row, then my rowing will not make a difference. So I should only bother rowing if exactly one of you is going to join me. Luc Bovens (2015) argues that the “tragedy of the commons” is also best modeled as this kind of game rather than a Prisoner’s Dilemma. Thanks to Bovens for conversations about this part of the paper.

294   Andrew Chignell and it is only triggered every 100,000 sandwich purchases, then the average effect of each purchase is 1/​100,000 × 5,000 = 1/​20. In other words, the expected effect of an individual purchase is exactly what one might predict: 1/​20th of a chicken.15 It is then an empirical question whether the thought of occasionally saving 1/​20th of a chicken would suffice to maintain the psychological resolve of someone who thinks that industrial chicken production is wrong. This response fails because the standing policy combined with the empirical trend means that many purchases (or abstentions) have no effect at rather than the average effect. Remember that they typically receive between 1.9 and 2  million orders every week, and they throw out the extra. So there is effectively a buffer in the system that keeps them from ever falling short of demand, but that also means that the decision to purchase or abstain cannot, over time, have anything close to the average effect as calculated above. Note, too, that the “buffer” represented by the policy of the fast-​food chain is hardly the end of the story. For in real-​world situations, there is often, as Budolfson points out, a series of “buffers” like this—​a series of points along the supply chain where waste is tolerated or absorbed. The restaurant’s suppliers, for instance, will presumably also have some sort of threshold policy vis-​à-​vis the farmers who raise the chickens, and be prepared to absorb some decrease in demand before reducing their order. Similarly, the farmer gets the chicks from an incubator facility, which itself will have a threshold policy that is tolerant of a certain amount of waste. Moreover, in a market as big as the chicken market (around 45 billion animals per year worldwide), the suppliers are almost certain to have other customers who will be able to pick up slack in a given period, and so may not tell the farmer to produce 5,000 fewer chickens after all, even if the threshold is occasionally crossed. Likewise at the level of farmer and incubator. And so on: it is buffers all the way down.16 In such a situation, there is, as Budolfson (2016, 208) puts it, a “vanishingly small” chance that when an individual arrives at the restaurant counter, she is at a threshold or “pivot point” in that supply chain that will make her choice efficacious If you add in other kinds of supply chain “noise,” then the chance becomes “infinitesimal.”17 The 15 

See Singer 1980 and Kagan 2011. Despite some similarities, this chicken sandwich scenario poses problems for both rationality and resolve that are somewhat different from real-​world voting paradoxes. When voting for president, one might not make a difference to the outcome but still be able to take credit for signaling support, or increasing the “manifest normative mandate” of the winner (see Guerrero 2010). But analogous reasons are not available to someone who abstains from the chicken sandwich in a lumpy supply system, but is not at a pivot point. 16  For more discussion of all these points, see Kagan 2011, Nefsky 2017, as well as Budolfson 2016 and forthcoming. 17  I am not entirely sure what Budolfson means by “noise” but perhaps this is an example: apparently cultural trends can make the demand for certain cuts of poultry go up (turkey breast at Thanksgiving, chicken wings during years when the local football team does well, etc.). But animals come in wholes, and so if wings are in high demand this year, a decision not to eat a chicken sandwich (which is not made of wings) is even less likely to have any effect on how many chickens are produced and processed, since retailers are demanding as many wings as possible. Thanks to conversations with Cornell food scientist and poultry expert Joe Regenstein here; see also Parcell and Pierce 2000.

Religious Dietary Practices    295 expected effect would be difficult to calculate, but it is nowhere near as high as 1/​20th of a chicken. In light of all this, Rabbi Yanklowitz’s (2015, 27) claim in The Jewish Vegan that “it is not hard to buy a leather-​free belt to spare animals from unnecessary suffering” seems well-​intentioned but off the mark. Same with the younger Peter Singer’s assertion that becoming a vegetarian is not merely a symbolic gesture. Nor is it an attempt to isolate oneself from the ugly realities of the world, to keep oneself pure and so without responsibility for the cruelty and carnage all around. Becoming a vegetarian is a highly practical and effective step one can take toward ending both the killing of non-​human animals and the infliction of suffering upon them. (1975, 168‒169)

In Chignell (2016), I used the term “opportunistic” to characterize acts in which (a) a person benefits by (b) consuming products of activity on the part of others that (c) the person takes to be morally wrong, and where (d) generating those products is a constitutive aim of the activity in question.18 Intuitions about cases in which someone receives a gift, wins a prize, or finds something edible in a dumpster reveal that most of us think opportunistic eating is permitted in some circumstances. “Freegans,” for instance, have no problem consuming food that results from others’ purchases, even though they would never produce or purchase those items on their own.19 Likewise, some Theravada monks regard it as permissible to eat meat that others give to them, but not to kill the animals themselves.20 Cases of opportunistic purchasing are more complicated: most of us share Yanklowitz’s and Singer’s conviction that we have a moral reason not to purchase the products of wrongful activity on the part of others. However, it is surprisingly difficult to find a sound argument for that conclusion, especially in the context of massive, insensitive supply systems (see Boey 2016; Harman 2016; McPherson 2016; Chignell 2016). It would be worth thinking more about which ethical theories can rule out opportunistic purchasing or rebut the conceptual version of the inefficacy objection. However, I do not propose to go further into those debates here.21 Instead, I want to examine the

18 

The term “opportunistic carnivore” is used in zoological circles to describe animals that are typically herbivorous but will at times eat carcasses and other meat that is the byproduct of the activity of normal carnivores. Such opportunists include hyenas and vultures. As far as I know, Almeida and Bernstein (2000) are the first to use the term to refer to certain kinds of humans. 19  Freegans (http://​freegan.info/​) will also eat roadkill or animals that died a natural death. Those would not be cases of opportunism as defined here. (For more discussion of freeganism, see Singer and Mason 2006.) 20  They also must not “have seen, heard, or suspected that the animal in question was killed specifically for them” (Goodman 2017). 21  See Nefsky, in this volume, for more discussion of these issues.

296   Andrew Chignell psychological version of the problem and see whether the “broadly religious approach” to dietary regulations offers an effective response to it. I co-​teach a class (also a Massive Open Online Course) on “The Ethics of Eating.”22 The goal of the class is to expose students to some important facts about the food system and then help them reflect philosophically on the ethical and political ramifications of various consumption patterns. The first thing that the students come to appreciate is that the industrial part of the food system is enormously impressive: relatively few people, using a whole lot of technology, are able to feed billions. Industrialization has also led to dramatic increases in yield, efficiency, and safety. Writing in an industry journal, food scientist John Floros points out that since 1950 the average yield of corn nearly quadrupled (from 39 to 153 bushels per acre), the productivity for meat production increased by a notable 88%, and the output of eggs and poultry increased by a remarkable 411%. Combined, all these improvements resulted in an astonishing 145% increase in overall productivity. (Floros 2009)

All the same, there are notorious problems, abuses, wastes, and unaccounted externalities throughout the industrial system, as Floros goes on to point out. When confronted with these problems, many of our students seem energized: they agree that aspects of that system are morally objectionable, they want to “make a difference” via their food choices, and they vow to change their habits. However, when confronted with the size, complexity, lumpiness, and opacity of the system—​and the resulting challenges facing those who want to bring about change—​many of our students become demoralized. To see why, consider one of the main components of the food system: animal agriculture. That part of the industry processes more than 9 billion land animals per year in the United States and as many as 60 billion land animals worldwide (many billions more if you include all the seafood and bycatch).23 It also produces more greenhouse gases than the entire transportation sector according to a 2006 UN report.24 Someone who thinks that aspects of that system—​the treatment of some of the animals, the conditions of some of the workers, the rampant overuse of antibiotics, the loss of CO2 absorbing forests and jungles to raise grain for livestock—​are morally objectionable might reasonably want to change the system. But when confronted with these daunting numbers, and the lumpiness of some of the supply chains, she might also reasonably think that her individual food choices—​even over an entire lifetime—​will not make a significant difference. This is one kind of demoralization: (D1) General despair or dejection in the face of the very long odds of making a significant positive difference to the system in question. 22 

https://​www.edx.org/​course/​ethics-​eating-​cornellx-​phil1440x. https://​www.nass.usda.gov/​; http://​www.humanesociety.org/​news/​resources/​research/​stats_​ slaughter_​totals.html. 24  Food and Agriculture Organization 2006. 23 

Religious Dietary Practices    297 Often this will lead to another and more serious kind of de-​moralization: (D2) Loss of psychological resolve required to do what the agent still takes herself to have moral reason to do. When completely demoralized in this way, the agent will presumably revert to purchasing whatever is most convenient, tasty, and affordable—​despite her moral qualms. The conjunction of (D1) and (D2) is what I will mean by “double demoralization” in what follows.25

How Religion (Broadly Speaking) Helps In a recent survey article on “Religion and Food,” Tyler Doggett and Matthew Halteman argue that “surface” level religious principles about what or how to eat (e.g., do not eat pork, do not eat beef) are typically grounded in “deeper” principles (do not pollute yourself, practice ahimsa) and metaphysical doctrines (a cow is a motherly deity). These deeper principles and doctrines, in turn, are often drawn from what Doggett and Halteman call a “cosmic vision”: an “intersubjective, communal, evolving way of both understanding and being in the world” Cosmic visions reflect origin myths and oral histories as well as more abstract philosophical and theological reflections; they are often inscribed in folklore, rituals, and authoritative texts. In addition to providing understanding and ethical guidance, these visions can also serve as the basis for political decisions regarding communal identity and policy (2016, 283). In many religious cultures, following the surface principles can be a way of adhering to the deeper principles, demonstrating commitment to the doctrines, and expressing allegiance to the community and the cosmic vision (see also Kaplan 2017 on “food narratives”). Because there are these connections to more fundamental aspects of their practice, religious people can then coherently view the surface regulations as both unlikely to make a significant observable difference (apart from making them feel hungry or miss certain foods) and as morally and spiritually significant. For example, fasting may be a way of performing other supersensible actions: loving or worshipping God, honoring ancestors, propitiating divine anger, becoming like God, expelling the Three Worms, annihilating the ego, seeking divine favor, doing penance, crucifying the flesh, and so on. It might also count as obeying divine commands, but the broadly religious approach I am exploring here does not entail divine command theory. The point, rather, is that moral psychology

25  Internalists and externalists about moral motivation may have slightly different ways of spelling this out, but I am abstracting from that debate for present purposes and focusing on psychological motivation or willpower. For two very different reflections on the psychology of demoralization, see Jamieson 2014 and Foa Dienstag 2006.

298   Andrew Chignell can be strengthened by religious adherence: each of these good-​making though largely unobservable aspects of a fast can help motivate the keeping of it.26 Some religious people also look for positive results from their fasting and abstinence. Most of these results, too, will be unobservable: spiritual insight, increased faith, the replacement of a coarser qi with a more rarefied qi, a clean conscience, greater harmony with the whole, good karma, heavenly treasure, immortality, and so on. Finally, some religious people regard fasting as able indirectly to generate observable results in the world, since, for example, a deity who is obeyed, worshipped, and well-​pleased may act favorably on their behalf to produce observable, measurable results: sending manna and quail from heaven, healing a sick relative, mending a relationship, parting the Red Sea, furthering a business enterprise, striking down an enemy. Given that God is not, on sophisticated religious pictures anyway, constrained by contracts or buttered-​up by rituals, there can be no guarantee that any of these results will obtain. None of them is likely. But a religious outlook at least offers grounds for resolve-​sustaining hope. I characterized the “broadly religious approach” to food regulation as involving the following two ideas: 1. The beneficial effects of intentional dietary regulation (fasting and other forms of abstinence) can extend well beyond its likely observable results, and 2. Focusing on this possibility can help maintain one’s resolve to follow the regulation. This is doctrinally minimalistic—​so much so that later I will sketch a way in which this “broadly religious” approach might be adopted in a secular context. In this section, though, I have been developing a somewhat more concrete and substantive version of that broadly religious approach. It can be summarized as follows: Traditional Religious Mindset: Following dietary regulations is morally good and spiritually beneficial because of how this practice is grounded in my tradition’s deeper moral principles, metaphysical doctrines, and cosmic vision. Following these regulations may also lead, via supersensensible mechanisms, to other good outcomes—​both observable and unobservable. Again, there are typically no guarantees in this context.27 So it would be rash to be optimistic that my individual efforts are going to result in any observable outcomes beyond 26  Here and in the next two paragraphs, I briefly list some claims about how religious traditions conceive of food regulations, most of which I am not expert enough to describe or defend at any length. What limited acquaintance I do have is informed by encounters with individual practitioners as well as with Douglas 1974; Walker Bynum 1988; Halteman 2008; Narayanan 2010; Sandford 2011; Zamore 2011; Arthur 2013; Zeller et al. 2014; Freidenreich 2015; and Yanklowitz 2015. 27  It may be that in a few traditions, extraordinary observable results are indeed regarded as likely. We noted above that the recipes in the second chapter of the Daoist Wufuxu, for instance, promise an increase in health and even reversed aging and immortality for those who follow its regimens. See Arthur 2013, ch. 4.

Religious Dietary Practices    299 the obvious ones (improving my ability to resist hunger, for example). A Traditional Religious Mindset, however, clearly does provide the basis for a kind of hope that is both compatible with a lack of optimism and a bulwark against double demoralization. Religious people who fast on behalf of sick relatives are not optimistic, perhaps, but they cling to hope that their fasting will somehow help.

Kantian Religion: Moral Arguments for Theoretical Conclusions We have seen that a Traditional Religious Mindset offers psychological resources to sustain hope and moral resolve, even in the face of perceived inefficacy. If this is correct, then it might be tempting to think that there is a kind of “moral argument” here from the negative psychological effects of perceived inefficacy to the adoption of such a mindset. Moral arguments are found throughout the nineteenthth-​century Pragmatist and Idealist traditions, but Immanuel Kant is a key forebear, and his philosophy of religion is explicitly designed to answer the question “What may I hope?” So it is worth looking briefly at a Kantian religious argument that stems from our general psychological need for moral hope. I will then consider an analogous argument based in our need to overcome the psychological ramifications of perceived inefficacy. Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone (1793) is the treatise in which Kant describes the “rational essence” of religion—​the doctrines and practices that can survive examination by the tribunal of universal rationality. The result is called “moral religion,” “rational religion,” or “rational faith” (Vernunftglaube) in order to distinguish it from creedal or enthusiastic forms based in special revelation or alleged mystical experience. Kant articulates the rational essence of the doctrine of providence in the following passage: Each must, on the contrary, so conduct himself as if everything depended on him. Only on this condition may he hope that a higher wisdom will provide the fulfillment of his well-​intentioned effort. ([1793] 1902, 6:101)

The passage displays what we might call a consequence-​dependent moral psychology. Kant is famously not a consequentialist in ethics generally: “The fulfillment of duty consists in the form of the earnest will, not in the mediating causes of success” ([1790] 1902, 5:451). But he also says that it is rational and (for most of us) psychologically necessary to hope that good consequences will result from the action, even if via a supersensible mechanism (“a higher wisdom”). Interestingly, Kant’s view of the psychology of sustained ethical action is based in an empirical claim about perceived inefficacy: most human beings are sensible, embodied

300   Andrew Chignell “creatures of need” as well as rational beings. For us, the best state is not one of mere Epicurean desire-​satisfaction nor does it consist (as the Stoics say) simply in being virtuous. Rather, the best state—​the “highest good”—​is a state of true justice: a state in which virtue is perfectly proportioned to happiness. But happiness, for Kant, is at least partly bodily: it involves the satisfaction of our inclinations, many of which arise from our sensible nature as “creatures of need” ([1788] 1902, 5:61). And so prolonged experience of injustice—​of a world-​history in which the wicked often prosper and the virtuous are often unhappy—​can slowly chip away at our resolve. This sensitivity on Kant’s part to empirical psychology and embodied desire makes him keenly aware of how hard it is to remain virtuous without some hope that justice will be achieved—​i.e., some hope that happiness will come to those who keep to the straight and narrow. Indeed in the Critique he says that “all hoping aims at happiness” ([1781/​7] 1902, A805/​B833). In the Religion passage above, he intimates that one of the needs we have, in the context of ethical and political action, is to see our “well-​intentioned efforts” fulfilled—​at least sometimes. Perhaps the moral law demands that we try to help the disadvantaged by donating our money to various causes. And perhaps this is true regardless of actual outcomes. Still, most of us also want our altruism to be effective: it helps us to retain psychological resolve if we can believe (or at least reasonably hope) that the poor are actually benefiting from our gifts. Even in a Kantian context, a morally good person will reasonably care about the goodness of the consequences of her actions, and not just about the goodness of her actions. In Religion, Kant depicts this as a rationally respectable appropriation of the ancient doctrine of Providence—​a doctrine that has ancestors in the even more ancient and cross-​cultural idea that the gods, including the most capricious ones, tend to cooperate with people who do their bidding. Consequence-​dependent moral psychology and an appeal to demoralization is also found in Kant’s famous “moral proof ” of God’s existence. Here is one of his more lyrical presentations of it in the third Critique: A righteous man (like Spinoza) who takes himself to be firmly persuaded that there is no God and . . . also no future life . . . does not demand any advantage for himself from his conformity to the moral law, whether in this world or another; rather, he would simply and unselfishly bring about the good to which that holy law directs all his powers. But his strivings [Bestreben] have limits. . . . Deceit, violence, and envy always surround him, even though he is himself honest, peaceable, and benevolent. The other righteous people that he encounters at times will, in spite of all their worthiness to be happy, nevertheless be subject by nature, which pays no respect to that, to all the evils [Übeln] of poverty, illnesses, and untimely death, just like all the other animals on earth. It will always remain so until one wide grave engulfs them all together (whether honest or dishonest, here it makes no difference) and hurls them, the very ones who were capable of believing that they were the final purpose [Endzweck] of all creation, back into the abyss of the purposeless chaos of matter [Schlund des zwecklosen Chaos der Materie] from which they all were drawn. ([1790] 1902, 5:452)

Religious Dietary Practices    301 In the end, when faced with this abyss, the righteous Spinoza has two options: either he will “certainly have to give up his end [of being righteous] as impossible” or “he must accept (annehmen) the existence of a moral author of the world (Welturheber), i.e. of God, from a practical point of view.” The “impossible” here can be read psychologically: he simply cannot keep to the path of virtue without some source of hope that justice will ultimately prevail.28 Here is a stepwise look at one interpretation of this moral argument from despair29: (1) We ought to do what is morally right (from an independent argument). (2) It would be demoralizing in the first sense (i.e., it would lead to despair) not to be able to hope that there is a moral order by which a just arrangement (i.e., a “moral world”) will come about, for then we would have to regard it as certain that the whole history of the universe will not be good on the whole, no matter what we do (empirical premise). (3) Such demoralization has an enervating effect on the motivation of finite agents and is thus de-​moralizing in the second sense: many of us will no longer do actions that we take to be morally good or required (empirical premise). (4) Double demoralization of this sort is seriously morally undesirable ((1), conceptual truth). (5) Therefore, there is serious moral advantage in being able to hope that there is a moral world order (from (2)‒(4)). (6) Hope that p involves belief or faith that p is really possible30 (conceptual truth). (7) Therefore, there is serious moral advantage in being able to believe or have faith that a moral order of the universe is really possible (from (5)‒(6)).

28  It was common in eighteenth-​century Germany to regard pantheism as tantamount to atheism, since it rejects the existence of the classical deity. During the Pantheismusstreit in which Lessing was reported by Mendelssohn to have been a Spinozist, it became important to disavow Spinoza for a time. Another way to read Spinoza, however, is the way Novalis did: as “that God-​intoxicated man.” For more on all this, see Israel 2002. “Accept” here is “annehmen,” the verb Kant often associates with the noun “Glaube.” Camus (1955 [1942]) famously rejects this: he considers the same predicament and says that we must both accept the demands of the moral law and embrace the absurdity of a world in which justice never prevails: “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” 29  Note that I am not trying to work closely with the texts or satisfy my fellow Kant scholars here, though I do think that this captures one strand of Kant’s thinking about the moral proof. Robert M. Adams (1979a) develops this more empirical-​psychological way of reconstructing Kant’s proof. The present reconstruction is inspired by Adams, but differs from his in many key respects. See also Zagzebski 2007. In the first Critique, Kant presents a very different version of the moral proof according to which hope for happiness seems to be part of the incentive for acting rightly. In the second Critique we find the more canonical articulation of the proof according to which we ought to will be the highest good, and this involves, as a sort of presupposition, adopting moral faith in the existence of God and the afterlife. See Wood 1970. Very little attention has been devoted to the moral-​psychological argument from despair in the third Critique and Religion. For an important exception, see Fugate 2014. 30  For a lengthy discussion of this premise in a Kantian context, see Chignell 2013.

302   Andrew Chignell (8) The existence of God provides the only adequate account of the real possibility of a moral order of the universe (theoretical premise31). (9) Therefore, there is serious moral advantage in being able to believe or have faith that God exists (from (7)‒(8)). (10) There are no good epistemic reasons either for or against the existence of God (result of Kant’s critical examination of natural theology). (11) Rational belief requires good epistemic reasons (conceptual truth32). (12) Therefore, belief in God’s existence is irrational (from (10)‒(11)). (13) Rational faith (Vernunftglaube) does not require good epistemic reasons; it can instead be based on good moral or pragmatic reasons (conceptual truth33). (14) Therefore, other things being equal, faith (though not belief) that God exists is morally (though not epistemically) justified (from (9)‒(13)). Kant says that this proof does not count as an exercise in wishful thinking or self-​ deception as long as we note that the justification is moral rather than epistemic, and that the result is not belief (Überzeugung) or even opinion (Meinung) but rather mere hope for a moral order (in (5)) combined with faith in the existence of the only being who can and would bring it about (in (14)). Let us take a look at a couple of the key premises. Premise (8) is obviously a lynchpin. A friend of the argument would have to rule out other accounts of the real possibility of a moral world: dialectical historical processes, political revolutions, a karmic system that ensures that the arc of history ultimately bends toward justice, liberal democracy, and so on. It is not at all obvious that this could be done (cf. Adams 1979). Premises (10)‒(13) are also crucial: the existence-​claim has to be one for which the evidence is epistemically ambiguous in order for moral faith to be rational. Large portions of the Critique of Pure Reason are dedicated to undermining traditional efforts to prove or even render probable the existence of God on either demonstrative or empirical grounds. Kant also rejects all atheistic arguments, including the empirical argument from evil (Huxford, forthcoming). So, in the famous phrase, knowledge of both theism and atheism is “denied” in order to make room for the kind of moral faith that overcomes demoralization ([1787] 1902, xxx). 31  There is a famous objection here: Kant moves from a commitment to the possibility of the highest good to faith in the actuality of God’s existence. But why could not faith that God is possible be sufficient? Understanding Kant’s answer would involve going deeper into his theory of modality. I will set the objection aside here, but see Chignell 2009; Chignell and Stang 2015; and Stang 2016. 32  Non-​evidentialists will deny that this is a conceptual truth. But Kant is a conceptual evidentialist about what we would call “belief ”—​the kind of holding-​for-​true (Fürwahrhalten) that can count, if true and justified, as knowledge (Wissen) (Kant calls it “conviction” (Überzeugung), as do many contemporary German epistemologists). See Wood 1991 and Chignell 2007a. 33  Rational faith, for Kant, is a voluntary state of holding-​for-​true (Fürwahrhalten) that, for non-​ epistemic reasons, a subject uses to guide deliberation, action, and assertion in certain contexts. See Chignell 2007b.

Religious Dietary Practices    303 In the Religion passage quoted at the beginning of this section, Kant is not discussing hope for a “moral world” generally but rather hope for more specific outcomes of specific actions. But this hope, too, requires faith in the existence of a supersensible mechanism:  a providential “higher wisdom” that makes the fulfilment of our efforts really possible. Returning to food ethics and inefficacy problems, it seems clear that people who already have a Traditional Religious Mindset can just focus their hopes around the supersensible mechanism to which they are already committed. They can focus, in other words, on the real possibility that this supersensible mechanism arranges things such that some of their choices make a significant positive difference—​unobservable and observable. That would presumably help sustain psychological commitment. But is a version of this argument against double demoralization available in secular, naturalistic contexts as well?

Application: A Moral Argument for Difference-​M aking? Given that the industrial food system is deeply insensitive to slight changes in demand, any attempt to inculcate full-​blown belief that my individual purchase is going to make a significant positive difference with respect to that system would be a miserable exercise in self-​deception. Faith in that proposition also looks more like a Kierkegaardian leap than sweet Kantian reason. Again, Kant joins Pascal, James, and others in the Pragmatist tradition who reject the idea that practical arguments can underwrite a theoretical conclusion whose opposite we have strong epistemic reasons to believe. With this in mind, let us consider a moral argument that starts, like Kant’s own proof, from the conditions on mere hope: (1*) I ought to abstain from purchasing the products of a morally objectionable part of the food system (from an independent argument or moral intuition). (2*) It would be doubly demoralizing not to be able to hope that my abstinence will make a significant positive difference (with respect to the plight of animals, workers, the environment, etc.) (empirical premise). (3*) Such double demoralization is seriously morally undesirable ((1*), conceptual truth). (4*) Therefore, there is serious moral advantage in being able to hope that my abstinence will make a significant positive difference (from (2*)‒(3*)). (5*) Therefore, other things equal, hope that my abstinence will make a significant positive difference is morally justified (from (4*)).

304   Andrew Chignell So far, so good: this looks like a simple argument for the practical rationality of hope that I will make a significant positive difference (where “significant” is left vague precisely because the amount of difference-​making required to avoid demoralization will differ from person to person).34 But what are the conditions on having hope of this sort? We saw earlier that, for Kant at least, hope involves regarding its object as really (i.e., metaphysically) possible. This “regarding” can presumably involve full-​blown belief, but it can also involve mere faith: (6*)  S hopes that p only if S believes or has faith that p is really possible (conceptual truth). (7*) Therefore, other things equal, belief or faith that it is really possible that my abstinence will make a significant positive difference is morally justified (from (5*)‒(6*)). Some people may find it psychologically possible to leave things there. They will be able to abstain from consuming industrial strawberries, chicken, avocados, leather (or whatever else they are concerned about) in the stubborn hope that this abstention will somehow make a significant positive difference. Despite the incredibly long odds, they believe or have faith that it is possible, and that is enough to preserve their resolve. Kant finds such people admirable but rare: for him, as we have seen, virtue is not its own reward, and even someone as righteous as Spinoza is liable to be demoralized in the absence of some sense of how justice might prevail. For the vast majority of us, something more than a gesture at the brute possibility of a good outcome is required for long-​ term moral-​psychological stability. This is one reason why Kant’s moral proof proceeds from a claim about real possibility to a claim about the actual ground or explanation of that possibility: What is it about the actual world that makes the hoped-​for outcome really possible? Well, one idea is just: (8*) The existence of God provides the only adequate account of the real possibility that my abstinence will make a significant positive difference. (Theoretical premise) If this were acceptable, then the rest of the argument could run like the previous one and conclude with full-​blown moral theism. Only such faith, this version of the argument would say, makes it psychologically possible to retain the hope that my abstinence will make a significant positive difference to a morally objectionable system. So that hope and faith, together, allow me to avoid double demoralization, and are prima facie morally justified as a result. 34  It is also an empirical question precisely what a given agent will need to hope for in order to avoid demoralization. Some people may simply need to hope that one of their actions (who knows which) across a certain stretch of time will make a non-​trivial difference. Others will need to hope that many of their actions make a significant difference in order to keep pressing on.

Religious Dietary Practices    305 The problem with this, obviously, is that (8*) is patently false. In Kant’s moral proof, there is at least some plausibility to the idea that God’s existence is “the only adequate account” of the real possibility of a perfectly just society or a fully moral order. But in the case of a more localized hope—​like the hope that my individual actions will make a significant positive difference to the food system—​(8*) itself is hopeless. As we saw back in the second section, there are naturalistic ways to account for the possibility that my individual actions make a significant positive difference, even in a massive system with a lumpy supply chain. It is just barely possible, for instance, that I am at one of those thresholds or pivot points. If I am, then my choice to abstain will make a significant positive difference (5,000 chickens saved!). Given the availability of naturalistic ways of accounting for the real possibility that my abstinence makes a difference, there can be nothing like a theistic proof here, even in a “moral” sense. If someone already has a Traditional Religious Mindset, then perhaps it makes sense for him to fix his hopes on a supersensible mechanism by appealing to a premise like (8**) The existence of God provides an adequate account of the real possibility that my food choices will make a significant difference. But for someone who does not already share the Traditional Religious Mindset, there is no compelling pressure to appeal to anything like this. No compelling pressure. There might be a little pressure, though, depending on how we think about the odds. I just said that a secular person who is threatened by demoralization can focus in a hopeful way on the possibility of pivotality—​she can give that possibility a prominent place in her mind every time she steps up to the restaurant counter. But that is not going to be easy: the chance that she is pivotal is vanishingly small, and it will be hard to keep such a slim hope from sliding into despair. According to the account of hope that I favor, the difference between despair and hope consists in facts about where the subject is disposed to place his focus. I might desire something and regard it as possible, but if I focus on the enormous odds against it, I am in despair. If I instead focus on the chance of its occurring—​even just the mere possibility—​then I am hoping. Mindful focus of this sort is sometimes under our control: we can sometimes decide to hope rather than to despair. By way of illustration: Andy and Red are the two main characters in Stephen King’s novella Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption: Hope Springs Eternal (1982), which is loosely based on a Tolstoy story and was made into a movie by Frank Darabont. Both Andy and Red desperately want to get out of prison: their desire is equally strong. And they both agree that it is possible. But there is a slight but crucial difference in their respective attitudes toward the idea, one that can be illustrated by linguistic emphasis: Andy: The chances of getting out are only one in a million, but it is POSSIBLE. Red: Yes, it is possible, but the chances of getting out are ONLY ONE IN A MILLION.

306   Andrew Chignell On the view of hope that I am sketching, Andy is hoping, and Red is in despair. Andy’s strong desire to escape, together with his steely focus on that outcome under the aspect of its possibility, so to speak, motivate him to look for pathways, even very implausible ones. Red’s fixation on the negative odds of the outcome, by contrast, prevents him from joining in: he wants just as badly to escape, but he does not want to “get his hopes up,” for fear of disappointment.35 So when the odds are very good, it is not hard to stay hopeful. When they are fair to slim, the focus will have to be more intentional: we will sometimes have to decide to hope rather than to despair—​that is one sense in which hope or hopefulness can be a virtue (compare Snow, forthcoming). When the odds of the desired outcome are vanishingly small, however, it will be extremely psychological difficult to attend to it under the aspect of its possibility rather than its improbability.36 Another option for someone who is not of a Traditional Religious Mindset is to emphasize the unobservable but still (allegedly) beneficial aspects of her abstinence. She might think that it expresses a kind of integrity or authenticity, or that it allows her symbolically to “stand with the good.”37 This will not be of much comfort to the early Peter Singer, who is unhappy with merely symbolic gestures, or to a righteous Spinoza, whose resolve is threatened by the improbability of good observable outcomes. However, it may suffice for some. There is a fourth option that is by now crying out for mention. Someone who is genuinely threatened by demoralization at the individual level, who finds the chance of pivotality far too slim to sustain her hope, and who is not impressed by merely “symbolic” goods, might be driven to actions that go beyond individual abstention. She might engage politically, encourage others, join a movement, sign petitions, pursue legal efforts to change the morally objectionable parts of the food system, protest, boycott, and so on. These public efforts, and the collective actions to which they contribute, seem at least somewhat more likely than mere individual abstaining to make a significant positive difference. Surely hoping that they do so

35 

In the story, the difference between Andy and Red is more complex than this, of course. Andy is white and Red is black; presumably race determines a lot with respect to hope and despair in incarcerated America. Moreover, in the story Andy is not guilty and Red is. Still, citing the cartoon version of the story is now a common way of illustrating the point that mere desire plus belief in possibility are not sufficient for hope. See Meirav 2009 and Martin 2012. Interestingly, the Tolstoy story that inspired this one is called “God Sees the Truth, But Waits.” 36  Hope of this sort may naturally dispose us to many other things, including Luc Bovens’s mental imaging, C. R. Snyder’s pathways thinking, Philip Pettit’s acting as-​if, and Victoria McGeer’s orienting of our agential energies to the future. But in my view those important connections are ultimately contingent: hope simpliciter involves the conative component, the doxastic component, and the disposition to focus on the positive odds of an outcome occurring. (Note: Both Pettit and McGeer suggest that there is a rudimentary kind of hope that involves only belief and desire. But this does not seem to distinguish it from despair. My view of hope simpliciter falls between what Pettit calls “superficial hope” and “substantial hope.”) See Bovens 1999, Pettit 2004, McGeer 2004, and Snyder 2000. 37  On “standing with the good,” see Adams 1999; and on the related notions of symbolic value and moral taint, see Hill 1979; Appiah 1986; and Cuneo 2016.

Religious Dietary Practices    307 is a bit easier, and may suffice to sustain resolve—​in righteous Spinozas as well as more average agents.38 This last option avoids an objection that can be directed against the previous three—​ namely, that the hope in those accounts revolves around something that is either mysterious (supersensible mechanisms, symbolic value) or beyond our control (pivotality), or both, and that this is likely to have a stifling effect on political engagement. Someone whose hope for justice is grounded entirely in the supersensible, for instance, may continue to act within the religious community itself but also reasonably disengage from broader politics in the belief that, ultimately, the arc of history is not really his to bend. There are many examples of this in the monastic and Anabaptist traditions, as well as among some contemporary Christians (those who do not bother to recycle because these are the end times, for instance39). Another example is Franz Rosenzweig’s Messianic hope for “redemption”: on one reading, anyway, the only public actions that contribute to achieving this hope, for Rosenzweig, are liturgical and explicitly anti-​ political. “God, not the ethics and politics of man, is truly the agent of redemption. Man’s only agency is love and prayer; politics avails nothing” (cf. Mittleman 2009, 218). It is worth immediately emphasizing, however, that quietism is not entailed by any of these kinds of hope, including hope that is focused around the supersensible. As we have seen, Kant clearly says that hope in providence must be posterior to the duty of “each” to “so conduct himself, as if everything depended on him.” Kant’s progressive philosophy of history is also explicitly designed to be compatible with cosmopolitan efforts to bring about perpetual peace. Similarly, in the broadly religious vision of the great twentieth-​ century Marxist theorist of hope, Ernst Bloch, there is a kind of supersensible entelechy—​ “the principle of hope”—​that animates not just capital but the very stuff of the universe, bringing everything closer to some unforeseeable but utopian “not yet.” Still, Bloch rejects the idea that this leaves no room for political engagement: on the contrary, the ceaseless human effort to find a new collective home (Heimat) is one of the ways in which nature progresses (Bloch 1959). It cannot be an accident that a Jewish atheist socialist chose to write an entire book about a sixteenth-​century reformation leader (Thomas Müntzer) who thought that true believers should use political means to help God usher in an apocalyptic utopia (Bloch 1921). So, to summarize, we have considered four ways of sustaining hope and avoiding double demoralization in the face of perceived inefficacy: 38  This is not a failsafe way to avoid demoralization, of course. More than a few students have gone off with great enthusiasm to try to change the world, only to come back a few years later and say that the challenges were too overwhelming and they are now working on Wall Street. Going activist is also not a failsafe way to make an overall positive difference. Someone might try to convince his friends and family not to buy industrial chicken, make sure that co-​workers witness his own eating habits, and go door-​to-​ door for PETA on the weekends. And this might influence some people in the way he intends. But for all he knows it might also cause so much irritation and resentment that it pushes even more people away from what he is trying to encourage. For an environmental philosopher’s largely despairing reflections about activism, see Jamieson 2014. 39  Popular preacher Mark Driscoll, when asked how he can drive a SUV in an era of climate change, apparently replied: “I know who made the environment and he’s coming back and going to burn it all up. So yes, I drive an SUV” (Mehta 2013).

308   Andrew Chignell (a) Someone with a Traditional Religious Mindset can appeal to the morally and spiritually valuable aspects of the act itself in order to sustain resolve, and to the possible workings of a supersensible mechanism to sustain hope that he will make a positive difference. However, such a mindset requires the acceptance of substantive doctrines about supersensible mechanisms and also has the potential to foster public complacency or quietism. (b) Someone who does not share that mindset might still inhabit the “broadly religious approach” by focusing in hope on naturalistic mechanisms—​the chance of pivotality, say. But that kind of hope is very difficult to sustain, and double demoralization will remain a threat. (c) Someone else in this position might seek to stave off demoralization by focusing on unobservable but still symbolically valuable aspects of the action: standing with the good, avoiding moral taint, and so on. However, that requires accepting a somewhat mysterious axiology. (d) Finally, someone who finds little comfort in supersensible mechanisms, far-​flung hopes, and symbolic gestures might sustain her hope by going activist instead: by doing things, publicly and collectively, that seem more likely to make a significant, positive, observable difference than any individual purchasing choices. However, given the nature of politics, the threat of demoralization will not be wholly vanquished here either. The argument we have been considering here provides prima facie moral justification for responding in one or more of these ways, and possibly others. Unlike the Kantian argument from despair, it leaves numerous options open, only one of which involves something like traditional religious faith.

Conclusion Recent discussions of the causal inefficacy objection focus primarily on the conceptual side of the problem—​that is, on how inefficacy poses a challenge to traditional consequentialism as well as a few other influential normative frameworks. In this essay, I focused instead on the psychological side of the problem—​that is, on how the perception of inefficacy can lead to the kind of demoralization that, in turn, threatens to undermine agency. Recent discussions of the relationship between religion, fasting, and other dietary regulations focus primarily on the character of the regulations in particular traditions, on their functions in the life of particular communities, and on the sources of their authority or normativity. In this essay, I focused more abstractly on the merits of a “broadly religious approach” to fasting and how it might help us keep our resolve in the face of almost certain inefficacy. I concluded by showing that versions of the broadly religious approach are available in a secular or naturalistic context, too. By (b) focusing in hope on the extremely unlikely but still possible state of affairs in which one of their choices occurs at a threshold or “pivot point,” some people may be able to avoid double demoralization. For those

Religious Dietary Practices    309 who find this too unlikely to offer succor, the arguments we have been considering also offer prima facie moral justification for sustaining hope by (d) trying to effect change in more public, collective ways, (c) working up more appreciation for symbolic gestures, or (a) adopting faith in a supersensible mechanism after all.40

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Religious Dietary Practices    311 Harman, Elizabeth. 2016. “Eating Meat as a Morally Permissible Mistake.” In Philosophy Comes to Dinner, edited by A. Chignell et al., pp. 215–231. Hill, Thomas E. 1979. “Symbolic Protest and Calculated Silence.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 9(1): 83–​102 Huxford, George. Forthcoming 2018. “Kant’s Journey on Evil.” In Evil: A History, edited by A. Chignell. New York: Oxford University Press. Israel, Jonathan. 2002. Radical Enlightenment:  Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–​1750. New York: Oxford University Press. Jamieson, Dale. 2014. Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle against Climate Change Failed and What it Means for our Future. New York: Oxford University Press. Kant, Immanuel. 1781/​7. Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 2 ed. In vol. 4 of Kant 1902-​. —​—​—​​. 1788. Kritik der Praktischen Vernunft. In vol. 5 of Kant 1902-. —​—​—​​. 1790. Kritik der Urteilskraft. In vol. 5 of Kant 1902-​. —​—​—​​. 1793. Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft. In vol. 6 of Kant 1902-​. —​—​—​​. 1797. Metaphysik der Sitten. In vol 6 of Kant 1902-​. —​—​—​​.1902. “Immanuel Kants Schriften: Ausgabe der königlich preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, edited by Erich Adickes et al. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Kagan, Shelly. 2011. “Do I Make a Difference?” Philosophy and Public Affairs 39(2):105–​141. Kaplan, David M. 2017. “Narratives of Food, Agriculture, and the Environment.” In The Oxford Handbook of Environmental Ethics, edited by Stephen M. Gardiner and Allen Thompson. New York: Oxford University Press http://​www.oxfordhandbooks.com/​view/​10.1093/​ oxfordhb/​9780199941339.001.0001/​oxfordhb-​9780199941339-​e-​36. Kavka, Martin and Randi Rashkover. 2004. “A Jewish Modified Divine Command Theory.” Journal of Religious Ethics 32 (2): 387–414. Kemmerer, Lisa. 2011. Animals and World Religions. New York: Oxford University Press. King, Stephen. 1982. Rita Hayworth and The Shawshank Redemption: Hope Springs Eternal, part of Different Seasons. New York: Viking Press. Kuhn, Manfred. 2001. Kant: A Biography. New York: Cambridge University Press. Lamb, Michael. 2016. “Aquinas and the Virtues of Hope,” Journal of Religious Ethics 44(2): 300–​332. Lévi-​Strauss, Claude. 1969. The Raw and the Cooked: An Introduction to a Science of Mythology: 1, translated by John and Doreen Weightman. New York: Penguin. Li, Yong. 2006. “The Divine Command Theory of Mozi.” Asian Philosophy 16(3): 237–245. Martin, Adrienne. 2012. How We Hope. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. —​—​—​. 2016. “Factory Farming and Consumer Complicity.” In Philosophy Comes to Dinner, edited by Chignell et al., 203–​214. McGeer, Victoria. 2004. “The Art of Good Hope.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 592:  100–​127. https://www.princeton.edu/~vmcgeer/papers/ McGeer2004GoodHope.pdf McPherson, Tristram. 2016. “Why I am a Vegan (and You Should be One Too).” In Philosophy Comes to Dinner, edited by Chignell et al., 73–​91. Mehta, Hemant. 2013. “Pastor Mark Driscoll:  Christians Don’t Need to Care About the Environment because Jesus is Coming Back for Us.” Patheos, January 15, 2017. http://​www. patheos.com/​blogs/​f riendlyatheist/​2013/​05/​04/​p astor-​mark-​driscoll-​christians-​dont-​ need-​to-​care-​about-​the-​environment-​because-​jesus-​is-​coming-​back-​for-​us/​. Meirav, Ariel. 2009. “The Nature of Hope.” Ratio 22(2): 216–​233. Michaelson, Elliot. 2016a. “Act Consequentialism and Inefficacy.” In Food, Ethics, and Society, edited by Barnhill et al., 210–​214. —​—​—​​. 2016b. “A Kantian Response to Futility Worries?” In Food, Ethics, and Society, edited by Barnhill et al., 215–​218.

312   Andrew Chignell Michalson, Gordon E. 1999. Kant and the Problem of God. New York: Blackwell. Mittleman, Alan. 2009. Hope in a Democratic Age. New York: Oxford University Press. Narayanan, Vasudha. 2010. “Ritual Foods” In Encyclopedia of Hinduism, edited by Knut A. Jacobsen, Helene Basu, Angelika Malinar, and Vasudha Narayanan. Amsterdam: Brill 450–458. Nefsky, Julia. 2018. Entry in the present handbook. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Norman. Corrie E. 2012. “Religion and Food.” In Oxford Handbook to Food History, edited by Jeffrey Pilcher, 409–​427. New York: Oxford University Press. Parcell, Joe and Pierce, Vern. 2000. “Factors Affecting Wholesale Chicken Prices.” Journal of Agricultural and Applied Economics 32(3): 471–​478. Pettit, Philip. 2004. “Hope and its Place in Mind.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 592: 152–​166. Qur’an. 1997. The Qur’an: English Meanings, Saheeh International Translation. Jeddah: Abul-​ Qasim Publishing House. Riley, Samara Shantu. 2003. “Ecology is a Sistah’s Issue Too:  The Politics of Emergent Afrocentric Ecowomanism.” In Worldviews, Religion and the Environment:  A Global Anthology, edited by Richard C. Foltz, 472–​481. Belmont, CA: Thompson. Sandford, W. 2011. “Ethics, Narrative, and Agriculture:  Transforming Agricultural Practice Through Ecological Imagination” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 24(3): 283–​303. Schneider, Sarah (Susan) Yehudit. 1996. Eating as Tikun. Jerusalem: Still Small Voice. Singer, Peter. 1980. “Utilitarianism and Vegetarianism.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 9(4): 325–​337. —​—​—​. 2009 [1975]. Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for our Treatment of Animals. New York: HarperCollins. Singer, Peter, and Jim Mason. 2006. The Ethics of What We Eat: Why our Food Choices Matter. Emmaus, PA: Rodale. Sinnott-​Armstrong, Walter. 2015. “Consequentialism.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter), edited by Edward Zalta, January 5, 2016. https://​plato.stanford.edu/​archives/​ win2015/​entries/​consequentialism/​. Snow, Nancy. 2013. “Hope as an Intellectual Virtue.” In Virtues in Action, edited by M. W. Austin. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 153–170. Snyder, C. R., ed. 2000. Handbook of Hope:  Theory, Measures and Applications. San Diego, CA: Academic Press. Stang, Nicholas. 2016. Kant’s Modal Metaphysics. New York: Oxford University Press. Sterckx, Roel, ed. 2005. Tripod and Palate: Food, Politics, and Religion in Traditional China. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Stout, Jeffrey. 1978. “Meta-ethics and the Death of Meaning: Adams’ Tantalizing Closing.” Journal of Religious Ethics 6 (1): 1–18. Tanakh. 1985. Tanakh: A New Translation of The Holy Scriptures According to the Traditional Hebrew Text. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America. Wang Huan-biao. 1984. Mozi Jiao Shi. Hangzhou: Zhejiang Literature and Art Press. Wood, Allen W. 1970. Kant’s Moral Religion. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. —​—​—​. 1991. “Kant’s Deism.” In Kant’s Philosophy of Religion Reconsidered, edited by Philip Rossi and Michael Wreen, 1–​21. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Yanklowitz, Shmuly. 2015. The Jewish Vegan. New York: The Shamayim V’Aretz Institute. Zagzebski, Linda. 2007. “Morality and Religion.” In The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Religion, edited by William J. Wainwright. http://​www.oxfordhandbooks.com/​view/​10.1093/​ oxfordhb/​9780195331356.001.0001/​oxfordhb-​9780195331356-​e-​15. Zamore, M. L., ed. 2011. The Sacred Table: Creating a Jewish Food Ethic. New York: CCAR Press. Zeller, Benjamin, Marie Dallam, Reid Neilson, and Nora Lynne Rubel, eds. 2014. Religion, Food, and Eating in North America. New York: Columbia University Press.

chapter 14

The Clean Pl at e Club? Fo od Wast e and Indiv i dua l Resp onsib i l i t y Jaclyn Hatala Matthes and Erich Hatala Matthes

Introduction If your childhood was anything like ours, you were probably admonished for leaving uneaten food on your plate through the invocation of starving children in distant lands. This used to drive one of us up the wall (incidentally, the one who become the philosopher; the other was a much less picky eater). Given that the food on his plate could not possibly end up feeding anyone else, what good did it do to hitch his distaste for broccoli to his empathy for the suffering of others? Indeed, this nascent thought is one that we will develop further in this essay. The point, of course, is not that one should not have empathy for the suffering of others or ignore opportunities to relieve it. Nor will we argue that reducing the waste that you produce (be it food or otherwise) is not in general a good thing to do. Rather, the concern is with linking a morally important goal (the reduction of starvation) with a phenomenon that has a tenuous causal (and perhaps moral) relationship to it. There is a surprising disconnect between virtue-​and vice-​based objections to waste in individual behavior and the more consequentialist concerns with hunger and carbon emissions that often arise in the context of food waste discussions. To be sure, we have a problem. It is not a good thing that close to half of the food that we produce is ending up in landfills. In what follows, we will try to tease out some of the ethical complexities involved in confronting this problem and how it is framed. We

314    J. Hatala Matthes and E. Hatala Matthes will devote special attention to the problems of hunger and carbon emissions and their relationship to individual food behaviors. In doing so, we will suggest that there is often a misleading link made between these serious problems and individual waste behavior. Ultimately, we will conclude that, while there is certainly nothing wrong with trying to reduce your individual food waste, cultivating virtues of civic engagement geared toward systemic change in food production and distribution is more important than fostering extreme individual efficiency of food use.

The Facts about Food Waste To begin, it will be helpful to review the empirical lay of the land. From an empirical perspective, food waste is a complicated concept where the rigorous quantification of waste and its impacts are contingent on the food life cycle, which considers the processes by which food is produced, transported, sold, consumed, and disposed (fig. 14.1). Waste is created at every level along the food production life cycle, where it generally falls within one of the following four categories: (1) Inefficient resource use: input resources (fossil fuels, water, etc.) that are ineffectively used if they do not produce food for consumption

Fossil fuels (FF) Water Resources (fertilizer, feed)

FF Resources (cardboard, plastics)

FARM

Greenhouse gases (GHG) Pollution By-products (crop residue, animal waste) Wasted food (spoilage, aesthetics)

FF

FF Resources (cardboard, plastics)

FF

PROCESSING

TRANSPORT

VENDOR

CONSUMER

LANDFILL

GHG Pollution By-products (separating the wheat from the chaff) Wasted food (spoilage, aesthetics)

GHG Pollution

GHG By-products (packaging) Wasted food (expiration dates, spoilage, aesthetics)

GHG By-products (banana peels, packaging) Wasted food (unused food, leftovers)

GHG

Figure 14.1  Life cycle of the food system with associated inputs and outputs

Pollution Compost

The Clean Plate Club?    315 (2) Production waste: greenhouse gas emissions and pollution (3) Byproducts: otherwise unusable that are transferred with edible food (4) Wasted food: edible calories lost The agricultural systems that produce food require the extensive mobilization of input resources to sustain high rates of productivity. Globally, 70% of freshwater withdrawals are devoted to irrigation for agriculture,1 and the quantity of reactive nitrogen synthesized for agricultural fertilizers exceeds the amount of nitrogen cycled through all natural pathways combined.2 Agriculture also produces pollution that deteriorates important ecosystem services such as water availability, water quality, and biodiversity,3 and fertilizer runoff from agricultural systems is the dominant cause of pollution in the United States.4 Agriculture and the entire food system is also a major source of greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide, the three most important drivers of global climate change.5 Agricultural systems cover 38% of Earth’s ice-​free land,6 where the widespread land conversion from previous ecosystems is a primary driver of global biodiversity loss.7 These negative externalities are typically justified as means to producing the enormous quantities of food necessary for the exponentially growing human population. But in addition to the direct problems created by discarded edible food at later levels in the food system, wasted food also carries the burden of inefficient resource use of inputs and unjustifiable production waste through the creation of unnecessary greenhouse gas emissions and pollution. After food is produced in agricultural systems, depending on the type of food, significant byproduct waste is generated during food processing. Although most food byproducts are discarded as municipal solid waste, the large and increasing global volume of

1 

S. L. Postel, G. C. Daily, and P. R. Ehrlich, “Human Appropriation of Renewable Freshwater,” Science 271 (1996): 785–​788. 2  MEA, “Millennium Ecosystem Assessment,” in Ecosystems and Human Well-​Being: Biodiversity Synthesis (Washington, DC: World Resources Institute, 2005). 3  A. G. Power, “Ecosystem Services and Agriculture: Tradeoffs and Synergies,” Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 365 (2010): 2959–​2971. 4  P. M. Vitousek, J. D. Aber, R. W. Howarth, G. E. Likens, P. A. Matson, D. W. Schindler, W. H. Schlesinger, and G. D. Tilman, “Human Alteration of the Global Nitrogen Cycle: Sources and Consequences,” Ecol. Appl. 7 (1997): 737–​750. 5  P. Ciais, C. Sabine, G. Bala, L. Bopp, V. Brovkin, J. Canadell, A. Chhabra, R. DeFries, J. Galloway, M. Heimann, C. Jones, C. Le Quéré, R. B. Myneni, S. Piao, and P. Thornton, “Carbon and Other Biogeochemical Cycles,” in Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis, Contribution of Working Group I to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, ed. T. F. Stocker, D. Qin, G.-​K. Plattner, M. Tignor, S. K. Allen, J. Boschung, A. Nauels, Y. Xia, V. Bex, and P. M. Midgley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 6  N. Ramankutty, A. T. Evan, C. Monfreda, and J. A. Foley, “Farming the Planet: 1. Geographic Distribution of Global Agricultural Lands in the Year 2000,” Glob. Biogeochem. Cycles 22 (2008): GB1003. 7  J. A. Foley, N. Ramankutty, K. A. Brauman, E. S. Cassidy, J. S. Gerber, M. Johnston, N. D. Mueller, C. O’Connell, D. K. Ray, P. C. West, C. Balzer, E. M. Bennett, S. R. Carpenter, J. Hill, C. Monfreda, S. Polasky, J. Rockström, J. Sheehan, S. Siebert, D. Tilman, and D. P. M. Zaks, “Solutions for a Cultivated Planet,” Nature 478 (2011): 337–​342.

316    J. Hatala Matthes and E. Hatala Matthes waste at this level is driving research for the production of “second generation” fuels and chemicals produced from byproducts.8 However, byproduct reuse currently constitutes less than 0.5% of total byproduct waste. During the post-​agricultural stages of the food system, waste is also generated by inefficient use of the tremendous amount of fossil-​ fuel energy required to process, transport, and distribute food. Although processing can prolong the shelf life of food, therefore increasing the odds that it will be purchased and consumed, the mobilization of raw materials that are required to produce a typical bag of vending machine snack mix is astounding. Energy consumption at the Processing through Vendor levels of the food system represented 8% of the total US energy use in 2007, with the largest energy consumption at the Vendor level.9 Enormous quantities of edible wasted food are also created at the Processing and Vendor levels of the food system. Globally, 1%‒30% of rice and 2%‒50% of fresh fruits and vegetables are lost as wasted food following agricultural production and never reach individual consumers.10 Although there are insignificant differences in the total quantity of wasted food from differently resourced nations, reasons for post-​agricultural losses differ. In tropical nations, spoilage due to rainy or hot weather events is the most important driver of food waste, whereas in the United States and the United Kingdom, most food is wasted due to aesthetic selection for perfect products.11 At the Vendor level in the United States, up to 10% of total produced food is wasted12 for reasons that include overstocking, cosmetic “defects,” and expired “sell by” dates. Several European vendors recently launched campaigns to convince consumers to overcome stereotypes regarding perfect produce and reduce wasted food, offering lower prices on “weather blemished apples” in the United Kingdom and “inglorious fruits and vegetables” in France.13 Labeling perishable foods with “sell by” dates at the Vendor level has also generated recent public scrutiny, since these dates are not regulated through any system nor do they indicate food safety.14 Labeling confusion about sell by dates initiated at the Vendor

8 

C. S. K. Lin, L. A. Pfaltzgraff, L. Herrero-​Davila, E. B. Mubofu, S. Abderrahim, J. H. Clark, A. A. Koutinas, N. Kopsahelis, K. Stamatelatou, F. Dickson, S. Thankappan, Z. Mohamed, R. Brocklesby, and R. Luque, “Food Waste as a Valuable Resource for the Production of Chemicals, Materials, and Fuels,” Energy and Environmental Science 6 (2013): 426‒464. 9  US Energy Information Administration, “Primary Energy Consumption by Source” (Washington, DC: US Department of Energy, 2016). A. D. Cuéllar and M. E. Webber, “Wasted Food, Wasted Energy: The Embedded Energy of Food Waste in the United States,” Environmental Science & Technology 44, no. 16 (2010): 6464‒6469. 10  J. Parfitt, M. Barthel, and S. Macnaughton, “Food Waste within Food Supply Chains: Quantification and Potential for Change to 2050,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 365, no. 1554 (2009): 3065‒3081. 11 Ibid. 12  J. C. Buzby, J. Hyman, H. Stewart, and H. F. Wells, “The Value of Retail-​and Consumer-​Level Fruit and Vegetable Losses in the United States,” Journal of Consumer Affairs 45, no. 3 (2011): 492‒515. 13  M. Godoy, “In Europe, Ugly Sells in the Produce Aisle,” National Public Radio, December 9, 2014, http://​www.npr.org/​sections/​thesalt/​2014/​12/​09/​369613561/​in-​europe-​ugly-​sells-​in-​the-​produce-​aisle. 14  D. Gunders, “Wasted: How America Is Losing up to 40 Percent of Its Food from Farm to Fork to Landfill,” NRDC Issue Paper, IP:12-​06-​B (Washington, DC: National Resources Defense Council, 2012).

The Clean Plate Club?    317 level was responsible for up to 20% of wasted food at the Consumer level in the United Kingdom.15 The Consumer level of the food system primarily creates wasted food and food byproducts that are sent to landfills. The wasted available US food supply has grown from 30% in 1974 to near 40% in 2009, even after accounting for the increased caloric consumption that is driving America’s obesity epidemic.16 Rates of food waste production can be even higher in some communities, where a study in Ithaca-​Tompkins County in New York State (the location of Cornell University and its 19,000 students) found that 60% of edible food was wasted and 72% of that wasted food was sent to landfills.17 Reasons for the creation of wasted food vary, where people discard potentially edible food due to actual or perceived spoilage, over-​buying, or simply because they did not like something. Although donations of unused or unwanted canned or packaged food capture a very small volume of food waste (3% of wasted food in the Ithaca-​Tompkins County study), the relatively short shelf life of items like fresh fruits and vegetables, milk, eggs, and meats has challenged the feasibility of donation schemes for perishable food from individual households, and most of this food ends up in landfills. The Consumer level also accounts for the most significant disposal of food packaging byproduct waste. Packaging, including glass, metal, plastic, paper, and paperboard, produced 31% of US municipal solid waste in 2005, where two-​thirds of that fraction represented food-​packaging byproducts.18 Food packaging can increase the shelf life of foods and is an important component of food convenience, traceability, and marketing.19 While most food packaging is recyclable, in practice only 6%‒50% of packaging by-​products enter recycling streams for partial resource recovery.20 The majority of wasted food and waste byproducts from all levels of the food system end up in landfills, where the most significant impact is created through the formation of greenhouse gases by food and byproduct decomposition. Wasted food represented 14.6% of total municipal solid waste entering US landfills in 2013.21 Although both food byproducts and wasted food are often compostable, in practice only 3% of food waste is composted in the United States,22 mostly due to the lack of composting infrastructure. 15 

WRAP, “Consumer Insight: Date Labels and Storage Guidance,” May 2011, http://​www.wrap. org.U.K./​downloads/​Technical_​report_​dates_​final.cf179742.11175.pdf. 16  K. D. Hall, J. Guo, M. Dore, and C. C. Chow, “The Progressive Increase of Food Waste in America and Its Environmental Impact,” PLoS One 4, no. 11 (2009): e7940. 17  M. Griffin, J. Sobal, and T. A. Lyson, “An Analysis of a Community Food Waste Stream,” Agriculture and Human Values 26 (2009): 67‒81. 18  K. Marsh and B. Bugusu, “Food Packaging—​Roles, Materials, and Environmental Issues,” Journal of Food Science 72, no. 3 (2007): R39‒55. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. 21  US EPA, “Total MSW Generation (by Material), 2013,” 2016, https://​www3.epa.gov/​epawaste/​ nonhaz/​municipal/​images/​2012_​totl_​msw_​gen_​fig4_​lg.png. 22  US EPA, “Municipal Solid Waste Generation, Recycling and Disposal in the United States: Tables and Figures for 2010,” http://​www.epa.gov/​osw/​nonhaz/​municipal/​pubs/​2010_​MSW_​Tables_​and_​ Figures_​508.pdf.

318    J. Hatala Matthes and E. Hatala Matthes Within landfills, wasted food and byproducts rich in organic matter fuel the growth of methane-​producing microbes, which thrive within the low oxygen condition of landfills. Globally, landfills produce 25%‒27% of all anthropogenic methane emissions23 and in the United States landfills represent 18%‒25% of anthropogenic methane emissions,24 which is a greenhouse gas eighty-​two times more powerful than carbon dioxide on a twenty-​year timeframe. Composting wasted food and byproducts emits less total greenhouse gases than landfilling and promotes the cycling of renewable soil resources, however municipal compositing facilities tend to be more energy-​intensive than landfills.25

Conceptions of Waste With these facts about the extent and variety of food waste problems in mind, it is helpful to step back and consider the different ways in which the concept of waste itself can be understood. The discussion so far has assumed a common-​sense understanding of waste, or one that is given an operative definition in the scientific literature. Upon further analysis, it may turn out that using waste in these ways is misleading; or, alternatively, that the concept of waste is broader than it initially appeared. However, we should, of course, be wary of arriving at a conception of waste that is too revisionist, rendering our common use of the term unintelligible. For one, waste can be understood in both a descriptive and a normative sense. A normative concept is one that carries with it a prescription in favor of or against a certain action, attitude, state of affairs, and so on, whereas a descriptive concept lacks any direct implications concerning how things should be. So, for example “death” is a descriptive concept, whereas “murder” is normatively laden. Although we may often have negative associations with death, we can use it as a purely descriptive concept that indicates whether an organism is alive. On the other hand, to invoke the concept of murder is to indicate that the action should not be performed (as in “but that would be murder!”). Insofar as there is a descriptive sense of waste, it seems to refer simply to the byproduct of a process, or what is left over. So, for instance, we might descriptively refer to a cantaloupe rind or carrot peels as waste. If it is true that these items are waste in the descriptive sense, then by identifying them as waste, we do not imply that their existence is to be avoided. And this does seem true: we do not generally bemoan the production of carrot peels the way we do the production of bread that goes uneaten. This is, of course, not to say that there might not be better or worse things to do with this waste (e.g., compost it vs. send it to a landfill). Although we often have unpleasant associations with it, 23 

Ciais et al., “Carbon and Other Biogeochemical Cycles.” US EPA, “Inventory of U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sinks: 1990‒2013” (Washington, DC: US Environmental Protection Agency, 2015). 25  X. F. Lou and J. Nair, “The Impact of Landfilling and Composting on Greenhouse Gas Emission—​A Review,” Bioresource Technology 100, no. 16 (2009): 3792‒3798. 24 

The Clean Plate Club?    319 excrement is also a form of food waste, in the descriptive sense. As new parents who deal with a lot of waste from a tiny human, we can certainly attest to the unpleasantness of this waste, but it is certainly not a bad thing: on the contrary, proper production of waste is a sign that your child is healthy. However, in the context of food, “waste” is seldom deployed in the descriptive sense. Rather, to identify food waste (whether in a household, a supermarket, or an agricultural operation) is typically to make a claim about something that ought not to be done. We do not usually need to make explicit the claim that food ought not be wasted, any more than the claim that people ought not be murdered, because these are normative concepts that carry with them a prescription against their enactment. It is helpful to recognize that waste is typically invoked in a normative sense, especially when it comes to food, because it can draw out attention to cases where there may be slippage between descriptive and normative uses of the concept (as in the pizza example that we will discuss). Indeed, it seems that even the kind of thing picked out by these two senses of waste is itself different. As already noted, it seems like waste is usually used in the descriptive sense to identify the byproduct of a process. However, when used in the normative sense, waste seems less to refer to the byproduct of a process than to something that has failed to be used or whose potential is unrealized. This in itself may not be too surprising: after all, if byproducts are inevitable, and the philosophical dictum of “ought implies can” holds, then it would be strange if we had a normative concept that referred to such byproducts as things that ought not to be produced. This is, of course, not to say that we do not make further normative claims about what we ought to do with waste byproducts, as in the case of carrot peels: we might, for instance, think they ought to be managed by appropriate waste treatment facilities, but note that the “waste” in “waste management” is being used in the descriptive sense. It is intriguing to realize that the single concept of waste can refer both to the conclusion of a process and to a process that was never begun. While our empirical overview describes many forms of waste that occur in the production and distribution of food, we can see that the term “food waste” in the literature is typically understood (normatively) as food that is uneaten (Category 4). Note that in this context, waste is defined relative to a specific purpose (i.e., nourishment): it would still be wasteful to use canned goods as doorstops, even though they are being put to use. It seems to follow that food that is eaten is not wasted, at least within a reasonable range of consumption habits. This is certainly the implication of the childhood chastising that we introduced at the outset of the essay: if you just eat the leftover broccoli on your plate, then it will not have gone to waste. To be sure, we can acknowledge that gluttonous gorging on food might be wasteful, even though the food is eaten, but this kind of consumption is not typically counted as “waste” in the studies discussed so far.26 However, it is reasonable to ask: Why not? How should we really understand the concept of “waste” in

26 

There are exceptions. For example, see Hall et al., “The Progressive Increase of Food Waste in America and Its Environmental Impact.”

320    J. Hatala Matthes and E. Hatala Matthes these discussions? Perhaps there is justification for thinking of waste in even stronger terms than are typically employed in the empirical literature. As Mark Sagoff notes in a broader discussion of our consumptive practices, “defining or characterizing wastefulness may be an essential task in determining what we most need to reform about the way goods are produced and consumed.”27 Philosophers have not written an extensive amount about waste, when it comes to food or otherwise. Yet common themes emerge in these writings that call into question the straightforward understanding of food waste as uneaten food that seems to be operative in the empirical literature. For instance, Michael J. Thompson appears to define waste as follows: Waste comes into play whenever some thing, or some person, or some group, or aspect of nature is unable to bring forth into the world the maximum of its abilities and potentialities, either because of non-​use, under-​use, or misuse. For an activity not to be wasteful, it needs to be able to satisfy the greatest amount of potential needs that any specific resource possesses and it also has to be able to employ resources for the benefit of the society as a whole, and not merely for an exclusive part of, or at the expense of it.28

Note that this is a far more radical construal of waste than the sense employed in the statistic that roughly half the food we produce is wasted. That statistic uses “waste” in the conventional sense found in discussions of food waste; namely, food products that are thrown out without being consumed. According to Thompson’s definition, on the other hand, any food that is not made maximally beneficial to society as a whole is wasted. This would seem to entail that much of the food that we eat as individual consumers is in fact “wasted,” since it could better meet societal needs if it were redistributed to those who are hungry.29 Implications of this kind can also be found in accounts of waste that are at pains to pick out a definition that gels with our pre-​theoretical intuitions about the concept. Andrew Jason Cohen provides an exhaustive analysis of waste that is tightly circumscribed by various common uses of the term.30 He argues that waste is “(a) any process wherein something useful becomes less useful and that produces less benefit 27  Mark Sagoff, “Consumption,” in A Companion to Environmental Philosophy, ed. Dale Jamieson (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001). 28  Michael J. Thompson, “On the Ethical Dimensions of Waste,” Archives for Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy 101, no. 2 (2015): 255‒256. 29  This evokes Peter Singer’s argument that we ought to reduce ourselves to the level of marginal utility in order to assist suffering others. Peter Singer, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 1, no. 3 (1972): 229‒243. Interestingly, this very idea is explored in Dorothy Blair and Jeffery Sobal, “Luxus Consumption: Wasting Food Resources through Overeating,” Agriculture and Human Values 23 (2006): 63‒74. They define “luxus consumption” as “consumption beyond metabolic need” and assess the ecological impact of its increasing prevalence in United States in the 1990s. 30  Andrew Jason Cohen, “A Conceptual and (Preliminary) Normative Exploration of Waste,” Social Philosophy and Policy 27, no. 2 (2010): 233‒273.

The Clean Plate Club?    321 than is lost—​where benefit and usefulness are understood with reference to the same metric—​or (b) the result of such a process,” ultimately suggesting that it is wrong to prevent someone else from using what you are wasting, by your own lights, though tempered by the qualification that it is for the sake of the others’ preservation.31 Although this is not as radical as the maximizing account suggested by Thompson, it is still predicated on the idea that waste results any time that something could be “better” used. Bernard Baumrin notes that according to a maximizing utilitarian, any time that is not spent making the world better is “wasted,” another way of describing the demandingness of that moral theory.32 Yet a further remark draws out the fact that we need not think of usefulness in maximizing terms in order to arrive at the conclusion that much of our time is wasted, morally speaking. He notes: “Acts are not morally neutral when they have as a consequence the failure to do something else of great value, and, though it might go without saying, there is always something of value worth doing.”33 Even if we do not adhere to the notion that we should always be making the best use of some resource (be it time, food, or something else), the idea that a resource is wasted when we could just do something better with it already places significant normative demands on how our resources are employed. Indeed, all of the philosophical reflections on waste briefly described here yield a normative conception of waste that is far broader, and consequently more demanding, than the conception that we typically employ. Thompson, Cohen, and Baumrin all begin their analyses of waste with reflections on Locke’s second proviso on property: “As much as any one can make use of to any advantage of life before it spoils, so much he may by labour fix a property in: whatever is beyond this is more than his share, and belongs to others.”34 But perhaps we should pause before predicating our understanding of waste on the thoughts of a philosopher who viewed the pre-​colonization Americas as “wild woods and uncultivated waste.”35 Putting aside the fact that Locke was simply wrong in claiming that Native Americans had not actively shaped their environment, this claim illustrates the dangers in thinking of waste only in relation to potential use.36 Not all who wander are lost, and surely not all that is unused is wasted. To view wilderness as a wasteland betrays an evaluative outlook perverted by utilitarian preoccupations. It may feel as if we have now gone far afield of our primary topic. You might agree that viewing all uncultivated land as waste is a mistake, but note that the application of this thought to the issue of food waste is unclear. After all, food has already been cultivated: it has an explicit purpose that is not being met when it is simply thrown away. However, 31 

Although Cohen’s formulation implies that self-​preservation is a sufficient, not necessary, condition for such wastefulness to be morally wrong. 32  Bernard Baumrin, “Waste,” Journal of Social Philosophy 24, no. 3 (1993): 11. 33 Ibid., 18. 34  John Locke, Second Treatise, II. 31. 35 Ibid. 36  For discussion, see John O’Neill, “Wilderness, Cultivation and Appropriation,” Philosophy & Geography 5, no. 1 (2002): 35‒50.

322    J. Hatala Matthes and E. Hatala Matthes the tight connection between waste and potential use may have more dramatic implications for our thinking about individual food waste than it initially appears. If individuals wasting food is a vice, consider the corresponding virtue. On a strict use-​based understanding of waste, it seems that virtue would be something like efficiency: every item is used for its intended purpose (where on some accounts this will be its best purpose, variously defined). So with regard to individual food consumption, you should make sure that all the food that you purchase for consumption is eaten. To the extent that you fail to do this, you are wasting food. This is in essence the goal that the US EPA promotes in their literature on food waste.37 However, as with other virtue‒vice pairs, it is not obvious that taking any means to avoid a vice renders your action virtuous. Think of a time you were at the dinner table, fully sated, with a single slice of pizza left in the box. Everyone is stuffed, but inevitably someone will pick up the slice, intoning the maxim that “we shouldn’t let it go to waste.” We doubt we are alone in recalling many such scenarios. Is eating the last slice of pizza so as to avoid “waste” an instance of virtuous behavior? According to Aristotle’s “doctrine of the mean,” virtues are always the point of moderation between two vicious extremes. Now, many philosophers have critiqued the doctrine of the mean as a general account of the virtues, but that does not mean that Aristotle was not on to something. Thinking about our individual behavior with respect to food waste looks like a good example. While it certainly seems like a vice to gratuitously throw out edible food, it also seems problematic to seek perfect efficiency in our food habits, either by gorging ourselves in order to avoid “waste,” or, for that matter, through obsessive calorie counting in an effort to purchase the precisely correct amount of food for your household. That level of moral fussiness does not exactly feel like a virtue, any more than obsessively telling the truth (even to the proverbial murderer at the door) exemplifies the virtue of honesty. These brief thoughts suggest that, upon reflection, we are not actually inclined to think of waste, in the normative sense, exclusively in relation to potential use: we do not really think that every missed opportunity to use something is objectionably wasteful, and indeed, the pizza example suggest that slippage between the descriptive and normative senses of waste can have somewhat perverse consequences. Recall that earlier we noted that it seems like waste is usually used in the descriptive sense to identify the byproduct of a process, whereas it is used in the normative sense, to refer to something that has failed to be used or whose potential is unrealized. Rather than regarding the leftover slice of pizza as the descriptive waste byproduct of a delicious dinner, the use-​ based food waste concept mistakenly compels us to regard it as the normative waste of unrealized potential. While waste certainly is not unrelated to potential use, the examples considered so far suggest that an important element in our normative understanding of waste is that

37 

“Reducing Wasted Food at Home,” March 31, 2016, https://​www.epa.gov/​recycle/​ reducing-​wasted-​food-​home.

The Clean Plate Club?    323 it is gratuitous: our sense of wastefulness is not predicated only on potential use (itself a descriptive notion), but rather on a prior normative understanding of appropriate use that sets limits on deficient and excessive use. On this conception of waste, we can make sense of how both nonuse and excessive use can qualify as wasteful. This may be why we find aggregate statistics about individual food waste so troubling: we do not think it is appropriate at all to simply throw out a third of the food we buy. This is not just a waste of food, of course, but also a waste of money: we certainly do not think it is appropriate to effectively burn our money. Interestingly, though, the individual instances of nonuse that add up to these troubling statistics may not seem inappropriate to us at all. Some salad greens are wilted and slimy, so we throw them out. The last serving of cereal has gone stale, so we throw it out. The milk is starting to smell rancid, so we throw it out. Surely, if half the carton has spoiled, we are likely to bemoan this as a waste, but a little milk that turns before anyone gets around to drinking it is just the cost of doing business. Again, we are not perfectly efficient predictors of our food needs. Of course, there are many everyday behaviors that can seem troubling when we aggregate them. There is very little we are willing to drop $300 on, yet spending less than a dollar a day seems like no big deal (hence, the prevalence of converting to daily metrics in marketing). Clearly there is a framing effect at work here that affects our judgments about what is appropriate to spend or waste, but it is not obvious that the aggregate frame is necessarily the right one to employ. Indeed, when it comes to our normative thinking about individual actions, it is not implausible to think that the aggregate frame may be the distorting one. Recognizing that our understanding of waste depends not merely on potential use but on a prior normative understanding of appropriate use also accounts for cultural variability in the norms surrounding what is regarded as waste. This is a welcome consequence, and, contrary to appearances, does not raise the specter of moral relativism. For example, though we might agree that disrespecting another person is, other things being equal, universally morally objectionable, surely what qualifies as disrespect will be deeply embedded in various cultural norms. To acknowledge that what qualifies as waste will vary cross-​culturally is not to slide into cultural relativism, but to be appropriately sensitive to the diversity of cultural norms and the ways they inform a potentially universalizable set of thick ethical norms. There is a worry here that this move will excuse wasteful behavior that seems intuitively problematic but is acceptable within a given cultural context. But this is not an ad hoc effort to give an easy pass to the affluent, chalking up their less efficient use of resources to a more permissive waste norm. Indeed, there are a variety of cultural practices, from the potlatch ceremonies of the Pacific Northwest tribes to the ritual destruction and reconstruction of temples in parts of Laos, that might be regarded as “wasteful” according to certain Western cultural norms.38 Neither does it render anyone immune from waste-​based criticism of

38 

For discussion of the latter practice, see Anna Karlstrom, “Authenticity,” in Heritage Keywords, ed. Kathryn Lafrenz Samuels and Trinidad Rico (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2015).

324    J. Hatala Matthes and E. Hatala Matthes their practices. It simply encourages us to think about waste in the context of the various cultural norms within which understandings of appropriate use will inevitably be embedded. Another welcome consequence of acknowledging the cultural roots of use norms is that these norms are sensitive to influence and change. Indeed, we have seen examples of such changes. Consider, for instance, the rise of recycling or the increasing occurrence of dryscaping in the western United States. These are instances in which behaviors that were once regarded as culturally acceptable (sending all of your garbage to landfills, expending excessive volumes of water on cultivating a grass yard in an unfit climate) became regarded as wasteful. Thus, if we can zero in on an independently justifiable understanding of appropriate use for a given cultural context, we can argue that it ought to be adopted and that we ought to engage in campaigns to alter cultural norms surrounding waste in that context.

Food Waste and Individual Responsibility What might this argument look like in the context of food waste? One approach might be to pursue a strictly non-​consequentialist justification. So, for example, we might argue that leaving broccoli uneaten on your plate when other people are starving is disrespectful, and that is the concern that ought to drive our moral thinking about food waste, independently of whether cultivating a norm against uneaten broccoli has any effect on reducing the incidence of starvation. This approach is not without its appeal. However, it is worrisome to disconnect our thinking about waste norms from the consequences of our actions when there is so much that needs to be done in confronting the relevant problems. This is especially so if focus on our individual wasteful behavior might disincline us to pursue other activities that could make more of a difference. Moreover, it is difficult to spell out what precisely is disrespectful about not eating while others go hungry. In many contexts, this behavior will be private, so it will not express disrespect toward anyone in particular, and it is not clear what general principle of respectfulness the claim about food waste might be an instance of. It certainly does not seem to be true that it is disrespectful to forgo any opportunity just because it is unavailable to someone else. Nor does this even seem to be the case for injustices regarding other basic needs (is it disrespectful to forgo sleep when others are unfairly tired?). This is not to say that there is no way to make out this argument, but appeal to disrespect does not seem to provide a straightforward explanation for why we should cultivate certain cultural norms surrounding food waste.39 Although arguments against vices can, of course, come apart from strictly consequentialist 39 

Thanks to Kate Nolfi for pressing us on this point.

The Clean Plate Club?    325 concerns, this is a context in which some relationship to the production of helpful consequences seems desirable. So compare with the other two examples mentioned in the previous argument. Now, on the one hand, there are familiar philosophical worries about our moral obligations to modify individual behavior when our individual actions seem to make no difference.40 These collective action puzzles will be addressed directly in other chapters in this volume.41 However, putting those worries aside, we can see how large numbers of people modifying their behavior with respect to recycling and dryscaping could collectively have a significant impact on resource use. And if we have good moral reason to improve our resource use in these ways, then we might argue that we ought to attempt to shift cultural norms in a way that will help achieve those goals. But what of individual food waste? What would be the consequences of large numbers of people altering their food consumption habits? Surely the answer to this question will depend not just on how individuals conceive of wasteful behavior, but what kinds of actions they take to combat wastefulness (e.g., being a card-​carrying member of the Clean Plate Club). Let us consider, for the sake of argument, that we ought to modify our norms such that all uneaten (or gluttonously eaten) food is regarded as wasteful. Now, consider two different ways in which individuals might modify their behavior in order to avoid being wasteful. First, they might Buy Better, modifying their food purchasing behavior so as to reduce the amount of purchased food that goes to waste. Second, they might maintain their food purchasing behavior but Distribute Better, modifying their food donating behavior by making a concerted effort to ensure that purchased food that they will not consume will be distributed to the hungry (for instance, via local food banks). These are both suggestions made by the EPA. What will be the consequences of Buy Better? For one, individuals would throw out less food because they would do a better job purchasing only what they need. This on its own would have an impact on methane emissions from landfills (again, we are assuming that large numbers of people are engaging in these behavior modifications). While landfills represent a significant fraction of anthropogenic methane emissions, the burden of these greenhouse gases represents a small fraction of individual carbon emissions compared to the amount of carbon used in fossil fuel combustion for transportation, heat, and embedded within other goods and services. Even if 75% of the 2013 US landfill methane emissions were produced by wasted food (an estimate on the high end) and assuming that these emissions were spread among the US population over the age of ten, these emissions represent just 2.5% of the total average individual US carbon

40  For example, see Jonathan Glover, “It Makes No Difference Whether or Not I Do It,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes, 49 (1975): 171‒209; Shelly Kagan, “Do I Make a Difference?” Philosophy and Public Affairs 39, no. 2 (2011): 105‒141; Walter Sinnott-​Armstrong, “It’s Not My Fault: Global Warming and Individual Moral Obligations,” in Climate Ethics, ed. Stephen M. Gardiner et al. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). 41  In particular, see Nefsky, in this volume.

326    J. Hatala Matthes and E. Hatala Matthes footprint.42 Although this is a small fraction of the average individual carbon footprint, we can put this value into context by considering that 19% of the individual carbon budget is used for vehicle fuel, 15% for electricity generation, 5% for health care, 4% for air travel, and 1.5% for clothing (a meager value when considering the resources spent on green marketing of eco-​chic fashion).43 While the potential direct impacts of wasted food on landfill methane emissions are relatively small at the individual level, so are the carbon impacts of most goods and services. That carbon emissions are embedded within essentially everything that we use to support and enjoy our lives highlights the “death by a thousand cuts” nature of climate change, where we may incur benefits from even modest carbon savings. From a different perspective, eliminating the landfill methane emissions from individual food waste is equivalent to a 13% reduction in individual vehicle fuel use or a 16% reduction in individual electricity use, processes where increased efficiency can be more challenging to attain because it is tied to basic needs.44 And this simple calculation also ignores the large amount of food waste that occurs before the consumer level, indicating that this is a low estimate for the total impact of food w ​ aste reduction on the global greenhouse gas burden. The effects of Buy Better on the food distribution and production systems will be extremely complicated in reality, but if we assume that a decrease in demand will decrease food production, then there will also be upstream energy savings (particularly of water) from food producers. However, it is not at all clear that this assumption is warranted, given how far food production currently outstrips consumer demand. On a related note, it is not immediately obvious that Buy Better would have any particular effect on food distribution: indeed, increasingly picky buyers might exacerbate waste in the food distribution system as retailers attempt to display and offer only the very best-​looking produce to consumers aiming to buy only what they will use. Ideally, buying better would involve both more efficient purchasing and less picky purchasing, but these two goals might make uneasy companions.45 So where does Buy Better stand? The 2.5% of the individual carbon footprint represented by the landfill emissions from current rates of food waste is a small fraction, particularly when considering that the total elimination of all wasted food is unreasonable. While many actions that reduce carbon emissions are laudable, changing what we buy at the market, and not necessarily the quantity of food, would likely attain a more significant improvement in an individual’s carbon footprint. Food purchasing and consumption constitutes 15% of the average individual US carbon footprint, accounting for both direct and indirect processes within the food system that require fossil fuel use.46

42 

C. M. Jones and D. M. Kammen, “Quantifying Carbon Footprint Reduction Opportunities for U.S. Households and Communities,” Environmental Science & Technology 45, no. 9 (2011): 4088‒4095. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid. 45  For an overview of some efforts along these lines, see “How ‘Ugly’ Fruits and Vegetables Can Help Solve World Hunger,” National Geographic, February 25, 2016, http://​www.nationalgeographic.com/​ magazine/​2016/​03/​global-​food-​waste-​statistics/​. 46 Ibid.

The Clean Plate Club?    327 Changing individual diets by eating less meat and fewer calories generates the largest individual cost savings per unit of carbon reduction compared to many other individual reduction initiatives (e.g., reducing flying, changing thermostat temperatures, buying efficient vehicles, using CFL light bulbs, etc.).47 So buying better by modifying what you buy, and not just how much you buy, has the promise of being more impactful: not with respect to reducing how much food you waste as an individual, but in reducing the upstream carbon impacts of your purchasing. The complex nature of carbon emissions, and the fact that they are embedded within essentially all products, also create important downstream consequences for what individuals buy with their savings from potential diet changes and reduced food waste. Models of consumer behavior indicate that cost savings frequently shift consumption to other goods, not necessarily creating either an appreciable decrease in overall resource consumption or individual carbon footprint.48 While individuals might initially save significant financial and carbon resources through changing diet and reducing wasted food, the lasting impact of their efforts depends on how those resources are reallocated. For example, if a family of four is using their modest annual cost savings from food waste reduction to buy a new television, they might easily consume (or even exceed) the amount of greenhouse gas savings that they accrued from food w ​ aste reduction throughout the year. A single-​minded focus on food waste at the individual level does not capture the whole picture, and a more holistic attention to behavioral changes would create a more significant and lasting impact on individual carbon emissions. What of Distribute Better? The primary way that individuals could reduce their individual food waste in this way is by donating to those in need. This modification would ostensibly increase the supply of food available for the hungry at local food banks. However, the donation of perishables at the individual level is tricky, where a recent study showed that household donations reclaimed only 3% of wasted food.49 Due to the frequency with which it would be necessary, donating perishables would be burdensome on individuals who need to get the food from their houses to a food bank. Moreover, if we assume that opened containers cannot be donated, it is not even clear how much perishable food that individual consumers could reasonably hope to donate. This is, of course, not to say that individuals might not buy extra food for the purpose of donation, but we are focusing here on how to reduce waste given extant purchasing patterns. So it looks like promoting a modified conception of what counts as food waste, and buying better in response, might have some modest effects on our individual food waste, and some more substantial effects on our individual carbon footprints. However, in order to be effective, this shift would need to be accompanied by a range of other modifications in our purchasing and energy-​use behaviors. And as noted, individual food 47 Ibid.

48  T. Garnett, “Where Are the Best Opportunities for Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions in the Food System (Including the Food Chain)?” Food Policy 36, Supplement 1 (2011): S23. 49  Griffin et al., “An Analysis of a Community Food Waste Stream.”

328    J. Hatala Matthes and E. Hatala Matthes waste comprises only a very small fraction of overall carbon emissions. Far more significant progress could be made on this score by changes in the production and distribution of food, changes that individuals are in a relatively weak position to influence through their purchasing behavior alone. Thus, when it comes to emissions, it is not clear that a focus on shifting norms surrounding individual food waste behavior will yield results that will make a significant contribution toward affecting the substantial problems caused by waste in the food system. To be clear, there is absolutely nothing wrong with setting individual goals to reduce food waste, and it looks like widespread adoption of more efficient waste norms would have some modest positive results. However, it is important to remember that individuals have a limited capacity to adopt behavioral changes in their everyday lives. Moreover, adopting certain small goals can lead to the self-​licensing of other problematic behaviors.50 To that end, we need to think very carefully about what norms and virtues we want to devote time and resources to promoting. The extent of problems in the agricultural production and distribution systems relative to the benefits of widespread changes in individual food ​waste norms suggests that a more productive focus might be the promotion of virtues of civic engagement surrounding food and other environmental issues. Institutional changes have the potential for far greater improvements in the food and agriculture system, and individuals have a role to play in influencing those changes through activism and lobbying of their elected representatives. For instance, France has recently made it illegal for supermarkets to throw out edible food.51 It is difficult to imagine a governmental response to food waste of this sort in the United States without significant grassroots support. Moreover, promoting virtues of civic engagement has the potential for crossover effects surrounding other moral and political issues in contrast with the narrow scope of modifying individual food waste behavior. Laws requiring food producers and distributors to donate more food also have the potential to make more significant contributions to combatting hunger than the donation of food by private individuals. Indeed, though there is surely an important relationship between food waste and hunger, the rhetoric surrounding this relationship at the individual level can be misleading. For instance, a recent National Geographic article on food waste and world hunger notes: “Some U.S. schools, where children dump up to 40% of their lunches into the trash, are setting up sharing tables, letting students serve themselves portions they know they’ll eat, allotting more time for lunch, and scheduling it after recess—​all proven methods of boosting consumption.”52 For one, this approach to food waste plays into some of the same worries about waste norms already discussed: it 50 

See, for instance, Anna C. Merritt, Daniel A. Effron, and Benoît Monin, “Moral Self-​ Licensing: When Being Good Frees Us to Be Bad,” Social and Personality Psychology Compass 4, no. 5 (2010): 344‒357; Ayelet Fishbach and Ravi Dhar, “Goals as Excuses or Guides: The Liberating Effect of Perceived Goal Progress on Choice,” Journal of Consumer Research 32, no. 3 (December 2005): 370‒377. 51  Roberto A. Ferdman, “France Is Making It Illegal for Supermarkets to Throw Away Food,” May 22, 2015, https://​www.washingtonpost.com/​news/​wonk/​wp/​2015/​05/​22/​france-​is-​making-​it-​illegal-​for-​ supermarkets-​to-​throw-​away-​edible-​food/​. 52  “How ‘Ugly’ Fruits and Vegetables Can Help Solve World Hunger.”

The Clean Plate Club?    329 is not obvious that “boosting consumption” is a noble approach to eliminating food waste, especially considering the epidemic of childhood obesity in the United States. Moreover, though, school children throwing out a smaller percentage of their lunches have a tenuous connection with the alleviation of hunger. Food waste and world hunger are often mentioned in the same breath, and while this may play an important role in educating people about these broad problems and their relationship, we should be wary of implying that individual reduction of food waste is going to make significant strides toward eliminating hunger. The importance of institutional change when it comes to combatting hunger is not only about the more substantial contributions that food producers and distributors can make to food banks. Rather, it is about alleviating the pressure on food banks as an adequate solution to the problem of hunger in the first place. For instance, Mark Winne offers a critical appraisal of the relationship between food banks and food producers and distributors, arguing that what should be an emergency network for the hungry has come to function primarily as a mechanism for managing waste from a broken food system without making any substantial changes to that system. Summing up, he writes: All of this means that we must confront policymakers with the reality of food insecurity and hunger in North America and not let them use the private network of emergency food providers as an excuse to withhold adequate public funding to get the job done. Surely this would be better than expending the countless resources we do now to mobilize the thousands of people who are needed to manage the surplus food that our food system giveth and just as easily taketh away.53

Addressing food insecurity must ultimately be about providing accessible and affordable food that people can acquire, as Winne puts it “through normal channels.”54 Perhaps the innovation of stores like Daily Table (founded by Doug Rauch, formerly of Trader Joe’s), which sells surplus food from other vendors at discount prices might be part of an approach that unites concerns about hunger and food waste in a sustainable fashion.55

Conclusion This discussion suggests that the problem of food waste is more of a political and institutional problem than one of individual moral responsibility. This conclusion should have an effect both on what we do about food waste and how we talk about it. Current food waste rhetoric that focuses on individual consumer behavior has the potential to be a 53 

Mark Winne, “Waste Not, Want Not?” Agriculture and Human Values 22 (2005): 203‒205. Ibid., 205. For a recent discussion of the relationship between food banks and food security, see Domenic Vitiello et al., “From Commodity Surplus to Food Justice: Food Banks and Local Agriculture in the United States,” Agriculture and Human Values 32 (2015): 419‒430. 55  Daily Table, “About Us,” March 31, 2016, http://​dailytable.org/​about-​us/​our-​story/​. 54 

330    J. Hatala Matthes and E. Hatala Matthes “double diversion,” misleading at best because it obscures the disproportionality larger role played by institutions in causing food waste problems and pernicious at worst if this prevents us from effectively addressing the problem.56 This, of course, does not mean that individuals do not have a role to play in addressing that problem, but it suggests that discharging our moral duty with respect to reducing food waste will be largely a matter of political advocacy and activism rather than a matter of making substantial changes to our individual food behaviors. By all means, we should make reasonable efforts to not overbuy food and to avoid being overly picky about our produce. But these efforts should not lead us to neglect our responsibility to fight for systematic changes that have a much greater potential to solve the problem of food waste.57

56 

See William R. Freudenburg, “Environmental Degradation, Disproportionality, and the Double Diversion: Reaching Out, Reaching Ahead, and Reaching Beyond,” Rural Sociology 71, no. 1 (2006): 3‒32. Thanks to Chris Schlottman for making this connection. 57  Thanks to audience members at the 2016 UVM Food Ethics Workshop for helpful feedback on this essay. Thanks, in particular, to Tyler Doggett for thoughtful written comments.

Pa rt  I V

F O OD J U ST IC E A N D S O C IA L J U ST IC E

chapter 15

R acial Imperia l i sm and Fo od Tr a di t i ons Lee A. McBride III

Food ethics is a timely topic and a burgeoning field (Dieterle 2015b; Thompson 2015; Boisvert 2014; Kaplan 2012; Allhoff and Monroe 2007; Heldke 2003; Curtin and Heldke 1992). Given my own agrarian leanings, I believe that the ways in which food, fiber, and fuel are cultivated is fundamental to any viable notion of human and ecological well-​being (McBride 2012; Thompson 2010; Wirzba 2003). But one topic that is seldom broached in food ethics is race. This is a sensitive subject, particularly among philosophers. Some seem to maintain a color-​blind ideology, assuming that race is not an integral or salient feature in this discourse. Races are harmful fictions, mere social constructions lacking genetic and biological evidence. Sure, food deserts are bad, but why should such phenomena be linked to race rather than class? (Dieterle 2015a). The problem of food and food cultivation is a problem for all human beings. Race, for these people, is a red herring. Meanwhile, others claim and ardently defend foods along racial lines. Races may be social constructions, yet they capture shared histories and meaningful identities for particular populations. There are concerns of out-​group appropriation and inauthenticity; racial partisanship, in some cases, functions as a means of resistance to colonizing forces (Heldke 2003). Race, from this alternative perspective, is part and parcel of the social landscape. It is a prominent and persistent feature of heritage and social inequity. Still others simply do not know what to think. Polite quietism abounds. This impasse raises a few questions. If “race” is salient to food ethics in any real way, how exactly are we to conceive it? Is the proprietary ownership of particular foods and cooking techniques along racial lines a problem? To address these questions, I exploit a nuanced conception of race developed by Alain Locke (1885‒1954), which allows for a fruitful discussion of racial imperialism and the exchange of cultural products. Foods and foodways are described as cultural products, which likely bear the marks of historical if not present-​day racial contestation. In the end, I argue that there is a place for race in the discussion of food ethics and that we should repudiate racial imperialism and racialized partisanship in the exchange and consumption of food traditions.

334   Lee A. McBride III

Race as Tradition It is difficult to talk about race, partially because, in one sense, race is real; and, in another sense, it is not. Let us take up the latter first. It is now commonly accepted by the scientific community that racial essences do not exist. No human trait (skin color, texture of hair, intellectual aptitude, etc.) is sufficient to distinguish one human population as a distinctive racial type (Zack 2002, 19). As Naomi Zack puts it, “there are no positive individual biological traits for whiteness that are present in all white individuals” (Zack 1997, 33). Furthermore, genetically speaking, intra-​racial variation is far greater than interracial variation; that is, greater genetic variation is found between those people representing the same “race” than between people representing differing “races.” Thus, nothing in biology (including genetics) provides a good causal explanation of racial categorization. Biological notions of race fail to provide us with a concept that is central to biological thinking about human beings (Appiah 1999, 269, 276). In this sense, races, as biological kinds, are not real. This, at least, shows us the contingency of these categories. It shows us that racial categorization (among human beings) is not necessary. A world without race existed before, and the world could be refashioned without racial categorization in the future. But that is not to say that racial categorizations and identities have not had a real effect in the world. We must recognize that modern racial categorization was fabricated (or socially constructed) in the eighteenth century. Immanuel Kant was one of the first philosophers to systematically work out a theory of race, hoping to stimulate further investigation into the natural (i.e., essential) distinctions between the four basic racial groups—​the white race, the Negro race, the Hun-​Mongol race, and the Hindustani race (Kant 2000, 19‒20; cf. Jefferson 1982, 143). While local social groupings are a natural feature of human association, this racial categorization was a new conceptual development, fixated on readily observable characteristics (i.e., phenotype). Racial categories were imposed upon populations, haphazardly lumping peoples of differing ethnicities, cultures, languages, classes, and religions into one race. Racial categorization, so understood, was most often hierarchical, ranking the races in order of superiority—​sorting out the intelligent, superior race from those animalistic, degenerate races fit for subjugation or strenuous labor (Kant 2000, 17n3; Jefferson 1982, 139‒140). Kant, of course, attempts to establish the superiority of the race hailing from “the area between 31 and 53 degrees latitude in the old world,” which holds “the greatest riches of earth’s creation” (Kant 2000, 19). (This spans the area between Berlin and Jerusalem.) Theoretical racial categorization, in turn, made way for racist practices and institutions. For centuries, particular racialized populations were stigmatized and dehumanized, and in many cases stripped of their assets, their labor, or their access to basic material resources (McBride 2017, 225). For centuries, racial categories were reified de jure and de facto. Ethnic and cultural traditions were messily sorted and resorted into racial categories. So, now people of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Bhutanese, and Thai descent stand as representatives of the Asian race. Dark-​skinned

Racial Imperialism and Food Traditions    335 people of Ethiopian, Zimbabwean, South African, Congolese, Nigerian, Ivorian, and Senegalese lineage stand as representatives of the black race. Pale-​skinned people of German, Norwegian, Danish, Dutch, Swiss, French, and English descent represent the white race—​note, the whiteness of Iberian, Northern African, Central European, Mediterranean, Middle Eastern, and Latin American peoples is not taken for granted. Given racist practices and institutions, the stigmatized, the racialized groups, eventually came to recognize, and in some cases embrace, these racial categories and identities. Traditions of resistance with deep historical memories formed. Race has influenced social and material conditions; it has left its egregious marks on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In this sense, race is real. This is not meant to undermine my previous claim that race and racial categorization rest upon a fictitious base. I still affirm that races, as biologically distinct kinds, do not exist in human populations. But race, as a social construction, has been employed to separate people and rank them hierarchically. It has been used as a marker by which honor and dignity is bestowed (or withheld). It has opened (or limited) access and opportunity. Race is still a prominent feature of the twenty-​first century. And, importantly, it would seem that an acknowledgment of race is needed to address past racial injustices and present racial inequities. It is important to notice that races—​if we continue to use these categories—​are contingent and unnecessary social constructions, best understood in terms of social and historical causes, rather than essential, genetic, or physiological causes (Gooding-​ Williams 2006, 92–​95; Harris 1999, 438–​439). Alain Locke suggests that “race in the vital and basic sense is simply and primarily the culture-​heredity” (1989, 192). Race, on this account, names inherited or preferred traits and values passed from generation to generation; it operates as tradition. Cultivated and maintained styles, techniques, and cultural products are the characteristic features of racial groupings. Race then functions as a mere trope imposed upon specific ethnic or cultural groupings. This way of conceiving races—​as traditions—​offers a means for recognizing histories, cultural contributions, and accomplishments of racialized ethnic groups (Carter 2016, 123). Racial cultural characteristics will be born out in cadence, flavors, and tones, since all localized human social groupings, given the available resources and their cultural idiosyncrasies or proclivities, will exhibit provincial characteristics. But again, we must recognize that racial characteristics are contingent rather than inherent or permanent (Locke 2016; 1989, 190). Traditions change over time. Race and culture are not necessarily bound (Locke 1989, 188). The characteristic features of racialized traditions are constantly open to revision or adaptation, whether arising from internal or external impetus. The salient features of group membership as well as the cultural products produced by these traditions have and will continue to transform over time. When the preferred cultural traits and values change, racial re-​molding takes place (Locke 1989, 195). Thus, racial traditions are porous, variegated, and always subject to further alteration (Carter 2016, 123; Harris 1997; 1999, 439; Locke 2016). This means that, even if we deny inherent hereditary traits of a biological or a physiological nature, we can still talk loosely about the characteristics of historical racial traditions (Locke 1989, 191). That is,

336   Lee A. McBride III we can talk loosely about black music or Asian food, even if we reject the notion of races as biological kinds. Given the racial practices and institutions that lay behind our modern ways of grouping and identifying, we should not be surprised to find a lack of mutual respect and nonreciprocal exchange of cultural products. In an article titled “The Contribution of Race to Culture” (1930), Locke writes the following: There is and always has been an almost limitless natural reciprocity between cultures. Civilization, for all its claims of distinctiveness, is a vast amalgam of cultures. The difficulties of our social creeds and practices have arisen in great measure from our refusal to recognize this fact. In other words, it has been the sense and practice of the vested ownership of cultural goods which has been responsible for the tragedies of history and for the paradoxes of scholarship in this matter. (1989, 203)

I am quite convinced of the almost limitless natural reciprocity between cultures. I accept that all modern civilizations are amalgams of previous cultures, and I believe this is well supported by anthropological studies. But it does seem strange, at least prima facie, to say that numerous tragedies of history can be traced back to “a sense and practice of the vested ownership of cultural goods.” This passage seems to suggest that racial groups should stop trying to claim cultural products as distinctly theirs. And this leads to interesting questions. For instance, are jazz and gumbo black American cultural products? Are Bharatanatyam and curries South Asian cultural products? Are we somehow contributing to tragedy by lauding racialized groups for their cultural accomplishments? Here a distinction must be made between recognizing cultural contributions to cultural products and claiming proprietary ownership of cultural products. We can recognize and appreciate the characteristic racial contributions to cultural products without claiming proprietary ownership of them. For instance, we can recognize the contributions of black Americans to gumbo. But to claim gumbo as a proprietary black or African American cultural product, disregards the French and Choctaw contributions (viz., roux, andouille sausage, and filé powder). Moreover, it suggests that only black Americans make authentic gumbo; that only South Asians make authentic curries; that only white people make proper bratwurst. In this fashion, the proprietary ownership of cultural products by racial groups seems to lead us into many dubious claims. But, is this vested interest in the ownership of cultural products responsible for the racist tragedies of history? Yes, let me explain.

Racial Imperialism Imperial aspiration, the attempt by one group to establish its dominance over other social groupings, is a common feature in human history (Locke 1992, 22). In premodern times, imperial powers (e.g., the Romans and the Mughals) aimed to make other groups politically subordinate and they were content to receive tribute and taxes from them as

Racial Imperialism and Food Traditions    337 their subjects. These imperial powers, in large part, did not interfere with the day-​to-​ day life of the various subjugated peoples. Modern imperialism, in contrast, not only attempts to make other groups politically subordinate but also attempts to stamp out the existing cultures and foist its culture upon them (Locke 1992, 25; Gandhi 1996, 12‒24). There is an attempt to make the imperial culture universal; to civilize or develop “primitive” cultures (Shiva 1989, 14; Césaire 2000, 33). The imperialist thinks: “We will all be alike when we have finished civilizing you” (Boisvert 2014, 24). This move to stamp out foreign or “primitive” cultures has an economic motivation (Locke 1992, 25). Dominant groups in the industrialized world typically participate in the effort to further economic profitability and trade dominance by foisting their civilization upon any group maintaining an alien civilization (Locke 1992, 32; Gandhi 1996, 59, 62; Césaire 2000, 54‒55, 77; Kishwar 2005, 199). Locke writes, “Modern empire relies upon the capacity of developing in the life of the subjugated people a demand for the same articles which are current in the life of the governing folk” (1992, 26). That is, new consumer needs and desires must be inculcated in subjugated populations for modern imperialism to thrive. History bears out that social groups representing differing cultures have competed to establish economic and political dominance. The pulling together into “concentrations” or “federations” along racial lines is a novel characteristic of eighteenth-​century politics that extends to the present (Locke 1992, 34). And again “race” is a trope imposed upon ethnic groups, to demarcate dominant groups from subjugated groups by phenotype. Thus, social groups or races are pitted against each other, with one race engaged in imperial practices, attempting to establish its racial superiority, marketing its consumer goods and cultural products, ultimately furthering its economic dominance. This is not merely a question of wrangling over the appropriation of dance steps, musical genres, or cuisine. This is about the claim to racial superiority. This is about the creation of false consumer needs in subjugated peoples. This is about the stamping out of cultural contributions or the discrediting of cultural products fashioned by subjugated racialized peoples for the purpose of economic gain. This vested interest in the ownership of cultural goods lies at the heart of racial imperialism. It is part and parcel of the project of establishing racial dominance (Locke 1992, 30). Kant, of course, claims that the white race diverges least from the original human form and that Western Europe holds the greatest riches of earth’s creation (Kant 2000, 19‒20). And Jefferson finds black people foul smelling, lacking in beauty, and bearing no capacity for reason or imagination and thus suggests that they are “inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind” (1982, 143). By inference, only the white race holds rightful title to cultural products of intelligence, imagination, and beauty. The highest echelons of human achievement are thus racially typecast. W. E. B. Du Bois writes: How easy, then, by emphasis and omission to make children believe that every great soul the world ever saw was a white man’s soul; that every great thought the world ever knew was a white man’s thought; that every great deed the world ever did was

338   Lee A. McBride III a white man’s deed; that every great dream the world ever sang was a white man’s dream. In fine, that if from the world were dropped everything that could not fairly be attributed to White Folk, the world would, if anything, be even greater, truer, better than now. (2003, 57)

This unabashed attempt to establish white supremacy is but one historical manifestation of racial imperialism. Racial imperialism has caused innumerable (racial) tragedies in history. And a vested interest in the ownership of laudable or valuable cultural products lies at the heart of racial imperialism. So, yes, human beings should seriously consider spurning the idea that any social group has proprietary ownership over any particular cultural product. Or, at least, those human beings interested in pluralism, tolerance, and ideological peace should reject this idea.

Food Traditions as Cultural Products This way of conceiving race and racial imperialism provides an entry point into food ethics. If we recognize food and food traditions as cultural products, we can come to see how natural resources and tradition influence regional foods. We can begin to understand the characteristic features attributed to racialized foodways, even if racial categories are fuzzy and problematic. But we also see that foods and food traditions bear the marks of racial contestation and imperialism, since racial groups have, in fact, fought over the proprietary ownership of foods, cooking techniques, and modes of food production. Historically, cultural exchanges between racial groups have been nonreciprocal, coercive, or gravely unjust (Laudan 2013). In some cases, the foodstuffs made available to subjugated racial groups were limited to the waste materials (e.g., offal) of the dominant group (Ferris 2014; Pilcher 2012; Opie 2010). In other cases, the mestizo’s use of corn flour, in contrast to the Spaniard’s wheat flour, was initially coded as a mark of heathenism (Pilcher 2012). Even today, racialized or “ethnic” foods are often relegated to street food carts, shacks, buffets, and takeaways, while “fine dining” is reserved for European and Anglo-​American cuisine (Ray 2016, 97; Chen 2012, 436). There are innumerable ways in which race may intersect with food ethics. In the remainder of this piece, I will limit myself to a synoptic discussion of race and cultural appropriation. Cultural appropriation is a bristly topic. The core claim is that one group has misappropriated, usurped, or stolen another group’s cultural product(s). For instance, some claim that Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis commandeered a sound (i.e., rock and roll) that was already well-​established by Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, and Little Richard. Some would claim that Iggy Azalea is now misappropriating hip-​hop culture in the same spirit. Some have taken offense at the British appropriation of Chicken Tikka Masala as its national dish (Majumdar 2009; Nelson and Andrabi 2009). Others claim that Americans have appropriated, distorted, and bastardized various Asian foods (Friedersdorf 2015; Gross 2015; Rogers 2015). In each of these cases, there is the

Racial Imperialism and Food Traditions    339 assumption that there is a lack of respect for the appropriated culture, that there is a distorting or watering-​down of the cultural product, or that the cultural usurpers are operating in an inauthentic manner. And beneath this often lies the assumption that the cultural products are exclusively owned and produced by particular racialized groups. Under this guise, the charges of cultural appropriation reveal the implicit racial contestation. “Rock and Roll was initially black, before it was coopted and white-​washed.” “Hip-​hop music is a black cultural product and thus Iggy Azalea, as a white woman, can neither fully respect the culture nor authentically participate in the production of the music.” “Chicken Tikka Masala is a cognate of curries originating in South Asia, and white British colonialists have appropriated the dish as a Glaswegian innovation.” “White American imperialists produce cheap, low-​grade meals and label them (Chinese) Lo mein, (Vietnamese) Bánh mì, (Japanese) Sushi, etc.—​and that is culturally appropriative.” Again, these types of charges rest upon the idea that racial groups hold proprietary ownership of cultural products. And I hope to discourage the idea that any racial group holds proprietary ownership of particular cultural products. While particular cultural products may have relatively stable features that reflect characteristic racialized molds or qualities, we must recognize that these cultural products are amalgams or composites, bred of cultural intermingling. Locke writes: The Negro cultural product we find to be in every instance itself a composite, partaking often of the nationally typical and characteristic as well, and thus something which if styled Negro for short, is more accurately to be described as “Afro-​American.” . . . American jazz is not a pure Negro folk-​product, but a hybrid product of the reaction of the elements of Negro song and dance upon characteristic popular and general elements of American life. (2012, 241)

He continues, “jazz is one-​third Negro Folk idiom, one-​third ordinary middle-​class American sentiment, and one-​third spirit of the ‘machine-​age’ ” (198). One may dispute the proportions, but I think the point stands. All cultural products, even those bearing the characteristic racial features, are hybrids or composites of previous cultural exchange. As cultural products, foods and foodways bear the marks of past cultural exchanges. Food anthropologists provide accounts of the earliest documented exchanges of maize or corn, wheat, rice, potatoes, pigs, bananas, and cocoa. With each new cultural exchange, with each new resource, foodstuffs, recipes, and techniques are appropriated and adapted (Chen 2014; Ferris 2014; Laudan 2013; E. Lee 2013; Pilcher 2012; Opie 2010; Tsui 2010; J. Lee 2009; Revel 1982). If this is the case, it seems dishonest or wrongheaded to claim culinary cultural products as the property of a particular racial group. Authenticity in food is itinerant and illusive (Boisvert and Heldke 2016, 157). We should, of course, recognize the cultural contributions of racialized groups, but to claim that only Asian or Vietnamese people can create “authentic” Bánh mì or that only South Asian or Indian people can create “authentic” Chicken Tikka Masala is troubling. Conversely, to claim that black American chefs cannot cook “authentic” Haute (French) cuisine or that white American chefs cannot cook “authentic” Mexican food just seems patently false (Godoy

340   Lee A. McBride III and Chow 2016; Godoy 2015). The intercultural exchanges that comprise modern-​day foods and foodways are extensive and exceedingly complex. To reduce these foods and traditions to romantic snapshots and assign proprietary ownership to one isolated racial group is conceptually and historically dishonest (Heldke 2003, xix, 145). Moreover, the limiting of cultural products to one racial group limits cross-​cultural culinary experimentation and innovation. Even Aimé Césaire writes, “I admit that it is a good thing to place different civilizations in contact with each other; that it is an excellent thing to blend different worlds; that whatever its own particular genius may be, a civilization that withdraws into itself atrophies; that for civilizations, exchange is oxygen” (2000, 33). The categorizing of foods by racial groupings is fraught with conceptual difficulties. I find that more specific, regional labels are preferable when categorizing foods (Ferris 2014; Lee 2013). “Creole” or “low country” cooking do not fall neatly into racial categories, but each captures a regional food, which can be done (and done well) by people of differing racial groups. “Soul” or “African American” food captures a loose categorization of the foods and food techniques prevalent in the United States of America, but it does not extend to all people racialized as black. All dark-​skinned people of African lineage—​from the United States, Brazil, Nicaragua, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Bermuda, or Cuba—​do not share the same languages, comportment, religions, music, or foods. There are huge differences between Chinese, Japanese, and Thai foods—​Asian foods. By the same token, there are huge differences between Chinese and Chinese-​ American foods (Chen 2014; Tsui 2010; J. Lee 2009). There are huge differences in the cultures and foods in the various regions of any large, geographically diverse nation. Racial categories, here, are blunt conceptual tools, which often distort the complex history of food exchange, ingenuity, and struggle. This leads me to think that the policing of racial authenticity in food traditions is wrongheaded. It would seem that both dominant and subjugated racial groups should refrain from claiming proprietary ownership to dishes, foodstuffs, and cooking techniques. Racial partisanship distorts the past and stifles creative possibilities. I am enamored by Cristianos y Moros, Gumbo, SPAM musubi, Currywurst, Korean BBQ tacos, Vietnamese Cajun crawfish boil, and Adobo fried chicken. These dishes, to me, represent cultural reciprocity, cross-​fertilization, and creativity. I do not consider them an affront to authenticity or tradition. I side with Chef Edward Lee, who says “tradition isn’t stagnant, it isn’t meant to be. We have to change, we have to adapt” (E. Lee 2014a, 2014b, 2013, vi‒xi). The musician, Bo Diddley once said: I’m classed as a Negro but I’m not: I’m what you call a black Frenchman, a Creole. All my people are from New Orleans, the bayou country, French, African, Indian, all mixed up. I like gumbo, dig? Hot sauces, too. That’s where my music comes from, all the mixtures. (Boisvert 2014, 115)

There is something (beautiful) to be gained in cultural reciprocity. While food traditions will bear the marks of past exchanges, new ingredients, new techniques, new flavor profiles will be found. Diversity is to be expected. Locke writes:

Racial Imperialism and Food Traditions    341 We cannot expect to blot out the physiognomy of culture, it must have its distinctive features. The particularisms of art are not in themselves objectionable; it is the values of our criticisms, not the values of our art, that must change. We must uproot cultural partisanship and egotism, popular and professional, learn to produce art nationally or racially or in vital localisms even, but to consume it humanly and universally. Not cultural uniformity, but cultural reciprocity is needed. (2012, 181)

We need not feel compelled to assimilate or acquiesce to the dominant or hegemonic culture. We need not double down on our racial loyalties, our racial nationalisms (Boisvert 2014, 115; Heldke 2003, 167; Césaire 2000, 33; hooks 1992, 32). Rather, we need to uproot cultural partisanship. We need to alter the way in which cultural products are consumed. We need (thoroughgoing) cultural reciprocity. And yet, cultural (non-​)recognition is a problem. We should concern ourselves with whether racialized groups in these cultural exchanges are given their due recognition for their cultural contributions (Heldke 2003, 173, 186‒187). In 1939, Locke described the position of the Negro in American culture as paradoxical. Black Americans were socially despised, yet artistically esteemed. While considered economically parasitic, they remained culturally influential, an oppressed minority and a dominant cultural force (Locke 2012, 198). Locke writes: Prejudice, moreover, as a wholesale generalization of social inferiority and cultural incapacity . . . becomes, as a matter of course, more contrary to fact with every decade,—​yes, with every day. The dilemmas of non-​recognition become correspondingly deeper. Apart from the injustice and reactionary unwisdom, there is tragic irony and imminent social farce in the acceptance by “White America” of the Negro’s cultural gifts while at the same time withholding cultural recognition,—​the reward that all genius merits and even requires. (2012, 285‒286)

Under racial imperialist practices, the cultural contributions of subjugated racialized populations are often unrecognized, disregarded, or erased. Merits and honors are not bestowed. Due is not given (Garbes 2015; Godoy 2015). This, Locke says, is unjust—​a social farce. It is here that I find more substantive grounding for the charge of cultural appropriation. When a cultural product is clearly an intercultural composite and the dominant racial group appropriates the product, erasing or trivializing the contributions of subordinate racial groups, there is cultural appropriation. And it is unjust.

Conclusion This chapter is meant to accomplish two goals: first, to articulate a workable conception of race that makes plain the difficulty of discussing race and the cultural products of racial groups; and, second, to offer a relevant means by which to incorporate the

342   Lee A. McBride III consideration of race into food ethics. Appropriating Alain Locke’s conceptual insights, I have described foods and food traditions as cultural products, which likely bear the marks of historical if not present-​day racial contestation. Thus, I have argued that there is a place for race in the discussion of food ethics and that racial imperialism and racial partisanship in the exchange and consumption of foods should be repudiated.

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344   Lee A. McBride III Opie, Frederick Douglass. 2010. Hog and Hominy: Soul Food from Africa to America. New York: Columbia University Press. Pilcher, Jeffrey M. 2012. Planet Taco: A Global History of Mexican Food. New York: Oxford University Press. Ray, Krishnendu. 2016. The Ethnic Restauranteur. New York: Bloomsbury. Revel, Jean-​Francois. 1982. Culture and Cuisine. New York: Da Capo Press. Rogers, Katie. 2015. “Oberlin Students Take Culture War to the Dining Hall.” New York Times, December 21. http://​www.nytimes.com/​2015/​12/​22/​us/​oberlin-​takes-​culture-​war-​to-​the-​ dining-​hall.html?_​r=0. Shiva, Vandana. 1989. Staying Alive. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Zed Books. Szende, Jennifer. 2015. “Food Deserts, Justice and the Distributive Justice Paradigm.” In Just Food, edited by J. M. Dieterle, 57–​67. New York: Rowman & Littlefield. Thompson, Paul B. 2003. “Expanding the Conservation Tradition: The Agrarian Vision.” In Reconstructing Conservation: Finding Common Ground, edited by Ben Minteer and Robert Manning, 77–​92. Washington, DC: Island Press. —​—​—​. 2010. The Agrarian Vision:  Sustainability and Environmental Ethics. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. —​—​—​​. 2015. From Field to Fork: Food Ethics for Everyone. New York: Oxford University Press. Tsui, Bonnie. 2010. American Chinatown: A People’s History of Five Neighborhoods. New York: Free Press. Wirzba, Norman. 2003. “Introduction: Why Agrarianism Matters—​Even to Urbanites.” In The Essential Agrarian Reader, edited by Norman Wirzba, 1–​16. Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint. Zack, Naomi. 1997. “Race and Philosophic Meaning.” In Race/​Sex, edited by Naomi Zack, 29–​43. New York: Routledge. —​—​—​. 2002. “Philosophical Racial Essentialism: Hume and Kant.” In Philosophy of Science and Race, 9–​24. New York: Routledge.

chapter 16

F o od Sovere i g nt y, Ju stice, a nd Indigenous Pe opl e s An Essay on Settler Colonialism and Collective Continuance Kyle Powys Whyte

Introduction: “All the Value that Rice Holds” All people are involved in various ways, from production to consumption to recycling, in food systems. Food systems refer to the complex chains of food production, distribution, consumption, recirculation, and trade. These chains are entangled with human political, cultural, and economic institutions—​institutions through which humans relate to and impact nonhuman lives (e.g., plants, animals) and ecosystems (e.g., coral reefs, forests). Food system chains can be viewed from rather local perspectives, such a neighborhood’s access to fresh vegetables, or from more regional and global perspectives, such as the effects of droughts on the supply and prices of crops in many countries. Food injustice occurs when at least one human group systematically dominates one or more other human groups through their connections to and interactions with one another in local and global food systems. In Michigan in the United States, where I live, white racism, class discrimination, and capitalist exploitation engender domination inflicted on people through the vector of shared food systems. African American Detroiters live in neighborhoods that lack access to nutritious and fresh foods and, due in part to the corresponding diets, suffer the higher than average negative health consequences (White 2011). Farmworkers, largely Latino, are paid low wages for their work and live in housing that is “extremely substandard, including structural defects, lack of clean running water, exposed wires, overcrowding, close proximity to fields (and thus pesticides) and poor sanitation”

346   Kyle Powys Whyte (Michigan Civil Rights Commission 2010, 2‒3). Members of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians have historically had reduced access to culturally appropriate and economically valuable foods from the biodiverse St. Mary’s River (the confluence of two of the Great Lakes) due to pollution from a paper mill and steel mill in Canada and sewage and a tannery site in the United States (Ripley 2016). Recently, the tribe opposed a limestone mine in an area where tribal members harvest plants and animals because the mine threatens its “court-​affirmed [treaty] right to have unlimited access to this land for spiritual and cultural purposes” (Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians 2015). Scholars, activists, leaders, and policymakers offer many norms aimed at correcting food injustices in how goods associated with food systems are allocated, including the rights of all people to affordable and accessible nutritious and culturally appropriate foods and the rights to fair wages and safe work and living environments in food-​ related industries. In terms of democratic norms, people from groups vulnerable to food injustices should have opportunities to voice their concerns to policymakers, serve in advisory, leadership, or official capacities in government, and have access to legal and scientific resources to better advocate for their well-​being. In this essay, I  will focus on another norm that comes up in situations involving human groups that seek to govern themselves in different respects (e.g., culturally, socially, economically, etc.) as collective societies—​such as Indigenous peoples. The norm is food sovereignty or, according to one prominent definition, “the right of peoples and governments to choose the way food is produced and consumed in order to respect livelihoods” (La Via Campesina 2009, 57). Food sovereignty, then, is a norm defending the self-​determination of some collectives, including societies such as peoples and governments, over their food systems. Indigenous peoples often describe food injustice as a violation of their collective self-​ determination over their food systems (Whyte 2016). The Sault Ste. Marie Tribe, referenced earlier, states that the limestone mine violates its treaty right (an agreement with the United States) to self-​determine how its members care for and harvest plants and animals in that area for spiritual and cultural purposes. In many cases in the Great Lakes region, where I work, Indigenous peoples argue that their collective self-​determination over their food systems, or food sovereignty, is tied to the conservation of particular foods, such as wild rice (Donlin 2015; Hoover 2016). A former Minnesota Chippewa tribal president, Norman Deschampe, said: “We are of the opinion that the wild rice rights assured by treaty accrue not only to individual grains of rice, but to the very essence of the resource. We were not promised just any wild rice; that promise could be kept by delivering sacks of grain to our members each year. We were promised the rice that grew in the waters of our people, and all the value that rice holds” (Andow et al. 2009, 3). According to one Anishinaabe elder, Frances Van Zile: “There is no substitute for wild rice. My whole way of being as an Indian would be destroyed. I can’t imagine being without it. And there is no substitute for this lake’s rice” (Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission 1995). But how is it that conserving a particular food could be so closely entwined to collective self-​determination? Is it not also the case that, philosophically, suggesting that certain foods define Indigenous collective self-​determination freezes Indigenous peoples in time in ways that Indigenous leaders and scholars typically resist (Cornell and

Food Sovereignty and Indigenous Peoples    347 Kalt 2000; Goeman and Denetdale 2009; Mihesuah 2009; Lyons 2010)? I will argue that Indigenous peoples’ claims about the connections of particular foods to collective self-​ determination are much more complicated (Huambachano 2015). The claims are more about how colonial domination, in contexts such as US settler colonialism, is organized to undermine certain human institutions that are pivotal to Indigenous peoples’ capacities to exercise collective self-​determination, food sovereignty being a significant part of that. Some food injustices against Indigenous peoples are best understood, I will show, as violations of Indigenous food sovereignty that colonial societies, such as the United States, inflict on Indigenous peoples as strategies in the larger project of undermining Indigenous collective self-​determination. This essay will cover many concepts, and I  request forgiveness from the readers in advance as there will be some concepts I will not have the time to fully define or defend, as well as connections among concepts that I cannot successfully account for in the span of this writing. In the first section, I provide some background on the claim that the conservation of certain foods and food systems is closely connected to a societies’ exercise of collective self-​determination under US colonial conditions, using treaty rights and salmon in the Pacific Northwest as an example. In the second section, I describe, using some of the literature on resilience and Indigenous peoples in the Pacific Northwest, some reasons Indigenous peoples often advance for why particular foods or food systems are associated with one facet of collective self-​determination—​adaptive capacity or resilience. A food system is one collective capacity of a society that motivates its overall adaptive capacity. In the same section, I develop my own concept, collective continuance, to describe the overall degree of adaptive capacity a society has when we take all its collective capacities into account, from food systems to gender systems. Collective capacities contribute to collective continuance because they consist of relationships that have certain qualities, two such qualities being trustworthiness and ecological redundancy, which I will define carefully. In the third section, drawing on Karuk perspective and ideas, I show how US settler colonialism, as a form of domination, seeks to undermine these qualities of relationships, which then compromises Indigenous collective continuance. In the end, I seek to show how, for Indigenous peoples, food injustice can manifest as violations of food sovereignty that some Indigenous people associate with the destruction of particular foods or food systems. Violations of food sovereignty are one strategy of colonial societies, such as US settler colonialism, to undermine Indigenous collective continuance in Indigenous peoples’ own homelands.

“Without Salmon There Is No Treaty Right” Many Indigenous peoples signed treaties with the United States that sanction agreements of the parties to a range of Indigenous rights with respect to US settlement. One type is rights protecting Indigenous peoples’ relationships to particular foods from the

348   Kyle Powys Whyte actions of settlers. Many Indigenous peoples currently claim that the United States has violated treaty rights connected to particular foods and food systems. Billy Frank Jr., the late Nisqually leader, describes his view on the violations against the treaty tribes of western Washington in the Pacific Northwest: Through the treaties, we reserved that which is most important to us as a people: The right to harvest salmon in our traditional fishing areas. But today the salmon is disappearing because the [US] federal government is failing to protect salmon habitat. Without the salmon there is no treaty right. We kept our word when we ceded all of western Washington to the United States, and we expect the United States to keep its word. (Treaty Indian Tribes in Western Washington 2011, 6)

The Treaty Rights at Risk initiative, which Frank helped to lead, issued a report claiming that “as the salmon disappear, our tribal cultures, communities and economies are threatened as never before. Some tribes have lost even their most basic ceremonial and subsistence fisheries—​the cornerstone of Tribal life” (Treaty Indian Tribes in Western Washington 2011, 6). Respect for treaty rights, as treaties are agreements of the highest legal significance connecting different societies, is at the same time respect for the collective self-​determination of the society holding the rights. The tribes in the case are arguing that salmon conservation, treaty rights, and collective self-​determination are of a piece. Frank refers to this elsewhere as “food sovereignty,” which to him involves the idea that “our treaties recognize that food is at the center of our cultures. Indian tribes are sovereign nations, and part of that sovereignty includes access to the traditional foods needed to keep ourselves and our communities healthy and strong” (Frank 2012). According to the Treaty Rights at Risk initiative, the US federal government violates treaty rights by endorsing activities that permit US settlers to establish their own ways of life in western Washington at the expense of Indigenous peoples’ ways of life, which heavily involve salmon but also other treaty-​protected plants and animals. Dams, intensive agriculture, urban development, pollution from industry and other land-​use practices, including recreational activities, are among the actions that advance settlers’ aspirations at the same time that they degrade the habitats of salmon and other species (Treaty Indian Tribes in Western Washington 2011). In settler colonial contexts such as the United States or Canada, treaty rights are, at one level, legal issues that involve court proceedings and formal negotiations to resolve. At another level, treaty rights raise moral issues concerning justice and rights to collective self-​determination (and hence food sovereignty) between Indigenous and settler societies. Treaty Rights at Risk claims that the United States agreed to respect the entwinement of salmon, salmon habitat, and human institutions—​where human institutions include norms, conventions, and administrative structures that support cultural integrity, economic vitality, health, and political order—​that is, what has been referred to earlier as “Tribal life,” “the center of our cultures,” and “healthy and strong” communities. At the heart of these Indigenous claims is a theory of food sovereignty that pertains to situations in which two or more societies live in the same places. In these situations, one

Food Sovereignty and Indigenous Peoples    349 form of injustice that can occur is settler colonial domination. Roughly, settler colonial domination occurs when several factors are present. First, at least one society secures its members’ cultures, economies, health, and political sovereignty by permanently inhabiting the places in which one or more other societies already inhabit and without any of the original societies having consented. The original societies have already cultivated these places to suit their members’ own cultures, economies, health, and political sovereignty. Second, the settler societies engage in settlement by erasing the capacities that the societies that were already there—​Indigenous societies—​rely on for the sake of exercising their own collective self-​determination over their cultures, economies, health, and political order. Common strategies of erasure used by settler societies everywhere include boarding schools designed to eliminate Indigenous languages, forced adoption of Indigenous children by settler families, renaming locations in settler languages, failing to feature Indigenous histories in public education, ignoring Indigenous issues in the media, stealing Indigenous knowledge and claiming settler intellectual ownership over the knowledge, ignoring agreements such as treaties or decrees, among many others. The actions settlers perform that carry out strategies of erasure are diverse. Some actions are conscious or deliberate, such as blatant violations of legal agreements that advance US economic interests against Indigenous ones. Others rely on moralizing narratives, such as how some Christians believed forcing Indigenous children to assimilate would civilize them. Yet others are quite tacit, such as individual persons who in everyday speech refer to the United States as “giving” land or special privileges to Indigenous peoples. Although many settler actions are tacit or involve ignorant moralizing narratives, when it comes to food sovereignty, US settlers deliberately endorsed actions of erasure to undermine Indigenous collective self-​determination. For example, in 1889, when the United States forced many Indigenous persons to become farmers, a Bureau of Indian Affairs Report stated: “The Indians must conform to the ‘white man’s ways’ peaceably if they will, forcibly if they must. They must adjust themselves to their environment, and conform their mode of living substantially to our civilization. This civilization may not be the best possible but it is the best the Indians can get” (Prucha 2000, p. 176). Regarding the collapse of salmon populations due to damming in the Pacific Northwest, one US senator made it clear what was going on when the opening of Dalles dam in Oregon in the 1950s erased Celilo Falls, one of the premier Indigenous salmon fisheries in the region. “Our Indian friends deserve from us a profound and heartfelt salute of appreciation. . . . They contributed to [the dam’s] erection a great donation—​surrender of the only way of life which some of them knew” (Barber 2005, 4). Frank’s statement refers to the US-​ endorsed actions (i.e., deliberate violations of treaty rights) that erase Indigenous food systems as carrying out one strategy that works to secure settler cultures, economies, health, and political sovereignty in western Washington. Again, he claims, “Without the salmon there is no treaty right.” Frank tethers Indigenous self-​determination (the treaty right) to salmon habitat (an ecological system). The initiative states that “as the salmon disappear, our tribal cultures, communities and economies are threatened as never before.”

350   Kyle Powys Whyte Salmon habitat, in Treaty Rights at Risk, is discussed as entwined with human institutions as a collective capacity supporting Indigenous self-​determination. US settlement works to erase this capacity through diverse actions ranging from treaty violations to the ignorance of private citizens whose actions, such as littering or pollution through their business ventures, add up to degrade salmon habitat. Food injustice, in this settler colonial situation, is a derivative of settler colonial domination. That is, food injustice occurs when settler societies interfere with the food systems of Indigenous societies as a strategy for securing their own members’ cultures, economies, health, and political sovereignty in places already inhabited by Indigenous peoples. This interference is both nonconsensual and conducive to producing health problems, such as higher rates of diabetes and hypertension that are associated when Indigenous peoples do not eat traditional diets (Dittmer 2013). I will show that the tethering of salmon habitat and Indigenous collective self-​ determination is part of rather complex claims that food systems promote certain human institutions that advance Indigenous collective self-​determination. Settler strategies to erase Indigenous food systems, such as salmon habitat, dismantle Indigenous capacities to support their collective self-​determination. The mechanics of how dismantling occurs involve settler societies working to actively unravel the entangled relationships between human institutions and food. What these human institutions are in relation to food and food systems is the topic of the next section.

The Entwinement of Human Institutions and Food Systems Food Systems and Resilience Indigenous persons, among them many Indigenous scholars, have sought to understand how foods and food systems are important beyond their function of providing nutrition and calories. To begin to understand what this means, I will build my account using some of what Indigenous scholars have written about Northwest coast Indigenous societies in North America whose food systems involved a number of species, including salmon (Clayoquot Sound Scientific Panel 1995; E. R. Atleo 2002; M. R. Atleo 2006; Trosper 2009). I will focus mostly on Ronald Trosper’s extensive studies here. The societies include groups such as the Nuu-​cha-​nulth and Kwakwaka’wakw in areas in what is now known by most as British Columbia. Trosper focuses on the potlatch ceremony, which exemplifies the intertwinement of human institutions and the conservation of certain foods. I will cover just a slice of Trosper’s and others’ analyses of the potlatch to highlight the ceremony’s positive contributions supporting these Indigenous peoples’ collective self-​ determination. Perhaps as surprise to some, in these studies, collective self-​determination

Food Sovereignty and Indigenous Peoples    351 comes to mean something more than decision-​making authority; rather, it comes to mean a society’s overall capacity to adapt to social and environmental changes, or resilience. Although I want to note, especially for readers who are concerned with any brief reconstructions of any society’s way of life, that my argument does not depend on my making the case that Northwest coast Indigenous peoples are or were perfect environmental stewards or bereft of moral shortcomings before the recent wave of foreign settlement. Trosper evaluates the potlatch ceremony’s contributions to collective self-​ determination in terms of its role in facilitating resilience, or adaptive capacity, according to Crawford Holling and Lance Gunderson (2002) and the Resilience Alliance (2002). In this sense of adaptive capacity, resilience refers to a society’s persistence in the face of environmental variability, that is, the “capacity of a social-​ecological system to absorb or withstand perturbations and other stressors such that the system remains within the same regime, essentially maintaining its structure and functions” (Resilience Alliance 2002). Trosper seeks to connect the human institutions intertwined with food systems through the potlatch ceremony to the capacity to adapt to social and environmental changes. One of the main goals of the ceremony was for “titleholders” of different “houses” to give away as much of their “wealth” as possible to others. Houses are “corporate groups with proprietorship to specific lands and fishing sites” (Trosper 2003, 7) and titleholders are the highest ranking leaders of houses (though not in a dictatorial sense). Wealth included food, especially salmon, and other edible and nonedible materials harvested from each house’s lands and waters. “Proprietorship” should not be understood as individual private property. Rather, houses, which included many different roles for members, actively cultivated the plants, animals, physical entities, terrains, and waters of the ecosystems they inhabited, creating in members a strong sense of moral responsibility to protect ecosystem functions. Marlene Atleo (2006) describes this as the “social fabric,” or “hahuulhi,” of each houses’ connection to the ecosystems it comes from. The particular lands and waters shared by different houses were referred to as the “common bowl” (Trosper 2009, 50). M.  Atleo describes how potlatch ceremonies were carefully organized spatially to respect participants’ deep connections to and knowledges of their houses’ specific ecosystems (M. R. Atleo 2006). A successful potlatch ceremony was required for the “reincarnation of salmon and other humans, essential to generate that very wealth” (Trosper 2003, 9) that must be given away at the ceremony. For Trosper, contra other interpreters (Krech 1999), the belief in reincarnation motivated conservation because tribal members saw salmon and humans as mutually responsible for sustaining each other over time. E. Richard Atleo describes how for the Nuu-​chah-​nulth, “The salmon does not give its life, but rather, in an act of transformation, is prepared to give and share its ‘cloak’ in endless cycles, provided the necessary protocols are observed, which indicate mutual recognition, mutual respect, mutual responsibility, and mutual accountability.” For Atleo, salmon and deer, among other species, are in “a relationship of trust and honor” with humans (E. R. Atleo 2002, 202‒203).

352   Kyle Powys Whyte In ecological terms, salmon are significant for their contributions to forest ecosystems, especially, as is widely accepted, that Pacific Coastal forests receive significant amounts of nitrogen, vital to tree growth, from the many pounds of anadromous salmon that bears kill when the fish return to inland streams to spawn, the bears dragging the fish deep into the forests to feed, nitrogen spreading through decomposition and bear’s urine. Insects also eat dead salmon, which has the effect of supplying more food for birds and other forest creatures; dead salmon are also eaten by crabs (Grames 2012; Lichatowich 2001). In light of the ecology of salmon, titleholders “were regarded as people with special knowledge and spiritual power” in relation to salmon. They were responsible for making informed decisions about salmon conservation for their houses. Trosper writes that “there was an aspect of secrecy and privately held knowledge underpinning the position of titleholders. Yet, there also had to be a shared system of knowledge, if scientific understanding had developed among them” (Trosper 2003, 12). While hereditary lineage was often one criterion for titleholder candidates, their candidacy gets judged publicly and critically by both other members of their houses and the representatives of other houses during potlatch ceremonies. To become accepted as a titleholder, a person had to organize a feast to give away wealth, which meant candidates had to know how to conserve sufficient salmon and the ecological sources of other gifts too (Trosper 2009, 50‒80). The capacity to hold a feast involved motivating fellow house members to help in this effort. During the potlach ceremonies, the members of the other houses took careful records about exactly how much was given and to whom. They reserved the right to object to a titleholder giving beyond what could be ecologically sustained. Titleholders could, hence, be removed if their knowledge or stewardship capacity was insufficient for hosting a feast, their house members objected to their leadership, or if the other houses judged their harvest to be unsustainable (Trosper 2009, 50‒80). This system involves a public, highly transparent process for evaluating humans’ responsibilities to salmon. Through potlatch ceremonies, kinship relations were established and maintained that connected different houses through friendship, marriage, and other connections. The kinship relationships created “a way for people living in different areas to provide aid to people in other areas.” In one extreme case, “in which the failure of a salmon run caused an entire village to cross over a watershed divide and seek sustenance from others; the assistance obtained had to be repaid at a later date” (Trosper 2003, 8). The social ties facilitated this exchange, as the houses knew they were taking their best interests to heart. The relationships solidified through potlach ceremonies served to support the making of difficult decisions about what to do when a member of society acted badly. “Trespass was a capital offense that would be enforced, usually after a warning. Killing a trespasser obligated the enforcer to invite the members of the trespasser’s house to a feast in order to prevent a cycle of killing from occurring” (8). There were detailed, consensus-​based processes for dispute resolution in which absolute respect was accorded to the right of the participants to each express their knowledges and arguments (Trosper 2009). Trosper sees the many responsibilities related to potlach as a “type of buffering system [that] had to operate at a relatively large scale, as salmon run failures would occur over

Food Sovereignty and Indigenous Peoples    353 an entire river system or tributary to a major river. Regional networks existed in separate parts of the Coast” (Trosper 2003, 8). The potlatch, then, facilitated large diplomatic networks across houses, facilitating trust and reliability across houses and worked to make sure people recognized and were accountable for their interdependence. Trosper discusses how “on a smaller scale, when neighboring houses all harvested salmon from a major river, they had to deal with the interdependence of their harvests” (8). Trosper claims that “the knowledge that neighbors would share their surplus through the potlatch system” made it so that “cooperation” not individual hoarding is “the correct strategy” (8). Trosper seeks to show how potlatch establishes and solidifies norms of resilience such as “high grading is not allowed” and consumption has an upper bound (Trosper 1995) and that allowed these societies to buffer, self-​organize, and learn in response to environmental issues (Trosper 2009). That is, the salmon-​based food system, concretized in one way through potlatch ceremonies of Northwest coast peoples, made it possible for these Indigenous peoples to adapt to change without incurring certain harms, such as malnutrition. Thus, Trosper describes humans figuratively as a species that played a pivotal, or keystone, role in maintaining relationships among many other species making up the ecosystem. For Trosper, when Canadian settlers outlawed the potlatch ceremony between 1885 and 1951, in addition to destructive actions they took that weakened the salmon habitats and altered the ecosystems, they struck a blow to both salmon populations and human relations to salmon. This interference with Indigenous food systems worked to compromise the capacity of Northwest coast Indigenous peoples to exercise collective self-​ determination. Collective self-​determination now includes, in my analysis, a society’s capacities to be resilient—​a society’s overall adaptive capacity. So conserving a species, such as salmon, is of a piece with the human institutions and human institutions that facilitated resilience.

Collective Capacities and Food Systems Reflecting on the previous section, I understand food systems through the idea that they are specific collective capacities that groups use to cultivate and tend, produce, distribute, consume their own foods, recirculate refuse, and acquire trusted foods, ingredients, and technologies from others. The relationship between salmon and potlatch reflects a slice of the entwinement of human institutions and food systems. In this way, food systems can be understood as collective capacities because they motivate human institutions that produce or facilitate certain valuable goods, such as political sovereignty, nutrition, and spirituality, and avoid preventable harms, such as starvation and undernourishment. Here, I  am not committed to the view that human institutions solely exist because they serve functions or originate from such functions. Rather, I am simply highlighting that Indigenous peoples are arguing normatively that some entwinements between human institutions and food

354   Kyle Powys Whyte systems are important to protect because of what they can contribute to collective self-​determination. The contribution focused on here is actually the collective capacity to adapt to social and environmental change while maintaining values such as nutrition and peace. I will go into more detail on what it means to say that a food system is a collective capacity. Collective capacities involve deep connections between human institutions (e.g., houses, potlatch ceremonies) and ecosystems (e.g., habitats, humans as keystone species). A collective capacity is valuable as a mechanism for facilitating adaptation to changes that arise from environmental and human sources. As Trosper shows, supporting buffering is a key role that the food system plays. In this way, the concept of collective capacities aims to describe an ecology (i.e., an ecological system) of interacting humans, nonhuman beings (animals, plants, etc.) and entities (spiritual, inanimate, etc.), and landscapes (climate regions, boreal zones, etc.) that are conceptualized and operate purposefully to facilitate a collective’s (such as an Indigenous people) adaptation to changes (Figueroa and Waitt 2011; Werkheiser 2015). In previous work, I have described the changes, using language common in some areas of environmental science, as meta-​scale forces. Meta-​scale forces are disruptions and perturbations that affected societies seek to adapt and adjust to without comprising their cultural integrity, economic vitality, degrees of health, and political self-​determination (Whyte 2015). Meta-​scale forces can be rising or declining average temperatures or changes in patterns of precipitation or infectious diseases caused by human migration or religious conversion by other populations. The forces may be human-​induced (anthropogenic) or based on complex earth systems over which humans have little control. The forces motivate local changes that vary by location depending on a number of factors: for example, the spread of disease may hit some groups harder than others. As in most understandings of ecology and agro-​ecology today, the term “ecology” is not denoting systems or capacities always seeking to bounce back toward some equilibrium. Rather, capacities are organized in ways that reflect more or less suitable adaptations to various meta-​scale forces over previous time (and what counts as suitable depends on perspective) (Whyte 2015). In many cases, collective capacities have evolved so that they are resilient to many of the challenges they have faced over time. But newer challenges that fall outside that range, including global environmental change and the intervention of other societies (e.g., settler colonialism), may interfere with, perturb, or degrade the ability of the traditional capacity to provide valued aspects of a collective’s quality of life, such as cultural integrity, freedom, food security, public health, and so on. According to various human perspectives, we can think about the suitability of the collective capacities of our societies to adapt to certain meta-​scale forces in ways that enhance or hinder our quality of life. From now on, I will refer to collective capacities and ecologies interchangeably since collective capacities—​such as Indigenous food systems—​are really ecological systems (Whyte 2015). While the term “ecologies” may strike some as strange, I use it to suggest both ecosystems but also the calculated stewardship of them (hence, the –​logy).

Food Sovereignty and Indigenous Peoples    355 A society can have many collective capacities that contribute to the cultural, economic, and political fabric of that society, food systems being one of them. Other examples of collective capacities could be gender systems, for example, which can be unpacked just as I have unpacked food systems via Trosper’s work. Gender systems designated leadership positions, environmental responsibilities, protocols of conflict resolution, and so on, similar to the example I used from Trosper’s work on salmon and potlatch. The terms “collective capacity” or “ecology” do not—​then—​seek to point out wholly distinct or isolated configurations of human institutions in a society (or across societies) given that, looking at the Trosper example, we could describe the potlatch system as part of a gender-​systems-​based collective capacity or ecology or a religious-​ systems-​based collective capacity or ecology. Instead, I focused on it as a food-​systems-​ based capacity or ecology. In this sense, by framing my analysis as I do, what I am pointing out is that analyzing collective capacities is akin to zooming in on a particular dimension of a society’s collective self-​determination and unpacking its significance for the sake of some goal, like the analysis of food justice. If we choose to zoom in very closely on food or gender, we can talk about them separately, yet as we gradually zoom out, we will find they both overlap and reinforce each other, which creates opportunities for us to explore ecologies at different scales and through different interconnections. When we zoom in on a specific collective capacity, its value concerns the capacity to adapt to meta-​scale forces in ways that produce and protect specific values associated with nutrition, motivations for stewardship, or the cultural integrity of certain ceremonies. If we zoom all the way out, where different capacities overlap, there is then the overall adaptive capacity. I will use the concept collective continuance to describe this overall adaptive capacity. I use collective continuance instead of resilience or simply adaptive capacity because I want to use the concept to go in directions that literatures on these other concepts do not typically go into at all or at least in the way that I would like to now.

Food and Collective Continuance When we zoom all the way out, we can see that all of a society’s collective capacities contribute to what I seek to call a society’s collective continuance. Collective continuance is a society’s overall adaptive capacity to maintain its members’ cultural integrity, health, economic vitality, and political order into the future and avoid having its members experience preventable harms. That is, meta-​scale forces and local changes present the potential for humans to face risks and suffer harms. A high degree of collective continuance refers to the state of having collective capacities consisting of human institutions that are organized in ways that are suitable for adjusting to potential changes, learning from the past, and mobilizing members of society to tackle hard problems. Again, human institutions range from norms, to skill sets, to decision-​making protocols, to social hierarchies or fluidities. When we zoom in more closely to particular human institutions such as potlatch, we see that they are built on relationships that may

356   Kyle Powys Whyte be exclusive to particular collective capacities (e.g., passing on knowledge of salmon habitat from elders to youth) or spread across different collective capacities (e.g., diplomatic relationships between houses). That is, collective capacities are built on relationships. The transition I will make in this section is as follows. A society’s collective capacities contribute to its overall degree of collective continuance. Collective capacities consist of human institutions that are made up of relationships. I will explore in this section what types and qualities of relationships collective capacities, such as food systems, are made of. Food systems, as collective capacities, promote collective continuance by facilitating at least three types of relationships. For the purpose of my analysis, to be in a relationship is to have responsibilities toward the others in the relationship. Responsibilities refer to the reciprocal (though not necessarily equal) attitudes and patterns of behavior that are expected by and of various parties by virtue of the different roles that each may be understood to be accountable for in a relationship. Food systems, then, can contribute to collective continuance as a capacity or ecology when they involve three types of relationships that support (1) the means of advancing robust cultural and social ways of life, (2) peaceful diplomacy and emboldened resistance to domination, and (3) the societal decision-​making protocols required for evaluating high stakes decisions. Each of these relationships can flourish if they are organized in ways that facilitate the discharge of responsibilities associated with being in the relationships. The types of relationships just described, in some cases, are very hard-​to-​replace immediately if lost, given their connection to particular ecologies. For example, the desire to discharge reciprocal relationships of giving (and not hoarding) in societies with potlatch ceremonies is very closely connected to persons’ experiences with the cultural and spiritual value of salmon and that fact that those persons have been gaining specific knowledge about salmon since time immemorial. If salmon and salmon habitat disappear at a highly rapid pace, then it will be hard for those responsibilities to endure because the responsibilities are so closely associated with the experience and knowledge of salmon. This is not to say that an analogous responsibility cannot endure in response to change. Rather, it is to say that a highly rapid disruption to salmon or salmon habitat can increase the harms a society will incur as it adjusts to the change. There are many qualities or characteristics of relationships that both make them facilitate responsibilities and that are hard-​to-​replace. Qualities here, different from other conceptions of quality, are properties of relationships that make it possible for a relationship to have wide societal impact by motivating the discharge of responsibilities. I will argue for two of them here, trustworthiness and ecological redundancy. Trustworthy relationships motivate responsibilities because parties in the relationships have reasons or emotions that track that the other parties take their best interests to heart, both in the sense of confidence that someone will do what they are supposed to and that they are so inclined (Govier 1997; Walker 2006). In Trosper’s work, there is the example of the one house that traveled far during a shortage of salmon to get relief from another house. In that case, there is a sense of trust between houses that is sustained through kinship relationships, cultural and linguistic similarities, and protocols.

Food Sovereignty and Indigenous Peoples    357 Trustworthiness also includes what many philosophers distinguish from trust, which is reliability and accountability (I treat both concepts as the same in this essay). For example, someone is more likely to discharge a responsibility if they know the other party has a reliable track record of fulfilling their reciprocal responsibilities back. In Trosper, titleholders had to be initiated into knowledge systems that had long track records of salmon conservation; moreover, titleholders were evaluated based on their capacity to exercise these knowledge systems well. There was a system of expertise, then, that was accountable to the community. Reliability and accountability are not so much about there being a sense that someone else will take your best interests to heart; rather they are more about there being available reasons to depend on someone else, such as evidence of their knowledge of their environment. The spiritual relationship between humans and salmon is also based on a complex relationship of trust and reliability. Salmon’s sacrifice is considered a gift. The potential to facilitate reincarnation involves accountability to maintain the habitats; hence, R. Atleo described the spiritual relationship with salmon as involving trust and honor. Ecological redundancy (or redundancy for short) refers to the idea that relationships contribute to high degrees of collective continuance only if there are a lot of opportunities to discharge the responsibilities and repeat doing so. Redundancy, the English word itself, strikes some people as a peculiar one to use; for me, I use it to highlight something that I cannot seem to express with a term like repeatability or even resilience (which is too broad). For example, one cannot exercise a responsibility to salmon if there is only one segment of a heavily degraded stream left where salmon can be harvested and if there is only one type of salmon. If that stream segment is compromised by a dam, the entire salmon culture is compromised. Redundancy refers to the idea that there are many salmon habitats and even types of salmon that can be engaged so that there are plenty of options given that different habitats are likely to change throughout the year and different types of salmon are suited to different conditions. Another example of redundancy concerns knowledge. If an entire community relies on one knowledge holder, then that person’s death would end that entire knowledge tradition—​so there should be a proliferation of many knowledge holders. This is similar to language as well, where having one or two elders who speak a language does not bode well for that language’s capacity to survive. M. Atleo describes how the ecosystems under the proprietorship of houses were very deliberately cultivated by creating opportunities for people to educate themselves about how, for example, to fish, cut, and store salmon. The ways the lands and waters are cultivated also involve the creation and repetition of stories and ceremonies that endow the entwined human institutions and food systems with sacredness (M. R. Atleo 2006). Trustworthiness and ecological redundancy are qualities of relationships that collective capacities, such as food systems, consist of. But some of these relationships are hard to replace because they cannot be engendered overnight. Trust and reliability, for example, requires familiarity, protocols, natural motivations, and so on, that can require generations to establish. They are so closely connected to ecological contexts, such as salmon habitat, that if salmon were to disappear right away, people have to regroup

358   Kyle Powys Whyte themselves without the knowledge base associated with salmon, kinship networks, the values, and so on. For ecological redundancy, certain relationships require particular landscapes to flourish. The hydrology and size of a region, for example, has to be right for that region to entwine with human institutions in ways that could produce sufficient salmon for food. While all societies adapt and change over time, some changes that occur too rapidly create the possibility that a society will incur harms that previously would have been preventable.

Food Sovereignty in Settler Colonial Contexts Settler Colonialism and Collective Continuance I have discussed the relationship between food systems and the collective continuance of Indigenous societies. A high degree of collective continuance means that a society has many collective capacities consisting of relationships with the qualities of trustworthiness (including reliability) and ecological redundancy. Trustworthiness and redundancy are qualities of relationships that are often hard-​to-​replace when compromised quickly—​both because these qualities are not formable overnight and because of their connections to particular ecosystems. When they are compromised, a society’s degree of collective continuance is lessened, which limits a society’s capacity to exercise collective self-​determination and increases the probability that members of that society will suffer what would otherwise have been preventable harms. Settler colonialism can be understood as a form of domination that directly targets the relationships that create collective capacities (the ecologies) that make up collective continuance. That is, if we explore how US settler colonialism works, we can see that it directly dismantles the trustworthy and redundant relationships that support high degrees of collective continuance. Ironically, settler societies do this to strengthen their own collective continuance. That is, one society seeks to strengthen its own collective continuance in a different place at the expense of another society’s collective continuance. Again, settler colonial domination occurs when several factors are present. First, at least one society secures its members’ cultures, economies, health, and political sovereignty by permanently inhabiting the places in which one or more other societies already inhabit. The Indigenous societies have already cultivated these places to suit their members’ own cultures, economies, health, and political sovereignty. Second, settler societies engage in settlement by erasing the capacities that the Indigenous societies Indigenous rely on for the sake of exercising their own collective self-​determination over their cultures, economies, health, and political order. One of the common strategies of erasure is to erase Indigenous people’s food systems. Food systems are one of the major vectors in which settler societies can destroy the

Food Sovereignty and Indigenous Peoples    359 relationships required for Indigenous collective continuance. Food is associated with many hard-​to-​replace relationships. In this section, I look in detail at another salmon-​ based tribe, the Karuk tribe, and their interpretation of how settler colonialism disrupted their food system as a strategy for erasing them and lessening their collective continuance as self-​determining peoples.

Karuk Views on Settler Colonialism: “If the Salmon quit running, the world will quit spinning.” The Karuk people’s homeland of roughly 1.48 million acres is in the Klamath River basin of Northern California and parts of Oregon. The Karuk consider themselves part of the ecosystem and have long traditions of engaging in environmental stewardship in ways that laid the foundation for why the region nonetheless remains rich with diverse species and habitats today. In this section, I interpret Karuk experiences and knowledge from the publications that some tribal members have been part of, especially Ron Reed, on food sovereignty and climate change adaptation, mostly done in collaboration with Kari Norgaard (a sociologist) (Norgaard 2014a, 2014b, 2014c; Norgaard, Reed, and Van Horn 2011). The Karuk are a salmon culture, among other key species that are part of the shared ecosystems of the basin. According to the Karuk, “species abundance and diversity of this region cannot be understood outside the Karuk knowledge and management activities that produced them” (Norgaard 2014c, 12). The Karuk carefully tended, harvested, and monitored the environment as part of their food system. The stewardship and cultural practices surrounding the use of fire, for example, are extremely significant for promoting forest ecosystems suitable for acorns, berries, roots, and fiber (hazel and willow) and to improve hunting conditions for elk and deer. These practices are tied to ceremonies (human institutions) as well that honor and renew the relationships connecting humans, plants, animals, and fire. Frank Lake, a Karuk descendent and scientist, claims that “as a human, you have a caretaking responsibility. And so you managed areas to share acorns, to share mushrooms, to share berries to share grass seeds” (Norgaard 2014c, 14). The biodiversity across the region and, as Lake points out, the culture of sharing, lay a foundation for trustworthy and redundant relationships. These relationships are so important that some Karuk express ideas such as “if the Salmon quit running, the world will quit spinning” (Norgaard 2014c, 51). Fire affects hydrology in ways that suit trees and shrubs that require different amounts of water. Since fire affects “the distribution of forests, shrubs, and grasslands,” it connects to infiltration from precipitation and departure from evaporation. Thus, fire affects “the balance of water in and water out” (Norgaard 2014c, 14). About three-​fourths of the Karuk cultural species, from “Tan Oaks, to huckleberries and Manzanita to deer, elk and mushroom species,” are affected by fire (Norgaard 2014c, 14). For the Karuk, practices such as fire burning and salmon ceremonies create the contexts for building trust and

360   Kyle Powys Whyte redundancy. They claim that “it is during the process of spending time that stories, techniques and information are shared, new observations are made, and young people are socialized around values of reciprocity and responsibility” (Norgaard 2014c, 37). US settler colonialism in the region in the mid-​nineteenth century involved drastic and radical social and ecological changes. Here I will focus on the United States’ establishment of its own collective continuance at the expense of Karuk collective continuance. In relation to the Karuk, the United States initiated “laws and policies designed to reduce Karuk people’s ability to inhabit and manage their lands.” These laws and policies “were implemented by the state of California and the Federal government specifically to achieve this transfer of wealth to non-​Native settlers in the region” (Norgaard 2014c, 33). During the Gold Rush period of the mid-​1800s, three-​fourths of the Karuk people were killed, including through US-​and state-​sanctioned bounty hunting. The settlers relocated many Karuk villages and engaged in widespread attempts to move Karuk people onto reservations. In some Karuk tribal members’ own words, these actions “all interfered with everyday ability of people to survive, much less carry out culture and the practices of tending to the natural world” (Norgaard 2014c, 14). In 1864, the Hoopa Valley Indian reservation was established, which was a much smaller area than previously inhabited by the Karuk. All Karuk people were ordered to leave their ancestral territories along the mid-​Klamath and lower Salmon rivers because those areas were not part of the reservation—​many moving to cities. Gold miners, military actions, and settlements damaged the ecosystem, restricting the supply of some food sources, including fish and wildlife. White settlers did not understand the role of fire in the ecosystem. Settlers shot Karuk persons, in some cases, for setting fires. The United States also refused to recognize Karuk land title or Karuk land-​use needs, since they were not based on practices US settlers could recognize, such as styles of farming popular in the United States at the time. The state of California also pressured Congress not to ratify the treaties with the tribes there because the treaty rights would interfere with mining and ranching. Many Karuk were sent to boarding schools in Oregon that stripped them of their language and culture. In the twentieth century, dip net fishing, one of the major salmon fishing methods, was outlawed. Today, US settler colonial laws and policies remain a problem. The Karuk continue to seek to practice and strengthen burning and other practices. Yet the US Forest Service considers it illegal to perform activities that include “gathering acorns, mushrooms, berries, basketry materials, and the use of fire to create the proper conditions for these species” (Norgaard 2014c, 26). Reed, speaking of deer and elk and the relationship with acorn groves and riparian plants such as hazel, mock orange, and fibers, says that “use of those materials is dependent upon those prescribed burns. So when you don’t have prescribed burns it affects all in a reciprocal manner . . . the place becomes a desert without cultural burns” (27). For Reed, the destruction of Karuk collective capacities or ecologies removes hard-​to-​replace environmental conditions for the tribe’s cultural integrity and economic vitality. The California Department of Fish and Game attempts to limit when Karuk persons can harvest fish and game according to the needs of non-​Indigenous recreational

Food Sovereignty and Indigenous Peoples    361 harvesting. Vera Davis, a Karuk tribal member, says: “I don’t think that no one has a right to tell us when we can do it when you have people who pay hundreds of dollars to come in, kill the venison and get the horns. I don’t think that is fair because this is our livelihood” (Norgaard 2014c, 27). Davis highlights the idea that US settler cultures and economies are expanding their cultures and economies at the expense of the Karuk people’s capacity to support themselves. The United States is substituting Karuk political self-​determination with settler self-​determination. The US alternatives for the Karuk are not acceptable because they give rise to what would have been preventable harms before US settlements. Based on a Karuk-​led survey of members living in the Klamath River area, “Twenty percent of survey respondents reported that they had decreased their subsistence or ceremonial activities as a result of such contacts [being caught by fish or game wardens]. To be fined or have a family member imprisoned imposes a significant economic burden on families” (Norgaard 2014c, 28). Over half the families living in the Klamath River area continued to fish and over two-​thirds hunted deer, most are not in the position to harvest enough to meet family needs. Almost half of the respondents are on food assistance programs on a daily basis. The percent of families living in poverty in Karuk aboriginal territory is nearly three times that of the United States as a whole. The Klamath Basin is considered a food desert and Karuk have rates of diabetes four times the US average and heart disease three times greater (Sowerwine 2012, 5). One Karuk report describes “this dramatic reversal in economic circumstances” as “the direct result of the systematic, state sponsored disruptions of the existing Karuk cultural and economic organization that were at the heart of traditional management and traditional knowledge” (Norgaard 2014c, 32; see also Huntsinger and McCaffrey 1995). Today, many Karuk tribal members note that state wardens are constantly watching Karuk people to make sure they obey settler policies. Leaf Hillman, also a tribal member, says “it is a criminal act to practice a traditional lifestyle and to maintain traditional cultural practices necessary to manage important food resources or even to practice our religion” (Norgaard 2014c, 23). Yet many of the Karuk continue to seek to practice certain aspects of their culture in connection with their food systems as responses to the harsh changes engendered by US settlement. One of the tribe’s reports states that “Karuk lifeways continue to be practiced both overtly (when they can get away with it) and covertly when they cannot. From a Karuk perspective, continuance of these traditional lifeways and practices is essential not only for food, but for the maintenance of traditional knowledge, cultural and tribal identity, pride, self-​respect and above all, basic human dignity” (Norgaard 2014c, 31). Consider some of the ways Karuk tribal members discuss what I previously called trust and redundancy. In terms of redundancy, Reed, previously quoted, claims that “without fire the landscape changes dramatically,” which makes “traditional foods that we need for a sustainable lifestyle . . . unavailable after a certain point.” For Reed, “the spiritual connection to the landscape is altered. . . . When we don’t go back to places that we are used to, accustomed to, part of our lifestyle is curtailed dramatically. So you have health

362   Kyle Powys Whyte consequences.” Reed’s definition of health is broad, including “nutrition,” “exercise,” and “spiritual balance” (Norgaard 2014c, 21). He argues that something like the “reduction of foraging habitat for elk” can mean “fewer opportunities for successful hunting, that in turn affects diet, food supply, the ability to engage in barter and trade, fewer social activities associated with hunting, the ability to properly conduct ceremonies, and overall cultural identity (22). For Reed, cultural burning creates a number of types of redundancy. It cultivates the required types of biodiversity for the Karuk sustenance and culture across the landscape. In the absence of fire, otherwise preventable mental, spiritual, and health harms occur. That is, what Reed is arguing is that there needs to be a sufficient abundance of land, plants, and animals to be able to maintain cultural integrity and health. There cannot simply be one place left in which a particular plant can be harvested, for example. That one place would not be able to furnish a sufficient amount of food or fiber to support the cultural vitality needed to fashion clothing or to support true nutritional outcomes. Reed also comments on trust and reliability. “Individuals who are unable to provide for their families and communities experience role stress and threats to their identity as Karuk people” (Norgaard 2014c, 20). Hence, family relationships are not based as much on people having reasons or emotions that give them the sense that others (in their families) are taking their best interests to heart. “On a larger scale the Karuk Tribe faces political challenges concerning the potential erosion of Tribal sovereignty in the face of continued lack of recognition of land title and taking of resources by Federal and State agencies” (20). This is a breakdown of diplomatic trust relationships between the United States and the tribe. Finally, Reed also argues that “criminalization of cultural practices matters for sovereignty because it directly prohibits the enactment of practices needed for the generation of knowledge” (22), breaking down relationships needed for trusted expertise. Reed goes on to discuss how “people describe how their moral responsibilities are being blocked and their obligations rendered impossible to fulfill. People describe how the situation represents an extreme harm to traditional conceptions of the moral life itself, literally denial of someone’s being able to do what is right to them” (Norgaard 2014c, 47). This is certainly true when we consider that the US-​imposed alternative is something that the Karuk cannot simply mold into in response to such a rapid pace of disruption. This is why the relationships of trust or reliability and redundancy are hard to replace. For Lake, when there’s low economy and there’s no other jobs to do and it’s just tough. . . . Normally, that salmon would be that role of building that capital when you don’t have that capital, it’s not a reservoir of, either monetary or even, kind of like, “I owe you one,” type of thing to draw from or relationship in the community. Yeah, you get stressed. Just like people in a contemporary sense would get stressed for not having financial security, when you don’t have salmon security, it adds all those other dimensions of stress to it. (32)

For Lake, salmon presents a kind of “capital” that when in abundance provides the capacity to adapt to whatever challenges are occurring.

Food Sovereignty and Indigenous Peoples    363

Conclusion:  Indigenous Food Sovereignty Based on the Karuk perspectives, we can see how settler colonialism deliberately interferes with the food system, as a Karuk collective capacity, by breaking down the qualities of relationships that are integral for high degrees of collective continuance, leaving the tribe vulnerable to what would normally be preventable harms. Perhaps this makes more clear what is meant by the Treaty Rights at Risk initiative with expressions such as “without salmon there is no treaty right,” and that salmon is the center of “Tribal life,” “our cultures,” and “healthy and strong” communities. Or, referring back to the Anishinaabe perspectives, treaty rights protect all the “value that rice holds” and “there is no substitute for this lake’s rice.” I argue that the value of these foods is that the foods themselves are entwined with hard-​to-​replace qualities of relationships that comprise collective capacities. Settler colonial strategies seek to erase Indigenous food systems by attacking, at a rapid pace, the qualities of relationships that contribute to collective continuance. Settler colonial domination is both highly nonconsensual and imposes preventable harms for reasons that are morally problematic, such as settlers’ desires to establish their own economies or political orders at the expense of others when doing so is not necessary in any sense (as the land could be shared even if we imagine a case in which settlement is somehow inevitable). If, following La Via Campesina, food sovereignty means “the right of peoples and governments to choose the way food is produced and consumed in order to respect livelihoods,” then I would make the case that what I have described in this essay represents an important dimension of how some Indigenous peoples understand food sovereignty. Even though many of the tribes I  quoted associate food sovereignty with particular foods or food systems, I hope to have conveyed that this by no means commits them to a static view of Indigenous culture, economics, health, or political order. If we understand that particular foods are associated with qualities of relationships and ecosystems, I can argue that it is these particularly hard-​to-​replace qualities that are at stake. That is, we can accept that, for example, over time, an Indigenous people, as many have, would change its food system drastically. But an injustice occurs, under settler colonial domination, when at least one society, the settler society, interferes with the qualities of relationships constitutive of collective continuance, which imposes social and environmental changes on Indigenous peoples in a way that is nonconsensual and at a rate so rapid that the indigenous communities suffer harms that would have been preventable before settlement. Violating indigenous food sovereignty is a strategy of settler colonial domination that erases Indigenous capacities for exercising collective self-​determination. Food injustice, just in this sense, can be understood as derivative of settler colonial domination. Looking forward, food sovereignty can be interpreted as based on particular qualities of relationships that promote a society’s overall adaptive capacity. In this essay,

364   Kyle Powys Whyte I  focused on Indigenous peoples’ seeking food justice and food sovereignty in areas they traditionally inhabited and that are also designated as reservations or treaty areas. But my analysis of adaptive capacity is meant to apply also to the demographic realities of Indigenous peoples today, where Indigenous peoples live all over North America, especially in major urban centers. By focusing on relationships and capacities, I am proposing a model of justice and sovereignty that embraces the demographic and other diversity of Indigenous peoples, and can be used to justify expressions of food sovereignty beyond those associated with, for example, federally recognized tribal governments or treaty organizations.1

Bibliography Andow, D., T. Bauer, M. Belcourt, P. Bloom, B. Child, J. Doerfler, . . . and R. Walker. 2009. “Wild Rice White Paper: Preserving the Integrity of Manoomin in Minnesota.” People Protecting Manoomin: Manoomin Protecting People: A Symposium Bridging Opposing Worldviews. https://​www.cfans.umn.edu/​sites/​cfans.umn.edu/​files/​WhitePaperFinalVersion2011.pdf. Atleo, E. R. 2002. “Discourses in and about the Clayoquot Sound: A First Nations Perspective.” In A Political Space: Reading the Global through Clayoquot Sound, edited by W. Magnusson and K. Shaw, 199‒208. Montreal, PQ, Canada: MQUP. Atleo, M. R. 2006. “The Ancient Nuu-​chah-​nulth Strategy of Hahuulthi:  Education for Indigenous Cultural Survivance.” International Journal of Environmental, Cultural, Economic and Social Sustainability 2(1): 153–​162. Barber, K. 2005. Death of Celilo Falls. Seattle: Center for the Study of the Pacific Northwest in association with University of Washington Press. Clayoquot Sound Scientific Panel. 1995. “Sustainable Ecosystem Management in Clayoquot Sound: Planning and Practices.” Victoria, BC, Canada. https://​www.for.gov.bc.ca/​hfd/​ library/​documents/​bib12571.pdf. Cornell, S., and J. P. Kalt. 2000. “Where’s the Glue? Institutional and Cultural Foundations of American Indian Economic Development.” Journal of Socio-​Economics 29(5): 443–​470. Dittmer, K. 2013. “Changing Streamflow on Columbia Basin Tribal Lands—​Climate Change and Salmon.” Climatic Change 120(3): 627–​641. Donlin, P. E. 2015. The Power of Food: The Ojibwe Food Sovereignty Movement: A Movement towards Regaining and Restoring Indigenous Lifeways through Food in Minnesota. Oslo: University of Oslo. Figueroa, R. M., and G. Waitt. 2011. “Climb: Restorative Justice, Environmental Heritage, and the Moral Terrains of Uluṟu-​Kata Tjuṯa National Park.” Environmental Philosophy 7(2): 135–​163. Frank, Billy, Jr. 2012. “Traditional Foods Are Treaty Foods.” http://​nwtreatytribes.org/​ traditional-​foods-​are-​treaty-​foods/​. Goeman, M. R., and J. N. Denetdale. 2009. “Native Feminisms: Legacies, Interventions, and Indigenous Sovereignties.” Special issue. Wíčazo Ša Review 24:9–​13. 1  Special thanks to the generous support from the Point Reyes National Seashore Association and the Mesa Refuge through their National Endowment for the Arts grant, “Climate Change at the Western Edge.”

Food Sovereignty and Indigenous Peoples    365 Govier, T. 1997. Social Trust and Human Communities. Montreal: McGill-​Queen’s Press. Grames, P. 2012. “Pacific Underwater:  Salmon Don’t Grow on Trees, but Trees Grow on Salmon.” http://​w ww.davidsuzuki.org/​blogs/​h ealthy-​o ceans-​blog/​2 012/​1 0/​-​p acific-​ underwater-​salmon-​dont-​grow-​on-​trees-​but-​trees-​grow-​on-​salmon/​. Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission. 1995. Sulfide Mining: The Process and the Price, a Tribal and Ecological Perspective. Odana, WI: Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission. Holling, C. S., and L. Gunderson. 2002. “Resilience and Adaptive Cycles.” In Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems, edited by L. Gunderson and C. S. Holling, 25–​62. Washington, DC: Island Press. Hoover, E. 2016. “From Garden Warriors to Good Seeds:  Indigenizing the Local Food Movement.” https://​gardenwarriorsgoodseeds.com/​. Huambachano, M. 2015. “Food Security and Indigenous Peoples Knowledge: El Buen Vivir-​ Sumaq Kawsay in Peru and Tē Atānoho, New Zealand, Māori-​New Zealand.” Food Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 5(3): 33–​47. Huntsinger, L., and S. McCaffrey. 1995. “A Forest for the Trees: Forest Management and the Yurok Environment, 1850–​1994.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 19(3): 155–​192. Krech, S., III. 1999. The Ecological Indian: Myth and History. New York: W. W. Norton. La Via Campesina. 2009. La Via Campesina Policy Documents. https://​viacampesina.org/​. Lichatowich, J.2001. Salmon without Rivers: A History of the Pacific Salmon Crisis. Washington, DC: Island Press. Lyons, S. R. 2010. X-​marks: Native Signatures of Assent. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Michigan Civil Rights Commission. 2010. “A Report on the Conditions of Migrant and Seasonal Farmworkers in Michigan.” https://​www.michigan.gov/​documents/​mdcr/​MSFW-​ Conditions2010_​318275_​7.pdf. Mihesuah, D. A. 2009. American Indians: Stereotypes and Realities. Atlanta, GA: Clarity Press. Norgaard, K. 2014a. “The Politics of Fire and the Social Impacts of Fire Exclusion on the Klamath1.” Humboldt Journal of Social Relations 36:73–​97. —​—​—​. 2014b. “Retaining Knowledge Sovereignty: Expanding the Application of Tribal Tradi­ tional Knowledge on Forest Lands in the Face of Climate Change.” Prepared for the Karuk Tribe Department of Natural Resources. http://​www.karuktribeclimatechangeprojects. files.wordpress.com. —​—​—​. 2014c. “Social, Cultural and Economic Impacts of Denied Access to Traditional Management.” Prepared for the Karuk Tribe Department of Natural Resources. http://​www. karuktribeclimatechangeprojects.wordpress.com. Norgaard, K., R. Reed, and C. Van Horn. 2011. “A Continuing Legacy: Institutional Racism, Hunger and Nutritional Justice on the Klamath.” In Cultivating Food Justice: Race, Class, and Sustainability, edited by Alison Hope Alkon and Julian Agyeman, 23–​46. Boston: MIT Press. Prucha, F. P. 2000. Documents of United States Indian Policy. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Resilience Alliance. 2002. “A Consortium Linking Ecological, Economic and Social Insights for Sustainability.” http://​www.resalliance.org. Ripley, M. 2016. “Mike Ripley on Restoring the St. Marys River for Future Generations.” Second Wave:  Upper Peninsula, March 24. http://​www.secondwavemedia.com/​upper-​peninsula/​ features/​mikeripleyaoc.aspx.

366   Kyle Powys Whyte Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians. 2015. “Sault Tribe Opposes Graymont Mine.” http://​w ww.saulttribe.com/​newsroom/​legislative/​40-​newsroom/​legislative/​2 119-​sault​tribe-​opposes-​graymont-​mine. Sowerwine, J. 2012. “Enhancing Tribal Health and Food Sovereignty among the Karuk, Klamath, and Yurok Tribes in the Klamath Basin through Collaborative Partnerships.” https://​wrdc.usu.edu/​files-​ou/​publications/​pub_​_​3563590.pdf. Treaty Indian Tribes in Western Washington. 2011. “Treaty Rights at Risk: Ongoing Habitat Loss, the Decline of the Salmon Resource, and Recommendations for Change.” http://​nwifc. org/​w/​wp-​content/​uploads/​downloads/​2011/​08/​whitepaper628finalpdf.pdf. Trosper, R. L. 1995. “Traditional American Indian Economic Policy.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 19(1): 65–​95. —​ —​ —​ . 2003. “Resilience in Pre-​ contact Pacific Northwest Social Ecological Systems.” Conservation Ecology 7(3): 6–​17. —​—​—​. 2009. Resilience, Reciprocity and Ecological Economics: Northwest Coast Sustainability. New York: Routledge. Walker, M. U. 2006. Moral Repair:  Reconstructing Moral Relations after Wrongdoing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Werkheiser, I. 2015. “Community Epistemic Capacity.” Social Epistemology 30(1): 25–​44. White, M. 2011. “D-​Town Farm:  African American Resistance to Food Insecurity and the Transformation of Detroit.” Environmental Practice 13(4): 406–​417. Whyte, K. P. 2015. “Indigenous Food Systems, Environmental Justice, and Settler-​Industrial States.” In Global Food, Global Justice, edited by M. Rawlinson, 143–​166. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. —​ —​ —​ . 2016. “Indigenous Food Sovereignty, Renewal and U.S Settler Colonialism.” In The Routledge Handbook of Food Ethics, edited by M. Rawlinson and C. Ward, 354–​365. New York: Routledge.

chapter 17

Fo od, Fai rne s s , and Gl obal Ma rkets Madison Powers

Introduction A conversation about how to feed the world in 2050 is gaining momentum.1 One strand of the conversation emphasizes the moral obligations of the global affluent to assist the global poor.2 The central question concerns the most effective means for meeting the basic needs of the poor. Frequently discussed options include food aid and technology transfer, including chemical inputs for improving crop yields and genetically modified drought-​resistant crops. By contrast, many economists recommend market-​ based mechanisms for global development rather than resource transfer strategies. The familiar mantra is “trade, not aid.”3 It is widely assumed within the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) that rapid integration of less developed countries into global markets is essential in order to increase the rate of economic growth, relieve severe poverty, and reduce hunger and food insecurity.4 The aim of this essay is to examine critically four kinds of agricultural policies favored by proponents of rapid global market integration as a pathway out of poverty and food insecurity. I explore the theoretical and empirical assumptions behind such policies, along with the norms of fairness widely cited as their moral justification.

1 FAO, State of Food Insecurity in the World 2009; Godfray et al., “Food Security: The Challenge of Feeding 9 Billion People”; and Government Office for Science, “Foresight, 2011: The Future of Food and Farming.” 2 Singer, One World, ch. 2. 3 Moyo, Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working. 4  World Bank, “World Development Report 2008: Agriculture for Development.”

368   Madison Powers In the second section, I preface the discussion of global agricultural markets by examining demand-​side and supply-​side market challenges to feeding the world in 2050. In the third section, I  examine “market fundamentalist” views that support pro-​ market solutions on grounds that they routinely produce outcomes that not only satisfy the economic goal of efficiency, but more important, also satisfy norms of fairness.5 I examine opposing arguments that claim that markets often fail to produce the expected outcomes, and even when they do, often they are unfair for reasons not recognized by market fundamentalists. In the remaining sections, I discuss four agricultural policies at issue in the debates between market fundamentalists and their critics. They include: (1) elimination of trade barriers and subsidies designed to benefit domestic consumers or protect agricultural producers; (2) shifting agricultural production from crops intended for local consumption to commodities intended for export; (3) expansion of access to global markets for small land holders through contractual production arrangements; and (4) promotion of foreign direct investment in large-​scale agricultural production facilities.

Feeding the World in 2050:  Global Challenges of Supply and Demand Current global agricultural markets are shaped by a number of factors. Not all of them are of recent vintage. Not even globalization of agricultural markets is new. There has been a world market for wheat, with more or less unified prices since the 1880s.6 Nor is the potential for popular backlash against the effects of global commodities markets new. For example, food riots in nineteenth-​century England were propelled by the Corn Laws, which imposed tariffs on grain imports in order to protect domestic farmers from the effects of global price fluctuations. The backlash occurred because the high commodity prices paid to farmers made the costs of basic food unaffordable for many people.7 More recently, complaints about rising grain prices figured prominently in the Arab Spring uprisings. The slogan that resonated across Tahir Square was “Bread, Freedom, and Social Justice” (aish, hurriya, adala igtimaiyya). Bread (aish) in Egyptian Arabic refers to life.8 The call for bread is a call for government policies that protect against the most serious threats to human life posed by global food markets. Some observers

5 Soros, On Globalization. The phrase has been popularized by George Soros. In the third section, I discuss how prominent developmental economists typically understand the tenets of market fundamentalism. 6 Tracey, Agriculture in Western Europe. 7  Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the 18th Century.” 8  Mittermaier, “Bread, Freedom, Social Justice.”

Food, Fairness, and Global Markets    369 predict that future protests of this sort are likely to grow in frequency and urgency due to the increased volatility of intensely competitive global food markets.9 Two demand-​ side challenges arise from changes in consumption patterns. It is estimated that by 2050 the world will need to increase food production by 50% to 100%.10 One reason is the Demographic Transition. By mid-​century, world population is expected to increase from 7 billion to 9.7 billion.11 Another demand-​side factor is the Nutritional Transition. As some residents of the developing world get richer, they increase the variety in their diets, with a larger share of their protein requirements obtained through the more resource-​intensive production of livestock animals.12 Two supply-​side challenges stem from the fact that some resources that are essential to food production are dwindling. First, the world is running out of land suitable for most agricultural cultivation. Roughly 70% of the world’s arable land is currently used for some human activity, including agriculture.13 Between 30% and 40% of the land under cultivation has become too degraded to support agriculture over the long term.14 The primary reasons for soil loss differ by region, but among the most important factors are overgrazing, increased soil or water toxicity, and water erosion due to deforestation or other land-​use decisions. The result is that the rate of topsoil depletion vastly exceeds the rate of replenishment in all regions of the world. The depletion-​to-​replenishment ratios range from 10 to 1 in the American agricultural heartland to as much as 40 to 1 in parts of China.15 Agricultural land scarcity is exacerbated also by the global conversion of agricultural lands from the production of food crops to the production of biofuels or livestock feed. Both also contribute to spikes in grain prices.16 Price volatility poses a grave risk of hunger and food insecurity.17 For the roughly 2 billion people who make less than $2 per day, food costs account for 50% to 80% of their household budgets.18 9  OECD-​FAO, “Agricultural Outlook 2015”; and Office of the Director of National Intelligence, “Intelligence Community Assessment: Global Food Security.” 10  Royal Society of London, Reaping the Benefits: Science and the Sustainable Intensification of Global; OECD, “Global Food Security: Challenges for the Food and Agricultural System”; and Tomlinson, “Doubling Food Production to Feed the 9 Billion.” Tomlinson offers a skeptical look at typical estimates of future production requirements. 11  UN, “World Population Prospects: The 2015 Revision.” 12  Keats and Wiggins, “Future Diets: Implications for Agriculture and Food Prices.” 13  Clay, “Freeze the Footprint of Food,” 287. 14  Pimentel, “Soil Erosion: A Food and Environmental Threat”; and FAO, “The Status of the World’s Soil Resources.” 15  Pimentel, “Soil Erosion: A Food and Environmental Threat.” 16  Stokstad, “Could Less Meat Mean More Food?”; and HLPE, “Biofuels and Food Security.” 17  Committee on World Food Security, “Coming to Terms with Terminology.” The FAO definition of food security is widely cited: “Food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical, social, and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life.” 18  World Bank, “World Development Report 2008: Agriculture for Development”; Keats and Wiggins, “Future Diets: Implications for Agriculture and Food Prices”; and Chastre et al., “The Minimum Cost of a Healthy Diet.”

370   Madison Powers Second, although dramatic increases in access to clean water and sanitation have been made over the last forty years, the world is running out of accessible fresh water.19 Groundwater mining and other improvident water-​management practices have led to the depletion of aquifers around the world.20 These practices, together with loss of glacier ice that feeds the world’s largest rivers and desertification exacerbated by global warming, are putting these gains in jeopardy.21 By 2025, 1.8 billion people are projected to experience absolute water scarcity, and two-​thirds of the world is expected to live under severe water-​stressed conditions.22 In addition to the immediate threat to human health from lack of potable water, there are important long-​term implications for agricultural production. Agriculture accounts for 70% of all freshwater uses globally and 85% of water used in developing countries.23 Unprecedented levels of demand for food, together with scarcity of essential production resources, are shaping the incentives of the major participants in agricultural markets. Multinational corporations and governments have expanded their global footprint in search of new opportunities for the production of food for citizens of developed nations. Where market fundamentalists see new opportunities for economic growth, poverty relief, and greater food security for less developed nations, critics see risks to the resources necessary to meet the needs of the world’s most vulnerable citizens.

Market Fundamentalism and Market Fairness Market-​based agricultural policy proposals are part of a broader set of economic policies that have enjoyed widespread favor within the World Bank, IMF, WTO, and various regional development banks. Among the most widely discussed policies are removal of tariffs and other restrictions on exports and imports, imposition of fiscal austerity on debtor nations, and the privatization of state industries.24 The common denominator of these general macroeconomic policies and specific policies for the agricultural sector is a commitment to an augmented role for market forces in shaping social organization and distributive outcomes. These economic policies are often referred to by critics as “neo-​liberalism” or the “Washington Consensus.” Both labels are useful insofar as they identify possible 19 

Joint Monitoring Programme, World Health Organization, UNICEF, “Progress on Drinking Water and Sanitation.” 20  World Bank, “Human Development Report 2006: Equity and Development”; and Margat and Van der Gun, Groundwater around the World—​A Geographic Synopsis. 21  Glesson et al., “Water Balance of Global Aquifers Revealed by Groundwater Footprint.” 22  FAO, “Aquastat.” 23  World Bank, “World Development Report 2008: Agriculture for Development.” 24 Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents, 14, 53, 61–​72, 180–​181.

Food, Fairness, and Global Markets    371 motivations behind the policies, but they deflect attention from the central task of this essay, which is to evaluate the merits of the arguments offered as justification for the policies. The term “neoliberalism” was coined by Louis Rougier in 1938 to describe a social agenda for transforming societies by insinuating the market into every aspect of daily life, thereby displacing relationships based on solidarity and shared responsibility.25 The phrase “Washington Consensus” was coined by John Williamson to designate specific elements of policy advice given by Washington-​based institutions to Latin American countries in the 1980s, but critics appropriated the label in order to highlight their claim that socially destructive policies were imposed on poor nations in order to promote the economic interests of developed nations.26 “Market fundamentalism” is a more recent label reflecting a somewhat different critical purpose.27 It shifts attention away from the motives behind the policies to what critics see as the flawed theoretical underpinnings and faulty empirical premises upon which the policies rest.28 Critics of market fundamentalism emphasize that the merits of such arguments matter, independently of whether they mask controversial visions of social transformation, provide ideological cover for economic nationalists, or, as some economists argue, result from uncritical acceptance of economic dogma within the economics profession.29 Market fundamentalism, according to its critics, is a worldview that goes astray by offering an overly optimistic view of how global markets work and a flawed view of the fairness of the outcomes they produce.30 Within international development circles, fairness arguments play a central justificatory role in the defense of competitive markets in international trade. An example is 25 

Busch, “Governance in the Age of Global Markets.” Rougier made this point in 1938 at the Colloque Walter Lippmann, held in Paris, Centre International d’Etudes pour la Rénovation du Libéralisme. 26  Williamson, “What Should the World Bank Think about the Washington Consensus?” 27 Easterly, The White Man’s Burden, 77–​94; Rodrik, The Globalization Paradox, 3–​23, 159–​183; and Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents, xii, 35–​36, 53–​88, 259. My summary of key tenets of market fundamentalism in this essay draws primarily on discussions by these authors. A variant of the fundamentalist label is “trade fundamentalism.” 28  Stiglitz, “Biographical Essay, The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2001.” Stiglitz used the term in his acceptance essay for the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences to criticize a bundle of global development policies that are based on an incorrect understanding of economic theory and an inadequate interpretation of the historical empirical data. 29 Rodrik, The Globalization Paradox, xx, 65–​66, 165–​170. Rodrik points to this third factor as part of the explanation for the persistence of market fundamentalist policies in the face of an accumulation of countervailing evidence. 30  Fairness norms, of course, are not the only moral considerations relevant to the appraisal of markets. Within the United States, markets are often defended on the basis of their instrumental contribution to individual liberty insofar as they expand opportunities for the exercise of individual choice. Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia. Another instrumental argument for perfectly competitive markets rests on the assumption that they have a strong tendency to produce Pareto efficient outcomes. A Pareto improvement occurs whenever a transaction makes at least one person better off and no is made one worse off. For some economists, Pareto efficiency is the essence of market fairness and that any objection to a Pareto improvement must be based on envy. Varian, “Equity, Envy, and Efficiency”; and Mishan, Cost-​Benefit Analysis, 162. Neither of these instrumental moral arguments plays a significant justificatory role in discussions of international trade.

372   Madison Powers found in the preamble to the Constitution of the World Trade Organization, where the signatory nations declare an intention to enter into “reciprocal and mutually advantageous arrangements directed to the substantial reduction of tariffs and other barriers to trade.”31 The relevant notions of mutuality and reciprocity can be made clearer by comparing them to similar ideals common within philosophical discussions of the moral purposes of cooperative social arrangements. John Rawls, for example, says that “social cooperation is always for mutual benefit . . . it involves . . . a shared notion of fair terms of cooperation, which each participant may reasonably be expected to accept, provided that everyone else likewise accepts them . . . all who cooperate must benefit or share in common benefits.”32 Rawls’s mutual benefit requirement is intended to apply to a single society, not relations between nations. Moreover, the underlying ideal of reciprocity on his view is one that he calls “reciprocity in the deepest sense.”33 On this account of reciprocity, every citizen who participates in a domestic scheme of social cooperation would agree to accept it benefits only if the scheme maximally benefits the least advantaged participants. The Rawlsian ideals of reciprocity and mutual benefit among citizens are very demanding, but the relevant ideals invoked in the international trade arena are much weaker. The global ideal of reciprocity does not require maximal benefit for the least advantaged. It merely holds out the promise of some benefit to all trading partners, and the demands of global reciprocity among trading nations merely requires something along the lines of what Ranier Forst suggests, “that none of the parties concerned may claim certain rights and privileges it denies to others.”34 In short, the prospect of mutual benefit for trading partners is the centerpiece of an ideal of fairness in global markets, and it is premised on global institutional arrangements that embody ideals of reciprocity that rule out the trade advantages for some nations unless they are extended to all nations. Importantly, fairness arguments on behalf of participation in competitive global markets are not based on the premise that a reciprocating nation will necessarily fare better than it would under alternative trade arrangements. In fact, the central attraction of diametrically opposed mercantilist trade policies is that an individual nation’s economic prospects might be improved by adopting a “beggar-​thy-​neighbor” approach, in which it takes advantage of other nations by denying reciprocal trade privileges and opportunities, thereby undermining the prospects for mutual benefit.35 Contemporary norms of market fairness, based on ideals of reciprocal advantage and mutual benefit are central to nineteenth-​century Classical economic theory. Following Adam Smith, economists such as David Ricardo made the case for competitive global 31 

WTO, “Preamble to the Marrakesh Agreement Establishing the World Trade Organization.”

32 Rawls, Political Liberalism, 300.

33 Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, 122–​138. 34 

Forst, “Towards a Critical Theory of Transnational Justice,” 177.

35 Rodrik, The Globalization Paradox, 24–​66.

Food, Fairness, and Global Markets    373 markets on the grounds of mutual (though not necessarily maximal or equal) benefit to every reciprocating nation. Classical arguments for free trade fell out of fashion in the early twentieth century, when sharp economic rivalries led to a resurgence of mercantilism and unapologetic economic nationalism, but they resurfaced in the later part of the century and dominate current debates regarding the moral merits of competitive global markets.36 Moreover, Classical theorists and their contemporary expositors supplement their free-​trade arguments based on a mutuality of benefit and reciprocity of advantage. They also argue that competitive global markets are fair because of their tendency to produce widespread dispersion of social benefits within each participating nation.37 The contemporary formulation of this line of argument for free trade based on widespread social benefit speaks to the co-​equal moral importance of “inclusive growth,” where the economic benefits of trade are said to filter through all segments of society.38 Critics raise objections to these ideals of market fairness on two distinct fronts. One objection is that market fundamentalists have an unwarranted faith in the ability of unfettered markets to produce mutually beneficial and socially beneficial outcomes. Their argument is that the conditions for such outcomes are not satisfied in crucial cases in which various market-​based policies are proposed. A second criticism is that even under conditions that approximate perfectly competitive markets, markets often generate efficient outcomes that nonetheless should be judged as unfair for reasons not grounded in competitive market ideals.39 The first type of objection involves two disagreements regarding the operation of global markets. Market fundamentalists assume that global markets produce mutually beneficial and socially beneficial outcomes only when they are not hampered by significant market failures, and when they are not subject to significant market distortions by governments. Critics argue that market failures are more common than the fundamentalists assume, and moreover, without a significant “market-​distorting” role for government, markets often fail to produce socially beneficial outcomes. “Market failure” is the label used to describe how certain features of markets can be obstacles to competitiveness, and in turn, “fail” to produce outcomes that are efficient in the technical sense that economists are concerned with, but in addition, they also fail

36  Ibid., 3–​46. Rodrik traces the rise and fall (and eventual rebirth) of the influence of Classical economic thought on international trade policies. 37 Satz, Why Some Things Should Not Be for Sale, 17–​49. Satz offers a lucid account of some differences between the moral foundations of Neoclassical and Classical economic arguments, including Classical arguments that emphasize the social dispersion of benefits within competitive markets, especially within labor markets. 38  World Bank, “Globalization, Growth, and Poverty.” 39  Stiglitz, “The Pact with the Devil.” Stiglitz points to both strands of the criticism in the following remarks made in a recent interview: “The theories that I (and others) helped develop explained why unfettered markets often not only do not lead to social justice, but do not even produce efficient outcomes.”

374   Madison Powers to be mutually and socially beneficial in ways that many economists cite as important moral grounds for valuing competitive markets. Types of market failures are numerous and diverse, but I will focus on two: concentration of market power and negative externalities. The first example of market failure involves excessive concentration of market power. Markets fail to produce efficient outcomes whenever one or a very small number of economic actors are unilaterally able to affect the prices they receive or pay. Monopolies are an example of asymmetric market power in the hands of a single seller of goods and services. A familiar US example is broadband service. Where Americans are at the mercy of their only local cable company, broadband is both slower and far more expensive than in other countries. Monopolies (and oligopolies to a lesser extent) have less incentive to invest in better equipment because doing so would reduce profitability. There is an issue of fairness at stake inasmuch as anti-​competitive practices undermine the expected mutuality and the promise of overall social benefit. Not only the individual customer, but society in general, is made worse off by a system of communication that remains suboptimal only because it benefits the monopolist. Monopsonies (and oligopsonies) also are examples of market failures based in asymmetric market power. But unlike in cases of monopoly (or oligopoly), the market power resides in the hands of one (or very few) purchasers of goods or services. For example, when an employer is the principal purchaser of low-​wage labor in a particular job market, it can artificially drive down wages, not only for their own employees, but it lowers the prevailing wage for an entire labor market. In sum, the main reason that excess concentration of market power in the hands of either buyers or sellers is unfair (and not merely inefficient) is that it allows those with asymmetric market power to capture for themselves the economic gains that would otherwise provide fair benefits to both buyers and sellers and reward more efficient, socially beneficial operations. A second type of market failure arises in transactions that produce uncompensated negative externalities (i.e., costs imposed on parties “external” to the exchange). The strictly economic problem is that overall efficiency is undermined, in the sense that the true social cost of an activity fails to be reflected in the market price. But issues of fairness are at stake as well. The result is that other members of society bear the costs of the prosperity of the parties for whom a market exchange is mutually beneficial. Examples include environmental degradation and adverse health effects from industrial or agricultural pollution. In such cases, parties to the transaction can prosper by offloading their costs of doing business and the resultant health and environmental risks of their activities onto others. Critics of market fundamentalist policies argue that market failures of both sorts are more prevalent and more serious than their proponents assume. The concentration of market power and the existence of serious negative externalities are key characteristics of global markets, including agricultural markets. If the critics are correct, the fairness norms of mutual benefit and social benefit are not realized by market fundamentalist policies in many instances.

Food, Fairness, and Global Markets    375 Market fundamentalists and their critics also disagree about the distributive implications of various market distortions. “Market distortions” refer to the existence of non-​market activities that allocate or influence the distribution of goods and services, resulting in outcomes that are at variance with outcomes that would have been produced solely by the operation of price mechanisms within competitive markets. Government policies, in particular, come in for sharp criticism from market fundamentalists.40 Food subsidy programs, production subsidies for farmers, protective tariffs on competing imports, public provision of water at rates below market price, government provision of health or educational services, and economic safety nets are examples of non-​market activities that “distort” the outcomes that price mechanisms would produce. The basis of the market fundamentalist’s unfairness complaint typically rests on judgments regarding the unintended social consequences of otherwise well-​meaning social welfare programs. For example, export tariffs designed to protect domestic agriculture may benefit some domestic farmers, but at the same time, they can deprive domestic consumers of access to food imports that would be cheaper without the tariffs. Also, production subsidies paid to farmers can raise the price that farmers receive for export commodities such as cotton, but they can steer farmers away from socially more beneficial activities, such as growing crops that prevent famine or local food insecurity.41 Numerous examples of how the widespread dispersion of social benefits is undermined have been cited as reasons for the elimination of well-​meaning, market-​distorting government interventions.42 Hence, what is at stake is not merely a fetishistic attachment to an abstract ideal of economic efficiency, but the moral claim that non-​market activities are often unfair because they undermine the market’s ability to achieve more socially beneficial outcomes. While market fundamentalists believe that government intervention in the operation of markets generally distorts prices in ways that are unfair, the critics disagree. There is thus an empirical and historical disagreement over whether certain market-​distorting government activities tend to undermine or promote the ideal of widespread diffusion of social benefits. Beyond merely factual disagreements over whether the conditions of mutual and social benefit are satisfied by markets free of market failures and market distortion, the second line of objection challenges the adequacy of these two norms as an incomplete account of what market fairness demands. 40 

Krueger, “Government Failures in Development.” Market distortions that produce outcomes at variance with outcomes produced solely by price mechanisms are often referred to as government failures. I use the more inclusive label because, in principle, non-​market activities that can distort distributions include activities by private charities as well as governments. 41  Pinstrup-​Anderson and Watson, Food Policy for Developing Countries, 41, 198. 42  Krueger, “The Political Economy of a Rent-​Seeking Society.” Another unintended consequence argument focuses on rent-​seeking behavior. Private sector producers (e.g., farmers who produce goods for foreign aid or domestic food supplements) lobby for legislative guarantees of profits above fair market value (rents), claiming that such prices are necessary to ensure a steady supply of goods and avoid program gaps.

376   Madison Powers For example, Joseph Stiglitz calls attention to the inadequacy of the social benefit norm. He observes that while markets might produce considerable social benefits for quite a few people “market processes may, by themselves, leave many people with too few resources to survive” and government, therefore, has an essential role “in ensuring social justice” for everyone affected by market organization.43 In other words, even if a widespread dispersion of social benefit results, reliance on markets alone can create unfair pockets of deep disadvantage for some specific groups of people whose opportunities are so constrained that they are locked in to extremely low life prospects. William Easterly, by contrast, focuses on the inadequacy of the mutual benefit norm. He says that even if voluntary exchanges make both parties better off, market transactions do not necessarily make both parties better off to the same degree. Because these inequalities of reward in systems of economic cooperation can have a variety of serious effects on the distribution of advantages, we can still raise questions about the fairness.44 For example, successive iterations of wage bargaining may leave vulnerable employees better off than they would have been, thus ensuring mutuality of benefit, but over time, the more economically advantaged employers may extract wage and other concessions, thereby perpetuating a downward spiral of benefit for the least advantaged. Stiglitz and Easterly thus identify issues best described as matters of unfair disadvantage, affecting either the bargaining parties themselves or parties who are external to a transaction. These disadvantages are unfair, even if market exchanges are not ones that should be judged unfair on grounds that they fail to be mutually beneficial or they create significant negative externalities instead of widespread social benefits. The upshot is that the normative grounds for the discussion of agricultural policies and global development in the next four sections include questions of whether policies satisfy the two most basic, and generally agreed upon, norms of fairness (mutual benefit and social benefit) derived from the theory of competitive markets, and whether they run afoul of the two additional fairness norms pertaining to the distribution of disadvantage.

Trade, Aid, and Market Distortions One of the United Nation’s seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is to “end hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition, and promote sustainable agriculture.”45 Each of the SDGs identifies targets by which attainment of its goal can be measured. One of the targets for agriculture speaks directly, though in quite general terms, to the problems of hunger and food security: “By 2030, end hunger and ensure access by

43 Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents, 218. 44 Easterly, The White Man’s Burden, 75. 45 

UN, “Towards a Sustainable Development Agenda.”

Food, Fairness, and Global Markets    377 all people, in particular the poor and people in vulnerable situations, including infants, to safe, nutritious and sufficient food all year round.” There is little disagreement on the importance of the hunger and food security target, but disputes regarding the appropriate means are at the center of current Doha Round of negotiations over the future of agricultural products under international trade rules codified in the multilateral trade agreements that are interpreted and enforced by the WTO.46 A great deal of controversy surrounds another SDG target that embodies the market fundamentalist position: “Correct and prevent trade restrictions and distortions in world agricultural markets, including the parallel elimination of all forms of agricultural export subsidies and all export measures with equivalent effect, in accordance with the Doha Development Round.” Since the implementation of the WTO in 1994, global agricultural trade has been treated differently from other goods and services. It has been governed by the temporary and jurisdictionally limited Agreement on Agriculture (AoA). The Doha Round, beginning in 2001 was established, in large part, in order to create permanent rules for full extension of the WTO’s authority to review and regulate agricultural products and policies of member nations, but debates over permanent rules have proved politically intractable.47 Fourteen years after the Doha Round began, the close of the 10th Ministerial Meeting in Nairobi, competing national interests and ideologies left many temporary rules in place, key deadlines postponed, and major disagreements unresolved.48 At least rhetorically, the main sticking points reflect pervasive moral disagreement about the proper role of markets in agricultural policy. On one side of the debate, a bloc of lesser developed nations, led by the Group of 33, which includes India and China, argued that reliance on market forces often conflicts with a variety of social welfare policies and practices, especially those intended to reduce hunger, malnutrition, and food insecurity. On the other side of the debate, a bloc of developed nations, including the United States, the European Union, Australia, and Canada, opposed demands of developing nations for latitude in deciding what government interventions are needed to protect farmers and consumers from the vicissitudes of global markets. Two ethically charged flashpoints were most prominent. The first issue arose from the insistence by the Group of 33 that certain AoA protections for food security programs in developing nations be made permanent. The AoA exempts developing nations from requirements to reduce their agricultural subsidies, permitting “special and differential flexibilities,” for example, allowing them to use

46 

The enforceable agreements include the General Agreement of Trade and Tariffs (GATT), the General Agreement of Trade and Services (GATS), and the Agreement on Trade-​Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). 47  FAO, “The Implications of the Uruguay Round Agreement on Agriculture for Developing Countries.” 48  Donnan, “Trade Talks Lead to ‘Death of Doha and Birth of New WTO’ ”; and Watkins, “What Next for Poor Countries Fighting to Trade in an Unfair World?”

378   Madison Powers various forms of price support to incentivize agricultural production and thereby maintain enough food for stockholding programs designed to ensure food security. More specifically, a provision referred to as the “peace clause” ensures that other member nations cannot use the WTO adjudication procedures to challenge policies that developing nations defend as essential to their food security objectives. Bringing agricultural products within the full scope of WTO authority would expose such programs to the threat of being overridden by the WTO if they are determined to be unduly restrictive of global trade. Exposure to WTO adjudication procedures is significant because the scope of WTO review is broad. It includes not only tariffs on imports, but domestic subsidies and other measures that have the “equivalent effect” on trade (the same lawyerly language found in the SDG target) of import tariffs on free trade. The upshot is that without such protections for agricultural products and policies, the WTO would extend its authority to review laws pertaining to environmental, health, safety, and other social welfare programs of member nations and determine whether they constitute non-​tariff barriers to trade.49 The United States and other developed nations complained that within rapidly developing nations, such as China and India, the conditions that once might have justified differential treatment are no longer in place. Their primary demand was for the elimination of the peace clause so that member states can scrutinize and then challenge such policies that they believe unnecessary to advance legitimate food security goals.50 In addition, developed nations argued that some policies of developing nations perpetuate harm to their poorest citizens. Of particular concern are input subsidies. These are payments provided directly to farmers to purchase fuel, fertilizer, electricity, water, and seeds. The argument is that while such policies increase the profits of some poor farmers, they encourage the production of crops that are not in such short supply, that farmers do not need these incentives in order to ensure sufficient stocks for responding to famine or other food shortage emergencies, and that they promote commodity production in areas where water and electricity needed for running the deep well pumps are scarce.51 In short, the developed nations bolster arguments based solely on their own national self-​interest with objections to the market-​distorting effects of food aid programs on grounds that they deprive the global poor of affordable food, water, and other scarce resources. The second key point of ethical contention was the long-​standing demand from the Group of 33 that developed nations eliminate their own state subsidies for domestic agricultural products and tariffs they impose on foreign food imports. Under the AoA, developed nations are allowed to retain the very protectionist agricultural policies that 49 

In addition, the WTO review authority even extends to goods and services are produced and consumed exclusively within a single country, and its rulings are binding on every member country. 50  Suneja, “India Opposes US Proposal to Dismantle Price Support and Subsidies in World Trade Organization.” 51  Kanth, “Proposal on Low-​Income Farmers Faces Opposition at WTO.”

Food, Fairness, and Global Markets    379 developing nations are often forced to abandon as a condition for obtaining IMF loans and gaining admission to the WTO.52 Although the AoA has provisions that commit member nations to their eventual elimination, the pace of change has been slow, and critics point to the inherent unfairness of rules that retain these trade advantages for the developed nations while perpetuating serious disadvantage for developing nations.53 The unfairness of differential trade advantages built into the AoA is highlighted by the fact that roughly three-​quarters of the protectionist policies retained by members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) are ones that the OECD itself concedes as among the most market-​distorting policies.54 In particular, the developed states preserved direct price support payments to farmers “coupled” to their level of production. The problem with coupled supports is that they create incentives to farmers in the developed states to produce more than the market demands, thereby artificially driving down global commodity prices. Artificially lowered commodity prices have many adverse effects on the global poor. They deprive less developed countries of agricultural revenue they would have had were markets not distorted by trade policies designed for the benefit of farmers in affluent nations.55 Moreover, the developed nations often dump their excess production in poor nations at prices below the cost of local production, further disadvantaging farmers in developing countries. Artificially created global surpluses, either sold or given away as part of food aid programs, thus undermine, rather than advance the goal of hunger relief and food security by destroying the ability of farmers in less developed nations to compete effectively.56 A consistent market fundamentalist position, of course, would recommend the elimination of protectionist policies for both developed and less developed countries.57 However, if there is a case for differential treatment, current AoA policy gets matters backwards. Less developed nations have a stronger argument for protectionist policies because they confront a far graver threat of hunger and food insecurity than developed nations face.58

52 Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents, 61–​101; Moellendorf, “The World Trade Organization and

Egalitarian Justice,” 148–​149. 53  Oxfam, “Trade Report: Rigged Rules and Double Standards”; ICTSD, “Towards New Rules for Agricultural Markets?”; and Singer, One World, ch. 3. 54  Tangermann, “Farming Support: The Truth behind the Numbers.” 55 Thompson, The Ethics of Aid and Trade. 56  UNCTAD, “Trade and Development Report, 1999”; Oxfam, “A Recipe for Disaster.” The UN estimate for one extended period in the 1990s is that the loss is as much as four times greater than capital inflow from trade liberalization. Oxfam offers estimates of the impact of surplus production on the depression of global prices that the poor receive for their agricultural exports, as a result of dumping. See also Potter, “Agricultural Subsidies Remain a Staple in the Industrial World.” 57  Mill, “Of the Laws of Interchange between Nations,” 31–​32. The unfairness of non-​reciprocal trade arrangements is a staple argument of Classical economists, including Mill: “Until, by common consent of nations, all restrictions are done away with, a nation cannot be required to abolish those from which she derives a real advantage, without stipulating for an equivalent.” 58  Anderson and Martin, “Agricultural Trade Reform and the Doha Development Agenda.”

380   Madison Powers The 10th Ministerial meeting in December 2015 did little to alter the status quo. It closed with a declaration dubbed the “Nairobi Package.” It extended deadlines for developed nations to end their export subsidies from 2013 to 2018. It allowed developing nations to continue public stockpiling of food, retain their farm subsidies, and utilize treaty provisions known as the Special Safeguard Mechanism (SSM), which allows them to raise tariffs when faced with a surge of food imports. Even the commitment to free trade in agriculture was left in doubt as the meeting ended with representatives declining to “reaffirm” Doha’s mandate.59 In reality, no country seems inclined to follow the strict advice of the market fundamentalists with respect to agriculture. Virtually all national agricultural policies rest on the implicit assumption that food is morally special, and not merely another commodity among others. Some kinds of market support for farmers, defended as necessary in order to ensure adequate food supplies during periods of natural shortage or market volatility, along with some programs that provide direct food aid for the poor, are essential organizational features of nearly all national economies.

The Commodity Trap: Exceptions to  the Comparative Advantage Argument The production of export crops is one frequently recommended way of promoting rapid economic development in the world’s poorest countries. Often, IMF loans to debtor nations struggling with repayment of foreign loans are conditioned on the adoption of detailed economic plans that include strategies for improving export-​led growth, especially the production of agricultural commodities for export.60 The central argument in favor of a strategy of export-​led growth, focused on particular commodities is the argument from comparative advantage. The assumption is that nations overall tend to realize greater economic gains when they produce goods for which they have a comparative advantage and forego production of goods that are more expensive for them to produce. The idea of comparative advantage is an old one. Adam Smith made the argument and it was developed and made famous in the nineteenth century by James Mill, John Stuart Mill, and David Ricardo.61 When a country can make steel for comparatively less cost than it can make another product, it is more efficient to import the product that is comparatively more expensive to produce.62 59 

See note 48.

60 Easterly, The White Man’s Burden, 65–​72, 144–​147, 213–​215, 228–​235. Easterly provides a number of

important details regarding the history, contractual terms, implementation processes, and economic consequences of loan conditionality arrangements. 61 Ricardo, The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, ch. 7. 62 Mill, Elements of Political Economy. Comparative advantage is not absolute advantage. Absolute advantage is the ability to produce a greater quantity of a product (or service) than competitors, using the same amount of resources. A country may have no absolute advantage over others in producing

Food, Fairness, and Global Markets    381 A global system of trade based on the doctrine of comparative national advantage is often encouraged on the grounds that it is mutually advantageous. Everyone, it seems, benefits from productive specialization. Moreover, increasing the scale of export-​led economic growth strategy seems to be a moral imperative for less developed nations that are home to a large number of the global poor because it offers immediate economic benefits. Basing international trade on what a country can produce at lower costs means that a country takes advantage of the resources and productive capacity it has on hand. What many less developed countries have on hand is a surplus of agricultural labor, economically unproductive land, and a plentiful supply of sunshine and water. What they lack is a skilled industrial workforce, industrial infrastructure capacity, and sources of capital sufficient to produce other exports in a comparably profitable way. There are at least three other arguments for a targeted economic growth strategy that is focused on an increase of agricultural export commodities. First, the focus on agriculture fits well with much available evidence regarding the best way to pursue pro-​growth policies that are also pro-​poor, or in other words, aimed at raising the incomes of the poor rural farmers. The evidence suggests that other things being, investment in rural agriculture produces more economic growth and it concentrates more of the benefits of growth among the rural poor than many other sectorial investment strategies.63 Given that half the world’s population living on less than a dollar a day are smallholder farmers, greater benefit for the rural poor can be among the most broadly socially beneficial development strategies available.64 Second, assuming that the problems of lack of capital and access to technological inputs—​fertilizers, pesticides, machinery—​can be overcome, farmers would be in position to benefit from increased access to global export markets that are generally more lucrative than domestic cash crop markets.65 Third, a salutary consequence of increased farm income is the multiplier effect it has on non-​farm incomes in the local community.66 Such investments not only have the potential to be mutually beneficial for farmers and global buyers (and for international trading partners) but socially beneficial.67 For all these reasons, there is a pro tanto case for a shift away from subsistence production to export commodity production and for a targeted approach to export-​led growth

anything. However, a country pursuing its comparative advantage will produce and export more of what it can produce a relatively low (opportunity) cost and produce less of what it can import at less than the cost of domestic production. 63  World Bank, “World Development Report 2008: Agriculture for Development.” The World Bank cites estimates that increases in GDP based on growth of agricultural production increases the incomes of the poor by as much as two to three times as growth in production within the non-​agricultural sectors of the economy. Cf. ILO, “World Employment Report 2004‒05: Employment, Productivity, and Poverty Reduction.” 64  Lipton, “The Family Farm in a Globalizing World.” 65  World Bank, “World Development Report 2008: Agriculture for Development.” 66  Pinstrup-​Anderson and Watson, Food Policy for Developing Countries, 178–​179. 67  ILO, “World Employment Report, 2004‒2005: Employment, Productivity, and Poverty Reduction.”

382   Madison Powers by focusing on agricultural production of a few commodities for which a country has comparative advantage. However, as many economists have shown, there are morally significant exceptions that tend to be forgotten or ignored. Such policies can lead to a “commodity trap,” a condition in which a country has few viable economic options but an economic development strategy that revolves around today’s comparative advantage. The problem with this approach is that over time, it can lock in a variety of long-​term disadvantages.68 Five aspects of the commodity trap illustrate what is at stake. First, while farmers in developing nations might experience an absolute, short-​term economic gain, market participants who produce raw commodities, including agricultural commodities, operate at the least profitable link in the global value chain.69 The overwhelmingly profitable position is at the bottom, or final phase of the value chain, where finished products are sold. Enterprises based in the developed nations reserve for themselves the profitable positions within global trade, while farmers within developing nations are consigned to the least profitable positions. Mutual benefit alone, as Stiglitz notes, falls short of a plausible norm of fairness whenever the low ceiling on the life prospects of some market actors enables other market actors to gain so much more. Second, nations that concentrate on supplying raw commodities to developed nations tend to deindustrialize. Whatever diversified industrial base they had initially withers, resulting in the erosion of opportunities for more lucrative international trade.70 Third, a developing country’s decision to focus on current comparative advantage can have morally problematic consequences for their most vulnerable citizens. While it is true that a country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) may rise dramatically, and its ability to pay off foreign indebtedness may improve more rapidly, a temptation is for a country to exploit its comparative advantage through the production of goods that rely on an abundance of cheap labor, including slave labor or oppressively low-​wage regimes, or through lax regulatory schemes that prevent environmental costs or health consequences from being captured in the market price.71 Fourth, the shift from a mix of subsistence agriculture and production for local consumption to export-​based agricultural commodity production has cascading negative effects on consumers, especially the poor. Because the shift to more lucrative large export crops causes the prices of farmland go up, small holders are less able to afford land for the purposes of subsistence farming or production for local markets. The result is that the rural poor lose an important hedge they once had against economic hard times and food insecurity. Once local food production withers consumers must rely more on food imports. The problem, as we have seen, is that the global poor are highly vulnerable to global price shocks. Fifth, a more general problem is that staking the lion’s share of an economic development strategy on international trade can have profound redistributive effects within 68 Rodrik, The Globalization Paradox, 156. 69 

Gereffi, “The Organization of Buyer-​Driven Global Commodity Chains,” 95–​122. Devarajan and Rodrik, “Trade Liberalization in Developing Countries,” 283–​287. 71 Rodrik, The Globalization Paradox, 50–​55. 70 

Food, Fairness, and Global Markets    383 developing countries. For every dollar of increase in a developing country’s GDP that is achieved through increased international trade, roughly $50 of income is transferred from the lowest economic strata to the middle and upper income strata. In addition, the same groups of people with the lowest skills tend to get hit hardest with each successive upward tick in GDP.72 Much of the new wealth generated by global trade gets captured by existing economic elites, including the owners of large plantations.73 The point of this discussion of global commodity markets is not to deny that global trade should be a part of an economic growth and poverty reduction strategy for developing countries. However, for all of the reasons outlined in this section, the presumed benefits of focusing heavily on an agricultural commodity, export-​based pathway to development and poverty relief, based on comparative advantage, should be viewed with some caution, both for the fate of developing nations generally and for the fate of their poorest citizens.

Contract Agriculture and the Concentration of Market Power Many economists are committed to the model of export-​led growth with a focus on the production of agricultural commodities, notwithstanding its ethically problematic consequences. However, they hope that something can be done to address the problem of access to global commodities markets historically available only to the large plantation owners.74 The World Bank and USAID have been among the biggest supporters of the global extension of contract agriculture, pioneered in the United States, as a way to improve market access for small holders.75 An assessment of contract agriculture on a global scale, therefore, requires an examination of how it has evolved in the American context, in light of what the extensive literature on supply-​chain management, microeconomics, and economic sociology reveals about the underlying incentive structure that is not specific to the United States. In the late twentieth century, a revolution occurred in the way agricultural supply chains were structured in the United States. Many of the major agricultural commodities in the United States, other than perishables, are sold under exclusive production contracts, 72 

Ibid., 55–​61. Ibid., 139–​142. 74  Kumar and Kumar, “Contract Farming: Problems, Prospects and its Effect on Income and Employment”; NPAD, “Contract Farming Offers Fresh Hope for Africa’s Declining Agriculture”; and UNCTAD, “World Investment Report 2009 on Transnational Corporations, Agricultural Production and Development.” 75  World Bank, “World Development Report 2008: Agriculture for Development”; and Anseeuw and Boche, “Contract Farming: Why? What? How?” 73 

384   Madison Powers which are entered into between farmers and purchasing agents who typically negotiate on behalf of large commercial agricultural processors. Although production contracts differ, a key feature is the oversight and control exercised by the buyer during the production stage. Crops and animals grown under contract are raised according to the buyer’s specification, often including the choice of seeds, fertilizers, and other production inputs. In the case of broiler chickens, even the chicks and feed are supplied by purchasers to growers who own the production facility. The producers contract directly for farm labor, and they bear the risk of harvest failures and local regulatory compliance.76 Even when producers have made substantial investment in industry-​specific equipment and facilities that conform to buyer standards, such contracts are subject to contingent renewal at the discretion of the buyer. Between 1969 and 2003, the percentage of US agricultural products produced under contract increased from 11% to 39%.77 As a result, agricultural markets in the United States have been transformed. Traditional spot markets are in steep decline. Spot markets are made up of numerous competing buyers and sellers who enter into commodity sales transactions “on the spot” with no rights to the oversight of production or expectation for interaction beyond each discrete transaction.78 Another critically important aspect of the market transformation is the proliferation of global grocery retailers and fast-​food chains that are now the main global purchasers. There are, of course, obvious textbook reasons for expanded scale of the purchasing entities. Increased efficiencies of scale make possible cheaper bulk purchases and lower procurement and transportation costs.79 However, because the biggest buyers operate worldwide enterprises, they need to buy in bulk, restrain and stabilize commodity prices, and thereby ensure a reliable supply of standardized agricultural products that will be used in food sold under global retail brand names.80 A standard worry about the potential anti-​competitive consequences of market concentration among a declining pool of large buyers is the adverse social impact of rising consumer prices. However, thus far, the evidence does not point in that direction.81 The main consequences of the massive increase in scale among a smaller number of commodity purchasers fall upon farmers and farm communities. The primary effect on farmers is either outright market exclusion or steadily declining economic rewards. Market exclusion is a consequence of the fact that large purchasers have few economic incentives to buy from small producers. It is far more expensive to negotiate many production contracts, monitor performance standards at multiple production 76 

Gereffi, “The Global Economy: Organization, Governance, and Development.” MacDonald and Korb, “Agricultural Contracting Update: Contracts in 2008.” 78  Sporleder and Boland, “Exclusivity of Agrifood Supply Chains: Seven Fundamental Economic Characteristics.” 79  Sporleder and Peterson, “Intellectual Capital, Learning, and Knowledge Management in Agrifood Supply Chains.” 80  Martinez and Davis, “Farm Business Practices Coordinate Production with Consumer Preferences.” 81  US GAO, “Concentration in Agriculture.” 77 

Food, Fairness, and Global Markets    385 sites, and secure delivery from many small producers than from a small number of large producers.82 The concentration of market power in the hands of a few large buyers means that small farmers are effectively excluded from most of the major commodity markets. This result was not unexpected when antitrust law enforcement began to wither in the United States. As US Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz advised in 1976, “get big or get out.”83 The contract production model has in fact entrenched the importance of large-​scale production. Many US farmers have either gotten out or gotten big enough to deliver commodities in sufficient volume to make it worthwhile for the large buyers to enter into purchasing agreements. Even getting big is not always adequate protection against the adverse impact of asymmetric market power exercised by a declining pool of buyers. The market power of national oligopsonies and regional monosoponies has enabled buyers to dictate prices to farmers, driving down the economic return for commodities, sometimes below the costs of production.84 For some products, paradigmatically the broiler industry, the impact is dramatic. Many US poultry growers are in debt over a million dollars, but they have net annual incomes only slightly above the poverty level.85 In some regions of the United States where contract production practices have become the norm, local economies have been transformed in numerous ways that extend beyond the adverse effects on farmers. Food processors tend to locate regional hubs or clusters of contractual relationships in areas where there are weak unions, a surplus of flexible labor, low prevailing wages, and weak labor and environmental laws.86 These hubs have an adverse effect on the local labor pool. Contract farmers replace whatever stable, formal employment relations that once existed with informal labor patterns, characterized by a loss of regular hours, benefits, and worker security.87 In addition, the high concentration of unabated environmental degradation, due to runoff of fertilizer and animal waste, pollutes the air, water, and soil. These are the predictable systematic effects of the geographic concentration of such facilities.88 Because many of the main market dynamics that have driven the transformation of American agriculture are at work globally, there are strong presumptive reasons to expect the global model to resemble the development of the US model simply because the incentives at work in the United States are in place globally. The purchasing imperatives of giant global buyers generates a need to look for commodities from anywhere 82 

Sporleder and Boland, “Exclusivity of Agrifood Supply Chains: Seven Fundamental Economic Characteristics”; and Martinez and Davis, “Farm Business Practices Coordinate Production with Consumer Preferences.” 83  Carlson, “Obituary: Earl Butz.” 84  Taylor, “The Many Faces of Power in the Food System.” 85  Taylor and Domina, “Restoring Economic Health to Contract Poultry Production.” 86  Constance, “The Southern Model of Broiler Production and Its Global Implications.” 87 Ibid. 88  Burmeister, “Lagoons, Litter and the Law: CAFO Regulation as Social Risk Politics”; and Pew Environment Group, “Big Chicken: Pollution and Industrial Poultry Production in America.”

386   Madison Powers they can be grown at lower costs, whether it is the southern United States or South Sudan.89 Among the main cost-​saving benefits of global sourcing are the reduction of transaction costs associated with environmental, safety, and labor regulations in countries where governmental regulation is lax.90 Also, given both the higher costs of operation in many parts of the developed countries, along with the rapid degradation of land and water in many of those countries, there are added incentives to expand their agricultural footprint into the less developed world. Global supply-​chain management sometimes takes a different form. Another model of a vertically integrated enterprise is found among food-​processing companies that own every aspect of the supply chain, from seed to shelf, as the saying goes.91 However, for most agricultural commodities, that business model has been largely replaced for a variety of reasons. The growing cycle is the least financially rewarding stage of the food production and processing chain, and it involves the most risk due to uncertainties in weather, rapid devaluation of soil and other production assets, changes in the regulatory climate, and costs of a long-​term commitment to a fixed workforce pool.92 Contingent contract production avoids the drawbacks of ownership of the means of production and the financial commitment to a network of permanent employment arrangements and production facilities that ownership requires. Indeed, agribusiness learned some of its main lessons from other industrial approaches to global supply-​chain management. The underlying business model of contract agriculture is in fact merely a part of a larger global transformation of the way in which global supply chains for the production of a wide range of consumer goods is organized and controlled. The contract model, perhaps best known to many as a business model developed most extensively within the garment industry, represents a dramatic retreat from the traditional industrial production model based on ownership of the means of production and a system of formal labor contracts with a regularized pool of employees.93 It pioneered “just-​in-​time-​delivery schedules,” contracting with small fabricators around the world for standardized production on an as-​needed basis.94 Large-​scale and long-​term investments are no longer required at the riskiest point of the supply chain. The contract production model therefore shifts the various risks associated with long-​term financial commitments from the large-​scale retailers of finished products to the local contractors. The same business model has become firmly rooted in contract agriculture, where the production risks include not only losses due to weather but also the loss of goods due to transportation disruptions, the continuing and uncertain costs of compliance 89 

Gereffi, “The Organization of Buyer-​Driven Global Commodity Chains.” Constance, “The Southern Model of Broiler Production and Its Global Implications.” 91  Sporleder and Boland, “Exclusivity of Agrifood Supply Chains: Seven Fundamental Economic Characteristics.” 92  De Backer and Miroudot, “Mapping Global Value Chains”; and Wever et al., “Supply Chain-​Wide Consequences of Transaction Risks and Their Contractual Solutions.” 93  Gereffi, “The Global Economy: Organization, Governance, and Development.” 94  Boyd and Watts, “Agro-​Industrial Just-​in-​Time: The Chicken Industry and Postwar Capitalism.” 90 

Food, Fairness, and Global Markets    387 with health and environmental regulations, and the ongoing burden of sustained employment relationships.95 If one geographic locality or political jurisdiction becomes inhospitable, there are fewer financial impediments to the relocation of their sourcing arrangements. Given the US experience, as well as the incentive structure inherent to the business model, critics have a reasonable concern that deeper global penetration of the contract model will not provide the clear benefits imagined for the poorest citizens of the developing nations. Their worries are compounded by the fact that the concentration of market power in the hands of fewer buyers within the United States, each operating on a massive scale, and exerting more market power over smaller, economically less powerful commodity producers is now replicated on a global scale.96 Indeed, the widely touted, widespread benefits of contract agriculture as a way of integrating developing nations into global agricultural supply chains has not materialized. According to some of the best evidence available, contractually organized global supply chains are dominated by a few large transnational buyers, and it has resulted in farmers in developing nations getting a small and declining fraction of the international price of the commodities they produce.97 Various case studies, however, do show some economic improvement for poor, small farmers under very specific local conditions.98 The main circumstances that provide reasons for optimism are ones in which coalitions of small farmers have developed some countervailing market clout.99 However, the issues of fairness that loom large in the use of the contact model in the United States are present in developing countries. The contract producers remain stuck at the least rewarding position of the value chain, assume indebtedness with little ability to negotiate a more equitable distribution of market risk, and they lack the security of a long-​term contractual relationship.100 Large buyers everywhere have the same strong incentives to exclude the smallest producers, and even for farmers who get big enough to avoid outright market exclusion, there are often so few buyers in most regional markets that the commodity producers have few viable economic alternatives and little bargaining power.101 Equally important is the fact that contract agriculture has the demonstrated potential to transform whole communities in ways that are detrimental to wages and working conditions of the poor and harmful to their environment. It remains to be seen whether

95  Marsden, Flynn, and Harrison, “Retailing, Regulation, and Food Consumption: The Public Interest in a Privatized World?” 96  Cotterill, “Continuing Concentration in Food Industries Globally”; Sexton, “Grocery Retailers’ Dominant Role in Evolving World Food Markets.” 97  Prowse, “Contract Farming in Developing Countries.” 98 Ibid. 99  Agarwal, “Food Sovereignty, Food Security and Democratic Choice: Critical Contradictions, Difficult Conciliations.” 100  De Shutter, “The Right to Food: Note by the Secretary-​General, A66/​262.” 101  Gereffi and Lee, “A Global Value Chain Approach to Food Safety and Quality Standards”; and De Backer and Miroudot, “Mapping Global Value Chains.”

388   Madison Powers the business model developed in the United States, and now extended globally, can be adjusted so that contract agriculture can be mutually beneficial for both buyer and seller, as well as socially beneficial.102

The Global Land Grab:  Negative Externalities and the Natural Resource Curse Market fundamentalists support foreign direct investment in large-​scale agricultural production facilities as a way of enhancing economic growth, by providing less developed nations with needed capital and technology and by creating employment opportunities.103 However, critics argue that we are witnessing a “global land grab”—​a pattern of resource acquisition that threatens the long-​term food security of the global poor and makes more fragile the land tenure of many of the world’s most vulnerable people.104 Indeed, nations and private corporations are pursuing land and water resources globally, especially in developing countries where land is extremely cheap by developed nation standards and governance is weak.105 Especially attractive to foreign investors is land that either can be purchased at very low prices in the developing world or leased for a term of years. Both options offer the prospect of substantial economic gains without having to make significant long-​term financial commitments to the economic well-​being and environmental quality of the communities in which they operate. Moreover, it is not clear how beneficial such arrangements are for the host countries. Studies of the prevailing modes of purchase and leasing arrangements show that often these agreements are entered into by governments for little or no direct economic remuneration, offering little beyond the vague and unenforceable promise of overall increase in GDP.106 The geographic scale and overall impact of the global land grab is an evolving and empirically controversial story.107 However, there is a vast body of experience that 102 

NPAD, “Contract Farming Offers Fresh Hope for Africa’s Declining Agriculture.” Even a cautiously optimistic assessment of the prospects for contract farming in Africa offers a list of problems that mirror those in the United States: market exclusion of small farmers; declining payments for commodities due to bargaining differentials; and the shifting of risks of harvest failure and commodity market volatility. 103  World Bank, “Protecting Land Rights Is Key to Large-​Scale Land Acquisitions.” 104 Klare, The Race for What’s Left, 183–​208; Kugelman and Levenstein, The Global Farms Race; and Pearce, The Land Grabbers. 105  Center for Human Rights and Global Justice, “Foreign Land Deals and Human Rights.” 106 GRAIN, http://​farmlandgrab.org/​. This website hosts a massive databank of contract documents and details regarding acquisition. 107  World Bank, “Protecting Land Rights Is Key to Large-​Scale Land Acquisitions.” The 2010 World Bank study found that the annual acquisitions in 2008 were around 10 million acres, but the estimate for the first eleven months of 2009 jumped to 110 million. See Buckner, “The Myth of the African

Food, Fairness, and Global Markets    389 suggests that the well-​documented risks from traditional extractive resource industries, such as oil production and mining, is mirrored in the patterns of foreign investment in agricultural land.108 The portfolio of social and economic problems arising from these extractive industries is known as the “natural resource curse.”109 In some quarters, we are beginning to see a similar range of adverse effects produced by the large-​scale foreign investment in agricultural facilities.110 The documented risk of the traditional examples of the natural resource curses is that foreign investors, who are not necessarily present for the long term, will extract profits, deplete resources, produce goods for the global affluent, invest little that will improve the local economy or relieve poverty, leave behind environmental degradation, convert small holders to low-​wage transient workers, and dispossess many traditional landholders.111 All of these problems are replicated in foreign investment in large-​scale agricultural operations in developing nations.112 The presence of vast natural resources in poor nations, whether it is oil or soil, has led economists and astute observers of international politics and trade to ask why they often fare worse economically than other poor nations. While the primary cause (assuming that there is one) is a matter of ongoing debate among social scientists, the pattern of activities that contribute to the outcomes just described is clear. The presence of rich stores of natural resources in poor countries, having few other immediate economic opportunities, invites exploitation from the outside, enables autocratic leaders and their cronies to finance their own lifestyles, and funds the build-​up of arms and infrastructure that allows them to remain in power through repression and elaborate systems of bribery and patronage.113 Indeed, one of the most devastating effects of state-​sponsored foreign direct investment in extractive industries of any sort is the dispossession of the rural poor from traditional ancestral lands or public lands acquired by the state at the end of the colonial era. While such lands are used for private purposes the occupants in many countries have no legal title. The United Nations estimates that 4 billion people worldwide live Land Grab.” Estimates of the global scale of foreign investment in large-​scale agricultural projects in developing nations vary for a number of reasons. Market conditions change quickly; some deals turn sour; some estimates involve double-​counting from assimilated news reports; and most transactions lack public transparency. 108  GRAIN, “Responsible Farmland Investing? Current Efforts to Regulate Land Grabs Will Make Things Worse.” 109 Collier, The Plundered Planet. 110  Human Rights Watch, “Waiting Here for Death.” 111 Collier, The Plundered Planet; Humphreys, Sachs, and Stieglitz, Escaping the Resource; and World Watch Institute, “The Hidden Shame of the Global Industrial Economy.” 112  See, e.g., De Shutter, “How Not to Think of Land-​Grabbing”; Schiffman, “Hunger, Food Security, and the African Land Grab”; Robertson and Pinstrup-​Anderson, “Global Land Acquisition: Neo-​ Colonialism or Development Opportunity”; Human Rights Watch, “Waiting Here for Death”; and Center for Human Rights and Global Justice, “Foreign Land Deals and Human Rights.” 113 Collier, The Plundered Planet; Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents, 132–​159; and Wenar, “Property Rights and the Resource Curse.”

390   Madison Powers outside the protection of basic rules of law that establish rights to property and provide remedies for dispute resolution.114 Land that is in theory held in common for the use of the citizens of a country is easily expropriated by the state and made available either to local elites or foreign business interests who, in turn, pay the state for mining rights or for rights to establish large agricultural enterprises. The lack of any publicly known, regularly enforced, and transferable system of property rights virtually guarantees that the rural poor remain poor and powerless, leaving them at the mercy of ruling political elites and foreign businesses.115 Moreover, a cascade of further redistributive effects often accompanies foreign investment in extractive industries. GDP often goes up, just as proponents of greater foreign direct investment in developing economies predict. GDP, however, as we have seen, can be a poor proxy for how well nations overall or segments of their populations are faring. For example, GDP can go up even if most of the wealth leaves the country, leaving GNP (gross national product)—​the amount of money that stays within the nation—​ unimproved. In fact, much of the wealth that is created by extractive industries is not produced from the domestic sale of raw materials such as minerals, oil or gas, or agricultural commodities. Most of the market value is captured abroad in the manufacture and fabrication of commercially tradable finished goods sold by the global affluent to the global affluent.116 To make matters worse, much of the newly created wealth that does remain in the country is not invested for the sake of improving the well-​being of future generations or distributed for the benefit of the current generation of the poor. Projects that initially enhance a country’s GDP leave behind environmental degradation from extractive industries, environmentally mediated deprivation of health, and unsustainable economies that are too narrowly based on nonrenewable resources with little thought to the needs of the future.117 In some of the worst cases, it leaves behind soil degradation and groundwater depletion that undermines long-​term agricultural productivity necessary to meet the future food needs of the country.118 Because GDP measures only aggregate economic output of current transactions, gains in GDP fail to register these long-​term costs imposed on others. But in the nearer term, political cronies, corrupt government officials, and the rising urban middle classes capture most of the economic gains from foreign direct investment in extractive industries.119 114 

United Nations, “Making the Law Work for Everyone.” Robertson and Pinstrup-​Anderson, “Global Land Acquisition: Neo-​Colonialism or Development Opportunity,” 275–​276; and World Watch Institute, “The Hidden Shame of the Global Industrial Economy.” 116 Rodrik, The Globalization Paradox. 117  Stiglitz, Fitouss, and Sen, Mismeasuring Our Lives. 118  World Bank, “World Development Report 2008: Agriculture for Development.” The World Bank notes that the industrial cultivation of export crops in many less developed regions of the world has damaged soil and water quality so much that a third of the productivity gains have been lost. See also FAO, “World Agriculture: Towards 2030/​2050.” The FAO estimates that of new agricultural land created by forest clearing in the tropics 30%‒50% of the soil quality is exhausted in three years. 119 Rodrik, The Globalization Paradox. 115 

Food, Fairness, and Global Markets    391 Even members of the middle classes of developing nations are disadvantaged, a phenomenon known as the Dutch Disease. The global sale of natural resources and raw commodities strengthens a developing nation’s currency, which in turn, makes other exports more expensive for international buyers and thus less competitive on the world market.120 Thus, even if some sectors of the economy benefit from these sales, many other sectors are deeply disadvantaged. Corrupt governments and multinational corporations are not the only actors implicated in problematic examples of foreign direct investment. Nongovernmental organizations operating in developing countries argue that the problems created by traditional extractive industries or the global land grab are aggravated by policies and programs of the World Bank. They claim that socially irresponsible companies have been given the tools that help them press for governmental concessions that harm the poor. Since 2003 the World Bank has maintained a registry known as the Doing Business Report. It ranks 189 countries based on the ease of doing business. In 2014, the Bank claimed to have inspired over a quarter of the 2,100 reforms registered since its creation. However, the “reforms” intended to improve the “ease of doing business” typically involve lower labor and environmental standards, reduction in the taxation of corporations, diminished business contribution to social security funds, and easier and cheaper transfers of public lands.121 A coalition of 260 human rights groups, trade unions, and civil society groups recently urged the Bank to eliminate the Doing Business registry, but at the insistence of the wealthy G-​8 countries, the Bank instead instituted a similar registry for global agricultural land investment, known as “Enabling the Business of Agriculture.”122 Some international development institutions and aid agencies that encourage global land acquisition acknowledge the existence and seriousness of the concerns cited in this section, but they argue that the risks can be managed as long as voluntary guidelines are met.123 Critics, however, argue that the illusion of self-​regulation simply makes matters worse by accelerating the acquisition process, with no effective accountability, and thus, offering no convincing reason to believe that the world’s most vulnerable people will be protected or empowered to protect themselves.124 By contrast, there is a strong case for an alternative developmental approach that has the acceleration of land reform and the extension of the rule of law as its centerpiece. This alternative approach puts more land in the hands of small holders, under conditions that establish clear legal ownership rights, and prevents government complicity with foreign investors that ultimately leads to the dispossession of many current residents whose claims are not legally protected.125 120 

The Economist, “What the Dutch Disease Is, and Why It’s Bad.” Lau, “The World Bank’s Doing Business Rankings.” 122  GRAIN, “The G8 and Land Grabs in Africa.” 123  FAO, IFAD, UNCTAD, and the World Bank Group, “Principles for Responsible Agricultural Investment.” 124  GRAIN, “Responsible Farmland Investing? Current Efforts to Regulate Land Grabs Will Make Things Worse.” 125  Knight et al., “Protecting Community Lands and Resources.” 121 

392   Madison Powers Moreover, the promotion of direct foreign investment in agricultural land as a vehicle for increasing domestic food security is in tension with the primary reason cited for adopting contract production as a vehicle for expanding market access for small farmers. It overlooks the fact that access to cheap land gives multinational corporations new incentives to establish their own supply chains and bypass small local farmers altogether, as long as there is keen competition among lesser developed countries for foreign investment and pressure by the World Bank for wholesale deregulation.126 Also, the argument for large-​scale foreign production facilities as a vehicle for technology transfer necessary to improve local food security is at odds with a central premise behind the push for export commodity production. Foreign investors have little incentive to produce crops for local consumption for the very same reasons that market fundamentalists cite when they promote export crop production. Domestic consumption markets are far less lucrative than export crops, and the evidence thus far suggests that foreign investors are not in the business of producing food for local consumption.127 Given these economic realities, foreign investors might help feed the world, but there is scant evidence of significant incentive to feed those who occupy the small corners of the world where they are doing business, or incentive to establish mutually beneficial contractual arrangements over a long time horizon. Large-​scale global investment in agricultural land, like the emphasis on commodity exports and the contract production model, is a good deal for the global affluent, especially when trade rules confer added advantages upon them at the expense of less developed nations. For the global poor, the benefits are speculative and the disadvantages are demonstrable. In sum, there are compelling reasons to ask why any of the three agricultural policies widely promoted by the developed nations and global development institutions should be seen as a good bet for the global poor, given the existence of an obvious alternative. The alternative would empower the poor by providing them with legal ownership rights that cannot be overridden by authoritarian governments and create legal protections of land and water from devastation by those who have little long-​term stake in environmentally sustainable and socially beneficial enterprises.128 A land reform approach, together with overall development policies that favor economic diversification, offers the global poor a chance to participate in global trade on reciprocal and mutually beneficial terms, instead of leaving them subordinated to economically powerful foreign interests that also shape the trade rules governing global markets. 126 

De Shutter, “How Not to Think of Land-​Grabbing,” 251. De Shutter identifies a number of buyers and lease holders who cite the economic benefits of securing their own sources of commodities, as long as the price and risk is relatively low and global commodities markets continue to be volatile. 127  This point is made in all of the studies cited in note 112. 128 Lipton, Land Reform in Developing Countries.

Food, Fairness, and Global Markets    393

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chapter 18

M u lti-​I s su e Fo od Acti v i sm Jeff Sebo

Introduction Food activism sits at the intersection of many different social and political issues.1 For example, you might get involved in food activism because you care about malnutrition, food deserts, food swamps, animal suffering, public health harms, environmental harms, or a host of other problems. You might also take many different approaches to food activism. For instance, you might advocate for local food, organic food, vegan food, food security, food justice, food sovereignty, or a host of other solutions. The pluralistic nature of food activism has risks as well as benefits. On one hand, it can lead to conflict within and across food groups, since different individuals and groups have different beliefs, values, and priorities. On the other hand, it can also bring people together around a common cause so that they can learn how to help each other, or at least not harm each other, through their work. As a result, many people are now calling for unity in food activism. For example, Eric Holt-​Giménez and Annie Shattuck write: Food sovereignty, food justice, and the right to food ultimately all depend on building a unified food movement diverse enough to address all aspects of the food system, and powerful enough to challenge the main obstacle to food security—​the corporate food regime.2

1 

For my purposes in this chapter, I will use “food activism” in a broad sense that refers to any effort to bring about social, political, or economic change regarding food production or consumption. I will use “alternative food” in a broad sense that refers to any alternative to conventional industrial animal agriculture, such as local food, organic food, or vegan food. 2  Holt-​Giménez and Shattuck, “Synopsis,” 317.

400   Jeff Sebo However, it is not always clear what kind of unity people are calling for, or why. Moreover, while an aspiration to unity would have many benefits, it would also seem to have certain costs. For example, it would place many restrictions and demands on current approaches to food activism. My aim in this chapter is to examine the tensions between what I will call multi-​issue food activism, which spans multiple movements and addresses multiple issues (including but not limited to movements and issues related to food), and what I will call single-​ issue food activism, which does not.3 I will begin, in the next section, by reviewing the kinds of connections across issues that will be relevant for our discussion. I will then, in the following two sections, present and evaluate two arguments for multi-​issue food activism—​one principled and one pragmatic. In the next three sections, I will examine three approaches to multi-​ issue food activism—​ unity, solidarity, and mutual understanding. Finally, in the last section, I will close with a few general, preliminary conclusions about how to do food activism in an ethical and effective way in light of these considerations.

Parallels, Intersections, and Root Causes There are many kinds of connection across issues, identities, and oppressions that present activists with challenges and opportunities. I begin by reviewing three kinds of connection that will be relevant here—​parallels, intersections, and root causes—​and by explaining how I understand the relationship between multi-​issue activism, single-​issue activism, and intersectional activism for my purposes in this chapter. First, there are parallels among issues, identities, and oppressions. That is, there are respects in which different issues, identities, and oppressions are relevantly similar. For example, Iris Young argues that many oppressions share some or all of the following features: exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and violence.4 Many people explore parallels between specific practices and traditions as well, often in controversial ways. For example, some people argue that current treatment of nonhuman animals in agriculture is similar in some respects to past treatment of Black people during slavery (for instance, people separate them from their families and keep them in captivity in order to extract economic value from them) as well as of Jewish people during the Holocaust (for instance, people control their breeding and slaughter them in industrialized killing centers).5 Of course, 3 

Some people use “intersectional activism” to refer to what I am calling “multi-​issue activism.” I explain how I understand the distinction between these categories in the second section. 4 Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, 39–​65. 5  For discussion of animal use and slavery, see Spiegel, The Dreaded Comparison, and for discussion of animal use and the Holocaust, see Patterson, Eternal Treblinka.

Multi-Issue Food Activism    401 there are many relevant differences among these issues as well, and it would be a mistake to examine parallels among them in simplistic, reductive, or appropriative ways. (We will consider controversies surrounding parallel oppression analyses involving historical atrocities such as slavery and the Holocaust later on.) However, if and when people examine certain parallels in nuanced, thoughtful, and respectful ways, they can advance understanding of all relevant issues as a result. Second, there are intersections among issues, identities, and oppressions. That is, there are respects in which different issues, identities, and oppressions interact so as to make the whole different from the sum of its parts. For example, Kimberlé Crenshaw argues that if one wants to understand the challenges that Black women face in the workplace, then it is not enough to simply think about the challenges that Black people and women face in the workplace and add these thoughts together (especially if one has a tendency to think of Black people as male by default or to think of women as white by default). Instead, one needs to examine the respects in which racism and sexism conspire to create new, distinctive challenges for individuals who hold both marginalized identities in this context.6 Similarly, some people argue that, if one wants to understand the challenges that undocumented migrant workers face in agriculture, the challenges that low-​ income single parents face in food deserts, the challenges that people with mental and physical health issues face at protests, and so on, then one needs to examine the respects in which racism, sexism, classism, ableism, and more conspire to create new, distinctive challenges for these individuals in these contexts. Third, many people think that there is a shared cause or root cause of some or all oppressions. For example, some people identify capitalism as a shared or root cause of oppression, since capitalism leads people to objectify each other as they compete for dominance in the global marketplace.7 In food movements, some people develop this idea in terms of industrial food systems and the neoliberal approach to food policy that informs the food security efforts of the IMF, World Bank, and WTO.8 Of course, not everybody agrees that there is a single root cause of all oppression, or that this root cause is capitalism or neoliberalism. But even if people reject these ideas, they might still think that there are at least some common causes of at least some of the problems that they face. Insofar as they do, it will guide their thinking about the nature of these problems as well as how to solve them. A common idea in activist groups is that if the problems that people face are connected, then the solutions should be connected as well. This is especially true in food activism, given how many groups experience harm as a result of industrial food systems. Some people channel this call for connectedness into a call for unity, understood as a call for people to work together across movements. Others channel it into a call

6  See, e.g., Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex”; Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins”; Carastathis, “Basements and Intersections”; Carastathis, “The Concept of Intersectionality in Feminist Theory”; and Garry, “Intersectionality, Metaphors, and the Multiplicity of Gender.” 7  For more, see Frye, The Politics of Reality, 1–​16; and Torres, “Property, Violence, and the Roots of Oppression.” 8  For more, see Counihan and Siniscalchi, Food Activism; and Schanbacher, The Politics of Food.

402   Jeff Sebo for solidarity, understood as a call for people to support each other across movements. Increasingly, people are also channeling this idea into a call for intersectional activism. Some people use this term in a general sense, to refer to activism that operates at the intersection of multiple movements and expresses or promotes understanding of connections across them. However, others use it in a more specific sense, to refer to activism that operates at the intersection of multiple movements and expresses or promotes understanding of intersectionality, in the sense Crenshaw discusses, in particular.9 Since the term “intersectionality” has a specific origin and usage that I want to preserve, I will use “multi-​issue activism” to refer to activism that addresses multiple issues (as opposed to “single-​issue activism,” which does not), and I will use “intersectional activism” to refer to multi-​issue activism that expresses or promotes understanding of intersectionality in particular. Meanwhile, I will use “unity,” “solidarity,” and “mutual understanding” to refer to different approaches to multi-​issue and/​or intersectional activism. Having defined multi-​issue activism, we can now examine arguments for and against this approach to activism, some of which are principled and some of which are pragmatic.

A Principled Argument for Multi-​Issue Food Activism First, consider a principled argument for multi-​issue food activism. The general idea behind this argument is: your reasons for supporting movement x commit you to supporting movement y as well (including by incorporating support for movement y into your support for movement x). Activists can use this kind of argument in at least two ways. First, they can use it to get people to expand their moral concern. For example, it is common for people to argue as follows: “If you think that racism is wrong because everyone has a right to equal consideration no matter what social or biological group they happen to be in, then you should think that sexism is wrong for the same reason, notwithstanding important differences between them.” Or (more controversially, as we will see later on): “If you think that ableism is wrong because everyone has a right to equal consideration no matter what social or biological group they happen to be in, and no matter what cognitive or physical abilities they happen to have, then you should think that speciesism is wrong for the same reason, notwithstanding important differences between them.”10 9 

Thanks to Maryse Mitchell-​Brody and Julinna Oxley for helpful discussion on this point. For an example of this kind of argument, see Singer, Animal Liberation, and for critical discussion, see Taylor, Beasts of Burden. 10 

Multi-Issue Food Activism    403 Second, activists can use this kind of argument to get people to expand their understanding of what moral concern requires. For example, it is common for people to argue as follows: “If you think that it would be wrong to use words or images that marginalize women (e.g., by using ‘he’ by default), then you should also think that it would be wrong to use words or images that marginalize non-​binary people (e.g., by using ‘he or she’ by default).” Or (again, more controversially): “If you think that it would be wrong to use words or images that objectify humans (for example by using ‘it’ to refer to them), then you should also think that it would be wrong to use words or images that objectify nonhumans (e.g., by using ‘it’ to refer to them).”11 We can represent all of these arguments as a simple syllogism: 1.  x is morally wrong. 2.  y is relevantly similar to x. 3. Therefore, y is morally wrong as well.12 When confronted with this kind of argument, one can respond in at least four ways. First, one can accept the conclusion. For example (and to focus on consumer activism for now, though other kinds are relevant too, as we will see), I became vegan in part because I was persuaded that my reasons for caring about humans for their own sake extend to all sentient beings. Second, one can reject premise 1. For example, I initially resisted veganism because I sensed that it would commit me to other kinds of consumer activism as well, and I was reluctant to accept these further commitments (or to open myself up to accusations of hypocrisy insofar as I fell short of them). Third, one can reject premise 2. For example, I am not fruitarian because I deny that my reasons for caring about sentient beings for their own sake extend to non-​sentient beings. Finally, one can reject the aspiration to consistency in the first place. For example, I wrote a draft of this chapter at a Starbucks, on an Apple product, while wearing clothes from Urban Outfitters, despite expecting that a fully consistent approach to consumer activism would have ruled out at least some of these choices, because—​well, because I wanted to (and because I know that at some point I need to stop thinking about what to buy and just get on with my day, or else consumer activism will become the only kind of activism that I ever engage in, which would be bad). How should we evaluate these responses to appeals to consistency? We have no choice but to evaluate them on a case by case basis. For example, the first three responses are clearly appropriate in some cases. When we see what follows from a moral principle we accept, it sometimes makes sense to accept that requirement and it sometimes makes sense to reject that principle (e.g., because we realize that, once universally applied, it requires the impossible). Moreover, even if two actions are relevantly similar in some respects, they might not be relevantly similar in all respects, and so we might have stronger moral reason 11 

12 

For discussion of these issues, see, e.g., Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat, and Chen, Animacies. We could also put this argument in terms of actions that are morally permissible or required.

404   Jeff Sebo to perform one of these actions all things considered. With that said, given that rejecting the conclusion of an appeal to consistency coincides with self-​interest more often than not, I think that we can expect to prefer to do so more often than we should, and so we should discount our preference for this option accordingly. As for rejecting the aspiration to consistency in the first place, this response admits of two readings, one of which I think is more plausible than the other. On one hand, I think that it is a mistake for us to reject the aspiration to consistency in theory (i.e., to say that we do not need to treat like cases alike in principle). On the other hand, I do not think that it is always a mistake for us to reject, or at least restrict, the aspiration to consistency in practice (i.e., to say that we should not make the perfect the enemy of the good or allow consistency to always have priority over humility or toleration in practice). This is true for epistemic reasons (e.g., if we aim for consistency at all costs, we may be more likely to accept simple, dogmatic worldviews), as well as for practical reasons (e.g., if we aim for consistency at all costs, we may end up either not doing anything at all or channeling all our efforts into an ineffective, counterproductive, and unsustainable obsession with individual or collective purity).13 However, it is important to qualify this point in two ways. First, given that rejecting the aspiration to consistency, like rejecting the conclusion of an appeal to consistency, coincides with self-​interest more often than not, I think that we can expect to prefer to do so more often than we should, and so we should discount our preference for this option accordingly. Second, while I agree that we should not make the perfect the enemy of the good or allow consistency to always have priority over humility and toleration in practice, I also think that (a) most of us can cultivate much more consistency than we currently have compatibly with cultivating these other virtues, and (b) if and when these virtues conflict, we should not assume that the latter always trump the former any more than we should assume that the former always trumps the latter. Instead, I think that we should accept that this is a complex issue, and that different approaches will be appropriate for different people in different situations. In my case, for example, while there may be limits to how much time, energy, and money I should be spending on consumer activism, I may not have reached those limits yet. Maybe I should be paying at least a bit more attention to where my soy chai lattes are coming from than I currently am after all (if, indeed, I should even be buying them at all).

A Pragmatic Argument for Multi-​Issue Food Activism Now consider a pragmatic argument for multi-​issue food activism. The general idea behind this argument is: your support for movement x will be more effective if you 13 

For more, see Thompson, From Field to Fork, 227–​256.

Multi-Issue Food Activism    405 support movement y as well (including by incorporating support for movement y into your support for movement x). The argument for this conclusion is simple. Multi-​issue activism benefits all involved. There are many different issues to work on and many different groups working on them. In the food movement, these groups have shared interests, including an interest in combating industrial food systems, and they also have different strengths, including different backgrounds, resources, and constituencies. Thus, if food activists work together, or at least work in harmony with each other, then they will likely benefit epistemically as well as practically from this activity, with the result that they will all be stronger overall. Moreover, if there is a shared or root cause of some of the problems that food activists face, then that will only enhance this pragmatic argument, since it will support the idea that, if food activists want to bring about real change in the long run, then they must address the shared or root cause of these problems (which will involve working in harmony across groups) rather than merely treat the symptoms of their own problems (which might not). As William Schanbacher puts the point regarding food politics: “A simple band-​aid will not work. We need to transform society. The whole debate over food, the environment, and property [is] a community question, and we have to consider this in order to form alliances.”14 However, multi-​issue activism has costs as well. First, not all issues are equal. Some problems are more important than others, and some solutions are more impactful than others (though activists disagree about which). Moreover, multi-​issue activism takes a lot of time, energy, and money to do well (especially initially), which raises important questions about priority-​setting, especially for groups that have very few resources to begin with. Finally, many people believe that multi-​issue activism is often ineffective, because it can distract from the core mission of particular groups and alienate people both within and across groups. As a result, many people believe that if activists want to be effective, then they have to be willing to stay on message, make arguments that people can relate to, and ask for changes that people can accept, which means picking their battles rather than fighting every battle at once. For instance, some food security advocates think that they can get more traction promoting taxes for food corporations and subsidies for family farmers than by advocating for radical redistribution of wealth and entitlements. Why? Because, they think, if they want to get support from the business and political leaders who actually set food policy and the nonprofits and foundations that actually support food advocacy, then they need to select concrete, measurable goals that these people can identify with—​a requirement that is usually not regarded as satisfied by a stated aspiration to, say, overthrow capitalism or neoliberalism. If we grant that multi-​issue activism has benefits as well as costs, what should we say about this pragmatic argument all things considered? As with the principled argument, I think that we have no choice but to evaluate it on a case by case basis—​and to keep in mind possible sources of bias along the way. First, we should keep in mind possible sources of bias in favor of single-​issue approaches. Yes, some issues are more important

14 Schanbacher, The Politics of Food, 11.

406   Jeff Sebo than others, and yes, single-​issue activism can be more impactful than multi-​issue activism in certain respects. But with that said, (a) it is easy to overestimate the importance of issues that we work on, since we tend to know more about these issues, and (b) it is also easy to overestimate the impact of single-​issue activism, since the direct, individual benefits of single-​issue activism are easier to measure than the indirect, structural benefits of multi-​issue activism, and the direct, individual costs of multi-​issue activism are easier to measure than the indirect, structural costs of single-​issue activism. If this is right, then we can expect our intuitive cost-​benefit analyses to be biased in favor of single-​issue approaches, and we should discount our preference for these approaches accordingly. Second, we should also keep in mind possible sources of bias in favor of self-​interested multi-​issue approaches. In particular, many of us have a tendency to focus more on what others can do for cause areas that we work in than on what we can do for cause areas that others work in. This tendency to, as Marilyn Frye puts it, “arrogantly perceive” others as here for us is deeply rooted in human psychology as well as, for some of us, reinforced by social, political, and economic privilege.15 Yet our resulting stance toward inconsistency is, itself, inconsistent, and we need to come to terms with that. We should either be as impatient with ourselves for the ways in which we fall short as we are with others (and resolve to do more as a result), be as patient with others for the ways in which they fall short as we are with ourselves (and resolve to demand less as a result), or, more plausibly, strike a balance between these extremes (keeping in mind, of course, that some people can and should be expected to do more than others in some cases, for reasons we will consider later on). Either way, insofar as our intuitive cost-​ benefit analyses are biased in favor of self-interested multi-issue approaches, we should discount our preference for these approaches accordingly. Finally, we should also keep in mind possible sources of bias in favor of particular other-​interested multi-​issue approaches. For example, in some cases we may feel motivated to work on a particular issue at least in part because of the salience of this issue or social, political, or economic incentives for working on it. Of course, this can sometimes be good, since it can sometimes motivate us to work on issues that we have independent reason to be working on. But it may not always be good, since the salience or social acceptability of a particular issue may not always map onto the priority that we should be giving that issue (especially if we think that we should be prioritizing relatively neglected issues all else equal). Either way, insofar as our intuitive cost-​benefit analyses are biased in favor of particular other-​interested multi-​issue approaches, we should discount our preference for these approaches as well (which is not, of course, to say that we should discount any preference that we may have for other-​interested multi-​ issue activism in general, though perhaps some of us should do that too). With these considerations in mind, we can now consider three approaches to multi-​ issue food activism—​unity, solidarity, and mutual understanding—​and examine principled and pragmatic arguments surrounding each.

15 Frye, The Politics of Reality. (Thanks to Lauren Townsend for this reference.)

Multi-Issue Food Activism    407

Unity First, food activists can promote unity by working together across movements, for example, by working in multi-​issue groups or on multi-​group campaigns. This kind of approach can take different forms and come in different degrees. First, we can sort attempts at unity in terms of how broad the alliance is. At one end of the spectrum, when people talk about food movements uniting, they might mean building alliances across all relevant groups. For instance, food activists might try to build a coalition of labor rights groups, animal rights groups, environmental groups, food security groups, public health groups, and so on in order to protest industrial animal agriculture. Call this global unity. At the other end of the spectrum, they might mean building alliances between or among a small number of natural allies. For example, an environmental group might work with a public health group in order to protest the waste produced by a particular farm. Call this local unity. Global and local unity have different virtues. On one hand, global unity allows activists to find strength in numbers, as well as to learn from each other and improve their work as a result. On the other hand, local unity allows activists to work together on projects of shared interest with relatively little conflict or disagreement to navigate.16 We can also sort attempts at unity in terms of how formal an alliance is. At one end of the spectrum, when people talk about food movements uniting, they might mean that certain food groups should become a single food group or an integrated network with multiple chapters. Call this formal unity. At the other end of the spectrum, they might mean that food groups should remain separate, but should work together on projects of shared interest. Call this informal unity. Formal and informal unity have similar virtues as global and local unity, respectively. On one hand, formal unity allows groups to build deeper alliances than they otherwise might, and it also ensures that every group is accountable to every other group, as well as to the coalition as a whole. On the other hand, informal unity allows each group to maintain its own individuality and act quickly and decisively without first having to achieve consensus with a wide range of groups that may disagree about important issues.17 So should food movements unite, globally or locally, formally or informally? As far as I can tell, nobody thinks that all food groups should pursue full global and formal unity with each other. Instead, most people think, plausibly, that groups function best when they strike a balance between unity and difference. Why? Because while it is certainly important for activists to work together, it is also important for activists to 16  Examples of food groups that aspire to unity in one or more of these senses include Coalition of Immokalee Workers, Food Empowerment Project, Grassroots International, La Via Campesina, More and Better, the Landless Workers Movement, Roots of Change, United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, US Food Sovereignty Alliance, and Why Hunger. For discussion of these and other examples of such groups, see Holt-​Giménez, Food Movements Unite! 17  For more, see Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 125–​183; and Jasper, Protest, 143–​167.

408   Jeff Sebo work separately so that they can perform experiments in activism, establish a division of labor, compartmentalize harm, learn from each other, and generally speaking live and let live across movements, groups, and approaches, within certain limits.18 These points are especially important for small, grassroots groups who would risk losing their identity and autonomy entirely if they were to join a formally and globally united food movement whose agenda was set primarily, if not entirely, by larger, more mainstream groups.19 So the question activists have to ask is not how to achieve full unity, but rather how to strike a balance between unity and difference in particular cases. With that said, I think it is safe to say that food groups have reason to unite beyond traditional alliances more than many currently do. For example, suppose that your goal is to address obesity in food deserts and food swamps. In this case, it might seem natural to create ads that promote healthy eating or create policies that incentivize healthy eating in these communities, for example, through taxes, subsidies, or bans on certain food products. But if you do this work without partnering with members of the relevant communities (and ensuring that they take the lead in these efforts) and without addressing the many other structural forces that motivate people to eat unhealthy food, then people in your intended audience will be likely to dismiss your work as hypocritical and parentalistic, and they may be right. Similarly, suppose that your goal is to address increasing adoption of North American and Western European industrial practices in Latin America or Asia. In this case, it might seem natural to create ads that promote alternatives to industrial food or create policies that incentivize adoption of alternatives to industrial food in these regions. But, again, if you do this work without partnering with members of the relevant regions (and ensuring that they take the lead in these efforts) and without addressing the many other structural forces that motivate people to prefer industrial practices, then people in your intended audience will be likely to dismiss your work as hypocritical and imperialist, and, again, they may be right.20 Part of what makes uniting beyond traditional alliances difficult, however, is that it raises questions about what the scope of these expanded alliances should be and how groups should navigate conflicts or disagreements that may arise among them. For instance, many human rights activists currently pursue movement unity in a way that excludes animal rights as part of this coalition, despite the fact that animals are central to the public health and environmental harms of our global food system. I think that this omission is partly principled: many human rights activists accept ideologies, such as a kind of Marxist humanism, that they see as conflicting with animal rights. But I also think that this omission is partly pragmatic: many human rights activists worry that, even if they accept animal rights in principle, incorporating this issue into their work will be alienating and distracting, and will do more harm than good as a result. Meanwhile, many animal rights activists currently pursue movement unity in a way that excludes 18 

For more, see Mill, On Liberty; and Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference. For more, see INCITE!, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded. 20  For more on these issues, see Barnhill et al., “The Value of Unhealthy Eating and the Ethics of Healthy Eating Policies.” 19 

Multi-Issue Food Activism    409 particular human rights groups, such as food sovereignty groups, as part of this coalition, despite the fact that corporate control of food production is central to the animal welfare harms of our global food system. As before, I think that this omission is partly principled: many animal rights activists accept ideologies, such as universal animal liberation, that they see as conflicting with food sovereignty. But I also think that this omission is partly pragmatic: many animal rights activists worry that, even if they accept food sovereignty in principle, incorporating this issue into their work will be alienating and distracting, and will do more harm than good as a result. Many other conflicts and disagreements stand in the way of unity in the food movement too. For example, food activists disagree about whether they should seek to regulate or abolish production methods that they oppose (e.g., industrial agriculture, animal agriculture, genetically modified agriculture, and so on). They disagree about whether they should pursue reform or revolution as a means to this end (e.g., whether they should bring about sustainable food systems by revising or replacing unsustainable food systems). They disagree about whether they should adopt hierarchical or horizontal organizational structures (e.g., whether they should adopt majoritarian or consensus-​based decision procedures within groups). They disagree about whether they should advocate for individual change or structural change (e.g., whether they should promote production and consumption of alternative foods or promote social, political, economic changes that make such behavior more appealing). They disagree about whether they should engage in conciliation or confrontation (e.g., whether they should praise people for making small dietary changes or blame people for not making large dietary changes). They disagree about whether they should engage in education or manipulation (e.g., whether they should focus only on the welfare, health, and environmental benefits of alternative foods or also on celebrity endorsements and product placements). They disagree about whether they should engage in civil disobedience or uncivil disobedience, and, if the latter, what the ethical limits of uncivil disobedience are. Finally, they disagree about many other, more particular issues as well, for example, about whether a particular campaign is racist or sexist, whether a particular approach to conflict resolution is satisfactory, and so on.21 These disagreements raise an important question: Should food activists aspire to unity with each other only insofar as they agree about these issues? This question drives a partial wedge between the principled and pragmatic arguments for multi-​issue food activism, since activists might sometimes have stronger principled than pragmatic reason to pursue unity across these divisions, and they might sometimes have stronger pragmatic than principled reason to do so. For example, sometimes moderate and radical activists are supportive of the work that each other is doing, since they see radical work as shifting the center of debate and paving the way for moderate reform, and they see moderate reform as shifting the goalposts and paving the way for radical change. But they also think

21 

For more on these debates, see Schlottmann and Sebo, Food, Animals, and the Environment.

410   Jeff Sebo that it would be a mistake for them to work together, since that would make it harder for each group to play its role in this division of labor. Conversely, sometimes moderate and radical activists are critical of the work that each other is doing, since they see each other as taking ineffective or counterproductive approaches. But they also think that it would be good for them to work together, since doing so would be net beneficial for the movement overall, notwithstanding persistent disagreements between them.22 Of course, even if activists accept a policy of liberal toleration with respect to many of these issues, they still have to decide where to draw the line between tolerable and intolerable disagreement in certain hard cases. For example, many activists think that, even if they should tolerate disagreement about, say, abolition and regulation, they should not tolerate disagreement about, say, violence and nonviolence, since violence is unacceptable for principled as well as pragmatic reasons. In borderline cases, it can be hard to know how to best strike a balance between building a pluralistic movement in which activists can agree to disagree about many issues, on one hand, and building a united movement in which activists can uphold certain core values and hold each other accountable for choices that they see as bad, on the other hand. I will not attempt to say exactly how activists should answer these questions in the abstract. But I will say that, insofar as activists should be uniting more than they currently are and should be uniting beyond traditional alliances, they will have to be willing to tolerate disagreement about important issues, as well as to challenge their own assumptions about these issues. This, in turn, will require challenging the beliefs, values, practices, and power structures that dominate within particular groups—​which will mean engaging in the other two kinds of multi-​issue activism: solidarity and mutual understanding.

Solidarity Second, food activists can promote solidarity by working in harmony across movements, for example, by helping each other or at least not harming each other through their work. This kind of approach can take different forms and come in different degrees as well. As with unity, we can sort attempts at solidarity in terms of how broad the support is. Specifically, we can distinguish global solidarity, which aspires to support all relevant movements and approaches, and local solidarity, which aspires to support particular relevant movements or approaches. Global and local solidarity have similar virtues as global and local unity, respectively. We can also sort attempts at solidarity in terms of how active the support is. For example, when people call for solidarity across groups, they might mean that groups should

22 

For more, see Ahmadi, “Racism and Food Justice”; Best and Nocella, Terrorists or Freedom Fighters; and Holt-​Giménez, “Food Security, Food Justice, or Food Sovereignty?”

Multi-Issue Food Activism    411 help each other, for instance, by participating in each other’s work (and doing so on each other’s terms). Call this active solidarity. Alternatively, they might mean that groups should at least not harm each other, as they would, for instance, if they used words or images that denigrated each other in order to appear relatable to people (and, as we will see, this kind of collateral damage is unfortunately extremely common in the food movement).23 Call this passive solidarity. These approaches have different virtues as well. On one hand, active solidarity provides support for people who need it and builds community across groups. On the other hand, passive solidarity addresses the deeply entrenched patterns of harmful behavior that currently exist within and across groups, thereby paving the way for more effective active solidarity and formal and informal unity in the long run. So should food movements stand in solidarity with each other, globally or locally, actively or passively? As with unity, I doubt that anyone would say that all food groups should attempt to stand in full solidarity with everyone all the time. After all, a commitment to full solidarity would be all-​consuming, especially for smaller groups. So as before, the question that activists should ask is not how to achieve full solidarity, but rather how to strike a principled and pragmatic balance among global, local, active, and passive solidarity in particular cases. Start with global and local solidarity. As with unity, food activists have a tendency to favor local solidarity with traditional allies. But also as with unity, there are reasons for resisting this tendency. Consider a few such reasons (there are others as well, including, of course, the objective importance of certain issues). First, consider practical and epistemic reasons. As discussed with respect to unity, there are currently many conflicts and disagreements in the food movement. Some of these conflicts and disagreements will likely persist whether or not people aspire to help each other and not harm each other. But not all of them will. In general, if and when we make an effort to stand in solidarity with groups that we know less about, and if and when we do so in the right kind of way, for example, as Southerners on New Ground (SONG) puts it, by being “honest about where we are coming from,” accepting that we are not “more knowledgeable about the communities and cultures of others than we are,” accepting “that people are experts on their own lives and are the best leaders in the struggle for their own liberation,” and making a commitment to “listen . . . not just once” and “not just today”—​we can learn about other groups, support other groups, and, as a result of these efforts, ease at least some of the tensions that currently exist across groups.24 Second, and relatedly, consider moral reasons. Many people believe that individuals and groups have a moral obligation to take responsibility for past harms, either for its own sake or as a means to promoting equality or utility in the world.25 And, as previously discussed, many people also believe that alternative food groups have a history 23 

For more, see Gaarder, Women and the Animal Rights Movement. SONG, “Being an Ally/​Building Solidarity.” 25  For discussion of this obligation in the context of Black reparations, see Boxill, “Reparations.” For discussion of this obligation in the context of climate justice, see Shue, “Global Environment and International Inequality.” 24 

412   Jeff Sebo not only of conflict and disagreement but also of harm, for example, in campaigns that use oppressive words and images and in communities that center white culture; maintain patriarchal “divisions in labor, leadership, and legitimacy”; tolerate abuse, sexual assault, and sexual harassment among community members; and more.26 As a result, many people believe, alternative food groups (especially groups whose members tend to hold privileged identities) have a special moral obligation to expand the scope of their solidarity as a way of taking responsibility for these harms. Granted, one could argue that food groups also have a right to focus on the issues that they care about. Yet insofar as the duty to take responsibility for such harms conflicts with the right to focus on what one cares about, the former duty plausibly has at least as much, if not more, weight than the latter right in many cases. Moreover, if alternative food groups find that these values are regularly in conflict, then they plausibly also have a duty to try to expand the scope of what they care about so as to reduce this conflict—​especially if their current, narrow set of interests is part of what perpetuates the very harms that they should be taking responsibility for in the first place. Now consider active and passive solidarity. Our thinking about this issue will depend heavily on what we think about the moral difference between helping and not harming. On one hand, many deontologists, who deny that morality is entirely a matter of consequences, accept that there is a moral difference between helping and not harming in principle. In particular, they think that people are sometimes but not always morally required to help each other (this is known as an imperfect duty of beneficence); whereas, people are always morally required to avoid harming each other within certain limits (this is known as a perfect duty of nonmaleficence). Granted, most deontologists do set limits to this latter duty, for example, in cases where people are pursuing an important goal, they cannot pursue this goal without harming others, and they harm others only as a byproduct (rather than harming others as a means). But even given this complication, many deontologists still think that the duty not to harm is more universal than the duty to help. As a result, they will likely also think that the duty to stand in passive solidarity with other groups is more universal than the duty to stand in active solidarity with other groups.27 However, there is a complication here, which is that even passive solidarity takes a lot of active work, and so it is not clear how to draw the line between helping and not harming in this area. For example, suppose that in order to avoid harming others through my work, I need to spend a lot of time and energy identifying and addressing my own biases as well as encouraging other people in my community to do the same, for instance, by promoting and participating in anti-​oppression trainings; diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives; robust accountability and conflict resolution processes; and more. In this case, am I helping or not harming people through all this work? This is a challenging question, since, on 26 Gaarder, Women and the Animal Rights Movement, 87. See also Harper, Sistah Vegan; Guthman, “If Only They Knew”; and Tuttle, Circles of Compassion. 27  For an argument in favor of a moral difference between actions and omissions, see Foot, “Killing and Letting Die”; and Foot, “Morality, Action, and Outcome.”

Multi-Issue Food Activism    413 one hand, I am clearly doing active work, yet, on the other hand, I am also clearly doing this work with the aim of preventing myself (and others) from causing harm. Moreover, if we classify me as “helping” through this work (and if we accept that I have an imperfect duty of beneficence), then it follows that I am not always morally required to do this work, which means that I am sometimes morally permitted to (allow myself and others to) harm people. Yet if we classify me as “avoiding harm” through this work (and if we accept that I have a perfect duty of nonmaleficence), then it follows that I am always morally required to do this work, which implies that ethical solidarity is much more restrictive, as well as much more demanding, than some deontologists might have expected.28 On the other hand, consequentialists, who accept that morality is entirely a matter of consequences, deny that there is a moral difference between helping and not harming in principle. Instead, they think that people should do the most good they can, regardless of whether they do so through actions, omissions, or (in the case of passive solidarity) actions in the service of omissions. Most consequentialists also deny that there is always a moral difference between helping and not harming in practice. Granted, if one can do more good in everyday life by following a general policy of not harming anyone than one can by following a general policy of helping everyone (which is plausible, given that the former policy is much easier to follow than the latter, notwithstanding the complications mentioned in the previous paragraph), then consequentialists will say that one has stronger reason to follow the former policy than the latter in practice. However, in cases where one can clearly do more good by helping someone than by not harming anyone, many consequentialists will say that one should set this policy aside and perform the action that will have the best consequences overall.29 With that said, I do think that consequentialists should value both active and passive solidarity in general more than they sometimes do. Many consequentialists accept the following kind of decision procedure: one should use evidence and reason to identify the cause areas in which one can do the most good, and then one should work in those cause areas.30 Yet while I endorse the pragmatic spirit of this decision procedure, I also worry that it can lead to a bias in favor of single-​issue activism, since, as discussed previously, the benefits of single-​issue activism are more direct and measurable than the costs; whereas, the costs of multi-​issue activism are more direct and measurable than the benefits. Thus, if consequentialists use this decision procedure to decide what to do, they risk overestimating the value of focusing entirely on the cause areas in which they seem to be able to do the most good. To mitigate this risk, I think that consequentialists should accept a more indirect decision procedure. In particular, I think that they should focus mostly on the cause areas in which they seem to be able to do the most good, while also making a commitment to stand in solidarity with other good cause areas to a degree. This will still allow them to engage in strategic 28 

For related discussion, see Persson, From Morality to the End of Reason. For an argument against a moral difference between actions and omissions, see Rachels, “Active and Passive Euthanasia.” 30  See, e.g., MacAskill, Doing Good Better; and Singer, The Most Good You Can Do. 29 

414   Jeff Sebo priority-​setting, but it will also ensure that they support other groups, learn from other groups, build alliances with other groups, and generally speaking become more effective in their attempts to maximize good outcomes (especially since many ways of helping and not harming other groups, once internalized, are relatively costless).31 What is the upshot for food activism? That will differ from theory to theory. But if this discussion is correct, then the upshot for many deontologists is that activists should always aspire to global passive solidarity (except in cases where they would be harming others as a necessary byproduct of important activity) and they should sometimes but not always aspire to local active solidarity (perhaps giving priority to movements and approaches that they have not supported as much in the past all else equal). Whereas the upshot for many consequentialists is that activists should adopt a strong presumption in favor of global passive solidarity (except in cases where they would clearly be doing the most good overall by harming others) as well as a strong presumption in favor of local active solidarity (again, perhaps giving priority to movements and approaches that they have not supported as much in the past all else equal). Either way, they will also have to accept that passive solidarity requires active work, and that they may have to correct for self-​interest, measurability bias, and so on in their assessment of these issues. Either way, then, ethical solidarity is a restrictive and demanding standard. First, it is restrictive since it problematizes much of what food activists currently do. That is, not only does it problematize harming other groups as means, but it also problematizes harming other groups as unnecessary byproducts. For example, it problematizes serving animal products at food justice fundraisers; promoting healthy diets through fat shaming; promoting alternative foods in ways that stigmatize people who live in food deserts;32 campaigning against animal abuse in factory farms and slaughterhouses in ways that support incarceration for exploited workers;33 campaigning against harmful food systems in other nations in ways that perpetuate racism, colonialism, or imperialism;34 and more. Second, ethical solidarity is demanding, since it requires activists to do a lot of active work. In particular, as Lori Gruen writes, activists need to research other issues and pay “critical attention to the ways in which power may be operating to marginalize cultural ‘others,’ ” so that they can be fully informed about how to help and not harm others through their work.35 They also, as Anthony Nocella writes, need to participate in other movements, listen to other people without “taking up space,” take directions without “telling others what to do and controlling the agenda,” and more, so that they can build respect, support, and understanding across movements over time.36 Needless to say, this standard is difficult, if not impossible, to fully live up to all the time. Thus, as we have seen, the challenge is not to stand in full solidarity with all groups 31 

For more, see Sebo and Singer, “Activism.” For more, see Viertel, “Beyond Eating with Your Fork.” 33  For more, see Smith, Governing Animals, ch. 5. 34  See, e.g., annual controversy about whether and how Westerners should protest the Yulin dog meat festival in China. 35 Gruen, Ethics and Animals, 94. 36  Nocella, “Building an Animal Advocacy Movement for Racial and Disability Justice,” 168. 32 

Multi-Issue Food Activism    415 in all situations (or to expect the same in return), but rather to expand the scope of our solidarity in thoughtful and strategic ways, keeping in mind everything that we have discussed here (and more) when thinking about priority-​setting. Still, if this discussion is correct, then activists should work on other issues more than many currently do, which, in turn, will mean engaging in the third kind of multi-​issue activism: mutual understanding.

Mutual Understanding Third, food activists can promote mutual understanding by sharing information and arguments across movements. In particular, they can share information and arguments about the kinds of connections across issues, identities, and oppressions discussed earlier, including parallel oppression analyses, intersectional analyses, and root cause analyses. In what follows, I will use “critical analyses” as a general term that covers all three of these categories. People can, and do, present critical analyses in many different ways in food activism.37 For example, A. Breeze Harper writes about her identity as a Black feminist vegan, as well as about racism and sexism in the animal rights movement, in Sistah Vegan, and Aph Ko and Syl Ko do the same in Aphro-​ism. Carol Adams writes about parallels between sexism and speciesism, as well as about sexism in the animal rights movement, in The Sexual Politics of Meat, and Emily Gaarder does the same in Women in the Animal Rights Movement. Sunaura Taylor writes about parallels between ableism and speciesism, as well as about ableism in the animal rights movement, in Beasts of Burden. Marjorie Spiegel examines parallels between animal agriculture as slavery in The Dreaded Comparison, and Charles Patterson does the same with the Holocaust in Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust. Will Tuttle brings together a variety of authors to examine links among animal rights, disability rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and more in Circles of Compassion. Of course, many academics and activists then attempt to distill these complex analyses into simple messages that they can present to the public through ads, social media posts, op-​eds, protests, and more. As we have seen, critical analyses can be useful for many reasons. They can invite people to expand their moral concern as well as their understanding of what moral concern requires. But they can also, if not done carefully, either appear to be or actually be simplistic and reductive and appropriative, with the result that they do more harm than good overall. For example, when animal advocates such as Gary Francione, Tom Regan, and Peter Singer argue that people should not kill animals for food if they would not be willing to kill cognitively relevantly similar humans for food, all else equal, disability advocates such as Eva Kittay reply that these arguments erase the many relevant 37 

I will focus here on examples involving human and nonhuman animals, since these tend to be the most controversial kind of critical analysis in the food movement.

416   Jeff Sebo differences between animality and disability, and they also risk supporting ableism more than they disrupt speciesism in practice.38 Similarly, when animal groups such as PETA promote animal rights by juxtaposing images of cruelty to nonhumans with images of cruelty to humans (including images of lynched Black people and Jewish people in concentration camps), some critics reply that these images are exploitative and triggering, and they also participate in a long history of dehumanizing Black people and Jewish people by comparing them with nonhumans. As a result, in these and many other cases, attempts at critical analysis can have the opposite of the intended effect: instead of persuading people to accept connections across movements and expand their compassion as a result, they can persuade people to reject these connections and/or restrict their compassion as a result. The fact that these latter, negative impacts are always a risk is predictable in light of some basic facts about how social movements work. First of all, even if the people creating critical analyses are members of the relevant communities who are attempting to do real justice to all relevant issues in books or talks that allow for rigorous, systematic discussion, the people popularizing them are often outsiders with respect to the relevant communities who are attempting to use one issue to promote another in campaigns that require simple, pithy messaging. As a result, many people understandably—​and accurately—​experience these analyses, as presented in these campaigns, as offensive. For example, as A.  Breeze Harper writes with respect to the PETA exhibit comparing animal use to slavery and the Holocaust (among other atrocities): Spiegel and Patterson provided sensitive, scholarly explorations of these topics, whereas the PETA exhibit, and the ensuing controversy, were handled insensitively. The lack of sociohistorical context by PETA is perhaps what is upsetting to many racial minorities, for whom such images and textual references trigger trauma and deep emotional pain.39

Moreover, even when people do attempt to present critical analyses sensitively, some people may still experience them as offensive, either because the presenter is still making mistakes or because the audience is (or both). Of course, it can be frustrating to make a good faith attempt at critical analysis, only to have people react negatively. Still, the fact remains that, if enough people have this reaction, then this attempt at critical analysis will have done more harm than good. As a result, many activists now think that, in this kind of case, impact matters more than intent.40 That is, no matter how good our intentions are and no matter how accurate our message is, insofar as people experience our message as harmful or offensive, it will have had a negative impact, and, insofar as we could have foreseen and avoided this impact with reasonable due 38 

See, e.g., Kittay, “At the Margins of Moral Personhood.”

40 

For representative discussion, see Utt, “Intent vs. Impact.”

39 Harper, Sistah Vegan, xiv.

Multi-Issue Food Activism    417 diligence, we will be (at least partly) responsible for it. On this view, then, it is not enough for us to insist that the people who experience our message as harmful or offensive are wrong (“When I discussed racism, sexism, and speciesism, I was saying that these oppressions are linked and that we should treat everyone involved better, not that these oppressions are the same or that we should treat anyone involved worse!”). Instead, we need to accept that we are responsible for presenting our message in an accurate and effective way—​which, of course, is not always easy, or even possible, to do. When we put these ideas together, the upshot is that critical analysis is very difficult to do well, especially when presented by outsiders and within the limits of a simple, pithy ad campaign. Which raises the question: Should activists ever attempt to use critical analyses in these circumstances? First, if I am not a member of a particular community, should I ever attempt to use critical analyses involving this community in my activism? This is a complicated question. On one hand, we might think that, if I am not a member of a particular community (and especially if I have privilege with respect to the relevant issues), then I can usually do more good, and less harm, overall if I create space for members of this community to speak about these issues than if I attempt to do so myself—​epistemically, because members of this community have evidence about these issues that I lack, and practically, because members of this community have an authority to speak about these issues that I lack (at least in certain social contexts). As Ruby Hamad writes with respect to vegan advocacy: The acceptance of veganism into the broader social justice movement hinges on bridging [the gap between animal rights and other movements]. And no one is better placed to do so than those vegans who are most marginalised in society—​people of colour, women, LGBTI, fat people, disabled people.41

On the other hand, we might also think that there are at least some cases where, even if I am not a member of a particular community (and even if I have privilege with respect to the relevant issues), I can still speak about these issues in an accurate and effective way provided that I proceed with great care. Indeed, we might even think that my privilege can be an asset in some cases, since it can help me to draw mainstream attention to issues that would otherwise remain marginalized. But even if we accept this (and not everyone does42), we should be clear about what it would involve. If I want to speak about parallel oppressions without appearing to be or actually being appropriative, then, as Christopher-​Sebastian McJetters writes, I will at the very least have to (a) “employ sensitivity and discernment when approaching these discussions,” (b) “amplify the voices

41 

Hamad, “When Is Being Vegan No Longer about Ethical Living?” For an argument against this idea, as well as against certain approaches to unity and solidarity across social movements, see Rigby and Ziyad, “White People Have No Place in Black Liberation.” 42 

418   Jeff Sebo of marginalized people who talk about these issues,” and (c) “make an attempt to understand how layered oppressions impact different groups to maximize our impact and build a broader, more inclusive community.”43 I will also, as Aph Ko writes, have to learn to “speak to issues that intersect in a way that honors each issue as its own manifestation of a problematic system” rather than in a way that, say, “use[s]‌imagery from historical black oppression only . . . to draw sympathy to animal oppression without meaningfully analyzing contemporary manifestations of racism.”44 Needless to say, these conditions are hard to satisfy in practice (and people tend to overestimate the degree to which they have satisfied them in particular cases). Still, we can observe that, insofar as activists do this work, their attempts at critical analysis will likely become more accurate and effective as a result—​confirming once again that unity, solidarity, and mutual understanding are themselves linked and mutually reinforcing. Second, and relatedly, should activists ever try to present critical analyses within the limits of a simple, pithy ad campaign? It depends. On one hand, we might think that some comparisons, such as general comparisons between factory farming and slavery or the Holocaust, are difficult if not impossible to present in an accurate and effective way within these limits, and therefore activists should adopt a strong presumption if not prohibition against attempting them, especially if they are not members of the relevant communities. On the other hand, we might think that other comparisons, such as specific, partial comparisons across race, gender, or species, are not as difficult to present in an accurate and effective way within these limits, and therefore activists do not need to adopt as strong a presumption against attempting them, especially if they are members of the relevant communities. For instance, consider a cartoon image by Natalie Peragine in which a pregnant cow asks a pregnant human, “Do they let you keep yours?”45 In pointing to a specific connection between these individuals (a shared love and desire to care for their children), this image conveys the idea that veganism is, in part, a feminist issue without at all risking the appearance of “demoting” humans who have children to the status of “mere animals” who do. Of course, many other cases will require more nuanced evaluation. For example, consider an activist who attends a Pride Parade with a sign that reads “Vegans for LGBTQ+ rights” or “No one is free when others are oppressed” along with a Mercy for Animals logo. Should we say that this approach is bad, since instead of showing up fully for one cause, they are also attempting to draw attention to another? Or should we say that this approach is good, since in addition to showing up fully for one cause, they are indicating how broad the support for this cause is? Similarly, consider an activist who argues that, instead of talking in terms of “human rights” and saying that “all humans are equal,” people should talk in terms of “animal rights” and say that “all animals are equal.” Should we say that this approach is bad, since it functions to erase the particularity of human rights struggles, as when people respond to “Black Lives Matter” with “All Lives Matter”? 43 

McJetters, “Animal Rights and the Language of Slavery.” Ko, “Public Facebook Post.” 45  Peragine, “Do They Let You Keep Yours?” 44 

Multi-Issue Food Activism    419 Or should we say that this approach is good, since it functions to make moral discourse more inclusive, as when people respond to “all men are equal” with “all humans are equal”? In these and other cases, our overall evaluation will likely depend on further considerations, such as the context in which this argument is being made, the context for which this argument is being made, the power dynamics in these contexts and across these issues, and the identities and experiences of all involved.

Conclusion I think that my discussion here supports a few general, preliminary conclusions about how to do food activism in an ethical and effective way. First, insofar as food activists ought to take a multi-​issue approach to food activism, they should adopt a strong presumption in favor of (a) pursuing unity, solidarity, and mutual understanding simultaneously rather than one at a time, (b) expanding these efforts beyond traditional alliances, and (c) ensuring that currently marginalized people are empowered to play a central role in these efforts. If food activists pursue these aims in a sustained way, then I think they will find that many currently harmful food campaigns naturally become less harmful over time, either because the internal circumstances that made them that way will no longer be present (e.g., a white male leadership that is not sufficiently aware of the harm they can cause to other communities) or because the external circumstances that made them that way will no longer be present (e.g., suspicion of alternative foods in some nonwhite communities because of the ways in which these foods are coded as white).46 Second, food activists should keep in mind that their intuitive reaction to the arguments that we have considered here will likely change depending on whether they stand to benefit from multi-​issue activism in particular cases. How can they correct for this tendency? First, they can make sure to demand the same sacrifice from themselves that they demand from others and to extend the same patience and compassion to others that they extend to themselves, all else equal (with the likely upshot that they will move a bit closer to the center in each case). Second, they can be proactive about expanding their sense of community over time, not only by pursuing unity, solidarity, and mutual understanding with other movements and approaches but also by engaging in what Maria Lugones calls “world traveling” (i.e., by spending time in other cultures and communities more generally)47 so that they can achieve, or at least better approximate, what Claire Jean Kim calls “multi-​optic vision” (i.e., “seeing from within various perspectives, moving from one vantage point to another, inhabiting them in turn, holding them in the mind’s eye at once”).48 46 

For more, see Guthman, “ ‘If Only They Knew.’ ”

47 Lugones, Pilgrimages, 78. (Thanks to Macy Salzberger for this reference.)

48 Kim, Dangerous Crossings, 19. For related discussion, see Gruen, Entangled Empathy.

420   Jeff Sebo Finally, and relatedly, food activists should keep in mind that ethical food activism is both more restrictive and demanding, and less restrictive and demanding, than they might have thought in particular cases. On one hand, we have seen that many, if not most, food campaigns currently fall short of its demands by either (a) failing to partner with potential allies even when doing so would have many benefits and few costs, (b) failing to help potential allies in real, relatively costless ways or harming them in real, relatively avoidable ways, or (c) either not drawing connections across movements or drawing those connections in simplistic, reductive, and appropriative ways. On the other hand, we have also seen that ethical food activism can sometimes, on some views, be compatible with not partnering with, not helping, or even harming potential allies. For a deontologist, this might mean harming the few as a necessary byproduct of helping the many, and for a consequentialist, it might mean harming the few as a means to helping the many. Either way, the upshot is that ethical food activism is a very challenging moral standard to live up to in practice. This kind of careful, deliberate approach to food activism is hard to carry out. These problems are all so urgent: our food system is arguably responsible for more harm than any other industry, and so it is tempting to advocate against it by any means necessary. But if the arguments that we have considered here are correct, then food activists have good reason to resist that temptation. As Aziz Choudry observes, “this is difficult, non-​ glamorous movement building work that, incrementally, is creating spaces where power can be challenged. We rarely hear about these struggles, but they are where hope for the future lies.”49

Acknowledgments Thanks to the editors of this volume as well as to the organizers and participants at the 2014 Vermont Food Ethics Workshop for terrific questions and comments on a previous draft. Thanks also to Lauren Gazzola, Zach Groff, Lori Gruen, Wayne Hsiung, Tyler John, Aph Ko, Julinna Oxley, and Regina Rini for helpful feedback on some or all of previous drafts, and special thanks to Maryse Mitchell-​Brody for detailed discussion throughout the writing process.

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Choudry, “Twenty Years of Fighting for Seeds and Food Sovereignty,” 8.

Multi-Issue Food Activism    421 Best, Steven, and Anthony Nocella, eds. Terrorists or Freedom Fighters?:  Reflections on the Liberation of Animals. New York: Lantern Books, 2004. Boxill, Bernard. “Black Reparations.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2016 Edition), edited by Edward N. Zalta. http://​plato.stanford.edu/​archives/​sum2016/​entries/​ black-​reparations/​. Carastathis, Anna. “Basements and Intersections.” Hypatia 28, no. 4 (2013): 698–​7 15. —​—​—​. “The Concept of Intersectionality in Feminist Theory.” Philosophy Compass 9, no. 5 (2014): 304–​314. Chen, Mel. Animacies:  Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect. Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 2012. Choudry, Aziz. “Twenty Years of Fighting for Seeds and Food Sovereignty.” GRAIN, 2010. http://​www.grain.org/​system/​old/​seedling_​files/​seed-​10-​07.pdf. Counihan, Carole, and Valeria Siniscalchi. Food Activism: Agency, Democracy and Economy. New York: Bloombury, 2014. Crenshaw, Kimberlé Williams. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” University of Chicago Legal Forum (1989): 139–​167. —​—​—​. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991): 1241–​1299. Foot, Philippa. “Killing and Letting Die.” In Abortion: Moral and Legal Perspectives, edited by Jay L. Garfield and Patricia Hennessey, 355–​382. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Reprinted in Steinbock and Norcross 1994. —​—​—​​. “Morality, Action and Outcome.” In Morality and Objectivity, edited by Ted Honderich, 23–​38. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985. Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2000. Frye, Marilyn. The Politics of Reality. New York: Crossing Press, 1983. Gaarder, Emily. Women and the Animal Rights Movement. New Brunswick, NJ:  Rutgers University Press, 2011. Garner, Robert. “A Defense of Broad Animal Protectionism.” In The Animal Rights Debate, edited by Gary Francione and Robert Garner, 103–​174. New  York:  Columbia University Press, 2010. Garry, Ann. “Intersectionality, Metaphors, and the Multiplicity of Gender.” Hypatia 26, no. 4 (2011): 826–​850. Gruen, Lori. Entangled Empathy. New York: Lantern Books, 2014. —​—​—​. Ethics and Animals: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Guthman, Julie. “‘If Only They Knew’:  The Unbearable Whiteness of Alternative Food.” In Cultivating Food Justice: Race, Class, and Sustainability, edited by Alison Hope Alkon and Julian Agyeman, 263–​282. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011. Hamad, Ruby. “When Is Being Vegan No Longer about Ethical Living?” Daily Life, December 17, 2015. http://​www.dailylife.com.au/​news-​and-​views/​dl-​opinion/​when-​is-​being-​vegan-​no​longer-​about-​ethical-​living-​20151216-​glp44t.html. Harper, A. Breeze, ed. Sistah Vegan: Black Female Vegans Speak on Food, Identity, Health, and Society, New York: Lantern Books, 2010. Holt-​Giménez, Eric, ed. Food Movements Unite! Oakland, CA: Food First Books, 2011. —​—​—​. “Food Security, Food Justice, or Food Sovereignty?:  Crises, Food Movements, and Regime Change.” In Cultivating Food Justice: Race, Class, and Sustainability, edited by Alison Hope Alkon and Julian Agyeman, 309–​330. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011.

422   Jeff Sebo Holt-​Giménez, Eric, and Annie Shattuck. “Synopsis: Food Movements Unite! Making a New Food System Possible.” In Food Movements Unite!, edited by Eric Holt-​Giménez, 317–​323. Oakland, CA: Food First Books, 2011. INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, ed. The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-​Profit Industrial Complex. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2007. Jasper, James M. Protest: A Cultural Introduction to Social Movements. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2014. Katz, Sandor Ellix. The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved: Inside America’s Underground Food Movements. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2006. Kim, Claire Jean. Dangerous Crossings:  Race, Species, and Nature in a Multicultural Age. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Kittay, Eva. “At the Margins of Moral Personhood.” Ethics 116 (October 2005): 100–​131. Ko, Aph. “Facebook Post.” December 16, 2015. https://​www.facebook.com/​AphroditeKo/​ posts/​1673948516216371. Ko, Aph, and Syl Ko, Aphro-​ism. http://​aphro-​ism.com/​. Lugones, Maria. Pilgrimages:  Theorizing Coalition against Multiple Oppressions. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003. MacAskill, William. Doing Good Better. New York: Gotham, 2015. McJetters, Christopher-​Sebastian. “Animal Rights and the Language of Slavery.” Striving with Systems, December 27, 2015. http://​strivingwithsystems.com/​2015/​12/​27/​animal-​rights-​and-​ the-​language-​of-​slavery/​. Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty. New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 2004. Montagut, Xavier. “We Eat, We Decide.” In Food Movements Unite!, edited by Eric Holt-​ Giménez, 187–​200. Oakland, CA: Food First Books, 2011. Nocella, Anthony. “Building an Animal Advocacy Movement for Racial and Disability Justice.” In Circles of Compassion: Essays Connecting Issues of Justice, edited by Will Tuttle, 159–​170. Danvers, MA: Vegan Publishers, 2014. Peragine, Natalie. “Do They Let You Keep Yours?” This Dish Is Vegetarian, April 10, 2012. http://​www.thisdishisvegetarian.com/​2012/​04/​herbivoree-​comic-​strip-​do-​they-​let-​you. html. Persson, Ingmar. From Morality to the End of Reason:  An Essay on Rights, Reasons and Responsibility. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Rachels, James. “Active and Passive Euthanasia.” New England Journal of Medicine 292 (1975): 78–​86. Rigby, Kevin, Jr, and Hari Ziyad, “White People Have No Place in Black Liberation.” RaceBaitR, March 31, 2016. http://​racebaitr.com/​2016/​03/​31/​white-​people-​no-​place-​black-​liberation/​# Schanbacher, William D. The Politics of Food: The Global Conflict between Food Security and Food Sovereignty. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger Security International, 2010. Schlottmann, Christopher, and Jeff Sebo. Food, Animals, and the Environment:  An Ethical Approach. Routledge, forthcoming. Sebo, Jeff, and Peter Singer. “Activism.” In Critical Terms for Animal Studies, edited by Lori Gruen. Chicago: Chicago University Press, forthcoming. Shue, Henry. “Global Environment and International Inequality.” International Affairs 75, no. 3 (1999): 531–​545. Singer, Peter. Animal Liberation. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2009. —​—​—​. The Most Good You Can Do. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015.

Multi-Issue Food Activism    423 Smith, Kimberly K. Governing Animals: Animal Welfare and the Liberal State. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. SONG (Southerners on New Ground). “Being an Ally/​Building Solidarity.” http:// ​ s outhernersonnewground.org/​ w p-​ c ontent/​ uploads/​ 2 012/​ 1 2/​ S ONG-​ B eing-​ A n-​ A lly-​ Building-​Solidarity.pdf. Spiegel, Marjorie. The Dreaded Comparison. New York: Mirror Books, 1997. Taylor, Sunaura. Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation. New York: New Press, 2017. Thompson, Paul. From Field to Fork:  Food Ethics for Everyone. Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2015. Torres, Bob. Making a Killing: The Political Economy of Animal Rights. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2007. Tuttle, Will, ed. Circles of Compassion: Essays Connecting Issues of Justice. Danvers, MA: Vegan Publishers, 2014. Utt, Jamie. “Intent vs. Impact: Why Your Intentions Don’t Really Matter.” Everyday Feminism, July 30, 2013. http://​everydayfeminism.com/​2013/​07/​intentions-​dont-​really-​matter/​. Viertel, Josh. “Beyond Eating with Your Fork: From Enlightened Eating to Movement Building.” In Food Movements Unite!, edited by Eric Holt-​Giménez, 137–​148. Oakland, CA: Food First Books, 2011. Young, Iris Marion. Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990.

Pa rt  V

E T H IC S A N D P OL I T IC S OF F O OD  P OL IC Y

chapter 19

Public Ju sti fi c at i on and the P ol i t i c s of Agricult u re Dan C. Shahar

In recent years, food activists have blamed industrialized agricultural systems for exacerbating many global ills. Pollution, environmental degradation, biodiversity loss, economic insecurity, and political inequality are all seen as bound up with the techniques that dominate food systems worldwide. In the eyes of many activists, these problems are so serious that the only tolerable response would be for governments to initiate a wholesale shift toward alternative modes of food production. Such demands have not gone unchallenged. Defenders of modern food systems argue that industrial techniques (and their continued development) are needed to address major global challenges like poverty, population growth, and climate change. According to these commentators, abandoning industrial methods in our current circumstances would be catastrophic. The foremost pioneer of the industrialized approach, Norman Borlaug, has been especially vocal in this regard, insisting that if scientists do not defend industrial agriculture, “we will be negligent in our duty and inadvertently may be contributing to the pending chaos of incalculable millions of deaths by starvation.”1 At first glance, these disagreements might seem like just another example of contentiousness, polarization, and hyperbole in the political arena. In contemporary public debates, disagreement is common and partisans often present issues as matters of life and death. Even so, it is worth noting that the concerns driving agricultural debates are not matters that could reasonably be taken lightly. Pollution, biodiversity loss, economic insecurity, and political inequality are serious issues, and the same is true of meeting people’s basic needs. If modern food systems really were responsible for the problems that their critics have ascribed to them, then overhauling agricultural policies really

1 

Borlaug 2000, 490.

428   Dan C. Shahar would be a matter of great importance. Likewise, if industrial techniques were really critical for keeping humanity fed in the face of a growing array of global challenges, then their continuation would be imperative. The gravity with which disputants present their positions is thus not merely a product of grandstanding (though surely there is some of that as well). It can also be traced to the fact that the stakes are high, and disputants see their opponents’ proposals as extremely dangerous. One implication of this state of affairs is that no matter what is done in the arena of agricultural policymaking, it is probable that some will deplore the resulting regimes. Governments will either impose strict controls on existing agricultural techniques, thereby offending proponents of industrial agriculture, or they will refrain from such impositions, and so offend critics. Given that all citizens will ultimately be asked to accept and adhere to political decisions once they are made, the inevitability of public dissatisfaction evokes serious questions. How could societies expect any agricultural policy regime to be willingly embraced by citizens, given that every such regime is bound to strike some as deeply objectionable? And what can the participants to these debates reasonably demand from their agricultural policy regimes, given that so many of their neighbors see their perspectives as misguided and dangerous? Questions in this vein have vexed political theorists for more than three hundred years. Since the late seventeenth century, philosophers have insisted that political arrangements should appeal to citizens’ own reason, justifying themselves to all subjects and not only to the powerful and influential. This idea has drawn particular emphasis in a body of literature placing standards of “public justification” at the center of theoretical accounts of political legitimacy.2 Philosophers writing in this tradition have hoped that commitments to public justification might enable citizens to live together on terms of reciprocity, mutual respect, and civic friendship. Yet agricultural controversies help to illustrate why, for theorists of public justification, deep disagreements about important matters represent the paramount puzzle in need of theoretical resolution. Such conflicts force us to clarify what an idea like “public justification” can mean in a society where messy disputes are the rule rather than the exception. They also force us to ask how far each of our convictions can be honored by our political arrangements, given that those convictions are so often controversial. Ultimately, I will argue in this essay that the most we can reasonably demand in a divided society like our own is a set of political arrangements that we can more or less live with, and that our neighbors can live with as well. This will turn out to be a depressingly lax standard: it will leave room, for example, for arrangements to be “justified” to us even

2 

This tradition has been known variously as “political liberalism,” “public reason liberalism,” and “justificatory liberalism.” In these contexts, the word “liberalism” refers not to the ideology of the modern political left, but rather to the long-​standing philosophical movement going back to writers like John Locke, Montesquieu, David Hume, Jean-​Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, Immanuel Kant, and Jeremy Bentham. For a general overview of the role that the idea of public justification has played in the development of liberal thought, see Gaus 2003. For a more focused discussion of modern perspectives in this tradition, see D’Agostino 1996.

Public Justification and Agriculture    429 when we believe they are repugnant and immoral. But this result will be guaranteed by the fact that in some of our disagreements over public policy issues, what some citizens see as morally necessary will sometimes strike others as deeply wrong. In such cases, satisfying the concerns of some would inevitably undermine the commitments of others. Still, even if the best we can demand is a set of political arrangements that we can live with, this does not have to be the best we can hope for. The search for public justification can help to focus our attention on the tragic nature of forcing individuals to live in a political order they view as immoral. This can inspire us to search for ways to ameliorate those features of our society that most offend our neighbors. When facing disputes like those over the future of agriculture, the moral concerns of our fellows can provide us with an impetus for further investigation, pushing us to find ways to meet our goals without threatening our neighbors in the process.

The Industrial Agriculture Debate Much of the theoretical discussion to come will draw on the details of this debate over industrial agriculture, and so I will begin by showing just how deep the disagreements at the heart of this debate really are. To this end, let us observe that there is no single, monolithic way in which any society produces its food,3 and so when people oppose something like “industrial agriculture” they are opposing not a specific technology or technique but rather a broad family of them. The term “industrial agriculture” is associated with reliance on chemical pesticides, synthetic fertilizers, and expensive machinery; with the use of modern genetic engineering techniques in the place of traditional breeding methods; with intensive plantations of genetically identical organisms; with market dominance by concentrated agribusinesses and technology corporations; and with farmers who run their operations like factory managers. According to food activists, practices conforming generally to these descriptions dominate the agricultural industries of most developed and many developing nations.4 Industrialized agriculture has been targeted for numerous criticisms. Chemical pesticides and fertilizers are said to have polluted human environments, degraded natural ecosystems, and exposed our bodies to largely unknown health risks.5 The costs of purchasing them, along with the costs of modern machinery and high-​tech seeds, have allegedly 3 

Even seemingly unitary notions like “organic” and “sustainable” refer to a portfolio of practices for producing diverse foodstuffs under a wide variety of conditions. Growing an “organic” cabbage is necessarily different from raising an “organic” chicken, and what counts as “sustainable” in Scotland might be catastrophic if implemented in Nevada. 4  Greenpeace UK 2001; Horrigan et al. 2002, 445; Kimbrel 2002, xi; Shiva 2014, 113–​115. Beus and Dunlap (1990) have characterized industrial agricultural systems as organized around a cohesive “paradigm”—​a suggestion that I do not directly take up here. 5  Krebs et al. 1999; Horrigan et al. 2002, 446–​452; Kimbrell 2002, 16, 29–​31; Greenpeace International 2009, 29–​31. Tony Weis (2010) has argued that these impacts collectively “contradict” the biophysical foundations of industrial agriculture itself.

430   Dan C. Shahar favored large and efficient corporate growers over small-​scale farmers, especially in less-​ developed nations.6 As economic power has concentrated in the hands of multinational corporations, political power is held to have followed suit, leading to public policy decisions favoring the interests of corporate shareholders over those of consumers, farmers, and the global poor.7 Together, these trends are said to have facilitated a dramatic loss of crop biodiversity around the world, making it increasingly likely that pests and diseases will decimate global harvests by developing resistance to existing lines of defense.8 On the basis of concerns like these, critics of industrial agriculture have recommended a suite of policy changes aimed at comprehensively transforming global food systems. Least controversially, they have insisted that governments and public research institutions should stop directing billions of dollars in annual support to agribusinesses and technology giants engaging in practices they oppose.9 But they have also pushed for stringent controls on pesticides, chemical fertilizers, concentrated feedlots, genetic engineering techniques, and various other technologies used by their opponents. These tools, they say, deteriorate the environment, endanger consumers, and leave more responsible farmers at a severe competitive disadvantage, and should thus be severely restricted if not banned outright.10 At their most extreme, food activists have advocated putting “precaution before profits”11 by allowing the proliferation of industrial methods only when their safety has been demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt.12 None of these proposals is seen as providing a “magic bullet” that would ameliorate every problem posed by industrialized food systems. But activists hope that the accumulation of such steps would ultimately yield thoroughgoing changes in the ways that societies produce their food. As Andrew Kimbrell has written in this connection: Even as we continue to work on various industrial food issues, whether pesticides, farm loss, or genetic engineering, we must also devote ourselves to becoming “paradigm” warriors against the industrial worldview and for a revived agrarian consciousness. Our ultimate goals must include nothing less than altering the thinking and very habits of perception of the public and policy makers.13

Defending Industrial Food Supporters of industrial agriculture have typically responded to such attacks by appealing to three interrelated considerations. First, they have insisted that many of their rivals’ 6 

Greenpeace International 2009, 31; Kimbrell 2002, 17–​18, 26–​27. Mittal and Kawaai 2001; Kimbrell 2002, 10–​14, 18, 25, 35; Rosset 2003; Beitel 2005. 8  Horrigan et al. 2002, 448; Kimbrell 2002, 24–​26, 34–​35. 9  Horrigan et al. 2002, 453; Kimbrell 2002, 18; Beitel 2005. 10  Kimbrell 2002, 15; Pesticide Action Network Europe 2014, 9–​10, 35–​42, 51–​53. 11  Greenpeace International 2003. 12  This disposition toward precaution is illustrated with particular clarity by the criticisms of European Union regulations discussed on p. 439. 13  Kimbrell 2002, xiii‒xiv. 7 

Public Justification and Agriculture    431 most serious complaints cannot be substantiated with compelling scientific evidence even though numerous investigations have attempted to do so. For example, although food activists have repeatedly challenged the safety of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), all commercially available GMOs have been subjected to a battery of safety tests and have been approved for sale only because no evidence of danger was found.14 Similarly, pesticides have been characterized as sources of grave human and environmental dangers, but compounds in current use have only escaped prohibition under existing regulations by failing to manifest the most serious negative effects displayed by previous generations of chemicals.15 Arguments along these lines aim to establish that industrial techniques are not as dangerous as their opponents have let on and that the risks they pose have been greatly overblown. A second line of response focuses on the significant present and future benefits allegedly offered by industrial methods. Paramount among these is the maintenance of an abundant supply of inexpensive foodstuffs in the face of an ever-​increasing global population. Defenders of industrialized food production stress that the world population has more than doubled over the past fifty years, and agricultural systems have only managed to keep pace due to spectacular increases in yields of staple crops like corn, rice, and wheat.16 As Borlaug has written: What would the world have been like without the technological advances that have occurred? For those who profess a concern for protecting the environment, consider the positive impact resulting from the application of science-​based technology. Had 1961 average world cereal yields (1,531 kg/​ha) still prevailed, nearly 850 million ha of additional land of the same quality would have been needed to equal the 1999 cereal harvest (2.06 billion gross metric tons). It is obvious that such a surplus of land was not available, and certainly not in populous Asia. Moreover, even if it were available, think of the soil erosion and the loss of forests, grasslands, and wildlife that would have resulted had we tried to produce these larger harvests with the older, low-​input technology.17

Looking forward to even further increases in global population in the coming decades, proponents of industrial agriculture argue that continued development of modern methods is necessary to prevent rising food prices and the exacerbation of existing challenges for the global poor.18 Similar points have been raised about the importance 14 

World Health Organization 2005, 24; American Association for the Advancement of Science 2012. See also Paarlberg 2013, 196–​198, 200–​201. 15  See, e.g., the standards established in European Parliament and Council of the European Union 2009a, as well as by the United States’ Food Quality and Protection Act of 1996 (P.L. 104–​170). Standards have also been established for required training, equipment upkeep, and usage practices when pesticides are employed (e.g., European Parliament and Council of the European Union 2009b and the United States’ Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act, 7 U.S.C. §§136–​136y). 16  Ausubel et al. 2013; Paarlberg 2013, 11–​12, 65. 17  Borlaug 2000, 488. 18  Christou and Twyman 2004; Farre et al. 2010.

432   Dan C. Shahar of industrial techniques in facilitating adaptation to climate change, which promises a number of impending obstacles for food systems in many parts of the world.19 None of these arguments should be interpreted as denying that problems have historically plagued the development of industrialized techniques. On the contrary, virtually all defenders of industrial agriculture acknowledge a variety of challenges that have accompanied their favored practices, especially relating to unequal access to modern technologies and irresponsible applications of industrial methods.20 Even so, proponents of the industrialized approach characterize these challenges as causes for further refinement of industrial agriculture rather than for its abandonment. In this connection, the third main argument used in defense of industrialized food systems is that no approach to global food production—​not even the ones proposed by critics of industrial agriculture—​could hope to avoid every problem or eliminate every risk. The most appropriate response to the difficulties generated by industrial agriculture is therefore said to involve a combination of careful regulation, experience-​based learning, further innovation, and strategic—​though limited—​public action.21 Perhaps unsurprisingly, opponents of industrial agriculture have strenuously rejected virtually all of these positions. For example, activists have questioned the validity of studies purporting to demonstrate the safety of industrial techniques, and they have similarly criticized regulators for employing lax standards in approving new technologies.22 They have also denied that better production capabilities can be achieved from industrial agriculture than from their favored alternatives, especially when all costs are considered over the long run.23 As might be expected by this point, however, counterarguments like these have failed to convince defenders of the industrial approach to abandon their views,24 and the deadlock between the opposing sides continues to this day.

Standards of Public Justification It is doubtful that the disagreements between opponents and defenders of industrial agriculture will be resolved anytime soon. But the fact that citizens disagree about 19 

McIntyre et al. 2009, 416–​422; Fedoroff et al. 2010; Varshney et al. 2011. E.g., Paarlberg 2013, 69–​73. 21  Borlaug 2000; Godfray et al. 2010; Paarlberg 2013, 118–​121. Such initiatives have increasingly been grouped under the banner of “sustainable intensification.” According to the proponents of this approach, sustainable intensification “denotes a goal but does not specify a priori how it should be attained or which agricultural techniques to deploy. The merits of diverse approaches—​conventional, “high-​tech,” agro-​ecological, or organic—​should be rigorously tested and assessed, taking biophysical and social contexts into account” (Garnett et al. 2013, 33). 22  Kimbrell 2002, 25; Greenpeace International 2008; Lotter 2009; Pesticide Action Network Europe 2013, 7–​13; 2014, 15–​18; Pesticide Action Network Europe and Generation Futures 2014. 23  Rosset 1999; Kimbrell 2002, 19–​22; Chappell 2007. See also Pimm 1997; Pretty et al. 2003; Pretty et al. 2006. 24  E.g., Paarlberg 2013, 75–​78, 175–​176. 20 

Public Justification and Agriculture    433 political matters does not necessarily eliminate the possibility of publicly justifying some set of policies. This is because individuals with competing viewpoints can often reconcile themselves to policy regimes that diverge from their most preferred arrangements, even if perhaps they do not judge those regimes to be optimal.25 Indeed, it is this basic observation that explains why political theorists think that public justification can ever be achieved even though citizens in a free society will disagree as a matter of course. In advocating for public justification, theorists are not seeking to achieve outcomes in which political differences disappear26 or in which every citizen believes she has gotten her first choice.27 Rather, they hope to uncover arrangements that citizens might have reason to find acceptable, regardless of their own views about what would be best or ideal.

Hobbes Although some notion of “acceptability” has been central to philosophical theories of public justification, this standard has been understood in different ways, leading to correspondingly different views about what public justification amounts to. Depending on how the standard of “acceptability” is understood, the achievement of public justification can take on varying degrees of moral appeal and, conversely, can be more or less difficult to realize in practice. By way of illustration, consider an especially permissive account of public justification that is very easy to satisfy, but that loses much of its moral attractiveness in virtue of this fact. In Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes contends that political arrangements can be justified to citizens simply on the grounds that life under a sovereign is superior to that in a lawless “condition of war.”28 Hobbes makes no claim that arrangements justified in this way will strike citizens as good or even decent,29 and indeed he suggests that individuals should suppress urges to judge public matters for themselves, since the sovereign’s judgments should ultimately be taken as decisive.30 Using Hobbes’s criterion, we might say that political regimes are “acceptable” to citizens when they are regarded as preferable to having no arrangements at all.31 This 25 

Rawls [1993] 2005, 118; Gaus 2011, 321–​325; Quong 2011, 132–​134. As John Rawls puts it, it is a brute fact that “Under the political and social conditions secured by the basic rights and liberties of free institutions, a diversity of conflicting and irreconcilable—​and what’s more, reasonable—​comprehensive doctrines will come about and persist if such diversity does not already obtain” (Rawls [1993] 2005, 36). 27  Gerald Gaus emphatically repudiates the idea that “Only if the moral rules of one’s society conform to one’s ideal social morality . . . can one be morally free,” saying that this view “is either deluded, authoritarian, or nihilistic” (Gaus 2011, 548; see also 443–​446). 28  Hobbes [1651] 1994, XIV. 29  In fact, Hobbes contends that people will tend to overemphasize the burdens they bear within a commonwealth and underappreciate the benefits they procure by participating in one. Hence, he thinks we should actually expect people to be dissatisfied with their governments even when they have good reason to embrace them (ibid., XVIII.20). 30  Ibid., XVII‒XVIII. 31  For further discussion of Hobbes as an early theorist of public justification, see Gaus 2003, ch. 3; 2013. 26 

434   Dan C. Shahar benchmark is clearly easy to satisfy and, given Hobbes’s aversion to failing to achieve public justification, he might well have seen this fact as counting strongly in its favor. However, as I have already indicated, this permissive standard lacks much of the luster that political philosophers have typically hoped to invest in their theories. Whereas Hobbes is willing to countenance arrangements that citizens consider horribly objectionable, most other writers have hoped to point the way to more appealing social worlds—​worlds in which individuals might have reason to embrace their political arrangements rather than simply to acquiesce to them. Adopting a standard of acceptability as weak as Hobbes’s therefore seems to miss a major part of what leads contemporary philosophers to seek public justification in the first place.32

Rawls Consider, then, a very different understanding of public justification—​one that better illustrates the optimism about political life that theorists have tried to incorporate into their views. In Political Liberalism, John Rawls calls for public justification of a kind that would enable citizens to see the foundations of their political arrangements as “derived from, or congruent with, or at least not in conflict with, their other values.”33 Unlike Hobbes, Rawls commits to finding a shared charter for public life that would be capable of aligning with citizens’ respective senses of justice,34 that citizens could affirm “for its own sake, or on its own merits,”35 and that would “secure what strikes us as just or fair, honorable or decent, relations between us.”36 In Rawls’s view, the sort of “acceptability” relevant to public justification is not built on mere acquiescence: rather, it is something that enables citizens to be “wholehearted members” of the societies they inhabit.37 Rawls’s view provides a helpful contrast to Hobbes’s for thinking about what an ideal of public justification might hope to achieve. His standard might be much more difficult

32 

In fairness to Hobbes, it should be noted that the goal of Leviathan is not to point the way to a political community founded on mutual respect. Rather, Hobbes’s aim is to explore how societies can maintain peace and order despite the pressures that drive people toward conflict. For further discussion of the shortcomings of extremely permissive accounts of public justification, see Vallier 2014, 90–​98. 33  Rawls [1993] 2005, 11. It should be noted that in Rawls’s own discussion, the demand for public justification is restricted to fundamental matters like “constitutional essentials” and “questions of basic justice” and does not extend to more mundane topics of everyday politics (214–​215). Interestingly, Rawls acknowledges that this restriction may be nothing more than a convenient simplification (215), and his critics have characterized the point as obscure (Gaus 1996, 232), seemingly baseless (Wall 1998, 42, 49), and positively misguided (Quong 2011, 273–​287). However, I hope to dodge this fraught distinction by treating the agricultural issues under discussion as if they constitute “questions of basic justice” and hence demand public justification on Rawls’s theory. If this move should be resisted, however, then the question of why public justification should be restricted in the way Rawls recommends would need to be investigated in greater depth than I attempt here. 34  Rawls [1993] 2005, 142. 35 Ibid., 148. 36 Ibid., 120. 37  Rawls [1995a] 2005, xxxviii.

Public Justification and Agriculture    435 to satisfy than those offered by Hobbes, but a society in which all citizens could see their political arrangements as just, fair, honorable, and decent would clearly be more attractive than one in which citizens merely preferred them to anarchy. Likewise, giving up on Rawls’s more demanding ideal would mean taking on an important moral cost: it would mean abandoning the hope that all citizens will be able to embrace the political arrangements under which they live in a wholehearted way.

Gaus One might wonder at this point whether an intermediate perspective is needed. Even if we desire to avoid Hobbes’s cynical conclusions about political life, we might also worry that Rawls’s lofty ideal will turn out to be unachievable in a divided society like our own. One such moderated view is provided by Gerald Gaus. In The Order of Public Reason, Gaus observes that successful societies are built around codes of social morality.38 These are systems of social rules to which citizens hold one another morally accountable,39 and which ground moral emotions like resentment, indignation, and guilt.40 Gaus argues that in order for such systems of rules to function properly, the people they govern must have sufficient reasons to embrace them. This is because the rules of social morality often ask people to sacrifice their values, goals, and objectives in the name of compliance.41 If citizens lacked strong reasons to comply with social morality, it would make little sense for them to feel guilty about non-​compliance when this would advance their cherished goals.42 Likewise, the propriety of resentment and indignation toward rule-​ violators would be undermined.43 Indeed, for citizens to make moral demands of each other without public justification would be to exercise a kind of “small-​scale authoritarianism” in which “some invoke the idea of morality to rule the lives of others.”44 Public justification on Gaus’s view thus enables us to see ourselves as members of non-​ authoritarian moral arrangements that establish relations of accountability between us. Gaus contends that social rules need to satisfy two main criteria in order to qualify as elements of a publicly justified social morality.45 First, they need to align with citizens’ 38 

Gaus 2011, 2–​6, 101–​104, 181–​182. Ibid., 6–​12, 187. 40  Ibid., 188–​191. 41  Ibid., 4–​6, 145–​148. 42  Ibid., 204–​205, 208–​211. 43  Ibid., 210–​211, 219–​224. 44  Ibid., xvi. See also 16–​17, 29–​30, 221, 230–​232. 45  In addition to the two criteria described later, Gaus’s model also invokes a “Pareto optimality” condition (ibid., 322–​323). This condition holds that whatever rules are ultimately chosen, there must not be some alternative set of rules that would better satisfy at least some citizens without making any other citizens less satisfied. Failure to meet this condition would mean that prevailing rules could be improved upon in the eyes of some citizens without offending anyone, such that failing to transition to the alternative rules would seem irrational. This criterion will be largely irrelevant for our purposes, since its main function is to facilitate the evaluation of particular proposals; whereas, we are primarily concerned with the question of whether or not there are any proposals at all that pass the test of public justification. 39 

436   Dan C. Shahar basic intuitions about what a moral code can be like. Individuals might not be able to see potential rules as bona fide moral proposals if they are insufficiently general, unsuitable to teach to children, incapable of resolving conflicts and validating claims, not presented as capable of overriding competing considerations, prejudiced against individuals occupying particular social roles, or hostile to certain citizens’ interests.46 Any rule suggested along these lines “simply would not qualify as a moral rule, even if everyone had reason to endorse it.”47 Secondly, Gaus claims that citizens need to be able to see the adoption of moral rules as preferable at least to having no moralized rules in the relevant domains.48 Gaus argues that in order to gain real insight into what arrangements citizens have sufficient reasons to accept, some baseline must be identified against which proposals are to be evaluated—​one capable of specifying the consequences of deeming a particular arrangement unacceptable.49 He finds a salient one in the sorts of non-​moralized arrangements that might proceed from a Hobbesian settlement: if citizens are to have reason to embrace arrangements that would subject them to moralized accountability, the arrangements would need to strike them as preferable to the “blameless” practices that might be adopted instead.50 It should be emphasized that neither of these criteria is sufficient to ensure that citizens would be able to view their society’s rules as moral, just, or fair. Indeed, Gaus is explicit that his theory is “not proposing a definition of wrongness, nor . . . seeking to develop a theory of justice.”51 His account rather aims to show how a society’s code of morality can earn its members’ allegiance in the face of deep disagreements about important public matters. According to Gaus, this achievement is consistent with arrangements that citizens concede to be authoritative but nevertheless regard as “far inferior to their own ideal rules.”52

Measuring Up These three perspectives may be seen as marking points along a moral continuum. On one end, we find attractive yet difficult-​to-​satisfy standards like Rawls’s; on the other, we find less attractive but easier-​to-​satisfy standards like Hobbes’s. As we have seen, the most ambitious theories of public justification envision a world in which all citizens could see their political orders as just, fair, honorable, and decent. More moderate views 46 

Ibid., 294–​303.

47 Ibid., 294.

48  Ibid., 312–​321. For discussion of how different domains of public life are to be distinguished, see ibid., 490–​497. 49  Ibid., 268–​270, 310–​312. 50  Ibid., 319–​321. 51 Ibid., 276. 52 Ibid., 548.

Public Justification and Agriculture    437 aim toward societies governed by bona fide social moralities that individuals consider authoritative, even if perhaps they also find them repellent. The least ambitious views hold that arrangements are publicly justified so long as they are preferable to having no arrangements at all. Giving up on the loftier ideals entails taking on a moral cost:  it means accepting that citizens may have to live in a society they consider unjust and even fundamentally immoral. Thus, in investigating the public justification of political arrangements, it makes sense to start with the most ambitious standards and to retreat to less ambitious ones only when necessary.53 It is with this framing in mind that we can finally turn back to the debate over industrial agriculture and to the questions that initially motivated our investigation: How could societies expect any agricultural policy regime to be willingly embraced by citizens, given that every such regime is bound to strike some as deeply objectionable? And what can the participants to these debates reasonably demand from their agricultural policy regimes, given that so many of their neighbors see their perspectives as misguided and dangerous?

Injustice in Every Direction The most intrinsically attractive way of interpreting these questions is through the lens of a theory like Rawls’s. So let us begin by asking what would be required to secure his brand of “wholehearted” endorsement from the parties to the agricultural debate. Consider first those who repudiate industrial agriculture. Presumably many of these individuals would claim that a political society is not just, fair, honorable, or decent if it grants citizens and corporations the right to expose their neighbors to unknown health risks, to release dangerous chemicals into the natural environment with little accountability, and to undermine the ecological integrity on which the world’s population depends. Similarly, many food activists would repudiate a regime that permits and even facilitates the concentration of economic and political power in the hands of agribusiness and technology giants, as well as the perilous deterioration of agricultural biodiversity around the world. Yet these maladies are precisely what the opponents of industrial agriculture see as flowing unavoidably from the food systems they oppose.54 53  Here my approach shares a great deal in common with the “two-​stage contractarianism” of Michael Moehler (2014). The main difference is that where Moehler’s theory treats Gaus’s ideal as the most ambitious goal appropriate for a pluralistic society, I treat Rawls’s ideal as an even higher benchmark to be evaluated first. 54  For those with more familiarity with Rawls’s theory, some additional explication seems warranted. My comments here pertain most directly to a scenario where the freestanding political conceptions developed at the first stage of Rawls’s exposition endorse schemes of rights, liberties, and political institutions that enable industrial agriculture to emerge. In such a scenario, it seems plausible that critics of industrial agriculture would not be able to reconcile the freestanding political conceptions with their comprehensive worldviews, not because they are “unreasonable,” but rather on the basis of controversial convictions about the consequences of industrial agriculture that we can explain by reference to the burdens of judgment. There is, however, at least one other Rawlsian pathway to embracing industrial

438   Dan C. Shahar In advocating the abandonment of industrial agriculture, food activists are not simply demanding to “get their way” in political life. Instead, they see themselves as standing up for basic standards of equity and prudence in the face of dangerous decisions being made by their societies. Any political order that secured their wholehearted endorsement would therefore seemingly need to take aggressive measures to curb what they see as the most serious threats posed by industrialized food systems. Consider next, however, what it would take to merit the wholehearted approval of those who would defend the industrialized approach. In the eyes of these citizens, it seems likely that a political order would fall short of being just, fair, honorable, or decent if it allowed groups of misguided “alarmists” to obstruct the economic activities of their neighbors without providing compelling evidence to substantiate their fears—​ especially when the economic activities in question were integral to satisfying the basic needs of a growing population and ameliorating global poverty and climate change. Yet this is precisely what they think would follow from acting on their opponents’ demands to abandon industrial agriculture. Once again, we can see that in resisting opposition to their favored agricultural systems, the defenders of industrial techniques are not simply insisting on satisfying their own preferences over those of others. Rather, they are denouncing the active harming of millions of people around the world that they think would come from obstructing industrial agriculture in the name of overblown fears. Any political order that secured these individuals’ wholehearted endorsement would therefore seemingly need to make substantial room for the continued development of industrialized food systems—​at least until alternatives were demonstrated capable of matching their performance on a global scale, or until existing practices were shown to be seriously harmful in line with prevailing standards of scientific evidence.

Compromise, Privatization, and Democratic Adjudication Given the gulfs between the competing viewpoints on industrial agriculture, it seems clear that adopting in full the proposals of either side would deeply offend the opposing group. Yet having stated the rival positions, we might wonder whether Rawls’s standard could still be satisfied through a sort of compromise.55 Perhaps, for example, governments could take control of the most serious risks posed by industrial agricultural agriculture. The freestanding political conceptions could fail to determine whether society’s scheme of basic rights and liberties should allow for the emergence of industrial agriculture, such that the issue would need to be put to a vote or resolved through some other procedural means. Such possibilities are addressed in the next subsection. Similar comments can be applied to the discussion of proponents of industrial agriculture, mutatis mutandis. 55  This suggestion tracks Rawls’s claim that “a spirit of compromise and a readiness to meet others halfway” are among the central virtues of political cooperation (Rawls [1993] 2005, 163). It is worth noting that Gaus expresses considerable skepticism about the role of compromise in facilitating coexistence (Gaus 2011, 406–​407).

Public Justification and Agriculture    439 techniques while taking considerably less action against more nebulous dangers. Steps could be taken to protect natural environments and genetic diversity from the gravest insults while allowing for moderate impacts in the name of agricultural efficiency. And measures could be adopted to constrain the market shares and political influences of agribusinesses and technology corporations without hamstringing their abilities to promote production on a global scale. If such policies were adopted, we might hope that individuals on both sides of the debate could embrace the results wholeheartedly even if they considered them less than ideal. Suggestions like these no doubt contain some promise. Yet despite the intuitiveness of seeking compromise along such lines, there is reason to think that such a resolution would not realize Rawls’s ideal. For in practice, compromises much like the ones just described already characterize the regulatory regimes of most developed nations. The European Union, for example, has embraced a so-​called “Precautionary Principle” to guide agricultural regulations since 2000,56 and yet food activists have continued to harshly criticize its regulators for their complacency.57 Meanwhile, defenders of industrial agriculture have already voiced concern that regulatory obstacles to the development of their favored methods are posing grave dangers for the future of agricultural productivity.58 In this connection, we may recall the warnings of Norman Borlaug that continuing down our current path would yield “the pending chaos of incalculable millions of deaths by starvation.”59 Complaints like these raise doubts about whether a compromise could ever command wholehearted support from both sides of the debate. Setting aside the feasibility of a mutually attractive compromise, two other potential ways of achieving Rawls’s ideal deserve consideration as well. One strategy would cast the choice of whether to support industrialized food systems as a “private” one, enabling citizens to make their own decisions while respecting their neighbors’ rights to do the same—​say, by buying food produced in the ways they endorse and aligning their business practices with their own convictions. This suggestion draws from a broad philosophical tradition of achieving social cooperation not by resolving disagreements through political deliberation, but rather by respecting each citizen’s right to live according to her own point of view.60 Institutions protecting religious liberty provide a helpful example of this strategy in action, showing how citizens with conflicting perspectives can live harmoniously together by granting each the right to practice a faith of her choosing. The main difficulty in applying this proposal to the debate over industrial agriculture arises from the challenge of specifying what counts as respecting each person’s right

56 

Commission of the European Communities 2000. Greenpeace International 2008; Pesticide Action Network Europe 2013, 7–​15; 2014, 15–​18; Pesticide Action Network Europe and Generation Futures 2014. 58  Farre et al. 2010; Fedoroff et al. 2010. 59  Borlaug 2000, 490. 60  See, e.g., Rawls [1993] 2005, 156–​157; Schmidtz 2006, 6; Gaus 2011, §18. 57 

440   Dan C. Shahar to live according to her own convictions. In the context of religious freedom, we typically draw a distinction between “minding one’s own business” and imposing oneself on others. The idea of “living in accordance with one’s convictions” is understood to apply more to the former than the latter. But if defenders of industrial agriculture were to insist that they are simply “minding their own business” by employing their favored techniques, their critics would reply that they are doing nothing of the sort. By polluting the environment, tainting the food supply, and diminishing global biodiversity, practitioners of industrial agriculture would be cast as making choices with inescapably public ramifications. Of course, eliminating such external impacts might enable food activists to wholeheartedly embrace freedom of choice. But given the inevitable spillover effects of industrialized food production as it is practiced today, doing this would effectively require the abandonment of industrial methods. This, of course, is precisely what defenders of industrial agriculture oppose. A different strategy for achieving mutually acceptable outcomes would be to submit competing proposals to a popular vote, asking citizens to embrace the outcomes whether or not they independently endorsed the winning bids. Like the previous suggestion, this idea also draws on an important tradition in political thought, this one recognizing that although citizens often disagree about what policies are best, they can often reconcile themselves to unpalatable political outcomes provided that they result from legitimate democratic processes.61 Just as baseball players can accept the rulings of an umpire even when they personally disagree with the calls being made, the citizens of liberal societies can often reconcile themselves to the outcomes of democratic procedures even when they yield disagreeable policy decisions.62 Unfortunately, there is a basic difficulty with looking to democratic deliberations to resolve agricultural disputes in mutually attractive ways. In general, we should only expect citizens to embrace the outcomes of democratic processes if two conditions hold: first, they believe that the issues being put to a vote are of the sorts that fall within the appropriate scope of popular discretion; and second, they do not expect the outcomes of voting to be abjectly horrible or “beyond the pale.”63 Just as we should not expect baseball players to wholeheartedly endorse the pronouncements of an umpire who commanded them to fight to the death or burn their stadium to the ground, we should not expect citizens to embrace democratic rulings that flouted individuals’ basic rights or blocked projects of fundamental moral importance. Yet we have already seen that these are precisely the matters believed to be at stake in debates over industrial agriculture. The fact that policy decisions were made democratically might therefore prove insufficient to convince the rival groups that resulting arrangements were just, fair, honorable, and decent. 61 

See, e.g., Sagoff 1986; Rawls [1995b] 2005, 393; Gaus 1996, 184–​191; Vallier 2014, 99–​100. It should be stressed that some political theorists dispute whether this sort of strategy really honors the spirit of calls for public justification (e.g., Quong 2011, 210). However, I will not enter into this debate here. 62  For elaboration of this idea, see Gaus 1996, 184–​191. 63  Ibid., 188–​191, 288.

Public Justification and Agriculture    441 In practice, then, it seems plausible that any currently feasible way forward in the arena of agricultural politics will offend at least some subset of the population in ways that prevent them from embracing the results wholeheartedly. We might expect policy decisions that satisfied the critics of industrial agriculture to be characterized as imposing significant and immoral costs on the world’s most vulnerable citizens, all in the name of avoiding dangers that have never compellingly been shown to exist. Meanwhile, decisions that satisfied proponents of industrial agriculture might draw predictable complaints about grossly inadequate protections for health, safety, environmental quality, and political integrity. In either case, Rawls’s ambitious ideal of public justification might seem more optimistic than circumstances can bear.

In Search of a Moralized Settlement Having failed to uncover a clear way to satisfy Rawls’s benchmark for public justification, our next step will be to lower our sights. As we have seen, one alternative way to think about the notion of “acceptability” focuses on the achievement of moralized social relationships. On Gaus’s account, the proper object of a theory of public justification is the authorization of a system of social morality. Gaus holds that authoritative social rules must align with citizens’ basic intuitions about what a moral code can be like and be preferable to having no moralized rules in the relevant domains. Meeting these conditions might not yield outcomes as attractive as those envisioned by Rawls, but in a world where Rawls’s ideal is simply unattainable, Gaus’s more modest approach could be seen as an appealing “second best” alternative. With our sights duly lowered, the task of achieving public justification appears less daunting. But let us consider whether Gaus’s standard can actually be met. We may begin by observing that there is a strong case for thinking his second condition could be satisfied in agricultural policy debates. Both opponents and supporters of industrial agriculture presumably have powerful interests in having moralized rules to govern matters like the protection of individual rights and the restriction of environmental pollution. They also have much to gain from living in a community that treats some spheres of activity as off-​limits to public interference, and that resolves contentious political disputes through democratic processes. So there are good reasons to think that at least one of the options discussed in the previous subsection—​compromise, privatization, or democratic adjudication—​would be seen by all parties as more expedient than having no moralized arrangements at all in the relevant domains. Gaus’s first condition, however, presents a serious obstacle. In order for moralized social arrangements to be publicly justified on Gaus’s view, they need to align with citizens’ foundational beliefs about what kinds of rules can qualify as bona fide moral requirements. These so-​called “formal constraints” on moral rules imply that even if citizens believed that it would be useful to adopt moral arrangements to govern agricultural domains, it might still be impossible to achieve public justification if none of the available options aligned with all citizens’ understandings of what a moral code can be like.

442   Dan C. Shahar As Gaus plausibly explains, one of the constraints that individuals would likely place on the viability of a code of social morality would be a modest “common good” criterion.64 According to such a criterion, rules asking people to make systematic and major sacrifices to their core interests would not count as genuinely “moral” at all. The common good requirement would not bar rules from asking people to sacrifice some of their interests in certain contexts, for grounding such demands is a main reason for having a moral code in the first place.65 But rules that were thoroughly hostile to the goods of certain individuals would be disqualified from moral authoritativeness even if most citizens saw them as “better than nothing.” For we could not properly expect people to feel guilty for violating such rules, and it would likewise seem difficult to sustain resentment or indignation in instances of noncompliance.66 With this criterion in mind, consider how a passionate critic of industrial agriculture would assess the credentials of a proposed set of rules that endorsed a right to engage in industrial agriculture. Such rules would make it fully legitimate from the standpoint of social morality for people to engage in actions that would, from this person’s point of view, poison the bodies of innocent third parties, undermine the integrity of the political system, and contribute to dangerous ecological degradation. These rules would license no blame or resentment against the perpetrators of such actions, and they would provide no indications that such people should feel guilty. But they would prescribe blame, resentment, and guilt in cases where people interfered with the actions of industrial agriculturalists in violation of the agriculturalists’ recognized rights—​even when these interferences were aimed at preventing what was seen as mass poisoning, disenfranchisement, or the destruction of critical environmental goods. It is difficult to say for certain whether the critics of industrial agriculture could regard such rules as possessing genuine moral authority. But it at least seems conceivable that food activists would find themselves unable to see rules like these as bona fide moral requirements. Even if they acknowledged the great importance of having some system of moral rules to regulate citizens’ activities within agricultural domains, these particular rules might seem to pose such serious threats to the interests of people around the world that food activists might find it incoherent to blame people who chose resistance over compliance. Likewise, expecting dissidents to feel guilty for their actions might simply seem absurd. On the other hand, suppose that supporters of industrialized agriculture were evaluating a set of rules that did impose strong restrictions on industrial techniques. Could these rules be regarded as bona fide candidates for moral authority? Consider that according to such rules, individuals would merit blame and resentment if they went forward with projects that used prohibited agricultural techniques to contribute to the alleviation of some of the worst challenges of population growth, poverty, and climate change. Indeed, under a moral regime of this sort, such people would be expected to feel 64 

Gaus 2011, 301–​303. See also 137–​138, 161–​162.

66 

Ibid., 302–​303.

65 Ibid., 302.

Public Justification and Agriculture    443 guilty for taking what they saw as the only proven means for combating global poverty and starvation. Again, it is difficult to say for certain how defenders of industrial agriculture would judge these matters, but it at least seems conceivable that some would consider rules along these lines so inimical to the interests of many around the world that they would simply fail to qualify as bona fide moral requirements. Such reflections raise the possibility that even on Gaus’s more modest standard, achieving public justification for an agricultural policy regime would be impossible in practice. Either the rules would be too permissive, and hence seen as hostile to the common good by critics of industrial agriculture, or they would be too strict, and hence seen as hostile to the common good by defenders. In either case, proposed arrangements might be rejected as morally unacceptable by at least some members of the public even if all parties agreed that having shared moral rules would be desirable from a practical point of view.67

Falling Back on Instrumentalism We face once again the prospect of lowering our sights. As we have seen, Hobbes identifies a relatively straightforward—​if uninspiring—​way to justify political arrangements to their subjects. This is to point out that even in the face of deep disagreements, it is typically true that everyone has a powerful interest in having some settled political arrangements in place, even if they are rather repugnant ones. In the present context, I have already said that regardless of what people believe about industrial agriculture, chances are that they find it advantageous to ensure that the production of food is not an anarchic domain in which individuals may simply do as they please, or a battleground in which outright conflict reigns. To this extent, both opponents and supporters of industrial agriculture may be able to reconcile themselves to some set of agricultural policies—​even including those enshrined in the status quo—​on the grounds that they are better than nothing. This will doubtlessly strike some readers as a disappointing way to think about how political arrangements are to be justified to their subjects. It is far from intuitive that policies can be “justified” to people who find them so deeply repugnant as to lack moral authority. But this is precisely what the Hobbesian standard of public justification allows. Given the need to find some way to live together in the face of disagreement, 67  I should stress that I present this possibility as only that: a possibility. For one thing, the rivals in this debate should not be portrayed as more rigid and uncompromising than they really are. Insofar as the parties to our agricultural debates recognize the great need for people in diverse societies to adopt moral rules despite their disagreements, this might lead them to accept arrangements that they consider quite repugnant for the sake of converging with their neighbors (Gaus 2011, 398–​400). Moreover, it is conceivable that our disputants could reframe the agricultural debate as just one part of a broader set of issues—​say, concerning property rights or liability law—​and thereby enable themselves to see a particular resolution as morally authoritative even in spite of a few “rotten bits” (495–​497). I cannot resolve these matters here, but such possibilities should not be ignored.

444   Dan C. Shahar Hobbes’s account urges us to accept arrangements as justified so long as we can more or less live with them, and so long as our neighbors can do the same. Admittedly, a policy regime that is “justified” in this sense will constitute nothing more than a modus vivendi worthy of acquiescence rather than moral allegiance. As the foregoing discussion suggests, this sort of outcome is far less appealing than what most liberal theorists have pursued. Yet despite our disappointment, we should not ignore the significance of finding ways of living peacefully together despite deep and fundamental disagreements. The history of human civilization has regularly seen groups with incompatible ideologies being led into violent moral conflict. If we can maintain orderly coexistence despite our own most intractable disagreements, then this should be recognized as a significant achievement in its own right. The upshot of embracing a Hobbesian standard of public justification is that when it comes to debates over agricultural policy, political decisions may be seen as justified to citizens so long as they secure peace and order among disputants, even if many view those decisions as abhorrent. Political arrangements justified in this way may not be able to command citizens’ wholehearted endorsement, and individuals may not even see themselves as morally required to adhere to them. But so long as shared arrangements enable people with radically divergent perspectives to coexist on peaceful terms, they can properly claim all the legitimacy that partisans can reasonably demand from their political orders.

Conclusion When our core commitments are threatened in public life, it is often tempting to think that the only legitimate thing for our societies to do would be to ensure that we get our way. In such cases, it might seem as though going against our convictions would be a sign that our political orders had failed. But when the gravest matters are also subjects of controversy, this intuition stands in need of qualification. We might all wish to live in a world in which every citizen could view her political arrangements as just, fair, honorable, and decent. Failing this, we might still see it as a laudable achievement if citizens could see the rules of their societies as possessing genuine moral authority. In some cases, however, we have seen that such achievements may be beyond our grasp. It may turn out that in our divided societies, we will find ourselves in circumstances where the best we can reasonably demand is a set of political arrangements we can more or less live with—​even if only grumblingly—​and that our neighbors can live with as well. In the context of disputes over industrial agriculture, this may mean that critics of existing food systems have to endure the perpetuation of practices they regard as morally reprehensible. On the other hand, insofar as these critics are able to implement their reformist agendas, it may also mean that supporters of industrial agriculture will face restrictions and obstacles they consider grossly harmful to the public interest. For

Public Justification and Agriculture    445 better or worse, our theories of public justification provide few resources for condemning either outcome: insofar as our circumstances render impossible the achievement of more mutually attractive arrangements, underwhelming results like these may be the best that can be achieved. Still, the conclusion that we cannot demand better outcomes than these from our societies does not imply that they are the best we can hope for. On the contrary, more ambitious standards of public justification can help to provide us with beacons toward which to strive, pushing us to seek outcomes capable of appealing more fully to us all. In the context of industrial agriculture, we can easily imagine a world where alleviating the concerns of food activists would be compatible with allowing techniques that defenders of industrialized methods consider necessary for meeting basic needs worldwide. Such a world may be unachievable with our current state of technology, but technologies can change and moral possibilities can change with them. If we are compelled by the idea of bringing about more mutually attractive states of affairs, then we may discover that possibilities abound for making progress in this direction. For example, critics of industrial agriculture could invest in the demonstration of safe and sustainable production alternatives at scales large enough to make major contributions to global consumer needs. If such alternatives were clearly available, then there would be little cause for proponents of industrial agriculture to cling to their currently favored methods in order to feel secure about future food accessibility. Instead, the alternatives could be embraced without threatening anyone’s moral commitments. Along similar lines, critics of industrial methods could continue to study the potential safety hazards of current techniques in order to provide the definitive proofs of harmfulness that their opponents seek. Improved information of this sort could eliminate the need to demand restrictions on what defenders of industrial agriculture view as uncorroborated bases. Even if activities along these lines did not completely resolve citizens’ disagreements about which agricultural policies are best, they might at least make it possible to achieve higher standards of public justification through some combination of compromise, privatization, and democratic adjudication. Meanwhile, proponents of industrialized food systems could take a variety of measures to ameliorate the concerns of their rivals as well. For example, they might devote themselves to combatting corporate favoritism and unnecessary subsidies that achieve little of moral importance from their own points of view. They could also work alongside their interlocutors to invest in safer and more sustainable agricultural techniques in order to meet productivity needs with ever-​smaller external effects. If successful, measures like these could help proponents of industrial agriculture to alleviate their opponents’ most serious objections without undermining the acceptability of resulting arrangements from their own points of view. It may seem hopelessly optimistic to expect that actions like these would be able to guarantee a timely solution to today’s acrimonious disputes over industrial agriculture. But for those who would hope to build toward more attractive states of public justification, suggestions along these lines provide a promising avenue for further investigation. To the extent that such efforts eventually bore fruits, an agricultural regime realizing

446   Dan C. Shahar a more ambitious ideal of public justification might someday be achievable. Indeed, if citizens could see their neighbors struggling alongside them toward a superior political world, then this recognition in itself might make it easier to bear the frustration of an enduringly imperfect agricultural order.

Acknowledgments I am deeply grateful to Sameer Bajaj, Mark Budolfson, Gerald Gaus, Greg Robson, Chad Van Schoelandt, David Schmidtz, and Amy Stabler for illuminating comments and conversations regarding earlier drafts of this essay.

Bibliography American Association for the Advancement of Science. 2012. Statement by the AAAS Board of Directors on Labeling of Genetically Modified Foods. Washington, DC: AAAS. Ausubel, Jesse H., Iddo K. Wernick, and Paul E. Waggoner. 2013. “Peak Farmland and the Prospect for Land Sparing.” Population and Development Review 38, supplement: 221–​242. Beitel, Karl. 2005. “U.S. Farm Subsidies and the Farm Economy: Myths, Realities, Alternatives.” Food First Backgrounder 11, no. 3. Bell, Derek. 2002. “How Can Political Liberals Be Environmentalists?” Political Studies 50, no. 4: 703–​724. Beus, Curtis E., and Riley E. Dunlap. 1990. “Conventional versus Alternative Agriculture: The Paradigmatic Roots of the Debate.” Rural Sociology 55, no. 4: 590–​616. Borlaug, Norman E. 2000. “Ending World Hunger: The Promise of Biotechnology and the Threat of Antiscience Zealotry.” Plant Physiology 124, no. 2: 487–​490. Chappell, M. Jahi. 2007. “Shattering Myths:  Can Sustainable Agriculture Feed the World?” Food First Backgrounder 13, no. 3. Christou, Paul, and Richard M. Twyman. 2004. “The Potential of Genetically Enhanced Plants to Address Food Insecurity.” Nutrition Research Reviews 17, no. 1: 23–​42. Commission of the European Communities. 2000. “Communication from the Commission on the Precautionary Principle.” Brussels: Commission of the European Communities. D’Agostino, Fred. 1996. Free Public Reason:  Making It Up as We Go. New  York:  Oxford University Press. European Parliament and Council of the European Union. 2009a. “Regulation (EC) No 1107/​ 2009 of the European Parliament and of the Council.” Official Journal of the European Union L309:1–​50. —​—​—​. 2009b. “Sustainable Use Directive 2009/​128/​EC.” Official Journal of the European Union L309:71–​86. Farre, Gemma, Koreen Ramessar, Richard M. Twyman, Teresa Capell, and Paul Christou. 2010. “The Humanitarian Impact of Plant Biotechnology: Recent Breakthroughs vs. Bottlenecks for Adoption.” Current Opinion in Plant Biology 13, no. 3: 219–​225. Fedoroff, N. V., D. S. Battisti, R. N. Beachy, P. J. M. Cooper, D. A. Fischoff, C. N. Hodges, V. C. Knauf, D. Lobell, B. J. Mazur, D. Molden, M. P. Reynolds, P. C. Ronald, M. W. Rosegrant, P. A. Sanchez, A. Vonshak, and J.-​K. Zhu. 2010. “Radically Rethinking Agriculture for the 21st Century.” Science 327, no. 5967: 833–​834.

Public Justification and Agriculture    447 Garnett, T., M. C. Appleby, A. Balmford, I. J. Bateman, T. G. Benton, P. Bloomer, B. Burlingame, M. Dawkins, L. Dolan, D. Fraser, M. Herrero, I. Hoffmann, P. Smith, P.  K. Thornton, C. Toulmin, S.  J. Vermeulen, and H.  C.  J. Godfray. 2013. “Sustainable Intensification in Agriculture: Premises and Policies.” Science 341, no. 6141: 33–​34. Gaus, Gerald F. 1996. Justificatory Liberalism: An Essay on Epistemology and Political Theory. New York: Oxford University Press. —​—​—​. 1999. “Reasonable Pluralism and the Domain of the Political: How the Weaknesses of John Rawls’s Political Liberalism Can be Overcome by a Justificatory Liberalism.” Inquiry 42, no. 2: 259–​284. —​—​—​. 2003. Contemporary Theories of Liberalism:  Public Reason as a Post-​Enlightenment Project. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications. —​—​—​. 2011. The Order of Public Reason: A Theory of Freedom and Morality in a Diverse and Bounded World. New York: Cambridge University Press. —​—​—​. 2013. “Hobbes’s Challenge to Public Reason Liberalism: Public Reason and Religious Convictions in Leviathan.” In Hobbes Today:  Insights for the 21st Century, edited by S. A. Lloyd, 155–​177. New York: Cambridge University Press. Godfray, H. C. J., John R. Beddington, Ian R. Crute, Lawrence Haddad, David Lawrence, James F. Muir, Jules Pretty, Sherman Robinson, Sandy M. Thomas, and Camilla Toulmin. 2010. “Food Security: The Challenge of Feeding 9 Billion People.” Science 327, no. 5967: 812–​818. Greenpeace International. 2008. Media Briefing—​GMO Debate, Ad Hoc Working Group, November 24, and Environmental Council, December 4.  Amsterdam: Greenpeace International. —​—​—​. 2009. “Agriculture at a Crossroads:  Food for Survival.” Amsterdam:  Greenpeace International. Greenpeace UK. 2001. “The Future of Farming.” London: Greenpeace UK. Hobbes, Thomas. [1651] 1994. Leviathan. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Horrigan, Leo, Robert S. Lawrence, and Polly Walker. 2002. “How Sustainable Agriculture Can Address the Environmental and Human Health Harms of Industrial Agriculture.” Environmental Health Perspectives 110, no. 5: 445–​456. Kaplan, Benjamin J. 2007. Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kimbrell, Andrew, ed. 2002. The Fatal Harvest Reader: The Tragedy of Industrial Agriculture. Washington, DC: Island Press. Krebs, John R., Jeremy D. Wilson, Richard B. Bradbury, and Gavin M. Siriwardena. 1999. “The Second Silent Spring?” Nature 400, no. 6745: 611–​612. Larmore, Charles. 1990. “Political Liberalism.” Political Theory 18, no. 3: 339–​360. Lotter, Don. 2009. “The Genetic Engineering of Food and the Failure of Science.” Food First Backgrounder 15, no. 2. McIntyre, Beverly D., Hans R. Herren, Judi Wakhungu, and Robert T. Watson, eds. 2011. International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science, and Technology for Development (IAASTD): Global Report. Washington, DC: Island Press. Mittal, Anuradha, and Mayumi Kawaai. 2001. “Freedom to Trade?: Trading Away American Family Farms.” Food First Backgrounder 7, no. 4. Moehler, Michael. 2014. “The Scope of Instrumental Morality.” Philosophical Studies 167, no. 2: 431–​451. Nagel, Thomas. 1987. “Moral Conflict and Political Legitimacy.” Philosophy & Public Affairs 16, no. 3: 215–​240.

448   Dan C. Shahar Paarlberg, Robert. 2013. Food Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know. 2d ed. New York: Oxford University Press. Pesticide Action Network Europe. 2013. “Pesticide Action Network Europe’s Annual Report 2013.” Brussels: Pesticide Action Network Europe. —​—​—​. 2014. “Pesticide Action Network Europe’s Annual Report 2014.” Brussels:  Pesticide Action Network Europe. Pesticide Action Network Europe and Generation Futures. 2014. “Missed & Dismissed: Pesticide Regulators Ignore the Legal Obligation to Use Independent Science for Deriving Safe Exposure Levels.” Brussels: Pesticide Action Network Europe. Pimm, Stuart. 1997. “Agriculture:  In Search of Perennial Solutions.” Nature 389, no. 6647: 126–​127. Pretty, Jules N., J. I. L. Morison, and R. E. Hine. 2003. “Reducing Food Poverty by Increasing Agricultural Sustainability in Developing Countries.” Agriculture, Ecosystems & Environ­ ment 95, no. 1: 217–​234. Pretty, Jules N., A. D. Noble, D. Bossio, J. Dixon, R. E. Hine, F. W. T. Penning de Vries, and J. I. L. Morison. 2006. “Resource Conserving Agriculture Increases Yields in Developing Countries.” Environmental Science & Technology 40, no. 4: 1114–​1119. Quong, Jonathan. 2011. Liberalism without Perfection. New York: Oxford University Press. Rawls, John. [1993] 2005. Political Liberalism. Expanded ed. New  York:  Columbia University Press. —​—​—​. [1995a] 2005. “Introduction to the Paperback Edition.” In Political Liberalism, expanded ed., by John Rawls, xxxv‒lx. New York: Columbia University Press. —​—​—​. [1995b] 2005. “Reply to Habermas.” In Political Liberalism, expanded ed., by John Rawls, 372–​434. New York: Columbia University Press. Rosset, Peter. 1999. “On the Benefits of Small Farms.” Food First Backgrounder 6, no. 4. —​—​—​. 2003. “Food Sovereignty:  Global Rallying Cry of Farmer Movements.” Food First Backgrounder 9, no. 4. Sagoff, Mark. 1986. “Can Environmentalists be Liberals? Jurisprudential Foundations of Environmentalism.” Environmental Law 16, no. 4: 775–​796. Schmidtz, David. 2006. Elements of Justice. New York: Cambridge University Press. Shiva, Vandana. 2014. “Toward a New Agricultural Paradigm:  Health per Acre.” In The Vandana Shiva Reader, edited by Vandana Shiva, 113–​138. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Taylor, Bron. 2013. “Resistance: Do the Ends Justify the Means?” In State of the World 2013, edited by Linda Stark, 304–​314, 421–​423. Washington, DC: Island Press. Vallier, Kevin. 2014. Liberal Politics and Public Faith: Beyond Separation. New York: Routledge. Van Schoelandt, Chad. 2015. “Justification, Coercion, and the Place of Public Reason.” Philosophical Studies 172, no. 4: 1031–​1050. Varshney, Rajeev K., Kailash C. Bansal, Pramod K. Aggarwal, Swapan K. Datta, and Peter Q. Craufurd. 2011. “Agricultural Biotechnology for Crop Improvement in a Variable Climate: Hope or Hype?” Trends in Plant Science 16, no. 7: 363–​371. Wall, Steven. 1998. Liberalism, Perfectionism and Restraint. New York: Oxford University Press. Weis, Tony. 2010. “The Accelerating Biophysical Contradictions of Industrial Capitalist Agriculture.” Journal of Agrarian Change 10, no. 3: 315–​341. World Health Organization. 2005. Modern Food Biotechnology, Human Health and Develop­ ment: An Evidence-​Based Study. Geneva: World Health Organization Press.

chapter 20

Paternalism, Fo od, and Personal Fre e d om Sarah Conly

Food is a sensitive issue when it comes to government interference. Eating and drinking are things we do every day, multiple times a day. We do it in public, we do it in private; we do it by ourselves, and we do it with other people. We go out to dinner for a first date or a fiftieth anniversary. Some holidays are almost entirely about food, whether it’s candy at Halloween or turkey at Thanksgiving. (These are American customs, but the same will hold true in other places: say, the French galette des rois on the Epiphany, or Christmas carp in the Czech Republic.) We may set daily routines to our food: black coffee at the local café starts my weekday, and without it I have trouble getting to work. So, eating is a big part of our lives, both in terms of the larger culture and the particular culture of a family that celebrates every Christmas with the same special dessert. For the government to tell us what we may and may not eat suggests, to some people, a significant intervention in private life, even if we believe they are right that too much sugar, too many holiday meats, and too much alcohol are bad for our health. At the same time, we value government interference in all sorts of dietary matters. How upset are we about the government bans on carcinogens in food? Not at all—​we think that is the government’s job. (A more popular complaint may be that the government doesn’t ban enough of them.) What about inspections of restaurants for food safety? We don’t mind a bit, even if it means we have fewer restaurants to choose from. And if the Food and Drug Administration issues a recall because of contamination by salmonella, listeria, or E. coli, we don’t rise up in protest against government intrusiveness. We want the government to protect us from dangerous products and to protect us by making the producer stop selling their dangerous products. Why do we have these quite disparate reactions, on the one hand, of indignation at too much interference, and on the other, indignation if there is too little? It seems that we class interference into distinct categories. In the first case, we see interference into our personal choices: bad. In the second, we see protection of our interests from bad guys who carelessly endanger us:  good. In the first, someone is interfering with our

450   Sarah Conly freedom, and in the second someone is aiding us in getting what we want. In the first case, someone intrudes into our private lives, and in the second, someone prevents others from intruding by sneaking dangerous products into our bodies. In the first case, someone is paternalistic, which disparages our claims to dignity, and in the second case, we are treated with respect. These distinctions are, I argue, misperceptions. Sometimes we need to interfere in people’s freedom precisely so they can get what they want, because in choosing freely they choose what they don’t actually want. Intruding into privacy is itself a way of keeping dangerous products out of our bodies, since we ourselves often choose what is dangerous, without realizing the damage we are doing. Finally, paternalism is respectful, more respectful than the benign neglect that is proposed as an alternative. The paternalist interferes with our actions so that we may better reach our own goals, and in so doing shows respect for us as agents whose successful pursuit of personal values is important for self-​definition and for happiness.

Paternalism What is it to be paternalistic? There are a number of definitions, but I think the most helpful is one that is broad. Paternalistic policies are those that are designed to benefit individuals, and to do that by attempting to change the individual’s own course of action from one that serves the individual’s interests less well to one that serves those interests better. The goal is to affect the individual’s own choices, so that instead of choosing what he would have, left to his own devices, he chooses what the paternalist thinks is more conducive to his welfare. It’s “paternalism” because the paternalist is said to play the role of the parent in protecting his child from performing actions that would harm him. The child, left to his own devices, would choose a diet consisting of candy, but the parent intervenes and insists that the child eat his vegetables; the child, left to his own devices, would do nothing but watch television, so the parent institutes a reading competition within the household so that those who read more get an attractive reward, hoping to introduce a lasting habit. When the individual is apt to choose poorly, the paternalist intervenes in some way to encourage a choice that she believes would better promote the individual’s welfare. When it comes to paternalism on the part of the government, which is what will be discussed in the present context, we may say that it occurs when “a public institution does not believe that people’s choices will promote their welfare and is taking steps to influence or alter people’s choices for what it considers to be their good.”1 What the paternalist understands as promoting the individual’s good and how the paternalist promotes the individual’s good vary with the particular form of paternalism.

1 

Cass Sunstein, Choosing Not to Choose: Understanding the Value of Choice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 129.

Paternalism, Food, and Personal Freedom    451 Historically, there have been those who wanted to override the individual’s own values and goals in favor of what the paternalist believed to be an objectively better life. Such perfectionist policies have been promoted by religious groups, for example, who might argue that an individual is simply a better person if he avoids homosexual actions, regardless of what he himself wants. Not surprisingly, any number of people find such attempts to impose values objectionable: for one thing, it’s hard to justify claims that a particular way of living is objectively better, and for another, the prospect of a world where people are forced to live a life in which they are unhappy and unfulfilled in order to measure up to some external standard is simply not an attractive one. Paternalists of the present day generally do not endorse this approach. Rather, they take the individual’s values as a given, and their goal is to do what best allows the individual to live in accordance with those values.2 They think that what the individual most wants is what it is reasonable for him to pursue, and there is nothing objectionable about that (as long as this isn’t harmful to others, which is a different concern). Such modern paternalists thus embrace what is called a subjective concept of welfare, where welfare consists in our attaining the things we ourselves want and value. It is precisely because contemporary paternalists want to help people pursue their own ends that they see interference as warranted: when we choose means that will actually undercut our attainment of our ends, allowing liberty of action is injurious, because we won’t be able to achieve what we wanted all things considered. Instead of letting us choose the action that undercuts our ability to reach our own goals, the paternalist intervenes to influence the individual to choose differently. While contemporary paternalists generally fall into the subjective camp as to content, there is more division between them when it comes to the methods they advocate to bring about change. Here there are two general approaches. “Soft” paternalists try to persuade you to change your ways through, for example, education or incentives, while leaving you the freedom to choose the wrong act if their persuasion fails.3 Education about calories that takes the form of calorie counts for food items in fast-​food stores would be an example here of a very soft method. It isn’t general education—​it doesn’t include all the facts about French fries, such as that they are tasty. It picks out those that will make it more likely that you won’t eat the items in question, since the goal is to reduce your intake of non-​nutritious calories.4 At the same time, it leaves you free to do

2  For example, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008); Cass Sunstein, Why Nudge? (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014); Sarah Conly, Against Autonomy: Justifying Coercive Paternalism (New York: Cambridge University, 2013). 3  Philosophy being what it is, the “hard” and “soft” terminology also gets used to capture the distinction already discussed between paternalist views which try to impose values and those which try to help the individual achieve the values she already holds. In this essay, I will use it only to describe differences in methodology. 4  Some might argue that education by itself can’t be paternalistic, since it merely provides information, but Cass Sunstein has effectively argued that in cases like calorie counts, not all information is provided, only that which is intended to change your behavior. Sunstein, Why Nudge, esp. 54–​58.

452   Sarah Conly whatever you choose in the end, which is why governments have seen it as at least relatively unobjectionable. Other “soft” methods include the “nudges” made well-​known by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein.5 They suggest, for example, that we could encourage healthier eating by putting fruit at eye level in cafeterias because we are more likely to pick what is at eye level, or, in the financial sphere, that we might make companies offer whatever is the best pension plan for the individual as the plan you get unless you actively opt out, given that people tend to accept the default plan, whatever it is. These are “soft” strategies because in both cases you can still choose the unhealthy dessert or the disadvantageous pension plan if you make the effort. Hard paternalistic strategies are more intrusive. Sometimes governments use these, such as when they require motorcycle helmets or seatbelts for adults for the sake of protecting the motorcyclist or motorist from injury, but such hard strategies are often controversial. Some paternalists nevertheless promote extending hard strategies more generally. I have argued for making cigarettes illegal, for example, on the grounds that (a) most people don’t really value smoking more than the ten years of life or so that they will lose on average by smoking, and (b) mere education isn’t doing enough to prevent people from starting to smoke. I’ve supported mandatory reductions in portion sizes in restaurants, given the correlation between the growth that has occurred in restaurant portions and the growth in obesity.6 The rationale for using hard strategies rather than soft methods is generally the same in all cases: soft, merely persuasive strategies in a given situation aren’t doing enough to bring about change, and the paternalist thinks coercive strategies could better help the person achieve her overall goals and without significantly greater costs. Some methods—​like taxes on cigarettes—​might be seen as either hard or soft, depending on how high the tax is: a very high tax makes it very difficult to smoke, and so might be seen as a hard method, whereas a very small tax creates an incentive not to smoke, but may not be prohibitive, and so might be categorized as soft. While there might be hard methods of paternalism that make it literally impossible for the person to do what the paternalist doesn’t want him to do, the difference is not usually so extreme: hard paternalism just makes it so costly to do the thing in question that it is regarded as coercive, while soft methods allow more freedom of action. Both have the same intention, though, which is to change the individual’s course of actions in the most efficient manner, all things considered. To be most efficient, an acceptable paternalistic policy must be effective (it must reach the desired goal); the benefits it creates must outweigh the costs of implementation (if a policy were so intrusive that it really lowered our quality of life overall, we would presumably find that even though it was effective in reaching its goal it wasn’t really an improvement, all things considered); and it must create the greatest margin of benefits over costs that is possible under the circumstances (even a 5 

Thaler and Sunstein, Nudge.

6 Conly, Against Autonomy, ch. 6. See also Sarah Conly, “Coercive Paternalism in Health

Care: Against Freedom of Choice,” Public Health Ethics 6, no. 3 (September 2013); and Sarah Conly, “Three Cheers for the Nanny State,” New York Times, March 25, 2013.

Paternalism, Food, and Personal Freedom    453 policy that achieves a goal while producing more benefits than costs won’t be the best one if another strategy could have done the same thing with fewer costs).7 This is what paternalism is about.

What Is the Problem with Paternalism? Most people consider paternalistic actions of all these varieties to be at least prima facie wrong: that is, paternalism is thought to be a bad thing in itself, even though a paternalistic policy might be justified in extreme circumstances by the outcome. John Stuart Mill, while promoting happiness as the only truly valuable thing, famously argued against paternalism as a means to that. He wrote that while it is fair for the state to prevent you from harming someone else, it is wrong to intervene when you yourself are the only one who will be harmed by your action.8Much of his argument rests on the claim that such intervention will probably be mistaken in its assumption of what your well-​being consists in, and will consequently have only bad effects. For him, it is obvious that you care about your welfare more than anyone else does, and that you are the best informed about what it is you want. What someone else thinks of as harmful may simply reflect the prejudice of society. For this reason, according to Mill, paternalistic intervention imposes unenlightened convention and stifles originality rather than serving to benefit. Both the individual and the society will suffer. “Where, not the person’s own character, but the traditions or customs of other people are the rule of conduct, there is wanting one of the principal ingredients of human happiness, and quite the chief ingredient of individual and social progress.”9 Modern opponents of paternalism are generally not quite so adamant in their opposition to it. Many will allow paternalistic interventions in cases where the danger to the individual from untrammeled freedom of action is great enough. That is, there may be cases where the prima facie wrongness of intervention is outweighed by the extreme benefit of the consequences, even though it is still undesirable in itself. Gerald Dworkin argued that while paternalism is generally wrong, state intervention may be justified in some cases if “the dangers are severe and far-​reaching.10 In his Paternalism, John Kleinig allows that the state can fairly mandate motorcycle helmets, given the danger of death to the motorcyclist.11 Roger Brownsword writes that paternalism is consistent with the principles of liberalism only if it relates to “essential infrastructural conditions for 7 Conly, Against Autonomy, ch. 6, esp. 150–​152. 8 

John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (originally published 1851), ch. 1, in Utilitarianism and On Liberty, ed. Mary Warnock (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003), 94. 9 Ibid., 132. 10  Gerald Dworkin, “Paternalism,” in Paternalism, ed. Rolf Sartorius, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983); see also Gerald Dworkin, “Paternalism, Some Second Thoughts,” in the same volume. 11  John Kleinig, Paternalism (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Allenheld, 1984), ch. 4 and pp. 109ff.

454   Sarah Conly human well-​being required for agency,” since these are “the staging for all human activity.”12 It’s not entirely clear what counts as essential infrastructure, but it is evidently a pretty high bar. It is furthermore true that even for those who endorse such stringent standards, there are cases where interventions are justified because they aren’t seen as genuinely paternalistic. If the person is in ignorance of the relevant facts (she doesn’t read mysteries, and therefore doesn’t realize that the tell-​tale scent of almonds means it’s cyanide in the cup she’s raising to her lips) or if the person is not in full possession of her faculties (drunk, or in a fit of despair that makes drinking cyanide appear, for the moment, to be a good solution to her problems) intervention is seen by most people to be acceptable because such a person isn’t really choosing what she wants. In On Liberty, Mill cites the case of someone who is about to cross a bridge he doesn’t know is broken: in a situation where we are sure he doesn’t want to fall and injure himself, and we don’t have time to inform him, we can step in and stop him.13 Still, while there are cases where interventions are justified because the agent literally doesn’t know what he is doing, or where the loss to the agent is extremely high and the interference is minor, many remain strongly anti-​paternalist when it comes to most sorts of paternalistic interference. Interference that overrides the will of a conscious, competent, reasonably informed agent is generally seen as not only wrong but insulting. It is wrong because it constitutes “a failure of respect, a failure to recognize the authority that persons have to demand, within certain limits, that they be allowed to make their own choices for themselves,” as Stephen Darwall puts it.14 And it is, according to Joel Feinberg, an “implied insult”15 because it treats people as children or, as Elizabeth Anderson says, as if they were “stupid.”16 Altogether, paternalistic intervention is generally seen as disrespectful and demeaning.

But Do These Objections Work? The issue addressed in this essay is how paternalism plays out in food policy, and whether these criticisms of paternalism are apt. As said, we accept some interventions wholeheartedly, and do not, apparently, regard them as paternalistic. Others are subject to popular disapproval as interventions that are at best unnecessary (since we can make good decisions by ourselves) or at worst both harmful and disrespectful, since

12 

Roger Brownsword, “Public Health Interventions: Liberal Limits and Stewardship Responsibilities.” Public Health Ethics 6, no. 3 (2013): 235–​240, 235. 13 Mill, On Liberty, ch. 5. 14  Stephen Darwall, “The Value of Autonomy and Autonomy of the Will,” Ethics 116, no. 2 (January 2006): 264–​284, at 268. 15  Joel Feinberg, Harm to Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 55. 16  Elizabeth Anderson, “What Is Equality For?” Ethics 109, no. 2 (1999): 287–​337, at 301.

Paternalism, Food, and Personal Freedom    455 they impose undesired outcomes and deprecate our judgment in so doing. The question is whether intervening in personal choices as to eating is somehow different in kind from intervening in the production of contaminated foodstuffs. Why think that the first is a moral violation, where the second is a moral obligation? In this essay, I will focus on the issue of junk food. It’s not the only case where paternalistic interventions in diet have been contemplated, but it has been a particularly contentious one, since junk food is so popular. Let us stipulate for purposes of this discussion that claims that the modern obesity epidemic is tied to uniquely modern diet options are correct: soda, junk food, and the much larger restaurant portions we now serve play a clear role in our current unhealthy weight.17 Eating junk food is never a healthy option, and eating it to the degree that many of us do is positively harmful. For this reason, we might imagine the government imposing portion limits on junk food servings, similar to the portion limits Mayor of Bloomberg of New York tried to establish for soda. As with ingesting salmonella, eating too much junk food creates health problems that interfere greatly with our ability to live as we want, including, at times, the severe health problem of death. What grounds are there for thinking that interference in junk food habits is less acceptable than government interference that mandates clean conditions for the production of food? In both cases, the motivations of the producers are probably the same. That is, those whose products are contaminated with salmonella certainly mean us no harm—​the contamination wasn’t intentional. What they wanted was to make a profit, and they were doing that in what they thought was a successful manner. Making people sick in these days of global publicity is not a good way for a company to make a profit, so they presumably would have avoided it if they had foreseen it. At worst, their desire for profit probably led them to take shortcuts, hoping, and perhaps believing, that there would be no costs to either to the consumer or to themselves. They did a harmful thing, not from malicious intent but from negligence, typically motivated by selfishness. Negligence is, of course, culpable, so this doesn’t mean they aren’t blameworthy. It just means their primary desire was one we accept in itself, maximizing profit, but that they went about it in ways that were potentially harmful, and therefore we feel interference in what they do is justified. How different are foods that promote obesity without promoting nutrition—​food that consists of so-​called “empty” calories? The goal of those who sell junk food is certainly not to harm us. It’s just to get us to eat a lot of junk food because that way they make a profit—​the more junk food, the more profit. They don’t intend for us to become obese. They probably hope we won’t become obese, since that does garner bad publicity for their products. They may even believe that we can avoid obesity even while eating the amount junk food it takes to generate present profits, although the grounds for such a belief are scant. By 2005, McDonald’s, PepsiCo.,

17 

L. R. Young and M. Nestle, “The Contribution of Expanding Portion Sizes to the U.S. Obesity Epidemic,” American Journal of Public Health 92, no. 2 (2002): 246–​249.

456   Sarah Conly and Coca-​Cola had all launched exercise programs geared toward children, arranging to teach children new games, building playgrounds, and passing out free pedometers to kids, respectively.18 They don’t want to be known as the people who destroyed a generation of American (and increasingly, Mexican and British) youth. (Unfortunately, if unsurprisingly, these mild efforts hadn’t correlated with any decline in the obesity rate among children as of 2012.19 And, sadly, obese children are likely to develop into obese adults.20) Since this information is widely publicized, junk food producers are familiar with it and also know that the rate of obesity in the world is increasing.21 They know furthermore that this increase correlates to increased consumption of “energy-​dense foods that are high in fat and sugars but low in vitamins, minerals and other healthy micronutrients,” what I am referring to here as junk food.22 A reasonable conclusion to draw is that while the marketing of junk food is certainly not malicious in intent, it manifests relative indifference to health. Marketers basically want to sell us their products whether or not it’s a good use of our money in terms of nutrition. So, there are clear senses in which the cases in which we approve of government intervention (contaminated food) and the actions where we think interference is unwarranted (obesity-​producing food) are similar: both initiated by actors who do not intend harm to us, but are willing to risk harming us for the sake of greater profit. Yet, we think it is right to fine or shut down those who fail to follow the sanitation policies needed to safeguard against contamination, but unacceptable to interfere in portion sizes. Of course, some will argue that one significant difference lies in the legality of the action. It is certainly true that in some cases of food contamination, health regulations were violated, and those marketing junk food are not violating any law. This is a fair distinction: people can be blamed for breaking a law in a way they can’t if everything they did was legal, as is certainly the case with producing fattening junk food. This distinction doesn’t help us, though, when we are trying to determine what the law ought to be. What we are trying to do here is determine the difference between those interventions we think should be legal and those where we think a law would be too intrusive. The fact that some activities are in fact legal at present and some aren’t doesn’t provide us with guidance as to what constitutes a good justification for a law. Why do people sometimes think a benevolent law attempting to save us from harm would be a bad law, whereas laws that allow junk food purveyors to sell us products that are bad for us are good? 18 

Caroline E. Myer, “Work Off Those Cheetos!” Washington Post, November 23, 2005. Cynthia Ogden, Margaret D. Carroll, et al., “Prevalence of Childhood and Adult Obesity in the U.S. 2011‒2012,” Journal of the American Medical Association 311, no. 8 (2014): 806–​814. 20  World Health Organization, “Childhood Overweight and Obesity,” http://​www.who.int/​ dietphysicalactivity/​childhood/​en/​. The report estimates there were over 42 million overweight children under the age of five worldwide in 2013. 21  Marie Ng, Tom Fleming, et al., “Global, Regional, and National Prevalence of Overweight and Obesity in Children and Adults during 1980‒2013: A Systematic Analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2013,” The Lancet 384, no. 9945 (August 30, 2014): 766–​781. 22 Ibid. 19 

Paternalism, Food, and Personal Freedom    457

Control What really bothers people seems to be the issue of control. We don’t know when chicken has salmonella, so we can’t control whether or not we ingest it. (It’s true we can try to control whether we eat substances with salmonella or other contamination by trying to avoid absolutely everything that might have contamination, but for most people this isn’t a practical choice—​it’s been found in chicken, pork, tomatoes, cucumbers, nut butter spreads, mangoes, and cantaloupe, among others,23 and in any case, it doesn’t give us a sense of control to be deprived of what we most want.) We do know that junk food has fat and fat and sugar, so we aren’t deceived when we buy it—​we are in control. What we want is control over what we eat. Legislation requiring proper sanitation and other food protection gives us control, but legislation as to portion sizes in soda or French fries takes our control away. But this raises the question of how much control we really have over the food we eat in restaurants. In order to have control, we need to be able to make an informed choice, and when it comes to junk food we lack information in at least two ways. We lack basic facts, and more important, we lack the capacity in many instances to use adequately the facts that we do have. First, and simplest, we often lack straightforward information about the food we eat. For example, when we order McDonald’s French fries, we order a lot more than potato and fat. McDonald’s now lists all the ingredients of its foods on its Nutrition website (although for French fries I had to scroll down through 14 pages, including multiple recipes for things like “liquid margarine,” presumably a less popular item). The nutrition page does not include calorie counts, either—​for that you go to a different page. Anyway, McDonald’s tells us that in (American) French fries we will find: FRENCH FRIES: Ingredients:  Potatoes, Vegetable Oil (Canola Oil, Soybean Oil, Hydrogenated Soybean Oil, Natural Beef Flavor [Wheat and Milk Derivatives]*, Citric Acid [Preservative]), Dextrose, Sodium Acid Pyrophosphate (Maintain Color), Salt. Prepared in Vegetable Oil:  Canola Oil, Corn Oil, Soybean Oil, Hydrogenated Soybean Oil with TBHQ and Citric Acid added to preserve freshness. Dimethylpolysiloxane added as an antifoaming agent. CONTAINS: WHEAT AND MILK. *Natural beef flavor contains hydrolyzed wheat and hydrolyzed milk as starting ingredients24

Do most people who eat their French fries know this? I certainly did not. It’s true that these may be perfectly unproblematic ingredients (although British McDonald’s French fries contain only four ingredients, excluding dimethylpolysiloxane, in particular, since 23 

24 

Center for Disease Control, http://​www.cdc.gov/​salmonella/​outbreaks.html. McDonald’s website, http://​nutrition.mcdonalds.com/​getnutrition/​ingredientslist.pdf.

458   Sarah Conly its use in food is controversial; it’s apparently an ingredient in Silly Putty).25 Still, most of us are ignorant of what these ingredients are. My guess would be that most people think French fries are made of potatoes, oil, and salt, and don’t even know about the beef flavor, with its hydrolized wheat and hydrolyzed milk. (And does beef flavor include actual beef, as in something from a cow, so that French fries are not a vegetarian option? Why, yes: French fries contain beef tallow.26) As said, it is true that one can now find these ingredients on line, but not clear that many people actually do that. Does this mean that their ignorance is under their control, and therefore not a problem, because it is in a sense a chosen form of ignorance? It’s a good question. There are a lot of things that we don’t know that we could know. Should we be held responsible for all of them? I don’t think so, and that includes this particular case. For one thing, we typically can’t find out (or at least not easily) what exactly is included in food that is prepared in restaurants. McDonald’s is actually unusual in allowing this information out, so it may not be information we know we can get. Perhaps more to the point, looking at a list like this is not, for most of us who aren’t PhD’s in chemistry, all that informative. TBHQ? Sodium Acid Pyrophosphate? The website says sodium acid pyrophosphate “maintains color,” but how is that done? And why is it done—​what happens to French fries whose color is not maintained? What color would they actually be without sodium acid pyrophosphate? Googling a bit tells me more—​that sodium acid pyrophosphate in its “bulk” state can be injurious upon contact with eyes or skin, or upon ingestion or inhalation, but that the FDA considers it safe enough when “dispersed” as a food ingredient.27 I can’t say, though, that this leaves me feeling fully informed. None of this is to suggest that there is anything wrong with sodium acid pyrophosphate or dimethylpolysiloxane. I know nothing to their detriment, as long as they are appropriately “dispersed.” It is merely to suggest that to say when we order French fries we know exactly what we are getting, whereas chicken with salmonella contamination is something we consume because we don’t know what we are eating, is not quite true. We often don’t know what we are eating in restaurants, and for that matter, in the home, if we rely on prepared foods. The fact that one could, possibly, familiarize oneself with the contents and with the effects of those contents, given enough hours of study, does not constitute for most of us an informed choice or even an example of something where our ignorance is willful. We typically speak of ignorance as willful when one has to make an effort to avoid learning the facts, not when it’s quite difficult to learn them without time and study. More significant than our lack of exposure to actual facts about ingredients, though, is our inability, as normal, functioning humans, to correctly use certain facts even when

25  “Micro Total Analysis Systems, Silly Putty, and Fluorous Peptides,” F-​Blog, January 18, 2008, http://​ www.fluorous.com. 26  “Our Food. Your Questions: Are your Fries Vegetarian-​Friendly?” http://​www.mcdonalds.com/​ content/​us/​en/​your_​questions/​our_​food/​are-​your-​fries-​vegetarian-​friendly.html. 27  Nancy Clarke, “Is Sodium Acid Pyrophosphate Dangerous?” April 16, 2015, http://​www.livestrong. com/​article/​549169-​is-​there-​any-​danger-​in-​using-​sodium-​acid-​pyrophosphate-​in-​food-​mixes/​.

Paternalism, Food, and Personal Freedom    459 we know them. The decisions we actually make are affected by any number of things rather than the overall strength of our desires. Particularly when outcomes are uncertain, we tend to make mistakes of calculation. At this point, the existence of cognitive bias has been well attested to in the literature, notably in the work of Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman and his partner Amos Tversky.28 It is clear that when we need to choose courses of action for the future, we can and do err greatly as to probability, and can and do choose means that don’t really conduce to our ends. After all, there is experimental evidence that we don’t eat larger portions because we really get satisfaction from them: a great deal of our overeating arises from the fact that when we are presented with a big portion we eat it, rather than because we are truly hungry. We would have been just as happy with a small portion, but nonetheless choose to eat the bigger one when we receive it.29 At the same time, we try very hard to lose weight, and we lose a great deal of money on illnesses exacerbated by excess weight. It seems reasonable to think that excess weight and the accompanying illnesses are things people really don’t want. Americans, for example, spend more than 60 billion dollars a year on weight loss remedies because they don’t want to be as fat as they are.30 Nor do we, individually or collectively, want to pay the approximately 147 billion dollars in medical care that obesity cost the United States in 2008, according to the Center for Disease Control.31 Nor do we want the economic losses that arise from lost work or higher insurance premiums and workmen’s compensation paid by employers. And then there are the non-​monetary costs. Being overweight is bad for self-​esteem. It further interferes with many activities, so that just walking upstairs becomes a struggle. Ill health and premature death interfere even more with doing the things we value! And yet, we do what will put us in precisely the position of having poor self-​esteem, difficulty in accomplishing daily activities, and ill health. Is this truly what we prefer? It is doubtful. The problem is with our decision-​making. One problem may lie in the calculation of incremental harms. We think, “this one French fry won’t make any difference,” and the perplexing thing is that, of course, that is true. No one diet choice, no one soda, no single extra cheesy deep dish sausage pepperoni pizza is going to do us significant harm. So, we are right. And yet, a series of such incremental choices is the only way we get fat, and we do get fat. It is hard for us to

28  See, e.g., their papers in Choices, Values, and Frames, ed. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); and in Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases, ed. Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, and Paul Slovic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); see also Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2011). 29  Brian Wansink, Collin R. Payne, and Pierre Chandon, “Internal and External Cues of Meal Cessation,” Obesity 15, no. 12 (2007): 2920–​2924; Brian Wansink, Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think (New York: Bantam Books/​Random House, 2010). 30  Geoff Williams, “The Heavy Price of Losing Weight,” U.S. News and World Report, January 2, 2013, http://​money.usnews.com/​money/​personal-​finance/​articles/​2013/​01/​02/​ the-​heavy-​price-​of-​losing-​weight. 31  Center for Disease Control, “Overweight and Obesity: Adult Obesity Facts,” http://​www.cdc.gov/​ obesity/​data/​adult.html.

460   Sarah Conly be realistic enough to see that the fact that yesterday’s pizza didn’t result in a 50-​pound weight gain doesn’t mean we can eat as many as we want. It’s hard for us to see that today’s choice isn’t just a one-​time event, but instead is one of a series, and that the series won’t stop until, faced with a given incremental choice, we choose against the potentially harmful thing, and then choose against it again and again. This is why it is so hard to change our “lifestyles”—​there never seems to be any need to change it at this particular moment. Yet, thinking this way leads to no change at all, and then we are faced with the consequence we wanted to avoid. If this given serving of large French fries were guaranteed to make us instantly obese—​and we really believed that—​we’d be much, much less likely to choose it. This is hard to test, since we don’t have any foods that instantly add 50 or even 10 pounds, but it’s plausible, that even when we’ve got a real yen to eat some fries we’d turn them down if the consequences were immediate. When it comes to incremental harms, we just don’t see vividly the role that it is playing as one of a series of similar acts. Sometimes we just don’t see it, and sometimes we think of it but tell ourselves that having made a poor choice today, we will make a better one tomorrow—​when looking at our past behavior gives us no reason for such optimism. Indeed, making a poor choice today may make us more likely to make a poor choice tomorrow because we develop a habitual behavior. What might once have been an indulgence becomes a normal part of the diet. So, a choice to eat a fattening or unhealthy thing doesn’t mean that we are willing to pay the price because we just value the taste of that food so much. It means we have not come to terms with the likely outcome of our continuing indulgence, thinking that we can stop it when we need to, or counteract it by taking a new daily habit of running five miles a day. We could do this, in some sense of “could,” but we fail to recognize that it is most likely that we won’t. If one choice, even a hard one, were all it took to lose weight, we would do that. When it is a series of choices each of which we recognize as individually insignificant, it is much harder. Given this, the benevolent thing is to help those who are victims of their own poor reasoning, recognizing that this is a natural tendency from which we all suffer. When we do this, we don’t impose values. We support the goals the person actually holds, but which they don’t sufficiently realize their actions are preventing them from reaching.

Freedom of Action So what is it that disturbs us so much when we imagine government interfering, when that will support us in what we want? Part of the problem is simply ignorance—​as said, we tell ourselves that we can change bad habits ourselves, even when we conspicuously fail to do so. Part of it seems to be that we want to be able to act as we’ve decided to act, no matter how poor those decisions are in getting us what we truly want. Some of us like the idea that we have control over our actions, even if we didn’t really control the decisions that prompt those actions. Maybe we shouldn’t want the 32-​ounce soda, but if we

Paternalism, Food, and Personal Freedom    461 do want it, we should be able to get it, because we have the right to act on our own poor decisions. Government shouldn’t control our actions. When we think about it, though, this belief that government portion control would take away a freedom we now have is rather odd. Say that you tell McDonald’s that a 32-​ ounce soda is not big enough—​you want a bigger portion. Do they run and fetch you an even bigger cup? No, they tell you that if you want more soda you need to order another drink. This is exactly what the Bloomberg administration’s regulation would have done, only with a smaller size—​it would make you ask for another one if you wanted more. Restaurants themselves don’t offer you the choice to pick exactly the size you want. It is true, fast-​food restaurants often offer more than one size, but these are standardized—​ you can’t ask just for the number of fries you want. And most restaurants offer you no choice at all—​you take what you are given. Want more? Place another order. If that gives you much more than you wanted, too bad. You don’t get to pick your size. I often wish my local coffeehouse offered cookies that weren’t roughly the size of pizzas, but do they ask what size cookie I’d like so they can rush out and bake one for me? No: they have what they have, take it or leave it. And no one seems to think we should be able to order just exactly what we want merely because that might be what we would prefer. We don’t have control over portion sizes as it is. Why, again, is a state’s benevolent intent to help us be healthier though drinking less soda more irritating than a restaurant chain’s self-​ interested attempt to make us drink more soda so it can make more money? Why is an essentially adversarial attitude—​trying to get our money out of our pockets for things that often are bad for us and never particularly good for us—​more respectful than the benevolent attempt of a government to impose health standards in food that will allow us to reach the goals we hold most dear? One might think it is an issue of how much control we have over their control. That is, companies may produce foods that have bad consequences, but we can change that by refusing to buy their stuff. If we don’t like the portion sizes one restaurant offers, we can go to another restaurant and eventually the first restaurant will see that it has to change in line with consumer demand. Markets are responsive to our desires, since they want to please us. Government, on the other hand, can boss us around as it chooses. This putative distinction, though, is an exaggeration. First of all, I myself have no control over the market. I’m one person among 7.3 billion. People who produce soda are obviously not concerned with individual desires, but the desires of enough people to affect their profit margin. So, when we buy, we have to buy based on the available choices, which is a function of what other people like and what is most profitable to the industry. That is, we can buy not what we want most, but what we want most from among the available options, which is quite a different thing. When I travel on I-​95 and stop at a rest area for food, I am presented often with nothing I want to eat—​say, a Cinnabon’s, a Burger King, and a place that sells leathery, over-​cheesy, under-​flavored pizza. These are all terrible as far as I’m concerned, but I am hungry, so I will buy what is least bad. If enough of us do this, the market may respond to this by putting more of the least bad options in at other service areas, but this still isn’t the food I (and any number of other people) would really like to have. Supermarkets, of course, are not the very limited places that roadside service

462   Sarah Conly areas are, but to an extent the same restrictions exist—​you buy from your options—​ what is present and what you can afford. It’s a choice that doesn’t necessarily reflect what you—​or indeed anyone—​would most like to have. Meanwhile, governments can be affected by popular opinion. Of course, it is true that money plays a role in who gets elected, just as it determines what products are offered. But unlike in the markets, it’s not the only determinant. We do get to vote, and we do get to write letters complaining about policies to newspapers, and we do get to organize group opposition to a regulation, and politicians are sensitive to publicity. While governments are not as transparent as they should be, and not all determinants of policy are apparent to us, the popularity or unpopularity of a given policy does play an important role in its continuance. (It is no accident that the legalization of gay marriage followed the widespread acceptance of gay relationships as morally equivalent to heterosexual relationships.) Since political representatives are elected locally, pressure from smaller numbers of people can affect their policies. While we are limited, in practical terms, in our options as to who to elect just as we are limited as to which product we can buy, individual representatives can change their policies according to pressure. There is no reason to assume government policies will be harder to change than commercial policies, even though the methods for changing them are different.

Culture and Identity Of course, to say that we value health more than we value large portions doesn’t end the discussion. Health is not, after all the only thing we value, even though we value it very much, both in itself and for what it makes us able to do. We might think that as much as we like good health, there are other values that our admittedly poor eating habits promote, and we care more about those than about good health. If the paternalist insists that good health is more important than anything else when we ourselves do not feel that way, he is justly accused of foisting foreign values on us, which is indeed disrespectful. One critic suggests that imposing health standards is like banning Dostoyevsky, if we were to find reading Dostoyevsky contributed to poor health (perhaps by inducing depression32 ). Such paternalists assume that health is more valuable than anything else and subsume our other, equally legitimate desires to another’s preferences. If this criticism were correct, it would be telling. It does seem belittling when someone tells us our values are false and theirs are correct, and then further makes us act in ways that support their values rather than our own. If someone were tell me I had to read Harlequin romances (over 100 new titles every month!33) instead of The Brothers Karamazov on the

32  David Resnik, “Paternalistic Food and Beverage Policies: Response to Conly,” Public Health Ethics 7 no. 2 (July 2014): 170–​177. See also Conly, “Coercive Paternalism in Heath Care.” 33  http://​www.harlequin.com.

Paternalism, Food, and Personal Freedom    463 grounds that Harlequins always have happy endings, I’d be very unhappy. I want to read about despair and madness, not true love. A similar point is made by those who say that food recommendations that exclusively stress good health don’t respect the value of social engagement.34 If we have always taken our granddaughter for ice cream as a special get-​together, doing away with those outings may seem a serious emotional loss to us both.35 If we decide that we value the ice-​cream-​eating experience more than the health benefits of avoiding ice cream, a policy that would (somehow) make ice-​cream eating more difficult would involve an imposition of values not our own. If we always take the team to McDonald’s after the game, giving that up won’t be worth what we lose in sociability. There are two answers to this argument, one obvious and one more complex. The obvious one is that if we derive a great deal of social satisfaction from an outing, that’s because the point of the outing is the social interaction involved, not the food. The grandmother cares about the granddaughter, not the ice-​cream cone. We can perfectly well grant that the social value of the occasion is great and outweighs the harm to health, yet still recommend cutting back on ice cream or McDonald’s because we can have equally nice outings while doing something else—​something other than eating or eating something other than junk food.36 If ice cream had never been invented, delightful familial outings could still occur—​as they did before Dairy Queen was ever created. The same arguments apply to those who promote the value of certain foods as emblematic of a culture. It’s true, we identify certain foods with certain cultures, and this is more poignant when the culture in question is one’s own and savoring a particular dish conjures up visions of home and family. However, to say that the enjoyment of a particular food is necessary to cultural identification rests on a peculiar sense of identity and of culture. Neither needs to be unchanging to be strong. Cultures are always evolving, and the foods that we identify with them change over time for all sorts of reasons. Indeed, lack of change would suggest a very peculiar identity and an impossible culture. I am American—​what food constitutes my cultural identity? Well, my guess would be that no food actually constitutes my cultural identity, and no food is essential to it—​I have both a personal identity and a cultural identity that is part of my personal identity, and they don’t really revolve around food. There are, of course, foods that we may typically find Americans eating, foods that I would find myself homesick for if I were in a new place, and foods that would conjure up the United States if I ran across them abroad after a long absence. But if they faded from view—​because the ingredients became less common, or because of the rise of subcultures within the dominant culture with foods

34  David Resnik, “Trans Fat Bans and Human Freedom,” American Journal of Bioethics 10, no. 3 (2010): 27–​32; and Resnik, “Paternalistic Food and Beverage Policies: Response to Conly.” 35  This example comes from the detailed discussion of this issue in Anne Barnhill, Katherine F. King, Nancy Kass, and Ruth Faden, “The Value of Unhealthy Eating and the Ethics of Healthy Eating Policies,” Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 24, no. 3 (September 2014): 187–​217. 36  Again, this point is made in Barnhill et al., “The Value of Unhealthy Eating.”

464   Sarah Conly we discover we prefer, or because our moral views change, or, yes, because certain foods are discouraged as unhealthy, does that really mean a loss of the sense of self? Surely not. Pizza, for example, is a common food for social gatherings—​birthday parties, soccer team celebrations, and Super Bowl get-​togethers. I do realize that, like many American foods, its origins lie outside the country, but it is now a standard and familiar staple of American dining. Sadly, pizza seems to be another contributor to obesity, especially in children.37 How awful would it be to cut back or even give up pizza, or at least to eat the Less Cheesy Pizza with Vegetables instead of the Double Cheese Loaded Pizza? As often as we eat pizza now, I doubt my parents ever had it. Pizza did not start to move out of immigrant enclaves into non-​Italian society until after World War II, reportedly because American soldiers returning from the war in Italy wanted it, and of course it took decades to become the standard fare we see today. It’s also true that when I was growing up, going somewhere and getting food to take home wasn’t as common as it is now, and having it delivered was even less common. Pizza just wasn’t part of the culture. And, of course, McDonald’s was only founded in 1955, with a single store in Des Plaines, Illinois.38 Our dependence on junk food is itself of very recent origin. Did that make my parents feel less American than I do? Did it mean that kids failed to have enjoyable social gatherings? Obviously not. They had their own favorite foods, which, given how much rarer obesity was then, seem to have been healthier. Americans eat different things at different times and in different places. Foods come and go. Different waves of immigration affect our diet. In the United States, we enjoy a lot of (what we still call) Mexican food—​tacos, burritos, nachos, and so on. Despite the fact that we call it Mexican, many of these foods are American takes on what was once a Mexican cuisine that have now become familiar staples. New technology affects what we eat, like the methods of transport and horticultural changes that made the widespread importation of bananas possible. Moral beliefs change our diets, and we become vegetarian. Cultures evolve: British people eat curry, French people eat couscous, and the Chinese drink coffee. It takes more than a change in food to destroy a culture. Of course, not all changes in food are neutral—​some foods are better in certain respects than other foods, so we shouldn’t be indifferent to every change. But having a culture, or a personal identity, doesn’t depend on continuing to ingest what you’ve typically eaten in the past and thought well of, or on eating what lots of people in your culture habitually eat, either generally or on specific occasions. The turkey gives way to the vegetarian casserole, and the holiday is different, but not gone. Sometimes these changes are welcome, and sometimes they are not, but while they may change a culture in some respect, they do not produce a feeling of deculturated alienation. So, the idea that a paternalist is always promoting health to the detriment of social interaction, cultural affiliation, and personal identity is just wrong. There is nothing 37  Lisa M. Powell, Binh T. Nguyen, et al., “Energy and Nutrient Intake from Pizza in the United States,” Pediatrics 135, no. 2 (2015): 322–​330. 38  From the McDonald’s website, http://​www.aboutmcdonalds.com/​mcd/​our_​company/​mcdonalds_​ history_​timeline.html.

Paternalism, Food, and Personal Freedom    465 about paternalistic policies that promote health that entails that no weight is given to other values. The pertinent question isn’t whether welfare, as the person herself construes it, is more enhanced by an outing + ice cream or no outing + no ice cream, or Thanksgiving + turkey versus no Thanksgiving + no turkey, in which case we might well conclude that it is better promoted by the former options. The question is whether welfare is more enhanced by an outing + no ice cream than an outing + ice cream. The valuable items—​the outing, the holiday, the sense of celebrations, remain even when the particular foodstuffs involved in them change. We are capable of changing inessential things (the particular food we eat while socializing) and capturing the part that truly has value. So much, as I say, is obvious. However, it may be reasonably argued that there are some values found in eating food that can’t be maintained when something else is substituted for the food in question. If I ever have to give up coffee for health, I expect that nothing will be an adequate substitute. I gave it up when I was pregnant (in the possibly false belief that this would be better for the baby) and I missed it each and every day, both the caffeine and the flavor. There just seemed to be no point in getting up in the morning. It is true, then, something may well be lost if we embrace a healthy diet. However, this in itself does not mean that the paternalist is imposing foreign values if he tries to limit our access to chips. Of course, I’ve only proposed limits on portion sizes, not an absolute ban on such foods, but we can imagine such a ban, and it’s true that junk food is something lots of people would truly miss. Even if the great taste of junk food is something that we truly value, though, such that limiting our access would truly constitute a loss, giving it up can still be consistent with our overall values. As we know from other parts of life, sometimes we have conflicts. We value two things and can’t have them both. We need to choose what we value most and give up what we value less. As long as we do that, our welfare has been promoted, even though we had to give up something we truly valued. Giving up unhealthy food, hard as that is when it tastes so good, can be consistent with our overall values if we get something we care more about in return: a healthy, long life. In those cases, where we would truly rather eat the unhealthy food in such quantities that it diminishes health and life, where that experience is worth living a sicker, shorter life, the consistent paternalist won’t recommend giving up that habit. I think, though, that such cases will be very few.

Diversity of Tastes One may well argue, though, that not everyone has the same values. That is, even if a paternalistic law moves to ban cigarettes when it’s been correctly determined that most people value a long and healthy life more than they value smoking, there will be losers. There will be people for whom smoking really is worth it: they just love it that much, or they are old enough that the health risks in their remaining years aren’t substantially worsened by smoking.

466   Sarah Conly This is quite true. Laws that make it difficult to consume certain things could stop people for whom consuming that thing is the right choice, given their values, as well as those for whom it is a poor choice. This is why some paternalists have promoted the “softer” means of paternalism mentioned in the second section of this essay. The idea is that if paternalist methods merely discourage you from doing a certain thing by making it slightly harder to do, you’ll ignore that discouragement if the act in question is truly consistent with your values. Methods that make it very hard to do the thing in question, however, will prevent even those who really value it most from being able to do what they want, and this is a cost. There is a substantial literature on this issue at present, and I will not review it here.39 I’m inclined to think, though, that the potential for over-​inclusion if we embrace harder methods of paternalism should not be regarded as a very significant issue. In some places, soft methods are appropriate, if only because they may have fewer costs attached. In others, though, soft methods will be under-​inclusive:  some people for whom an activity is irrational will pursue it if all that stands in their way is a not very prohibitive tax. They may smoke, for example, because the present urge to smoke is very strong, even though they wish overall that they could stop. Harder methods, where we make it extremely costly to do something (e.g., we ban cigarettes) will stop those people. The fact that they will stop some others as well—​the person who really has nothing in his life but the joy of cigarettes—​is too bad, but it is the nature of laws that they need to be relatively general, and that this means some people will be true losers: prevented from doing what they most want to do. We see this in every sort of law: speeding laws prevent, say, those who can safely drive at 90 mph from doing so for the sake of the rest of us who can’t. Naturally, the paternalist needs to consider how many are helped and how many aren’t in determining a correct public policy. And, of course, hard methods can have exceptions written into them—​maybe those old enough to smoke with no hazards to their health (because death is imminent, perhaps?) can be allowed to do so, and soda taxes, portion limits, and other such prohibitive devices could be remitted for those who somehow qualify. Where there is a clear class of people who should have an exception to a rule we can do that, while still helping those for whom a course of action is truly harmful. But will paternalistic laws prevent people from developing different tastes—​will it result in a stultifying monotony where everyone wants the same thing, since they haven’t had the chance to try alternatives? This was one of the things John Stuart Mill worried about, that people might be happy enough where there are paternalistic laws, but their happiness would be bought at the price of individuality. Some worry that we may express creativity through our food choices, and no doubt there are people who do.40 Outside of a positive effort to create something different, in the way that a commercial or home chef might, we may simply see our food choices as an expression of our personality, insofar

39 

40 

See Thaler and Sunstein, Nudge; Conly, Against Autonomy. Resnik, “Paternalistic Food and Beverage Policies: Response to Conly.”

Paternalism, Food, and Personal Freedom    467 as they reflect preferences (even if not preferences for what we would most like). Some food laws would take away some of the things we now can choose, obviously. Others, like a tax on soda, might make obtaining them more difficult, which could again change our consumption habits. However, it’s hard to see this making a significant difference in our ability to express ourselves. We are not talking about wiping out large swathes of the food spectrum. Grocery stores will still hold thousands of items. Restaurants will still offer variety. If we lose foods with trans fats, most consumers won’t notice. If we reduce portion sizes, they may notice, but there is always the option of ordering more, and after a while we will adjust in what we regard as a normal portion (and this in turn may lead to changing our expectations in the home as to what a normal portion looks like). In harsher measures—​if, say, we banned the sale of cigarettes—​we would lose an activity that is a significant part of some people’s lives, but in return we would get more options. We would get the ability to engage in more activities without running short of wind, and the many opportunities made possible by better health and longer living. Our options would change, but there would still be options. After all, our options are always limited, by the place we live in, the culture we live in, our family situation, and so forth. If we find it possible to express ourselves within these existing parameters, the loss of some foods won’t prove to be a significant stumbling block.

Dangers Are there then no problems attached to paternalist policies? It would be silly to think not. We’ve been discussing the ways in which paternalism need not impose foreign values on the citizenry, but of course there is always the possibility that an unwitting paternalist might support a policy that isn’t in line with what the majority of people value. In this case, it wouldn’t be just a few outliers who suffer, as happens with every law, but a sizable number of people whose suffering would outweigh any gains from the law. To say that someone values health isn’t to say that in each and every case where there is a choice between a healthier and a less healthy alternative that person most values the healthier alternative. We can value health very much, and still not want to do what is necessary to be as healthy as possible, when that involves trade-​offs with other goods. We need to judge when such trade-​offs are appropriate, and the danger is that we will make mistakes as to when a somewhat less healthy alternative is really most consistent with the person’s overall desires. How might this happen? Some worry justifiedly that our own prejudices will lead us to believe that what we ourselves value must be what others value, even where there is no evidence that our values are shared.41 Differences in education and class, for example, 41  See Dan Wikler, “Coercive Measures in Health Promotion: Can They Be Justified?” Health Education Monographs 6 (July 1978); Conly, Against Autonomy, 122; Jack Lively, “Paternalism,” in Of Liberty, Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures Series 15, ed. A. Phillips Griffiths (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 147–​165.

468   Sarah Conly can lead to a lack of comprehension: those in one class just can’t believe that those in another really care so much for something that they themselves find abhorrent. Those with money for fresh vegetables and time for cooking might want to ban the sale of boxed convenience foods at the market, for example, without regard for those for whom a mix that makes a 5-​minute meal is a godsend, even if it is somewhat less healthy. At the same time, they may think the unhealthy effects of a single malt Scotch are well-​worth the loss to health. This universalization of one’s own values is a real danger, and we are right to be on our guard against it. On the other hand, while this is a genuine risk that we need to be alert to, there are dangers that perhaps push in another direction. It is certainly true in the United States that those who make the laws are typically well-​off and from the empowered class, and they may not understand the desires of groups that are different from themselves. However, we should not underestimate, either, how much influence is already wielded against the relatively powerless in ways that make them less well off, be it through advertising, government subsidies for sugar, or the absence of healthy options (such as areas for exercise or local stores with fresh food). As Paula Boddington writes in response to those who worry about losing our control over food through paternalistic laws: we do in fact live in a world where, especially for the poorer of us, large corporations, government policy, and economic and social forces strongly influence, if they do not fully dictate, what we eat, and hence, influence when and how we get ill. This influence is likely to be stronger for the less well off.42

Nor do we want to exaggerate the differences between others and ourselves. It is hardly surprising that those who are less well off have suffered disproportionately from obesity and the diseases brought about by obesity, given the influences Boddington alludes to.43 (As time passes and more and more of us become obese, the obesity disparity is disappearing, but health disparities between those who are more and less privileged remain.) When we worry about misjudging the desires of those who are less empowered, we should also worry about the prejudice that too often makes us overestimate the differences between the economic underclass and those who have more wealth and power—​the prejudice that suggests to some that poorer people don’t really care about being healthy, that those people are perfectly satisfied with eating junk food and being obese. Saying that such behaviors are self-​imposed and believing that other people don’t mind the harms that the rich and educated try to avoid through the purchase of

42 

Paula Boddington, “Dietary Choices, Health, and Freedom: Hidden Fats, Hidden Choices, Hidden Constraints,” American Journal of Bioethics 10, no. 3 (2010): 43–​44, at 43. 43  “Relationship between Poverty and Overweight or Obesity,” Food Research and Action Center, http://​frac.org/​initiatives/​hunger-​and-​obesity/​are-​low-​income-​people-​at-​greater-​risk-​for-​overweight-​ or-​obesity/​; Sylvia Stringhini, G. D. Batty, P. Bovet, et al., “Association of Lifecourse Socioeconomic Status with Chronic Inflammation and Type 2 Diabetes Risk: The Whitehall II Prospective Cohort Study,” PLOS Medicine 10, no. 7 (2013).

Paternalism, Food, and Personal Freedom    469 gym memberships and expensive organic vegetables is an age-​old way of dismissing the plight of the badly off, and we need to guard against it. So while misuse is a possibility, there are different forms of misuse: indifference as well as narrow-​minded overzealousness. However, this is true of all laws: criminal laws may punish things that aren’t worth punishing, speeding laws may forget that we do actually need to get places, and so forth. Faced with a bad regulation, we don’t give up on regulation but strive to regulate better because regulation may be the thing that helps us most.

Conclusion All in all, there is no significant difference between the government interventions we welcome and those that are more controversial. We are all confronted with an industry of food production that is beyond individual control. It limits our options and influences us in non-​rational ways to consume its products, and without any one meaning us ill, this has resulted in a very bad effect on our health. We should welcome the various methods open to us to implement better choices, whether through incentives (like subsidies for the marketing of fruit and vegetables), disincentives (like taxes on soda, or simply removing the subsidies we give the sugar industry, which would itself raise the price), or outright bans, whether bans on large portions or bans on some substances altogether (such as some countries have instituted on trans fats). What we’ve been doing so far hasn’t been working, and it’s time to admit the legitimacy of stronger methods.

chapter 21

De cep tive Adv e rt i si ng and Ta ki ng Resp onsi bi l i t y for Oth e rs Seana Valentine Shiffrin

Most of us do not grow (or concoct) the majority of what we eat and consume.1 We rely on farmers, producers, and vendors not only for our food and drug supply but also for information about those goods, including: their identity, their sources, their healthfulness, and other effects associated with their consumption. A large network of laws and regulations govern both aspects of this dependence relationship, setting standards for what may be produced and sold, and under what description. Not only does the law of commercial misrepresentation function as an important component of the system of regulation of information about food and drugs, its structure and application embody a philosophically interesting division of labor in the practice of assigning responsibility. By “responsibility,” I do not mean to invoke considerations of praise, blame, or causal responsibility. I am interested in the sense of responsibility for something that means to bear the burdens associated with that thing, such as taking appropriate care with respect to it, maintaining apt conditions for its proper use (and understanding), preventing mishaps and bearing the costs of such mishaps as occur. As I will discuss, the law of commercial misrepresentation in the United States sometimes assigns responsibility without fault. Indeed, it sometimes assigns responsibility to speakers for errors made by consumers. Under California laws banning deceptive

1  Sabine Tsuruda’s contribution in this volume, Temporary Farmwork, discusses some of the philosophical issues associated with using temporary workers to satisfy agricultural needs in a culture in which most members do not grow what they need.

Deceptive Advertising and Responsibility    471 practices, Gerber would be legally liable for a label truthfully touting a product for children made with “real fruit juices and other all natural ingredients,” assuming plaintiffs could prove, as alleged, that the label had a tendency to mislead many consumers into thinking that all the product’s ingredients were natural.2 As this example illustrates, liability may attach even when what the speaker says is true, there is no evidence the speaker aims to deceive, and the misled audience members’ false inference is unreasonable, although understandable. In this and like cases, the law encapsulates some interesting ideas about deception and responsibility that I will explore and defend. Indeed, the phenomena to which I will draw attention are not confined to legal domains. Much of it occurs in everyday life, but has flown under the philosophers’ radar. There is a tension between this legal doctrine and some general moral precepts such as “there shall be no liability without fault” and “one should internalize the costs of one’s own choices, but not the costs of arbitrary misfortune or the costs of others’ decisions.” 3 I attribute the tension between the law and our moral thinking more to the prevalence of broad moral generalizations in these areas, than to a well-​considered rejection in moral thought of the law’s inherent moral position with respect to specific contexts. By thinking through the examples, my aim is to make explicit an implicit moral position that assigns responsibility without fault and to defend it as philosophically interesting and plausible. One way to pursue this idea would be to ask why we require and respond to fault, when we do. Then, one would show that some forms of liability do not fit this model because fault requirements make sense mainly when blame, punishment, and certain forms of remediation are at issue, but some other reasonable forms of liability are not occupied with these issues. That approach has merit, but I plan to take a different path

2 

See Williams v. Gerber Products Co., 552 F.3d 934 (9th Cir. 2008) (reversing lower court’s dismissal of claim). 3  Although there are some distinctively interesting features of deceptive advertising doctrine, the conception of responsibility extending past fault is not anomalous. Doctrines of strict liability also assign responsibility without fault in both torts and contracts. My defense of strict liability in contracts draws on some of the same arguments I offer here. See Seana Valentine Shiffrin, Enhancing Moral Relationships Through Strict Liability, 66 U. Toronto L.J. 353 (2016). Deceptive advertising doctrines go beyond standard forms of strict liability in contract by assigning responsibility to advertisers to encompass not only inadvertent deception but also cases where the other party (the consumer) is at moral or prudential fault. With respect to the strict liability performance doctrines in contract, the promisee’s fault will act as a defense to breach. Corbin on Contracts (2001) § 74.3 (where a party to a contract makes it impossible for the other party to perform, the latter’s nonperformance will be excused and, more generally, “if one party makes performance materially more difficult or expensive, the other party will be discharged and the party causing the difficulty may even be held liable for breach”). In strict liability cases in tort, the fault of the plaintiff may operate as a defense, usually to limit damages. Restatement (Third) of Torts: Prods. Liab. § 17 cmt. a (1998) (“A strong majority of jurisdictions apply the comparative responsibility doctrine to products liability actions.”). See also Restatement (Third) of Torts: Liab. for Physical Harm (Basic Principles) § 25 cmt. a (2010) (“[E]‌ven if the case is of a general type that renders strict liability applicable, in the particular case the plaintiff may have failed to exercise reasonable care in a way that invites the application of the defense of comparative responsibility.”).

472   Seana Valentine Shiffrin and will explore what is gained, in some domains, by loosening the grip that considerations of fault have on liability and other assignments of responsibility. My defense will argue that, at least in some domains, this assignment of responsibility facilitates justifiable and valuable relationships of reliance-​inducing trust and cooperation. Defending these positions requires overcoming some moral hurdles. As I have noted, some have the strong conviction that fault should be a prerequisite of moral and legal liability. Some may think it involves a further implausible stretch to extend one’s moral and legal responsibility to encompass the mistakes of others. Although I am sympathetic to the instincts that drive these moral convictions, further reflection on these legal doctrines and cases illuminates the limitations of these intuitions. What is revealed is an important aspect of moral life in which we expand our responsibility to include more than is under our control and to bear responsibility for others’ mistakes, even those of strangers. This expansion of responsibility is integral to a form of cooperation that does not conform to Hume’s prototype of two people rowing a boat, both actively performing (indeed identically performing) for amplified effect, where the trust involved is merely the trust that the other has the good faith to do his part.4 The trust Hume’s rowers have for each other is a condition, but not a constituent, of cooperation. The examples I will explore involve another form of cooperation in which one party’s performance enables a form of substantive trust that goes beyond trusting in another’s good will as a condition of one’s willingness to perform or of the performance’s achieving its purpose. In the cases I consider, achieving trust is an element of the end of cooperation and not only a means or condition of cooperation. It is a form of substantive trust because it involves not only trust in the other party’s cooperative good will but also trust in her epistemic accuracy. Interestingly enough, that substantive trust and the cooperative end itself are often better realized by one party’s playing a more passive role rather than the stereotypical active role of the cooperator who oars alongside. To make out this defense, I’ll offer a fuller, but not comprehensive, description5 of the pattern of liability I have in mind, one embedded in the law of deceptive advertising in the United States.6 Along the way, I will highlight how attending to the law of misrepresentation may suggest interesting conclusions about our philosophical positions about fault, cooperation, and the nature of deception. I’ll then offer a defense of this form of liability that aims to respond to concerns about paternalism and freedom of speech. A final preliminary note: I will refer to “speakers,” “advertisers,” and “producers” interchangeably and I will refer to the “audience,” “listeners” and “consumers” interchangeably. Of course, the chains of food production, labeling, communication, and advertising can be quite complicated and compartmentalized (as well as the chains 4 

David Hume, Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, at Appendix II (1751). More extensive detail may be found in Eric Goldman & Rebecca Tushnet, Advertising and Marketing Law: Cases and Materials (3d ed. 2016). 6  This pattern is not uniform, however. The Seventh Federal Circuit (covering the Midwest including Chicago), for example, is more resistant to it. See also infra note 32. 5 

Deceptive Advertising and Responsibility    473 of purchase and consumption), but for the purposes of this essay, those complications may be put aside.

The law of deceptive advertising: an incomplete introduction I’ll start with an abbreviated introduction to some elements of the law of deceptive advertising. Under the doctrine of puffery, advertisers may issue general and vague statements about their products without much accountability for their sincerity or truth. This doctrine is justified on the questionable grounds that given difficulties in verification and in containing one’s exuberance for one’s products, it is too difficult to police insincerity and inaccuracy about highly general, laudatory statements such as “Better Ingredients. Better Pizza,”7 and “America’s Favorite Pasta.”8 The American Italian Pasta Company touted Mueller’s pasta as “America’s Favorite,” despite the fact that Mueller’s pasta was not marketed nationally (making it dubitable that it was America’s favorite). There was no evidence to support the sincerity of the phrase, such as a consumer survey or other objective criteria showing that, despite its regional circulation, the product enjoyed a high level of national popularity. Given these facts, the slogan could not represent the credible (even if unverifiable) belief of the advertiser. Nevertheless, the phrase was upheld as a form of protected puffery.9 Whatever the merits of this doctrine, consumers are advised to withhold credence from advertisers’ general positive claims about their products and not to expect that those claims offer dependable warrants of quality or sincerity.10 The law of misrepresentation has sharper teeth, however, when it comes to more specific claims. That is where it becomes morally interesting. Unsurprisingly, advertisers are prohibited from issuing specific lies and other explicitly false statements about their products. For example, a court found “false on its face” a Tropicana advertisement in which a famous American Olympic athlete squeezed an orange declaring, “It’s pure, 7  See Pizza Hut v. Papa John’s International, Inc., 227 F.3d 489, 499 (5th Cir. 2000), cert. denied, 532 U.S. 920 (2001) (holding that, on its own, Papa John’s slogan “Better Ingredients. Better Pizza” was mere puffery on which reasonable consumers could not justifiably rely for purposes of the Lanham Act’s protection against misrepresentation of facts). 8  See American Italian Pasta Company v. New World Pasta Company, 371 F.3d 387 (8th Cir. 2004). 9  Id. 10  Although consumers are advised to withhold credence from these claims, those who claim that the free market will regulate excesses presuppose that consumers will pay some attention to them. “Defining puffery broadly provides advertisers and manufacturers considerable leeway to craft their statements, allowing the free market to hold advertisers and manufacturers accountable for their statements . . . . ” Id. at 391. It is fairly demanding to ask consumers to attend to these general statements, police them for accuracy, but at the same time, reflexively disregard their contents as potential warrants. I discuss and criticize the doctrine of puffery at greater length in Seana Valentine Shiffrin, Speech Matters 188–​91 (2014).

474   Seana Valentine Shiffrin pasteurized juice as it comes from the orange,” and then poured the fresh-​squeezed juice into a Tropicana carton. Juice, of course, does not emerge pasteurized from the orange but must undergo processing first.11 Because the law is interested in prohibiting deception, it offers protection not only against explicitly false statements, but extends further to recognize liability for other false claims indirectly implied by the advertiser’s utterance, including specific implicatures12 and other false intimations, such as presuppositions, of advertiser speech.13 11  See Coca-​Cola v. Tropicana Products, Inc., 690 F.2d 312, 318 (2d Cir. 1982) (finding sufficient evidence to warrant preliminary injunction of the advertisement under the Lanham Act). 12  In the canonical philosophical treatment of implicatures, Paul Grice observes that utterances may mean more than they literally say because the speaker either complies with or deliberately flouts various maxims of conversational cooperation to generate further meanings (and to warrant various inferences) that go beyond the literal meaning of the uttered statement. Paul Grice, Studies in the Way of Words 22–​40 (1989). He posited that a broad Cooperative Principle governs conversations or, as he often put it, “talk-​exchanges”: “Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged.” This principle gives rise to maxims of: quantity (make your contribution as informative, but no more, as required for the purposes of the conversation); quality (contributions should be truthful and supported by adequate evidence); relevance; and manner (roughly, speak clearly and without ambiguity). We may interpret utterances in light both of what they literally say and what they imply, given these background maxims. Notably, though, advertisements, like many signs and orders, are not exactly contributions to a conversation or a talk-​exchange. The speaker utters, without expectation of a reply from or a communicative exchange with the listener. Although Grice gestures at the category of nonconversational (and nonconventional) implicatures, he and other commentators do not much elaborate on them. See, e.g., id. at 28; Jennifer Saul, Speaker Meaning, What Is Said, and What Is Implicated, 36 Nous 228, 229–​30 (2002); Michael Haugh, Im/​politeness Implicatures 60–​62 (2015). But, what they seem to have in mind are not implicatures generated in communicative, but nonconversational contexts, such as advertisements, messages, orders, and signs. Rather, they seem to have in mind implicatures generated in conversation through compliance with or meaningful flouting of nonconversational maxims (such as those of politeness), i.e., maxims that achieve other purposes than to make the communicative aspect of the conversation meaningful. Adherence to and defiance of these maxims contributes to moral, social, and aesthetic aims of the participants that are putatively distinct from specific informational and persuasive communicative aims of conversation. I will simply note and bracket here that there are interesting, under-​explored questions about whether the Cooperative Principle and its subordinate maxims apply not only to conversational discourse but to discursive communication more generally or at least to nonconversational communicative contexts involving distinct speakers and listeners. For the purposes of this essay, I will assume that the maxims apply to advertisements, because, although outside of a conversation, the speaker and listener are both cooperating to relay and receive information through communication. (There is, incidentally, empirical evidence that advertisers try to exploit the maxims and that consumers’ inference patterns reflect the belief that advertisers adhere to the Cooperative Principle. See Michaela Wänke, What Is Said and What Is Meant: Conversational Implicatures in Natural Conversations, Research Settings, Media, and Advertising, in Social Communication 223, 223–​56 (Klaus Fiedler ed., 2007). Although, as I discuss infra in note 47, the strength of the demands these maxims place on the speaker may be higher because the speaker and listener do not directly interact or otherwise engage in “talk-​exchange.” 13  The evidentiary burdens on plaintiffs may differ depending upon whether the claim at issue is purportedly an explicitly false statement or an implied false one. The former may not require a showing that consumers materially relied on the statement but for the latter, plaintiffs may need to show that the implied false claim was material and believed by the plaintiff. See, e.g., Papa John’s, supra note 7, at 497.

Deceptive Advertising and Responsibility    475 Although consumers are asked to exercise skepticism about very general claims about quality (“the best!”), when it comes to specific claims, they are not generally expected to restrict their credence to what is explicitly said, but may also rely on reasonable, specific inferences from what is said. For example, the Federal Trade Commission found some POM Wonderful ads run in the New York Times and in Time Magazine to be misleading. The ads boasted that a study found that after surgery or radiation treatment, prostate cancer patients who drank “eight ounces of POM Wonderful 100% Pomegranate Juice daily for at least two years . . . experienced significantly slower PSA doubling times” (a measure of the growth of cancer cells).14 POM’s statement, while true, carried the deceptive implicature that patients who did not drink pomegranate juice had worse outcomes. Whereas, in fact, “patients who have undergone radical prostatectomy or radiation therapy for prostate cancer commonly experience a lengthening in PSA doubling time regardless of whether they consume pomegranate juice.”15

Responsibility without Fault The contrast that I have just described between the different approaches the law takes toward general and specific claims is itself interesting. What is more striking is that advertiser fault is not a prerequisite of many forms of liability for misrepresentation and deception.16 The law looks more to the effect of the speech on the audience than to the intent of the speaker.17 For example, the federal Lanham Act prohibits the use in commercial advertising of “any false designation of origin, false or misleading description of fact, or false or misleading representation of fact,” which “misrepresents the nature, characteristics, qualities, or geographic origin of .  .  .  goods, services, or commercial activities.”18 Liability inquiries under the Lanham Act focus on whether advertising

14  See In the Matter of Pom Wonderful LLC and Roll Global LLC, Federal Trade Commission, POM Figures Appendix B, Figs. 21, 27 (January 16, 2013),https://​www.ftc.gov/​sites/​default/​files/​documents/​ cases/​2013/​01/​130116pomappendixb.pdf. 15  POM Wonderful, LLC v. FTC, 777 F.3d 478, 487 (D.C. Cir. 2015). 16  See generally, Richard Craswell, Taking Information Seriously: Misrepresentation and Nondisclosure in Contract Law and Elsewhere, 92 Va. L. Rev. 565 (2006); Richard Craswell, Interpreting Deceptive Advertising, 65 B.U. L. Rev. 657 (1985). 17  Ordinary contract law does not focus on the intent to deceive per se. But, in contrast with some anti-​deception statutes, it does place more emphasis on whether the non-​mistaken party knew or should have known the other party was misled. See, e.g., Restatement (Second) of Contracts § 161 (b) (c) (grounding liability for some non-​disclosures when a party knows disclosure would correct a mistake of the other party about a fact and good faith would require disclosure or when the other party is mistaken about the content of a written contract); see also Restatement (Second) of Contracts § 153 (permitting the voidability of some contracts on the basis of one party’s mistaken understanding where that party does not bear the risk of the mistake and either enforcement would be unconscionable or the other party knew or was at fault for the mistake). 18  15 U.S.C. § 1125(a)(B)(2012).

476   Seana Valentine Shiffrin has a tendency to mislead or deceive consumers and not upon the speaker’s intent. The Federal Trade Commission Act likewise renders unlawful “unfair or deceptive” commercial practices.19 The Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act prohibits misbranding, which occurs for food when its label is “false or misleading in any particular.”20 Many state laws follow suit.21 Remedies may range from cease and desist orders and injunctions to damages and restitution. What counts as having a tendency to mislead or deceive presents a topic of even greater philosophical interest. Although the standard typically asks what would mislead or deceive the reasonable consumer, the “reasonable consumer” includes those whose knowledge may be limited and who may make fairly straightforward inferential mistakes. In some cases, the mistakes seem clearly reasonable. For example, the reasonable consumer may not know that 30% of milk’s calcium is lost in the process of producing cheese. So, to urge consumers to buy processed cheese over imitation cheese because calcium is important and because a processed cheese slice is made from “5 ounces of milk” may encourage reasonable consumers falsely to infer that each slice has all the calcium of 5 ounces of milk and therefore that it has greater nutritional value than it in fact has. I was such a reasonable consumer before I read the relevant case.22 The law also allows that the “reasonable consumer” may fail to read or to appreciate disclosed and readily available information. For example, the company named “vitaminwater” agreed to alter its labeling after a class-​action suit was filed complaining that consumers were deceived by the beverage’s name and slogans such as “vitamins + water = that’s all you need” and “vitamins + water = what’s in your hand.” Plaintiffs alleged that the labels and slogans persuaded them that the drink was purely a health drink composed of only vitamins and water, although its sugar content rivals that of a classic soda. Its sugar content, however, is not hidden but is disclosed on every bottle 19 

15 U.S.C. §§ 45, 52(2012). 21 U.S.C. § 343(2012). 21  In addition to parallel deceptive advertising statutes, most states recognize causes of action for negligent misrepresentation. 3 Dan B. Dobbs, Paul T. Hayden, & Ellen M. Bublick, The Law of Torts, § 666 (2d ed. 2011) (identifying Arkansas and Idaho as outliers without a negligent misrepresentation cause of action). Many recent food-​labeling suits have drawn on California law which provides private rights of action for inaccurate and deceptive labels. See California Health and Safety Code § 109875, in conjunction with California’s Unfair Competition Law, Bus. and Prof. Code §§ 17200–​17210 (West 2017), its False Advertising Law, Bus. & Prof. Code §§ 17500–​17509 (West 2017), and its Consumer Legal Remedies Act, Civil Code §§ 1750–​1784 (West 2009 & Supp. 2017). See also Anthony J. Anscombe & Mary Beth Buckley, Jury Still Out on the “Food Court”: An Examination of Food Law Class Actions and the Popularity of the Northern District of California, 28 Toxics L. Rep. 881 (2013). 22  Kraft, Inc. v. Federal Trade Commission, 970 F.2d 311, 322 (7th Cir. 1992), cert. denied, 507 U.S. 909 (1993). Or, consider the facts behind Zauderer v. Office of Disciplinary Counsel, a case involving an unsuccessful First Amendment challenge to a state levied sanction against an attorney for misleading advertising. 471 U.S. 626, 652–​53 (1985). The Ohio lawyer truthfully advertised that unsuccessful clients would not have to pay “legal fees” but did not reveal clients would be charged for costs; although what the lawyer said was truthful, because many consumers would not know that legal fees do not encompass all litigation costs, such as court costs, photocopy costs, and expert witness fees, and might conclude that an unsuccessful legal representation would be entirely free, the speech was deemed deceptive. Although the mistake occurs because of the listener’s ignorance, the advertiser may not take advantage of the mistake. 20 

Deceptive Advertising and Responsibility    477 on the nutritional panel. But, as a court opined at a preliminary stage of the litigation, “the presence of a nutritional panel, though relevant, does not as a matter of law extinguish the possibility that reasonable consumers could be misled by vitaminwater’s labeling and marketing” that “even reasonable consumers may not read the nutritional label prior to every purchase of a new product.”23 Other cases present grayer areas with respect to whether the “reasonable consumer” within the scope of the law really is reasonable or perhaps is a touch gullible. The FDA requires that food labels identify ingredients by their “common and usual name” and for that reason, currently advises manufacturers not to use the term “evaporated cane juice.”24 I appreciate that demand because, were I not thinking carefully, as a stereotypical Californian who loves juice, I might prefer yogurts with evaporated cane juice over one whose label admits “added sugar.” Although, if I took a moment to consider, I would cotton on to the term “evaporated cane juice” as a euphemism for sugar, albeit one that is bizarrely accurate as few euphemisms are. Or, consider the label in dispute in POM Wonderful v. Coca-​Cola,25 a case heard by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2014. The label of Coca-​Cola’s Minute Maid juice product prominently featured a large pomegranate half, three large blueberries, three red grapes, and two raspberries in the foreground and a large apple half in the background. The label stated in bold capitals “POMEGRANATE BLUEBERRY” and then in smaller print “flavored blend of 5 juices.” Coca-​Cola’s attitude toward pomegranate juice, however, closely resembled Alfred Hitchcock’s view of vermouth’s role in the gin martini. Hitchcock, as you may recall, advised “five parts gin and a quick glance at a bottle of vermouth.” Coca-​ Cola’s flirtation with pomegranate and blueberry juices only barely progressed beyond an initial glance. Its “Pomegranate Blueberry” beverage featured 99.4% apple and grape juice with only a .3% dash of pomegranate and even smaller dashes of blueberry and raspberry juices.26 FDA regulations permitted Coca-​Cola to call it “Pomegranate Blueberry” because of the “flavored blend of five juices” qualifier. What was at issue in the case was whether the fact of the FDA permission should perforce settle the issue of whether POM Wonderful, as a competitor, could pursue a claim of misrepresentation under the Lanham Act. In oral argument, counsel for Coca-​Cola opined that consumers are not “quite as unintelligent as POM must think they are. They know when something is a f[l]‌avored blend of five juices . . . [that] the nonpredominant juices are just a flavor.”27 That is to say, in her mind, the reasonable consumer is a close-​reading, skeptical sophisticate who has internalized FDA regulations. Hence, he knows that “pomegranate flavored” conveys “pomegranate, not so much” and when the term “flavored” is on the scene, he resists counter-​suggestions offered by a name and the scale of the pictures. 23 

Ackerman v. Coca-​Cola Co., No. CV-​09-​0395 (JG), 2010 WL 2925955, at *16 (E.D.N.Y. July 21, 2010). See also Gerber, supra note 2, at 939–​40. 24  See the discussion in Ivie v. Kraft Foods Global, Inc., 2013 WL 685372, at *12 (N.D. Cal. 2013). 25  134 S.Ct. 2228 (2014). 26  Id. at 2233, 2235. 27  Transcript of Oral Argument at 40, POM Wonderful, LLC v. Coca-​Cola, 134 S.Ct. 2228 (2014) (No. 12-​76).

478   Seana Valentine Shiffrin Justice Kennedy, in reply, copped to the fact that he had believed “this was pomegranate juice,” eliciting Justice Scalia’s observation that Justice Kennedy “sometimes doesn’t read closely enough.”28 Justice Kennedy survived the ridicule and prevailed, writing the unanimous opinion of the Court. The Court did not settle the factual question of whether the ad was misleading, but held that the FDA permission did not preclude a case for misrepresentation. It thereby allowed for the possibility that the reasonable consumer is not expected to read carefully and cynically, tailoring his interpretation to reflect the latest FDA and USDA concessions to business interests.29 This seems like the right posture. Most of us are now on alert that “cherry flavored” means that the laboratory, not the orchard, produced the red flavor, but we should not, as a general policy, insist that the reasonable person become a connoisseur of Madison Avenue market-​speak. In other cases, we move past gray into black and white where I think we can confidently say that the mistakes involve intellectually culpable errors. In this domain, the term “reasonable consumer” works as a conclusory label, not as a guide to what is and is not permissible advertising. In the examples of interest to me, it’s a point of pride, especially among those philosophers reading along, that you do not resemble the reasonable consumer. You are not so gullible.30 At least if you were paying attention, you would not make the earlier mentioned mistake of confusing the claim that Gerber Fruit Juice Snacks are made with “real fruit juice and other all natural ingredients,” for the claim that all their ingredients are natural.31 Statements that are true and that might meaningfully be advanced for their literal truth may still be illegal because they have a tendency 28 

Id. Lisa Henzerling details some of these concessions in The Varieties and Limits of Transparency in U.S. Food Law, 70 Food & Drug L. J. 11, 16–​20 (2015) (describing the USDA’s complacency over the application of “fresh” to highly processed meats and poultry at or over 26 degrees Fahrenheit, the FDA’s permission to label foods with 20 ppm of gluten as nonetheless “gluten free,” and the FDA’s permission to label foods with .5 grams of trans fat as containing 0 grams of trans fat). 30  The reasonable consumer’s knowledge, apparently, might be even more restricted than mere ignorance of dairy chemistry; he might believe that weight-​loss pills could suffice on their own to cause substantial weight loss while eating as much as and anything one likes. And, he may be a reasonable consumer even though he does not question whether ads making such claims might be leaving out other relevant material facts, such as that the offered testimonials may be atypical or may not apply to those with serious medical conditions like diabetes or high blood pressure. Porter & Dietsch, Inc. v. F.T.C., 605 F.2d 294 (1979). 31  Might “only other all natural ingredients” be the implicature of “other all natural ingredients”? If so, then the audience’s interpretation that Gerber meant to convey the former would be reasonable and would not involve fault by the audience. Although I take the audience’s interpretation to be understandable, I don’t think the audience’s inference is a Gricean implicature of Gerber’s statement because it is not necessary to infer that all the ingredients of the snacks are natural to interpret “other all natural ingredients” as saying something requisitely informative, as demanded by the maxims of quantity to make one’s statement as, but no more, informative as is required by the purposes of the exchange. Grice, supra note 12, at 26. Just as many attempt to reduce but not eliminate sugar intake, a consumer might aim to reduce the amount of artificial ingredients in her foods by selecting foods with more, rather than fewer, natural ingredients and with more, rather than fewer, ingredients processed with artificial additives. That these snacks had fruit juice and other all natural ingredients might convey useful information even if the snacks did not contain only natural ingredients. 29 

Deceptive Advertising and Responsibility    479 to mislead listeners, even those listeners who are not attentive or careful and who make mistaken inferences.32 Consider another example:  a Lanham Act violation was found when American Home Products advertised that “hospitals recommend acetaminophen, the aspirin-​free pain reliever in Anacin-​3, more than any other pain reliever.”33 This statement is literally true and, more importantly, might be offered (cooperatively) for its literal truth. Still, in practice, it might have a tendency to mislead the consumer into thinking that the brand Anacin-​3 is recommended more than any other pain reliever when in fact the acetaminophen-​carrier commonly used in hospitals is packaged under the Tylenol brand. The advertiser was liable even though the more straightforward way to convey the message that the listener mistakenly absorbed would have been to say that “hospitals recommend Anacin-​3, an aspirin-​free pain reliever containing acetaminophen, more than any other pain reliever.” Of course, that’s not what the ad said. The more indirect construction chosen by the advertiser should alert a good listener that something else was being conveyed. Even so, the advertiser had the obligation to protect the listener from making an incorrect inference by breaking the grammar into more easily digestible bits, saying something more like “[H]‌ospitals have recommended a product containing acetaminophen more than all other types of pain reliever combined. Anacin-​3 contains acetaminophen.”34 32  See Gerber, supra note 2 at 939 (disclaiming a responsibility for consumers to look beyond the front of the box and to “discover the truth” from the ingredient list on the side of the box).There is jurisdictional variation on this issue. Some courts are more demanding of consumers than others. Judge Easterbrook has written an influential opinion for the Seventh Circuit, for example, about an infant formula label declaring it the “1st choice of doctors.” The formula was favored by the plurality of doctors but 80% of consumers surveyed understood the phrase to suggest that a majority of doctors favor the product. The court found that the high level of consumer misunderstanding was insufficient to show the label was misleading. Mead Johnson & Co. v. Abbott Laboratories, 201 F.3d 883, 885 (2000). The court articulated a reasonable criticism of the survey, but also insisted that that however soundly constructed, survey research should not be used “to set the standard to which objectively verifiable claims must be held.” Id. at 886. As it stressed, “ ‘[m]‌isleading’ is not a synonym for ‘misunderstood,’ ” and a standard that hews closely to consumer confusion would lead to the (further) dumbing down of advertisements because consumers would not bother to read and digest more elaborate explanations. Mead Johnson & Co. v. Abbott Laboratories, 209 F.3d 1033, 1034 (2000) (revising wording of earlier opinion). Judge Easterbrook’s concerns about the quality of commercial conversation as well as the consumer’s limited attention span are recurrent themes in his opinions. In ProCD and Gateway, two famous cases that enforced box-​top contract terms against parties who arguably had formed contracts before those terms were revealed, Judge Easterbrook’s opinion worried that the approach favored by consumers and buyers would stimulate too much lecturing by merchants to consumers about legalities which would bore consumers. So, he crafted an approach that would permit merchants to specify binding contractual terms without having to reveal those terms to consumers at the time of purchase. ProCD, Inc. v. Zeidenberg, 86 F.3d 1447 (1996); Hill v. Gateway, 105 F.3d 1147 (1997). Apparently, our legal regime should not encourage “dumbing down” commercial conversations but it can encourage their suppression when it redounds to the benefit of commercial entities. That’s a hard position to make sense of. Judge Easterbrook’s voiced concern to privilege the quality of conversation over consumer understanding seems to operate as a cover for re-​invigorating a strong regime of caveat emptor. 33  American Home Products Corp. v. Johnson & Johnson, 654 F. Supp. 568, 588–​89 (1987). 34  Id. at 589.

480   Seana Valentine Shiffrin In one way, the law of deception regards fault as relevant to liability because remedies may be enhanced when deception is intentional or reckless. But in two other philosophically interesting respects, these examples illustrate how fault is sidelined as a relevant factor in this corner of the law: first, the fault of the speaker is not a prerequisite of liability and second, speakers may be liable for some false beliefs that are due to an intellectual fault of the audience. First, whereas many philosophers tend to describe deception as requiring an intention to manipulate the subject or an intention to deceive the subject, legal liability for deception may attach when speech is likely to deceive and/​or when a speaker has reason to know the audience will draw a relevantly false conclusion from one’s statement.35 Under these legal doctrines, a speaker may deceive a listener even when the speaker does not intend for the listener to form a false belief. One can imagine the Anacin-​3 ad being written by an innocent, grammatically careful copywriter. On this conception, deception can occur through negligence or even when the speaker speaks properly and reasonably, with an innocent motive, and the misapprehension arises from the listener’s own carelessness or inattention. This conception of deception might, at first, raise alarms for philosophers because the philosophical tradition has tended to analyze the wrong of deception in terms of the wrong of aiming to manipulate someone’s mental contents for one’s own purposes. If the wrong is analyzed in terms of intentional manipulation, then there is a mismatch between the legal wrong of deception (or misrepresentation) and the moral wrong. I think these alarms go off prematurely and that the moral wrong of deception is better understood in terms of the failure to exercise due care to ensure one does not impart or reinforce inaccurate beliefs in another. As will emerge, what due care demands varies according to the circumstances and relations of the parties. This understanding of deception not only makes room for the possibility of negligent deception but also, to its credit, for deceptions without wronging. Deception without wronging transpires when one imparts inaccurate beliefs to another without lying and without violating a standard of due care toward the listener. This may occur, for example, when a person’s truthful remarks nonetheless induce inaccurate beliefs in the listener about the speaker and the true facts are ones the speaker has a right to keep private. Purportedly, Athanasius of Alexandria was fleeing hostile pursuers who approached his boat and asked where Athanasius was. Unrecognized, Athanasius allegedly truthfully replied, “He is not far.” The false implicature (that he was not also “here”) deceived its recipients into believing the speaker was not Athanasius and that Athanasius was not on the boat. 36 Assuming his pursuers were not entitled to pursue him and had no right to 35 

See, e.g., Gerber, supra note 2, at 938 (discussing California law prohibiting statements “which, although true, [are] actually misleading or which ha[ve] a capacity, likelihood, or tendency to deceive or confuse the public.”). Deception may also involve images, as some of my examples will bring out. 36  See F. A. M. Forbes, St. Athanasius 102 (1919). A less familiar type of example goes a step further. In my view, except in heightened circumstances of urgency or special relationships (like fiduciary relationships or relationships of employment), other than respecting the duty not to lie, non-​expert strangers do not have much by way of a duty of care to ensure experts do not make mistakes about topics in their expertise. For instance, suppose a layperson patient sincerely, but mistakenly, told a doctor that

Deceptive Advertising and Responsibility    481 information about his location, the deception does not seem wrongful. In this case, there may well have been an aim to manipulate, but one can imagine like cases where there is no aim to manipulate. Suppose a sailor on Athanasius’ boat aspired to neutrality. He did not wish to be the source of the information that would doom Athanasius, and he had no obligation to assist his pursuers, but wasn’t all that concerned to save Athanasius either. He would not have stopped another sailor from revealing Athanasius’ identity. Our sailor may reasonably feel conversational pressure to respond to an inquiry and moral pressure not to lie. Satisfying these three desiderata (to respond, to do so without lying, and to do so without being the one to doom Athanasius) may lead to a terse, misleading response like “he is not far” even when there is no aim to manipulate. Although it is quite common to conceive of deception as involving intentional manipulation, a conception of deception that allows for some deception that is not wrongful and even some that is not driven by manipulative ends seems, on reflection, consonant with our experience.37 A second concern one might have about the legal doctrine of deception is that, even where the unwarranted inference is the fault of the audience, legal responsibility can still lie with the speaker where the audience’s mistake is likely. Advertisers may be liable even for misunderstandings for which, arguably, the consumer is at intellectual and prudential fault. That’s interesting because it renders the speaker responsible to avoid or to obstruct listeners’ errors. Two criticisms might be made of this doctrine that makes commercial speakers liable for some consumers’ intellectual errors occasioned by ignorance, inattention, or faulty stevia was one of the sugar substitutes recently found to precipitate glucose resistance and suppose the doctor were to believe this claim without checking. I do not believe the patient deceives the doctor and I certainly do not believe the patient wrongfully deceives the doctor (or otherwise engages in the wrong of deception). But, if in another scenario, the doctor were to form the same erroneous belief about stevia after reading the article about glucose resistance and passed this mistake onto another patient or doctor who believed her, then I think she may wrongfully deceive. After all, the doctor’s duty of care to others with respect to medical facts is greater than a layperson’s duty with respect to an expert. 37 

Why not conceive of these cases as cases of misrepresentation, reserving the term “deception” to cases of intentional (or intentional and manipulative) misrepresentation? I resist this suggestion primarily because misrepresentation may occur without infecting the listener with a false belief. I may engage in misrepresentation when I give a false name to you even if you do not accept my alias as valid. Here, I think I misrepresent but I do not deceive and there is no deception. Misrepresentation is a concept focused on the relationship between what the speaker says and the truth (and perhaps the speaker’s beliefs or those she should have). Whereas, deception is a concept focused on the listener and the listener’s acquisition of false beliefs as a consequence of another’s false or misleading representation. Second, but more diffidently, misrepresentation seems to involve some effort by the misrepresenter to represent something (whether through depiction or through speech). Whereas, although it is not the common case and not the focus of this essay, deception can occur without misrepresentation. A friend has stowed boxes of chocolate bars in my pantry just for the afternoon. I know you are worried that I forgot to get Halloween treats but you are biting your tongue not to mention it. Indeed, I did forget to pick up Halloween treats. To assuage your concerns, I leave the pantry door open while I futz in the kitchen so you can catch a glimpse of my friend’s stash. You leave thinking I am prepared for Halloween. I think this is a case of deception but not misrepresentation because I made no representations at all. Rather, I let you see something and I let you draw false conclusions, but I didn’t do it as part of any communication.

482   Seana Valentine Shiffrin reasoning: first, that it is paternalist and second, that it places undue responsibility on a speaker for the fault of the listener. This second objection may find deeper roots in worries about holding people responsible for other people’s faults and in worries about an apparent tension with the principle of freedom of speech. That principle thrives on the notion that speakers are not responsible for the beliefs formed by listeners but that all of us are individually responsible for making up our own minds about the information, opinions, and arguments presented to us. Neither objection seems apt to me. Exploring why not may help us understand the implicit picture of moral relations between speaker and listener embedded in the law.

Paternalism Let me first address the potential complaint that the legal doctrine is (objectionably) paternalist because it holds the speaker responsible for misunderstandings by the listener that the listener could have forestalled on her own, thereby shielding the listener from having to shoulder the consequences of her own mistakes. The doctrine is paternalist either in shielding listeners from their mistakes or by assuming listeners fall short of being rational and autonomous. I think this complaint involves an overly simple view of what constitutes (objectionable) paternalism, conflating it with a sort of radical libertarianism. “Paternalism,” as I will use the term, involves the unwelcome substitution of one party’s agency or judgment for another’s, in the latter’s rightful sphere of autonomy, that emanates from an implicit or explicit judgment by the former of the inferiority of the latter’s judgment or agency.38 To start with, it is unclear that the legal doctrine of deception and its justification, when charitably interpreted, must involve any initial, even implicit, assessment of the inferiority of judgment or agency about consumers. Rather, it represents an assignment of responsibility that serves the interests of consumers and renders their autonomy more meaningful by allowing them to devote their careful energies and attentions elsewhere. Consider a non-​speech example. Given adequate study, it lies in the range of our capacities to become experts on the pharmacology of purity and adulteration in water. We could devote some portion of our education, each of us, to learning about the integrity of our water supply, to testing our water as it comes out of the tap, to mending the water pipes ourselves, and to de-​salinating where necessary. That we decide instead, as a community, to relieve each of us of that responsibility and to locate that responsibility in the government or in quasi-​public utilities is not a sign of contempt for each other’s abilities.39 It is also, therefore, less a substitution of agency than a well-​motivated delegation 38  This is a rough abbreviation of the view I defend in Seana Valentine Shiffrin, Paternalism, Unconscionability Doctrine and Accommodation, 29 Phil. & Pub. Aff. 205 (2000). 39  See the related discussion in Sarah Conly’s essay, Paternalism, Food, and Personal Freedom, in this volume.

Deceptive Advertising and Responsibility    483 of agency. It should instead be understood as our effort to permit each of us to focus our attention elsewhere, while ensuring our safety. The fact that we have a capacity that we could develop into an ability we routinely exercise does not suggest that we must do so or that forms of social organization that relieve us of the need to do so are paternalist. 40 My suggestion about the law of deceptive advertising is that we view it much as we view the division of labor over the water supply. We could, of course, install a thorough-​ going regime of caveat emptor and caveat auditor in which we were made fully responsible for investigating the truth and accuracy of the representations made by sellers. Where sellers’ claims turned out to be false or where we could not ascertain their accuracy, we could just abstain from relying on their claims in our decisions whether to buy their wares.41 But, we have good reason to elect a different division of labor and responsibility, reasons not based on a sense of our inferiority of judgment or agency. Given our finite time and resources, shouldering that responsibility would divert our attention from other projects and pursuits that we choose to pursue and that more closely jibe with our individual passions and needs. Locating that responsibility in the speaker offers us greater opportunities to devote ourselves, in terms of time and capacity development, to our own chosen interests and pursuits, rather than to fact-​checking the agenda of the claims made by speakers to promote their own interests in hocking their wares. One might object that this account explains why listeners are shielded from responsibility for catching the errors and inaccuracies of speakers and why we might defend some deceptive advertising law as non-​paternalist. But, the objection would go, how would this defense extend to include speaker responsibility for (some) listener error? The water board can be vested with full responsibility for the quality of the water delivered to your home but not for the arsenic you unwittingly spoon into your coffee. Similarly, one might think that the speaker may reasonably be responsible for his own accuracy and sincerity, 40  More interesting problems arise when there is a division within the beneficiary community. See Dana Goodyear, Raw Deal, The New Yorker, April 30, 2012; Richard Bernstein, Raw Milk Becomes Contentious, N.Y. Times, March 24, 2010. For example, the majority wants to drink milk without having to worry and to investigate the sanitary conditions at the bottling location; thus, they are willing to authorize strict regulations and a pasteurizing scheme that puts us well beyond any envelope of risk. But the minority rues the loss of raw milk and resents that its choice to run the risks associated with raw milk is stymied by the majority’s risk aversion. Where a minority actively wants to assume burdens of agency that the majority wants to avoid out of a preference for other projects and the relevant system ties their fortunes together, does the minority have a reasonable complaint? I do not think they may complain of paternalism but they may reasonably rue that their preferred exercise of autonomy conflicts with the preferred conditions of others’ exercise of autonomy. For that reason, they may have sound grounds for exemption from the joint scheme, where it can be accommodated. It may be reasonable and important in such cases, to require that such minority groups form small, close coalitions with high standards of consent for admission, to ensure that unwitting members of the majority do not stumble in and inadvertently import their confident trust to the wrong milieu. 41  See Lillian BeVier, Competitor Suits for False Advertising Under Section 43(a) of the Lanham Act: A Puzzle in the Law of Deception, 78 Va. L. Rev. 1, 3 (1992) (concluding “that advertising in general promotes consumer welfare and that in the absence of any legal regulation false advertising would not pose a major threat to consumers.”)

484   Seana Valentine Shiffrin but not for the mistakes, even the predictable mistakes, of the listener. That additional move of relieving the listener of responsibility for her own mistakes and communicating in ways that are proof against misunderstanding may be thought to drift into paternalism because this part of the law is predicated on sheltering the listener from her own errors during activities the listener herself must conduct. (The objection might be put: You can assign the tasks of accurate speech, fact-​checking, and sincerity to the speaker but you cannot make the speaker listen and process the information for the listener.) Here, again, I want to resist. Our admission to ourselves and the acknowledgment of others that we may make errors is not a self-​admission of inferiority or inability to conduct oneself autonomously. Our picture of autonomous agency that others must respect and that we must respect about ourselves need not be one of perfect agency or dogged independence and self-​reliance. We could self-​police but in some domains, it may not be a profitable expenditure of our time and energies. We may reasonably arrange matters so that others must take charge and police against our own potential errors, thereby allowing us to pay minimal attention in this domain so that we can attend to other domains of our choosing. To be sure, there are some things we should not outsource, compatible with maintaining our status and identity as autonomous agents. For example, we should not outsource our judgments about our interpersonal moral duties, who to befriend, and how to conduct those friendships, our career choices, and our political affiliations and judgments. But, outsourcing our responsibility to safeguard against error in the comprehension of commercial solicitations does not seem to fall in these categories. It seems more like the law regarding overpayment. If I erroneously overpay a bill to a vendor, the vendor must return the money. She cannot pocket the proceeds of my error, even though the error was directly mine and I gave her the money deliberately.42 She has no claim to retain the funds when her possession is the product of an error, not a gift, and she has performed no service and provided no good that merits payment. Indeed, she must take some steps to return it, thereby insulating me from some of the consequences of my irresponsibility. Just as with the law of deceptive advertising, this rule relieves some pressure to institute further protocols and layers of self-​review and compulsive checking for error.43 42 

See also Ward Farnsworth, Restitution 14–​15 (2014). A related argument dismisses the attempted defense to fraud that the deceived could have protected themselves against the defendant’s lies through further investigation: “Requiring all lenders, investors, and so on to investigate every representation made to them would be extravagantly wasteful, compared with a legal regime that unconditionally requires speakers to tell the truth on every material topic if they speak at all. Thus investors’ gullibility and carelessness do not excuse willfully false statements or reduce the damages available to the victims. ‘The recipient of a fraudulent misrepresentation of fact is justified in relying on its truth, although he might have ascertained the falsity of the representation had he made an investigation.’ ” U.S. v. Rosby, 454 F.3d 670 (7th Cir. 2006) (quoting the Restatement (Second) of Torts § 540 (1977)). Although Judge Easterbrook adopts a listener-​sensitive position here with respect to investors, in other opinions, he has placed more demanding requirements of self-​protection on consumers, whether as listeners or as purchasers. See, supra, note 32. 43 

Deceptive Advertising and Responsibility    485

Freedom of Speech The more interesting complaint than paternalism may be one that issues initially from the speaker’s perspective, although it ultimately touches on both speaker and listener interests. I have argued elsewhere that it is a cornerstone of First Amendment jurisprudence that, in core cases of freedom of speech, sincere speakers should not be held legally responsible for their listeners’ reactions, including their listeners’ predictable but unwarranted and mistaken conclusions.44 A speaker who decries the corruption of the intellectual property regime may predict that this speech will inspire some audience members to conclude that legal disobedience is warranted and to pirate films and music, although this conclusion is not entailed by the speech. The speaker is not and should not be responsible for any pirating that results. Morally, the speaker may bear some responsibility to clarify predicted errors in entailment and to advocate at least plausible views, but even granting some such responsibility in some cases, it cannot be a comprehensive moral responsibility to addend all speeches with warnings about possible errors. It certainly cannot be a legal responsibility compatible with a regime of freedom. Indeed, so long as the speaker is not urging a mentally incapacitated audience under her spell, that is, so long as she is not inciting, the speaker who makes the abstract case for piracy should not be held legally responsible for convincing the audience that piracy is warranted or for any piracy that consequently ensues. As a general matter, a regime of freedom of speech must assign legal responsibility for drawing reasonable conclusions from speech to the listener. Even where the speaker advocates illegal activity, the listener cannot be considered her pawn but must be charged, as a citizen, with the responsibility to evaluate the argument and arrive at the proper conclusion with respect to her own practical agenda. A contrary regime will presuppose a conception of right answers that may be fallible and in any case should be contested and worked through by listeners. Further, a contrary regime would fail to offer speakers a sufficiently broad-​ranging outlet for speakers to share their thoughts, and thereby to benefit from codifying them and having them recognized and responded to by other thinkers. Yet, I defend the doctrine of misrepresentation for commercial solicitations which holds the speaker responsible not only for mistaken conclusions drawn from the speaker’s false or insincere utterances, but for some predictable, mistaken conclusions drawn from the speaker’s true, sincere utterances. Why, in such cases, should we say the listener was deceived by the speaker rather than by himself? How can assigning the duty of care over the listener’s mental contents be compatible with the division of responsibility embedded within our freedom of speech commitments? No one feature of the relationship between commercial solicitor and listener is dispositive. A cluster of features together justify this relation. First, in a competitive market, sellers’ expressions reflect a compressed set of motives governed by an overriding end of 44 

See Seana Valentine Shiffrin, Speech, Death, and Double Effect, 78 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 1135 (2003).

486   Seana Valentine Shiffrin survival in the market. Sellers are not primarily communicating to express themselves as human beings or to contribute to an understanding of the world with whatever content that may involve; the content of what they communicate about their products is, largely, driven and limited by the expected benefit of that communication in terms of sales and whatever legal regulation applies.45 (It is also worth noting that were expressing that particular content important to them as human beings, other avenues exist besides commercial advertisements.) The dominant values of freedom of speech that accrue to speakers do not range freely in commercial speech. This fact constrains the degree to which we should be worried about legal regulations that place more responsibility on speakers than listeners in these communicative transactions. The constrained circumstances as well as the restricted range and ends speakers pursue in this domain already mark a departure from the speaker-​listener relation celebrated and protected by our tradition of freedom of speech.46 Second, listeners are not well situated to assume the sort of responsibility that we ask of them in other domains of speech. It is not merely that there is an inequity of position, namely the speakers are experts about the subject of the speech but the listeners are not. That inequity holds true about a variety of topics covered by political speech, such as the economy and Iran’s true nuclear ambitions. It is also true about any manner of personal topics concerning the speaker’s life or mind. Two further factors here make a difference. First, with much speech about matters of public concern, any listener is welcome to become equally expert on the issues and the efforts she makes to do so enhance the public dialogue. Whereas, with commercial solicitations and other advertisements, the listener is not welcome to become equally expert on the issues. Second, as I have already discussed, in a well-​operating economic system, her efforts would not importantly enhance the public dialogue but would detract from the achievement of the cooperative ends and the listener’s individual chosen ends that our economic division of labor should facilitate. What do I mean when I say that as things now stand, in the commercial case, the listener is not welcome to become equally expert on the relevant matter? Most commercial advertisements do not exactly invite a dialogue in which the consumer may clarify exactly what was meant and what evidence the speaker relies upon for his claims.47 45 

I discuss some exceptions to this claim and some First Amendment implications of those exceptions in Seana Valentine Shiffrin, Compelled Association, Morality and Market Dynamics, 41 Loy. L.A. L. Rev. 317 (2007). 46  I pursue a longer discussion of this point in c ­ hapter 3 in Speech Matters (2014). 47  As I mentioned earlier, advertisements are not really contributions to a conversational context. See also supra note 12. At least where a speaker initiates non-​conversational communication for gain or under the guise of providing information relevant to the recipient’s welfare, we might reasonably hold the speaker responsible for framing her contribution in a way that will be understood by most audiences without great effort or careful attention. This normative expectation seems all the more apt when we know listeners will be bombarded by many like communications. Where parties expect to collaborate together in a conversation, we may tolerate greater levels of ambiguity, unclarity, and predictable audience-​error because an extended conversation affords opportunities for achieving understanding as both parties clarify their meanings and their uptake. Put another way, Grice’s Cooperative Principle (for

Deceptive Advertising and Responsibility    487 Representatives are not loitering in the market aisles standing ready to answer your questions about the label. Whether to evade communication or, to perhaps more charitably, to serve a mass of consumers in a cost-​efficient way, many companies impose structural barriers that make meaningful contact difficult through hidden phone numbers, automated recordings, time-​consuming phone trees and wait times, and by staffing those responsible for consumer service with workers neither trained nor authorized to respond to questions that go beyond the elementary.48 This deliberate elusiveness makes the effort to clarify information about a single product a daunting, discouraging task. Few consumers have the time to tackle one inquiry and pursue it to a satisfying resolution, much less to assume much responsibility for becoming expert on all the alleged features of the products advertised to her. Nonetheless, with foodstuffs, she will need to buy and consume many. Although consumers lack the time to develop expertise about the range of foods they need to acquire, producers have the luxury of a more focused agenda, perfecting the labels and advertisements for only their products. Not only does a consumer face practical barriers to gaining full information about the foods they consider, it is further unavailable to her (and her representatives) as a matter of legal right. She cannot enter the factory, examine the ingredients, tour the farm, read the internal studies commissioned by the company, or scrutinize company contracts to ensure labor is treated fairly. The speaker is free to exclude her. Our system of property and rules of trespass make it the case that the listener is designed to occupy an epistemically subordinate stature. Although, prudentially, I would counsel consumers to pay close attention to advertising for their own sake, when consumers (and their representatives) are precluded from pursuing many relevant lines of inquiry to test or verify claims, it becomes more difficult to assess ex ante which mistakes of understanding represent

conversations) includes, for example, the maxim of quantity: “Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current purpose of the exchange).” Grice, supra note 12 at 26–​27. We might think the same maxim applies in non-​conversational contexts, e.g., signs, advertisements, and orders transmitted with no expectation of reply, but that the requisite degree of informativeness is heightened because the communication happens outside of a talk-​exchange and thus follow-​up is difficult or impossible. In conversational contexts, by contrast, it is sometimes important for reasons of uptake, of conviviality, and of dignity to reveal information at a slower pace and to allow information and precision to emerge through the back-​and-​forth. 48 

See, e.g., Forbes Insights, Modern Customer Service: Are You Outpacing Your Executive Peers? 10–​11 (2015), http://​www.forbes.com/​forbesinsights/​oracle_​customer_​service/​index.html (an industry commissioned survey of business executives reported that minimizing time to handle customer issues was a very high priority). Another industry source describes that posting material on the internet may enable “help desks and call centers . . . to practice call avoidance and deflection by driving problem resolution to self-​service . . . [allowing] support workers to concentrate on more difficult . . .technical problems and . . . customer service workers to spend time on cross-​selling and up-​selling. “ It also quotes an H & R Block (a tax preparation service) executive’s description of the aims of customer service technology as “call deflection followed by email deflection,” and his company’s efforts to discourage consumer phone calls. Support Industry.com, Trends and Directions in Webbased Customer Service 2, 7 (2002), http://​www.gotoassist.com/​downloads/​pdf/​s/​DesktopStreaming_​ESupport_​White_​ Paper.pdf. See generally Emily Yellin, Your Call Is (not That) Important to Us (2009) (discussing anecdotal and field-​gathered evidence of consumer frustration and service worker overload).

488   Seana Valentine Shiffrin one’s own fault and which are due to exclusion. Consumers may reasonably not even know which questions to ask or what the range of relevant information is from which they are excluded, although these matters are entirely relevant to them.49 I suggest that the following principle holds: when we grant a monopoly, whether partial or total, to one party over information relevant to both parties, over which both parties have entitlements and/​or strong moral interests, the party with exclusive access should bear a substantially higher level of responsibility for ensuring that communications concerning this information are successful in imparting accurate uptake. This responsibility seems all the more apt when the scope of the monopoly is nontransparent. It is one thing to demand the exercise of intellectual responsibility from a party who has the ability to investigate freely as she sees fit; it is another when the boundaries of one’s investigation are artificially curtailed for the other party’s benefit. In the latter case, it seems reasonable to lay an additional duty of care on the party with greater control and to permit the party already constrained to adopt a posture of trust, one that is both epistemically and normatively justified. We could hold consumers responsible for doing their best with the materials available to them, but why would we demand they invest that effort and attention toward an endeavor in which they are constrained from the start? Holding consumers to a high level of responsibility for making independent, sound judgments about products and for thoroughly understanding of advertisements is epistemically infeasible given that much relevant information is tightly held and given the legally protected confidential structure of most corporate production. Hence, I contend that consumers are not equally welcome to inform themselves and develop independent judgments about these products and the claims made about them. Furthermore, assigning a large portion of such responsibility on consumers, rather than placing it predominantly on producers who have close access to the relevant information, burdens the ability of consumers to pursue life projects of their own choosing. This burden conflicts with the underlying mission of our joint cooperative economic enterprise. Rather than expecting the parties to check one another and to stand in an adversarial relation to one another given that the non-​expert party also has her hands tied behind her back, it makes more sense to complement the property right and the ability to exclude with a quasi-​fiduciary duty towards the excluded who the property owner hopes to entice into a commercial relationship. This quasi-​fiduciary duty involves, among other charges, not providing the occasion in which one party might predictably make a mistake to the other party’s benefit. We could instead free consumers’ limited time and attention 49 

This argument would also justify the asymmetry of legal burden litigated in Kasky v. Nike. In that case, Nike falsely touted sound labor conditions in its factories, but complained that its self-​ congratulatory advertisements were subject to different standards of accuracy than statements by its critics. See Kasky v. Nike Inc., 45 P.3d 243 (Cal. 2002), cert. denied, 539 U.S. 654 (2003). Most of the discussion of that case focused on Nike’s status as a commercial speaker (and a corporate, nonindividual speaker), but it seems also relevant to the argument that Nike had a special obligation of accuracy that Nike is an expert on conditions in its own factories, with special access to information and the legal ability to exclude others who wished to visit to verify or disconfirm Nike’s allegations.

Deceptive Advertising and Responsibility    489 so consumers may direct them toward their own individual projects and concerns on which there are no artificial constraints. Conceiving producers as having quasi-​fiduciary responsibilities to consumers is a way of underscoring that, if it is to be justified, our property and production system must be regarded as a decentralized yet cooperative project for mutual gain; thus, its design should follow that conception. Then, the assignment of greater responsibility for consumers follows as a natural complement to affording producers greater control and access to the modes of production. The producer has these property rights as a decentralized agent of the public cooperative project and heightened communicative responsibilities figure among the complementary components of that role as an agent.50 By establishing these expectations as well as guidance through direct governmental enforcement (as well as through indirect enforcement from competitors), the law of deceptive advertising gets it right.51 It gets it right whereas our doctrine of puffery, applying to communications of general opinion, gets it wrong and demands that consumers be distrusting and adversarial. Once we establish that the “reasonable” consumer may make mistakes of this kind and that the commercial speaker bears the responsibility to ensure accurate uptake, you may question my depiction of this relationship as one in which the commercial speaker must take responsibility for the fault of others. If the mistake is not unreasonable, then there is no fault. In a sense, of course, that’s right, but in another sense, it internalizes a conclusion too quickly rather than appreciating the elements that lead us to it. I’d rather say that in cases like the Anacin-​3 advertisement, there is an intellectual mistake traceable to a cognitive fault, but, then, that we should not and do not regard that fault as relevant to who should bear the ultimate responsibility for that mistake. The consumer

50 

I hasten to add that fiduciary agents are still reasonably subject to public oversight, even with respect to those activities over which they enjoy some justified discretion. That is, by making an argument about the further ramifications of a legally-​produced epistemic inequality, I do not mean to endorse the entrenchment or the current scope of that epistemic inequality. Even if some epistemic division of labor and asymmetrical control over information is justified, that does not mean that the current configuration of powers and burdens is sound. We might be better off with greater public access and transparency to the means of production. Indeed, even if companies have a reasonable interest in exerting some control over when they must host observers and how much information they must share, their reasonable interest and the responsibilities it entails are consistent with insisting that their control is not absolute and that they must submit to oversight, both by the government and by private watchdogs. The recent successful efforts of some agricultural producers to prevent observation and reporting on their methods of poultry and cattle husbandry are appalling. Further, the cooperation of some states with these efforts is a dereliction of their duties of supervision and of protecting freedom of speech. See, e.g., Lisa Heinzerling, The Varieties and Limits of Transparency in U.S. Food Law, 70 Food & Drug L.J. 11, 21 (2015); Sara Lacy, Hard to Watch: How Ag-​Gag Laws Demonstrate the Need for Federal Meat and Poultry Industry Whistleblower Protections, 65 Admin. L. Rev. 127 (2013); Jessica Pitts, Ag-​Gag Legislation and Public Choice Theory: Maintaining a Diffuse Public by Limiting Information, 40 Am. J. Crim. L. 95 (2012). 51  Although the theoretical posture behind the law is sound, the law is not achieving its aims due to under-​enforcement. See Heinzerling, supra note 50. See also Linda J. Demaine, Seeing Is Deceiving: The Tacit Deregulation of Deceptive Advertising, 54 Ariz. L. Rev. 719, 740 (2012) (arguing that deceptive advertising using visual imagery is under-​regulated).

490   Seana Valentine Shiffrin who makes the poor inference that Anacin-​3 is used in most hospitals really does make a poor inference. In other contexts, we acknowledge that mistake as an intellectual fault (e.g. on the LSAT, grammar exams, or our own logic quizzes) but, here, given the moral relationships and purposes of the advertising context, we think this intellectual fault is not the dispositive factor determining ultimate responsibility.

Other cases I have been emphasizing that consumer disempowerment in the oversight of commercial production offers special reasons to assign high levels of responsibility for consumer understanding to advertisers and to erect and maintain a legal infrastructure that would justify and redeem a relationship of trust, rather than one of suspicion. Of course, listeners are not excluded from free investigation and verification in this domain alone. Similar points might be made about some government speech, particularly when that speech concerns issues about or bordering on classified activities. Generally, I do think that the government has special obligations to ensure that its speech is not misleading in fact and not merely that it is truthful as far as it goes or that careful, informed listeners would not get the wrong impression. Government speech is, famously, both by and for the people; the public is not a distinct and separate entity from a democratic government. If one left notes to oneself, one would surely wish them to be effective, rather than merely strictly accurate. One wouldn’t escape a charge of self-​deception by maintaining that one’s notes to one’s later self were strictly accurate even if predictably misleading. Here, though, it isn’t that a quasi-​fiduciary relationship is warranted given an imbalance of information but rather that there is a sort of normative identity between speaker and listener. There is then the special matter of speech touching on classified matters. I remain on the fence about whether any information about governmental operations that does not protect the reasonable privacy of particular individuals really should be classified. But, however it may be justified, suppose there are justifications for some sorts of temporally limited classification of information about governmental actions. Given the normative identity of the public and the government, at best that justification will have to square with the idea that classified information is still information that belongs to the people but is being held in a sort of trust for them. When the government speaks about related, non-​classified matters, there is an additional reason for it to ensure that it is understood and not merely accurate. Because citizens are impeded from following what may be or what may seem like reasonable avenues of verification or challenge, to facilitate democratic governance, it is essential both that what information is conveyed is reliable and that the uptake is accurate –​because some of the standard avenues of self-​correction will have been blocked. The arguments I have been offering, however, do not extend as a general matter to impute higher levels of speaker responsibility for listener understanding with respect

Deceptive Advertising and Responsibility    491 to much self-​regarding personal speech, even though the separateness of persons and the maintenance of boundaries of privacy pose obstacles to wide-​ranging independent forms of verification and investigation by listeners. In the case of advertisers, the listener has an interest in and reasonable claim to accurate understanding of the product, its quality and its safety, but self-​pursuit of that interest is blocked by other conditions. Speaker responsibility both compensates for those conditions and also facilitates other legitimate interests of the listener. In the case of government speech, listeners have moral interests and claims in discharging their responsibilities as members of the system of self-​governance through accurate understanding of information relevant to state action; greater governmental responsibility for citizen understanding compensates for imposed conditions that block self-​pursuit of that interest. Whereas, with respect to private speech about personal matters, there is no standing listener interest and claim to the information that obstacles to verification and understanding frustrate; those obstacles facilitate justifiable speaker privacy but do not, as with the other cases, frustrate legitimate listener interests. So, there is nothing to compensate for. Speakers may generate special responsibilities for listener uptake by creating certain sorts of close relationships that give listeners special claims to private information. In such cases, of friendship, for instance, speakers assume responsibility for their actual understanding and even to prevent and correct some misunderstandings that represent carelessness or some other form of listeners’ intellectual fault. As a general matter, though, speakers do not bear responsibility for listeners’ erroneous interpretations of speakers’ self-​regarding personal speech.

Conclusions My intermediate conclusions are these. The law has it in some cases that some speakers can be liable for deceiving some listeners, even without intending to do so and even when the listeners’ inaccurate conclusions are the product of some intellectual fault on the part of the listener. I think this position is defensible and interesting, both for these features, and because it supports the idea that whether a particular utterance is deceptive may turn on whether the subject matter and other moral relations between the parties dictate that the speaker has a duty of care toward the listeners’ mental contents. If these ideas are correct, they suggest some revision in how, morally, we think about deception through speech; we cannot simply ask what the speaker said, what the reasonable interpretation of the utterance would be (including implicatures), and what the speaker’s intentions were. We also need to think about whether, independently, other features of the moral and epistemic environment impose a heightened duty of care on the speaker for the listener’s mental contents. Where there is such a heightened duty of care, the speaker can (but should not) culpably deceive the listener when she speaks in a way that courts misunderstanding—​even when the listener bears intellectual fault for the error.

492   Seana Valentine Shiffrin Taking this stance provides philosophical support for an approach to the law of commercial misrepresentation that emphasizes what listeners understand and what they predictably misinterpret, without investigating whether the listener is at fault or the speech was otherwise reasonably constructed. Such an approach has broader implications beyond supporting a number of legal decisions involving misleading discursive advertisements and the embedded conception of the “reasonable consumer” as one whose attention is rather distracted. This argument also provides support for recent efforts to require graphical depictions of messages whose impact may be diminished or incompletely absorbed when those messages are exclusively conveyed through words. Promoting actual consumer understanding was the impetus behind the FDA’s failed, but commendable, effort to require cigarette packages to carry visual warnings, such as images of autopsies, diseased lungs, stained teeth, tracheotomy holes, and oxygen masks, to supplement and vivify the discursive health warnings.52 It likewise supports supplementing the rather dry and sometimes esoteric discursive nutritional labels on food packaging by adding color-​coded graphs that quickly convey the bottom line about whether the food is a healthy choice.53 Greater use of graphics in advertisements might also partly address the needs of our multi-​linguistic population. Nearly 21% of the U.S. population speaks English as a second language, 22.4% of whom report they do not speak English well.54 An only partly overlapping group of 14% of the adult population of the United States is functionally illiterate in English.55 Relying more heavily on graphic warnings and disclosures may address both the barriers to communication posed by a multi-​lingual population and the complaints of advertisers about the challenges of offering translations in the 300 other salient languages spoken in the United States.56 Making audience uptake a 52  R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. v. Food and Drug Administration, 696 F.3d 1205 (D.C. Cir. 2012) (overturning the FDA’s graphic warnings regulation on First Amendment grounds). 53  See Christine Jolls, Debiasing Through Law and the First Amendment, 67 Stan. L. Rev. 1411 (2015); see also Rebecca Tushnet, Looking at the Lanham Act: Images in Trademark and Advertising Law, 48 Hous. L. Rev. 861, 915–​16 (2011) (discussing evidence of greater effectiveness of visual warnings on tobacco packages and graphic nutritional labels as compared to discursive measures). At the same time, given the persuasive power of visual imagery and other visual cues, we must pay greater attention to the problems associated with non-​discursive deception. See Demaine, supra note 51; Tushnet, id. (discussing the power of imagery in ads and some of the complexities associated with regulating deceptive imagery). 54  Camille Ryan, Language Use in the United States 2011, American Community Survey Reports (August 2013), https://​www.census.gov/​prod/​2013pubs/​acs-​22.pdf. 55  National Center for Education Statistics, National Assessment of Adult Literacy: Key Findings (2003), http://​nces.ed.gov/​naal/​kf_​demographics.asp. 56  See Ramirez v. Plough, Inc., 6 Cal. 4th 539, 553 (1993) (denying a requirement to provide Spanish language warning that aspirin could cause Reyes Syndrome and discussing challenges of demanding translations in multi-​linguistic communities); Farias v. Mr. Heater, Inc., 757 F. Supp. 2d 1284 (2010); but see Nam Soon Jeon v. 445 Seaside, Inc., 2013 WL 431846 (D. Haw. Jan. 31, 2013) (declining to follow Ramirez and holding that a jury might reasonably find a hotel catering to Korean tourists had an obligation to post warning signs about the absence of a lifeguard in both English and Korean). Although the issue was not squarely presented, in a footnote, the court in Ramirez rather abruptly dismissed the ability of pictorial representation to convey complex warnings. Yet, as Jolls’ article suggests, supra note 53, even simple pictures may combine with background knowledge to generate inferences beyond what is

Deceptive Advertising and Responsibility    493 priority would not, however, perfectly correlate with a graphics-​heavy approach to commercial communications. For example, given the lack of geographical literacy among the U.S. population, a label declaring that a piece of meat was “Slaughtered in Mexico” would probably be more effective in conveying that information than stamping a package with an outline of Mexico’s borders.57 My larger theoretical conclusion is that both legally and morally, we should continue to recalibrate how we think about the relationship between fault and responsibility. In law, our rules of negligence liability have encouraged the idea that, as a general matter, one party’s responsibility begins with fault and then ends where another’s fault begins.58 In moral and political philosophy, the dominance of the rhetoric of luck insensitivity and choice sensitivity has encouraged a similar conception. One is to be held responsible for the consequences of one’s choices, whether good or bad, but not for mere misfortune and not for others’ choices; they are to internalize the costs of their choices (including relevant omissions), whether good or bad. A growing stream of qualifications and objections to this idea has emerged.59 I hope here to have given some new reasons for hesitation by identifying some forms of cooperation in the economic sphere whose value sounds in terms other than those of mere economic efficiency. Some morally valuable and mutually supportive forms of cooperation are better achieved on models in which parties extend their responsibility past their degree of fault and even assume responsibility to absorb the costs of others’ errors.

conveyed. In the Ramirez case, a pictorial warning would not have been difficult to construct: a drawing of an infant and of a child with a hazard symbol across them and of a adult without the hazard sign would have conveyed that aspirin was unsafe for the former but safe for the latter. 57 

American Meat Institute v. U.S. Dep’t of Agriculture, 760 F.3d 1, 18 (D.C. Cir. 2014) (describing Department of Agriculture’s country-​of-​origin labeling requirements). 58  That doctrine was once rather extreme when it took the form of contributory negligence which eliminated defendant’s liability when there was any or sufficient plaintiff fault. Now, the doctrine has achieved a more appropriate balance in comparative negligence regimes in which where both parties are at fault, parties will share liability and responsibility for damage. See generally Dan B. Dobbs et al., supra note 21, vol. 1, c­ hapter 19 (2011). 59  See, e.g., Seana Valentine Shiffrin, Egalitarianism, Choice-​Sensitivity, and Accommodation, in Reason and Value: Themes from the Work of Joseph Raz 270 (Philip Pettit et al. ed., 2004); Samuel Scheffler, What Is Egalitarianism?, 31 Phil. & Pub. Aff. 299 (2003); Samuel Scheffler, Choice, Circumstance and the Value of Equality, 4 Politics, Philosophy, & Economics 5 (2005); Elizabeth Anderson, What Is the Point of Equality?, 109 Ethics 287 (1999); Jonathan Wolff, Fairness, Respect and the Egalitarian Ethos, 27 Phil. & Pub. Aff. 27 (1998).

chapter 22

Fo od L ab or Et h i c s Tyler Doggett and Seth M. Holmes

Some food is grown, picked, and eaten by a single person. Other food is produced by a chain: food is grown and picked, sent to a restaurant or store, and then consumed. Or food is grown and fed to an animal that is killed and prepared, sent to the restaurant or store, and then consumed. At each link along the chain, there are food workers. This essay considers multiple layers of ethical concerns related to food work. About tomato pickers, Barry Estabrook writes: Tomato harvesting involves rummaging through staked vines until you have filled a bushel basket to the brim with hard, green fruits. You hoist the basket over your shoulder, trot across the field, and heave it overhead to a worker in an open trailer the size of the bed of a gravel truck. For every 32-​pound basket you pick, you receive a token typically worth about 45 cents—​almost the same rate you would have gotten 30 years ago. Working at breakneck speed, you might be able to pick a ton of tomatoes on a good day, netting about $50. But a lot can go wrong. If it rains, you can’t pick. If the dew is heavy, you sit and wait until it evaporates. If trucks aren’t available to transport the harvest, you’re out of luck. You receive neither overtime nor benefits. If you are injured (a common occurrence, given the pace of the job), you have to pay for your own medical care. (2009)

Picking up on some of these points, adding others, describing restaurant work, Saru Jayaraman writes: Claudia [was] the only Latina server at [a]‌Houston pancake house. There were four white and two black servers working with her. . . . White servers were almost always chosen over Claudia and the black servers to work banquet events—​the rare parties that pulled in higher-​than-​average tips. . . . [T]‌he managers forced Claudia to translate their nasty comments to the Latino bussers and dishwashers. “When the managers were mad, they’d take it out on bussers and dishwashers, and they’d make me translate all the horrible things they were saying,” says Claudia. “The workers would cry when I told them they were being sent

Food Labor Ethics   495 home. I would apologize and feel horrible. They would say, ‘Please don’t send me home. I need to make this salary.’ I would say ‘I’m sorry, that’s what they’re making me tell you’ . . . I knew that this was the only job I could get, and the only one they could get. The managers would take the most vulnerable people and take stuff out on them when things were going bad. It was inhumane, horrible, how they treated them.” . . . Claudia made about $30 to $40 a day in tips, working five to six days a week. The $2.13 she earned in wages amounted to a weekly paycheck of about $10 after taxes. So, in total, she earned about $150 to $200 per week. . . . She was . . . hungry all the time. . . . She was a food service worker who couldn’t afford to eat. (2013, 80–​81)

Estabrook’s and Jayaraman’s claims recur in work on other agricultural, restaurant, and meat-​packing workers.1 Across these narratives, descriptions repeat. Food work is hard, monotonous, stressful, and potentially dangerous, threatening short-​and long-​term injury and illness. Wages are low. Benefits and legal protections are scant. The jobs are precarious, and workers feel coerced into them. They are often exploited and treated as tools, animals, or children. They face discrimination along the lines of citizenship, class, gender, and race. There are morally important issues to discuss about all of these workers and, too, about uncompensated workers in the home. While food workers at each link in the chain deserve scholarly, legal, and political attention, we focus especially on farmworkers as a helpful case for thinking through these issues. Some of the farmworkers we consider are Triqui native Mexican workers—​pickers—​on the West Coast of the United States.2 We focus on them because the experiences of these workers exemplify many of the issues that we have already explained. There is significant evidence that their experience is usual: descriptions of it cohere with descriptions of fieldworkers in Bon Appétit Foundation (2011), Bowe (2003, 2007), Estabrook (2009, 2011), McMillan (2012a, 2012b), Mines and Nichols (2009), Saxton (2015), all the way back to McWilliams (1939). So while our view is not panoptic, our focus should not lead a reader to think our points are limited to the ethics of treating a certain group of people in certain fields in a certain way. They are, rather, meant to draw out ethical issues in many areas of food labor: interpersonal relations in the workplace, societal-​level issues of economic exploitation, sexism, and racism, and international issues of immigration and political economy. 1  Indeed, Jayaraman’s ending echoes Marx (1844) on labor 150 years ago: “It is true that labor produces for the rich wonderful things—​but for the worker it produces privation. It produces palaces—​but for the worker, hovels. It produces beauty—​but for the worker, deformity.” For more on farmworkers, see, among others, Bon Appétit 2011; Bowe 2003, 2007; Gray 2013; Holmes 2013. For more on restaurant workers, see, among others, Bowe et al. 2000; Ehrenreich 2011; McMillan 2012b. For details on slaughterhouse workers, see, among others, Pachirat 2011; Schlosser 2001; Striffler 2005. For details on food workers in the home, see Shapiro 2008; Strasser 2000. 2  The group is discussed in detail in Holmes 2011, 2012, 2013. For a detailed overview of farm work in general, see Bon Appétit 2011.

496    Tyler Doggett and Seth Holmes

The Fields in Detail Consider farmworkers on medium-​sized and large industrial fields on the West Coast of the United States. Their work conditions, which will be described in some detail, are like the conditions in Floridian tomato fields described by John Bowe (2003, 2007) and Estabrook (2009, 2011). They are like conditions in Mexican fields described by Richard Marosi (2014) and conditions in Southeast Asian fields described by Raj Patel (2007). These workers differ from some workers described by Bowe and Estabrook, workers who are enslaved: kidnapped to work, not free to leave their jobs, who work under the watch of armed guards, who are beaten for failing to work or trying to escape, are confined to their homes (shacks, backs of trucks), and are charged exorbitant fees for services with the net effect that workers are in debt.3 In the words of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, agricultural enslavement is “not the norm in agriculture today. Rather, modern-​day slavery occurs along a continuum of systemic abuse that can best be described as sweatshop conditions” (n.d.; cf. Bowe 2007, 79‒80). Most farmworkers would not be considered slaves in legal terms. They have some latitude to find other jobs, though these other options are limited. In addition, at times, they organize for better working conditions.4 Yet the lives of farmworkers on the West Coast are highly controlled, which is one of the reasons immigrant farm work has been called “modern-​day slavery.” For example, consider a Triqui strawberry picker. He or she might wake up before sunrise to get the children ready for school or daycare and then drive or be driven to the field. Sometimes this is a short commute—​in Washington, workers sometimes live on-​ site—​sometimes it is over an hour each way. Picking strawberries starts before sunrise. It proceeds like a factory in the fields:5 humans bent over, picking quickly with both hands over and over, filling buckets and then running to weigh and empty those buckets. This repeats till the field is finished in the afternoon. (Raspberry pickers might work 12‒18 hours per day, onion pickers even more.) To maximize productivity, workers take few breaks:  more breaks makes for less fruit and, because workers are typically paid by the weight of what they pick, less pay. Furthermore, most farms lay off workers who do not pick a minimum weight per day. To avoid needing to take breaks to use the bathroom and thereby risk missing the minimum and being laid off, pickers eat and drink little before work. Only very recently did Washington State pass a law requiring official lunch or bathroom breaks (Jenkins 3 See http://​www.ciw-​online.org/​slavery/​. For discussions of the wrongness of slavery, see Coleman 2016; Hare 1979; Rawls 1971. 4  See Bacon 2016; Bardacke 2012; Minkoff-​Zern 2014; Shaw 2008. See also http://​www.fiob.org; http://​ www.pcun.org; http://​www.ufw.org; http://​www.foodjustice.org; http://​www.ciw-​online.org. 5  “Factory in the fields” comes from McWilliams (1939) and the factory imagery is also important to Mintz (1985, esp. ch. 2).

Food Labor Ethics   497 2015; State of Washington 2015; cf. Holmes 2013, 83, 93). Time on break opens one up to reprimands from field supervisors who are tasked with supervising picking, exhorting, instructing, and reprimanding. Workers are also directly but informally supervised by “checkers” who mark start and end times of work and weigh produce picked. Treatment ranges from respectful to disrespectful with the latter having a racist and dehumanizing tinge (Gray 2013, 44; Holmes 2013, 36). Work done, workers go back to the camp (sometimes via required farm transportation paid for by the workers). They pick up the kids or meet them at home. They do laundry. They get food. Occasionally, they attend a baptism party or health fair. They cook for the family (cooking is usually done by the women even though they often picked all day).6 They sleep and then repeat again the next morning as long as weather permits. This happens daily in Washington, six days per week in California. The strawberry season might last four to six weeks. Raspberries are similar. Blueberries last longer. Once a season is over, workers move on to new fields. The moving involves dislocation and the psychic costs of that. Movement also reduces workers’ time in one place and, hence, ability to put down roots and derive benefit from that (e.g., financial and social benefits for grown-​ups, educational and social benefits for children). At the same time, during this extremely demanding and damaging work, immigrant farmworkers build what Sarah Willen has called “inhabitable spaces of welcome” (Willen 2014) for themselves and their families in an effort to exercise power and choice wherever possible (Jackson 2005). In the midst of the severe limitations placed on them by their work, by structural racism, and anti-​immigrant policies and practices, they build relationships, care for one another, work toward better futures for themselves and their families, and, as already mentioned, at times organize for change. This brief sketch does not make clear the extraordinary toll of picking. Because of the hard, repetitive, lasting job, workers experience gastritis, headaches, and pains in their backs, hips, knees, and necks. They have higher than average rates of anemia, dental problems, diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, kidney and liver abnormalities, malnutrition, memory problems, nonfatal injuries, and sleep disturbances.7 Whereas farm executives worry about sustaining their business and worry about typical Western middle-​class conditions—​heart disease, various cancers—​whereas their immediate subordinates worry about that and their relations with their bosses, and whereas their administrative assistants worry about those and about repetitive stress injuries, pickers worry about all those plus the conditions already enumerated plus whether they will be able to keep their jobs and their housing, plus pesticide poisoning.8 6 

Farmworkers often lack enough food. According to Teresa Mares, “the incidence of food insecurity among farmworkers is as high as 3 to 4 times the national average, with a disproportionate number of households experiencing ‘very low food security with hunger’ ” (2016, 4). For an overview of farmworkers in California and food insecurity, see Brown and Getz 2011. For an overview of gender and food work, see ch. 5 of Barnhill et al. 2016. For a deeper look, see Allen and Sachs 2007; Cediel 2013. 7  For more, see Frank et al. 2004; Holmes 2012, 2013; McMillan 2012b; Mobed et al. 1992; Rust 1990; Sakala 1987; Slesinger 1992. 8  See Holmes 2013, 83, 93, 96; Guthman and Brown 2015.

498    Tyler Doggett and Seth Holmes For the pressure to work day after day at such a pace and the anxiety about losing one’s job make for risky picking practices. Strawberry pickers work without gloves. Pesticide residue mixes with strawberry juice and stains their hands. If they eat anything, they eat it in the fields while picking, without washing their hands so as not to take time away from work, so as not to risk failing to pick the minimum weight. Information on the dangers of pesticides is sometimes given only in English though workers often do not speak English, sometimes given in inaudible Spanish though many workers do not speak Spanish (Holmes 2013, 173). And yet pesticides are something about which workers should be educated since long-​term exposure to chemicals can lead to serious health consequences for both workers and their families . . . [P]‌regnant women exposed to common agricultural pesticides produced children with diminished cognitive development and, in some cases, lower IQs. . . . Meanwhile, the pesticides heptachlor and lindane . . . have been linked to elevated rates of prostate cancers in farmworkers. Cancers of the lip, stomach, and prostate, as well as leukemia, non-​Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and multiple myeloma are found at such elevated rates among farmworkers that they are sometimes referred to as “agricultural cancers” (Mills, et  al (2009)). (McMillan 2012b, 44)

Work from the early 1990s suggests that between a third and a half of agricultural workers report conditions signaling pesticide exposure (Rust 1990; Slesinger 1992). There are 10,000‒20,000 diagnosed cases of pesticide poisoning in the United States annually (NIOSH 2015). Work from the early 2000s suggests that children born near farms are more likely to be stillborn or deformed, presumed due to pesticide exposure (Eskenazi et al. 1999; Frank 2004; Marks et al. 2010).9 As compensation for this risky, hard work, there is very low pay. There is no minimum wage for workers under age fourteen. For those older, there is effectively no guaranteed minimum wage (102; see, too, Bowe 2007, 84; Ehrenreich 2011, ch. 3; McMillan 2012b, part two). Pickers are paid by their output, by the volume of fruit they pick. They are legally guaranteed minimum wage so they are given a minimum weight to make their work worthwhile. Enough failures to meet the minimum—​as few as two—​can get them fired. On the one hand, there is pressure and encouragement to work in ways that can degrade the body and produce an increase in allostatic load. On the other hand, the law guarantees minimum wage for the many hours put in. Even so, Bowe reports the median annual income for a farmworker as $7,500 (Bowe 2007, 8). The State of Washington reports it between $8,000 and $9,000 (Holmes 2013). Bon Appétit (2011) puts it between $15,000 and $17,500. Tracie McMillan (2012) pegs

9  Risks involved in animal processing plants are detailed in Schlosser 2001; Pachirat 2011. Risks involved in getting to the United States—​injury and death by violence, heat stroke, dehydration, and snakes—​are detailed in Cornelius 2001; Doty 2011; Holmes 2012, 2013.

Food Labor Ethics   499 it at $19,000. How is it possible that pickers work so long at minimum wage and get so little money? For one, there is mis-​recording of their hours worked. In her fieldwork, McMillan picked garlic for 8.5 hours per day. The minimum wage where she worked was $8 per hour. Yet she took home $16—​effectively earning $1.80 per hour. To keep costs down, her farm credited her for working two hours at minimum wage (McMillan 2014; 2012b, 66, 75). Relatedly, a standard start and finish time might be entered on one’s time card, regardless of when one actually worked (Holmes 2013, 68). Also pushing wages down is routine mis-​recording of how much weight is picked (Bowe 2007, 19‒21; Holmes 2013, 70, 76; McMillan 2012b, 57). Checkers routinely round down the weight of produce picked instead of paying for the exact amount. These illicitly meager wages might then be garnished. Workers might be required to pay a “ride-​giver” to take them to work each day or have payment withheld for food or housing or bathing. Bowe (2007) details an example of wages being garnished for use of a cold-​water hose “shower.” Much of this is illegal and yet enforcement in the fields has always been rare and has [recently] shrunk further. . . . Federal investigations of agricultural workplaces dropped by 60 percent between 1986 and 2008, according to analysis of data from the Department of Labor by Oxfam and Farmworker Justice, a farmworker advocacy group. In 2008, inspectors visited 1,499 farms of the more than 2 million in operation nationwide. This is not just bad news for workers but for those [farmers] who play by the rules. By paying honest wages, they operate at a significant disadvantage compared to those who flout the law . . . Even when violations are found, they rarely cost employers much. . . . Across the country, penalties for underpaying workers are so minimal, and so unlikely to be levied, that there’s no deterrent effect, says Mark Heller, a leading farmworker advocate from Ohio’s agricultural belt. “If you cheat 1,000 workers a week,” he says, “you might have to pay $4,000 to one person who complains but in the meantime you save $100,000. It’s cheaper to violate the law than to follow the law.” (McMillan 2012a)

So while, as we indicated, an important new law in Washington mandates paid lunch and bathroom breaks, the mere existence of the law is insufficient for producing those breaks. It will be important to watch how effectively this law will be followed and enforced. Generally, the legal protections that are an important bulwark preventing pickers from being slaves are weak and weakly enforced: no explicitly protected collective bargaining in most states, no overtime, no right to days off, and no paid sick days. Smaller farms in many states are held to even lower standards.10 This both reflects and reinforces the fact 10 

Gray 2013, 49; for helpful overviews of the lack of legal protections, see Schell 2002; Bon Appétit 2011. See also Harrison and Getz’s (2015) work on small versus large farms.

500    Tyler Doggett and Seth Holmes that workers are at the bottom of the pecking order in places like western Washington or the Central Valley of California (Holmes 2013, 96). Here we will just mention two signs of farmworker positioning in the pecking order: housing and healthcare. Some workers live in a camp on-​site. In cases documented by Seth Holmes (2013), they pay no rent but the camp comprises 10 x 12 shacks (at times, confused as chicken coops). Some are insulated. Some are not. Those that are not are subject to dramatic fluctuations in temperature because the roofs are made of tin that makes the interior hot in the sun or cold in the night. (For more on this, see Gray 2013, 57; Holmes 2013, 47, 76.) Other farmworkers rent apartments. Researching, Holmes (2013) and his cohort rent a flophouse: three bedrooms, one bath for nineteen people. It is fetid, dirty, and in disrepair. This is not unusual. Don Villarejo and his colleagues report that almost half of all farmworkers live in overcrowded housing—​more than one person/​room—​and a full quarter live in severely overcrowded housing—​more than 1.5 persons/​room (cf. McMillan 2012, 42). This matters because a wide range of health risks are associated with [overcrowded] housing conditions of farm laborers and their families, including anxiety, depression, exposure to toxic agricultural chemicals . . . increased risk of infectious disease due to poor sanitary conditions, and increased risk of infectious disease due to crowded conditions. (Villarejo et al. 2010, viii; cf. Bon Appétit 2011, 21; McMillan 2012, 43)

Overcrowding increases stress that is, of course, itself unpleasant but also increases health risks and structural vulnerability (Holmes 2011; 2013, 97, 101; Quesada, Bourgois, and Hart 2011). Health risks are compounded by poor access to healthcare and obstacles to good treatment once that healthcare is accessed. Healthcare requires patients and doctors who are able to understand each other, but many hospitals do not offer doctors who speak Spanish or sufficient interpreters. Moreover, if a hospital has no Spanish interpreter, it has neither a Triqui nor Mixtec nor Zapotec interpreter, making speaking with non-​Spanish-​speaking migrant workers all but impossible (Holmes 2013, 142‒143). The norm in healthcare is to make it accessible. Having interpreters is a necessary condition for this. Finances are another barrier to accessibility. Despite the acute need for health services for farmworkers, only fifteen states offer workers’ compensation to this population. The federal migrant health program is estimated to reach less than 15% of migrants (Holmes 2013, 102). Nearly 80% of farmworkers lack health insurance. In the words of Kurt Organista: “Such low rates . . . are the result of a formidable array of structural, cultural, and legal barriers about which service providers need to be aware if they are to have any success serving farm workers” (2008, 108‒109).11

11 

For an account of healthcare for slaughterhouse workers, see Schlosser 2001. For detailed discussion of healthcare for Mexican migrant farmworkers, see Holmes 2007, 2012.

Food Labor Ethics   501

Overview of Ethical Issues So much for what conditions for fieldworkers are like. These conditions raise a range of ethical issues. Some are about individuals: Is it permissible for employers to treat workers in various ways? If not permissible, why not? Is it bad for employers to treat workers that way? Unjust? Coercive? Exploitative? If so, how so? Then there are issues where it is unclear how much power individual persons have in the situation but where wrong—​or something otherwise morally objectionable—​seems to be done all the same: Is it distributively just that workers’ lives go so harshly? That they go so much more harshly than their employers’? That they go so much more harshly than the lives of pickers who are born in the United States? Or go so much more harshly than they would under alternative labor regimes? If any of these is a background injustice, who perpetrates it and who is responsible to remedy it? Relatedly, if treating workers in certain ways is wrong or unjust, is it permissible to buy products produced by such wrongful treatment? If treating certain workers in certain ways is wrong or unjust or coercive, who—​or what—​is responsible for that treatment? This essay is an overview. No issue can be dealt with in full depth. For a deeper dive into one issue in food work, see Sabine Tsuruda’s essay in this volume. Also, our overview is not panoptic. Some issues are not considered fully here because they are so broad—​for example, the political economic injustice of some having so much while others have so little. Others are left out because they are so straightforward—​whether it is morally objectionable to withhold payment just because you can.

Pain and Suffering Harm is clearly inflicted on workers in the form of physical and psychological suffering:12 knee pain, gastritis, anxiety, and so on. Picking is “pure torture” (Holmes 2013, 74) and not to be confused with the soreness someone might feel after a day’s gardening. An interesting ethical issue that we do not have space to discuss arises from the fact that people might misunderstand pickers’ work conditions by generalizing from their own experiences in gardens or as teenage farmworkers (Holmes 2013, 72). The infliction of such suffering is pro tanto wrong. There is clearly something morally objectionable about the infliction of such intense suffering. It crowds out other parts of 12 

By suffering, we mean to indicate the physical, emotional, and social pain experienced by people in circumstances of direct, structural, and symbolic violence (Scheper-​Hughes and Bourgois 2003). We do not mean to imply a universal human that erases distinction or uniqueness, rather we seek to acknowledge full, three-​dimensionality in all its aspects (including what many call agency) and different local contexts, ontologies, and epistemologies.

502    Tyler Doggett and Seth Holmes life out of the fields. Out of the fields in the short term, workers, among other things, manage pain. And note that the suffering is not limited to short-​term effects of hard work. It is not like suffering from painful medical procedures with no long-​term harmful side-​effects. On the contrary, picking produces short-​term suffering and also durable pain and long-​ term decay. As we noted, farmworkers have higher than average rates of kidney and liver defects, higher than average rates of assorted cancers. Durable, chronic pain is tagged in Anna Case and Angus Deaton (2015) as a driver of suicide. Hope Tiesman et al. (2015) rate farming as the job with the second-​highest suicide rate in the United States. Who proximately inflicts the suffering is clear: field bosses. Who ultimately inflicts it and who is morally responsible or blameworthy for such infliction are less clear. Take knee pain, a common affliction proximately caused by the fact that picking strawberries requires folding one’s body over, repeatedly pivoting, making small, rapid movement for hours each day, six or seven days per week. Abelino, a picker profiled by Holmes (2013), suffers this pain because of this style of picking. What proximately causes him to pick this way were the demands of his field bosses. Yet these people, like Abelino, are just following orders. The field bosses just follow orders of their managers who, in turn, follow the orders of farm executives who, to some extent, are subject to the demands of a consumer collective or individuals comprising it or the demands of shareholders or of the functioning of the prevailing economic system more broadly. Martin (2015) argues that responsibility for the treatment of factory-​farmed animals accrues to consumers even more than to farmworkers or even farm owners. If she is right, similar points apply to responsibility for the treatment of workers. It is unclear which of these people—​field bosses, managers, farm executives, shareholders, consumers, policymakers organizing the economic system and excluding farmworkers from legal labor protections—​should be thought of as primarily responsible for Abelino’s suffering. It could be more than one. The causal origins of Abelino’s knee pain trace not only to supervisors in the fields, farm owners, and strawberry consumers but also to politicians and educators on both sides of the border. As Iris Marion Young (2004) stresses with regard to responsibility for sweatshop conditions, there are types of responsibility that are not causal. There are, to boot, candidates for responsibility that are not persons: economic systems and social and cultural forces. Because of various economic policies and because of local exclusionary perceptions and practices, Abelino had vanishingly few opportunities for employment. Strawberry picking, the proximate cause of his pain, was best of the bunch available to him (Holmes 2013, 94; cf. Holmes 2011).

Exploitation This suggests that Abelino was exploited into taking this position. There is philosophical disagreement about the nature of exploitation, but there is some consensus that it requires someone (or something) getting something from

Food Labor Ethics   503 someone else when and because the latter was vulnerable, “taking advantage” of that vulnerability. Exploitation might, too, require harming the latter or treating her or him as a tool. It might require unfair acquisition of benefit. There is disagreement about each of these. But there is less disagreement that exploitation involves getting something from someone when and because that person is vulnerable and that manifests in the fields. Farmworkers are a vulnerable population, having few options for work (Holmes 2011, 2013; Quesada et al. 2011). Indigenous Mexicans are an especially vulnerable population (Mines and Nichols 2009). Because they are vulnerable, they can be treated in ways that seem morally objectionable. As a border patrol agent describing migrant workers says: You know these workers are so vulnerable. They’re housed miles from civilization with no telephones or cards. Whatever they are told they’re gonna do. . . . They’re controllable.13

As Margaret Gray writes, “[Farm bosses] who saw themselves as offering an escape from third world poverty . . . could not avoid taking advantage of workers’ undocumented legal status to tighten their control over them” ( 2013, 96). When workers are mistreated by having their hours miscounted or not being paid overtime, when they are pressured into not joining unions, when they are offered illegally shoddy housing, when they are given risky jobs for very little compensation, these are plausibly instances of exploitation: workers are mistreated and mistreated because they are vulnerable in certain ways—​as unauthorized immigrants, as people who are not fluent in English, as working-​class people, and as racialized workers, they either lack legal recourse or are not functionally able to access that recourse. Bosses,14 landlords, and even farm apparatchiks exploit. But then there are further questions about what else exploits the farmworkers: in many understandings, the system of capitalism clearly exploits. Does the state as well? What does treatment of farmworkers tell us about which things can exploit? Also, the treatment of workers might be systematically exploitative—​and exploitative along racial or gender and immigration status lines—​and that is oppressive, as argued by Young (1990). This treatment raises a series of questions: When is exploitation morally problematic? Is it possible to exploit a worker while also making that worker better off? If so, need such exploitation be morally objectionable? We have not argued for it fully here, but our view is that farmworkers are clearly exploited and that this exploitation is clearly morally objectionable and so if those workers are better off overall as a result of that treatment, this shows that exploitation need 13  Bowe 2007, 13; the book is largely about worker exploitation; cf. Holmes 2013, 56; and, for slaughterhouse exploitation, Schlosser 2001, 162. 14  For some discussion of management, see Gray 2013; Holmes 2013; Jackall 2010.

504    Tyler Doggett and Seth Holmes not involve any worsening-​off to be problematic. Yet this raises a question of why is exploitation morally problematic. Is exploitation problematic because it harms? Because it harms and treats victim unfairly? Because it involves benefiting from pro tanto wrongdoing? All of the above?15

Treating as a Tool In order for migrants to be exploited, some accounts imply, migrants must be treated as tools. Yet if they are treated as tools, this might itself be morally problematic regardless of its connection to exploitation. Indeed, the language of being treated as a tool or used—​ we treat the two synonymously—​recurs in literature on food workers. A doctor who treats indigenous Mexican farmworkers says: I see an awful lot of people just wearing out. They have been used and abused and worked physically harder than anybody should be expected to work for that number of years . . .  . In their early forties they have the arthritis of a seventy year old and they are not getting better. (Quoted in Holmes 2011, 4)

This recalls a chilling portion of Eric Schlosser’s book Fast Food Nation, an interview with Kenny Dobbins, a broken-​down slaughterhouse worker: “They [the slaughterhouse bosses] used me to the point where I had no body parts left to give,” Kenny said, struggling to maintain his composure. “Then they just tossed me into the trash can.” Once strong and powerfully built, he now walks with difficulty, tires easily, and feels useless, as though his life were over. He is forty-​six years old. (2001, 190)

Schlosser reveals that these body parts have something like prices:  you might get $36,000 in workers’ compensation for losing an arm, $3,000 for a finger, $2,000 for “disfigurement,” and so on (Schlosser 2001, 185). Julie Guthman critiques the ways workers are treated as subsidies: Healthy fresh fruits and vegetables, celebrated by the contemporary food movement and health professionals alike, are also artificially cheap, subsidized not by federal payments, but by the bodies of those who cultivate and harvest them. (2014, 331) 15 

Two helpful overviews of exploitation are Sample 2003 and Wertheimer 1996.

Food Labor Ethics   505 The suggestion is that workers are tools or machines to be used to pick strawberries, chop up carcasses, whatever. They are treated as merely these things, what Upton Sinclair calls “cogs in the great . . . machine.”16 The “merely” is important. When someone orders a coffee from a barista, it might be that they treat that person as a tool to getting that coffee but perhaps not merely as a tool. The philosophical literature on this is complicated, but there is some consensus that when a worker is treated merely as a tool, that worker is seen as lacking autonomy, as fungible, as property, as simply a way to benefit their bosses. Tools—​cogs, screwdrivers, coffeemakers—​are understood to lack feelings and wants and so understood to lack feelings and wants that need respecting. One’s treatment of a barista should (though may not) meet few of these conditions. In the fields, being treated merely as a tool, being used, manifests in being worked hard, in not having breaks, in lax treatment under the law (and then lax enforcement of those laws, as if the laws protecting farmworkers are not worth enforcing). On various moral theories, there is something suspect about treating people merely as tools though what, exactly, is suspect varies from theory to theory. As we said, it could be that treating someone merely as a tool is suspect because of its contribution to exploitation and exploitation is objectionable. It could be that treating someone merely as a tool manifests an objectionable attitude on the part of the user and is wrong because of that. Instead, it could be that the mechanics of treating someone merely as a tool—​regardless of the attitudes of the user—​are themselves objectionable. Or it could be that treating someone merely as a tool is objectionable purely because of its effects on the workers. Or it could be objectionable for all of these reasons or more. One important question in food work is what the right account is of what treating someone merely as a tool is. Others are when and why it is objectionable. Finally, who or what treats farmworkers merely as tools and who or what is complicit in that treatment? Immediate supervisors like checkers or field bosses? Higher-​ups on the farm? Consumers? Architects of trade agreements that produce the current system of migration? People who vote for those agreements? We suggest all of these in different ways.17

Treating as an Animal or a Child As workers are sometimes treated as tools, they are also “treated . . . as inferiors, sometimes as animals” (Holmes 2013, 36), falling along what has been called a hierarchy of 16 

Sinclair 1906: 92. That slaughterhouse workers are tools or simple machines is a theme of Pachirat 2011, Schlosser 2001, and Striffler 2005. That fieldworkers are tools is a theme of Bowe (2007) and Estabrook (2011). During her time in the fields, McMillan (2012b, 74) starts to self-​conceive as a tool. 17  Two foundational pieces on treating humans as tools are Kant 2012 and Marx 1844. Nussbaum 1995 and Langton 2009a are more recent ways into the topic.

506    Tyler Doggett and Seth Holmes animacy by Chen (2012).18 A worker interviewed by Bowe says she was “treated like a dog” (2007, 42). Richard Street’s history of California farmworkers entitled Beasts of the Fields derives its name from a newspaper claim in 1888 that Chinese migrant workers “could be treated like beasts of the field, and like them be removed by their drivers or herders when no longer needed” (2004, xxx). Gray quotes a worker saying he is treated as less than a dog (2013, 44). The insults used for Triqui workers are those used for dogs or small children: “dirty” (67) or “untrustworthy” (69). This treatment as animal or child also manifests in hospitals that assign a low priority or lack the necessary sensitivity and cultural knowledge to understand what non-​English-​speaking workers go through (Holmes 2013, 151). Treatment as an animal manifests in the way workers are housed. Gray (2013) highlights farm boss “paternalism,” wherein workers are treated as children to be controlled by parents and whose lives are open to those ersatz parents (see esp. 53‒61). As Gray brings up, even on “good” farms the amount of control that owners have over workers is quite large. Because some of them have good relationships with their workers, employers might feel emboldened to control which school workers send their kids to, which doctor to see, and so on. Farmworkers are, like pets or children, micromanaged and “dominated” by others in the useful term of Bourdieu (2000, 2001) and Pettit (1997). As with treating workers as tools, on various moral theories, there is something morally suspect about treating adults as children or animals though what, exactly, is suspect varies from theory to theory. It could be that treating someone merely as a child or animal is suspect because it is paternalistic, and paternalism is objectionable. (For more on food and paternalism, see Sarah Conly’s and Seana Shiffrin’s essays, in this volume.) It could be that treating someone as a child or animal manifests an objectionable attitude19 and is wrong because of that. Or it could be that treating someone merely as a child or animal is objectionable because of the control it involves and control it produces. Or it could be objectionably for all of these reasons or more. As with treating people like tools, treating them as children or animals raises a series of questions: What is it to treat an adult as a child or animal? When and why is it objectionable? Who or what treats farmworkers merely as children or animals? Who or what is complicit in that treatment? Immediate supervisors like checkers or field bosses? Higher-​ups on the farm? Community members? Consumers? Architects of trade agreements that produce the current system of migration? People who vote for 18 

This is, again, redolent of treatment of slaughterhouse workers. That people are treated like animals, unruly children, or things to be controlled is a theme of Pachirat 2011 and Schlosser 2001. Treatment as an (irresponsible) child is something Ehrenreich (2011) experiences working at Wal-​Mart and that Buford (2006) experiences in various restaurants. 19  Whether treated as tools or animals or children, it is clear that farmworkers often are not treated respectfully. Indeed, even on small, “idyllic” farms, Margaret Gray says, “Workers on about one-​third of the farms I surveyed . . . reported that they were not treated respectfully (2013, 44; for more on the relations between farm size and quality of work, see Harrison and Getz 2015). CIRS (2008) surveyed California farmworkers and found respectful treatment to be the most-​valued condition, above compensation and safety.

Food Labor Ethics   507 those agreements? Societies stratified by race, class and immigration status? Individuals within those societies who live within such stratification? Again, we suggest all of these things in different ways.20

Racism, Sexism, Classism The treating of someone as a tool or as a child or as an animal is the treatment of a particular group of people: poor, primarily Latin American, migrant workers. The treatment of these workers is raced and classed (and often gendered and “illegalized,” see Holmes 2013; Willen 2012). There are multiple layers of racism affecting farmwork, from individual interpersonal to institutional to structural (see also Jones 2000). Interpersonal racism can be seen in the comments of field supervisors calling farmworkers such things as “indios estupidos” or “Oaxacos” (a deliberate mispronunciation of “Oaxaqueños” with an explicit derogatory meaning) (Holmes 2013; Jones 2000). Institutional racism can be seen in the ways in which indigenous Mexican farmworkers are not promoted to processing or other jobs as often as mestizo (non-​indigenous) Mexicans based on many, relatively small and uncoordinated decisions and policies that are not explicitly orchestrated by any one person or group on the farm (Holmes 2013; Jones 2000). Another example of institutional racism could be the lack of translators in hospitals and clinics. Structural racism can be seen in the ethnic hierarchies in society at large that lead to differential access on a broad level to political power and economic stability that affect indigenous Mexican immigrants significantly and that have historically produced a racialized agricultural workforce in California (Brown and Getz 2011; Holmes 2013; Metzl and Roberts 2014; cf. Young 1990 on gendered divisions of labor). Labor laws themselves were borne of structural racism. Gray writes: The exemption of agricultural workers from labor laws dates to an era when the southern Democrats’ lock on national electoral politics was unassailable, resulting in white supremacist politics that assured the perpetuation of a low-​wage, southern, black work force. (2013, 49)

Structural racism is a form of “structural violence” (Scheper-​Hughes and Bourgois 2003) and is of a piece with structural violence manifested as social inequalities and hierarchies among categories of class, gender, and race. It is violence committed by configurations of social inequalities that, in the end, hurts (Holmes 2013, 43, 89; cf. Holmes 2007, 2012). It is violence because it is the infliction of physical harm through force. It is structural because the infliction results from the way one food system—​a “structure”—​ is set up (Farmer 1996) rather than from an attack of one or more persons on another. 20 

For entries into work on treating adults as animals or children, see Conly 2012; Dworkin 1972; Korsgaard 2015.

508    Tyler Doggett and Seth Holmes Of course, some race-​, gender-​, and class-​based violence in the fields is more direct and physical: Irma Morales Waugh (2010) surveyed 150 Mexican and Mexican American female fieldworkers in California’s Central Valley. Eighty percent reported being sexually harassed (McMillan 2012b, 60). Andres Cediel (2013) gives an account of sexual assault in farmwork.21 So there is objectification based on race or gender or class. There is hostility based on those things. There is what Lawrence Blum (2002) calls “inferiorization” based on them. One ethical issue is to figure out which aspects of these are wrong. Another is to figure out whether there are aspects in addition to objectification, hostility, and inferiorization themselves that are wrong or that support the objectionable racism, sexism, and classism. At any rate, objectification, hostility, and inferiorization issue from and then help to support various injustices—​something like a caste system out of the workplace, a compartmentalization in the workplace, and so on—​and products of injustice and supports for injustice are themselves objectionable.22

Coercion What is worse, participation in this labor system seems not to be the result of free, informed choice on the part of workers. Consider this recurrent note in Holmes’s work on indigenous migrant labor. He writes that Triqui laborers understood [migration] as something that they were forced into. [It was] not something where they . . . weighed pros and cons or all those things that we tend to assume about migration. Even academics who do migration studies often write about the push and pull factors and the way that immigrants weigh those factors and then make a choice to immigrate at a certain point. But the Triqui people . . . none of them ever talked about weighing pros and cons or making a decision. The only decision they ever talked about was, “Who’s going to migrate?” because every family in their home village had at least one or two or three people in the U.S., working and sending money back . . . the Triqui people weren’t talking about NAFTA so much. They were just talking about, “We can’t sell our corn, and there are no jobs here, and we have to go get jobs, so we’re going to leave our land 21  In food work, sexual harassment is not a problem limited to the fields. For statistics on sexual harassment and assault in restaurants, see ROC United 2012; Tahmincioglu 2011. When she works in a restaurant, McMillan herself is repeatedly sexually harassed and then sexually assaulted at a staff party. Saru Jayaraman details several similar cases and reports that “in 2011, 37% of the sexual harassment complaints received by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission were filed by women restaurant workers, even though only 7% of women in the United States work in restaurants” (2013, 142). Eric Schlosser (2001) details slaughterhouse sexual harassment. 22  Some recent entries into the literature on discrimination based on race, gender, or class are Alkon and Agyeman 2011, Blum 2002, Lippert-​Rasmussen 2014, and Young 1990.

Food Labor Ethics   509 here and leave our farms here to go and work on farms up there.” (McMillan 2013; cf. Holmes 2013, 17‒18, 21, 91)23

What is more, there are ways in which the political and economic system coerces not only subsistence farmers in southern Mexico to migrate (see also Holmes and Castaneda 2016; Yarris and Castaneda 2015) but also, in different ways, impinges on growers themselves (Holmes 2013, 180). The language in these works is the language of coercion either physical (involving the laying on of hands) or volitional (operating directly on the will). Although Holmes shows in other places how growers, managers, and supervisors have some range of decision, and, therefore responsibility, their range of decision-​making possibilities is enabled, encouraged, fostered, inflected, and limited by economic and political structures. Thus, there is significant coercion in the midst of some leeway within multiple levels of responsibility. Farmworker organizations calling for local, state, federal, and international change make these multiple levels of responsibility clear, as well. To coerce is to, in some sense, force someone to do something they, in some sense, prefer not to do. But in which senses? There is a vast philosophical literature about this, focusing on the nature of coercion, which types of actions can be coercive (threats, offers?) and which types of things can coerce (individuals, governments, economic systems?). There is consensus, though, that coercing someone is pro tanto wrong and that being coerced into something lessens one’s moral responsibility for it (Pallikkathayil [2011] connects these two.) There is consensus, too, that something morally objectionable about food work is the coercion involved. Yet something striking about the coercion of farmworkers and their immediate employers—​and this is especially striking with migrant workers—​is that apparently coercive force comes from trade agreements or economic systems. For example, Triqui people are apparently coerced into leaving Oaxaca, but there is no single human agent who coerces (though there are humans involved in multiple levels of decisions in these processes). There are other apparent cases of coercion that involve agents: apparently coercive pressure to take certain housing or to pick at a furious rate. Which happenings in the field are coerced? Which, by contrast, are merely instances of hard-​nosed but fair bargaining? (Could there be hard-​nosed but fair bargaining between persons of greatly unequal power?) Who or what does the coercing? If by something other than a person, that constrains philosophical accounts of coercion: they should not imply that only persons can coerce. Is the fact that Triqui families have no good option for work in Oaxaca sufficient to show that they are coerced into leaving? If so, why? If farmworkers are coerced into various actions, what does this show about their responsibility for them or for actions that follow from the coerced actions?24

23 

24 

Cf. Bowe 2007, 11; Holmes 2013, 21, 17‒18. For entries into work on coercion, see Anderson 2015; Pallikkathayil 2011; Wertheimer 1987.

510    Tyler Doggett and Seth Holmes

Immigration Ethics Recent estimates have it that nearly 81% of agricultural workers in the United States are immigrants from another country, 95% of whom were born in Mexico and more than half of whom are unauthorized immigrants (see Frank et al. 2004; Kandula et al. 2004; for what happens when such unauthorized immigrants are not allowed to work, see Powell 2012). Two levels in which a continuum of coercion is apparent in immigration are, first, the question of whether or not to immigrate and, second, the questions of how to immigrate. Despite the ways in which politicians and even many scholars speak and write about immigration, many immigrant farmworkers indicate that they do not experience immigration as a choice or at least clearly not a free choice. There are clear ways in which economic inequalities significantly influenced by policies and broad economic systems push many people to leave their home countries (most commonly Mexico) and work on farms in the United States (for an overview, see Yarris and Castaneda 2015). This level of coercion is seen clearly in the statements of farmworkers already adduced. One cluster of issues about immigration surrounds the justice of a system that coerces migration and the justice of laws that forbid migration (Burawoy 1976). Is it unjust that, through no fault of their own but through the fault of public policy, Triqui people need to migrate for work (whereas their bosses do not)? What are the moral objections to public policy that has facilitated or necessitated this migration? What are the moral objections to the migration producing and reinforcing a system in which some have so much and others have so little through no fault of their own? This raises a further series of important issues about government complicity and voter complicity.25 Another cluster of issues about immigration surrounds the mechanics of migration into the United States: dangerous border towns, hundreds of annual deaths due to heat stroke, dehydration, and violence that are partially due to knowing decisions of Border Patrol leadership,26 exploitative treatment at the hands of some coyotes (though some coyotes are experienced as protectors) or people who pretend to be coyotes and others who facilitate crossing or outright kidnap border-​crossing hopefuls.27 Unauthorized status is understood by many to increase detrimental allostatic load due to fear of apprehension and traumatic experiences crossing the US‒Mexico border (McGuire and Georges 2003). Another level on which significant coercion is apparent involves the means by which one immigrates.28

25 

For some recent treatments of complicity, see Kutz 2000; Lepora and Goodin 2013; Martin 2015. Holmes 2013, 92. See, too, McMillan 2013. 27  Rampell 2009; Daily Mail 2014. 28  For some introductions to immigration ethics, see Carens 2013; Wellman and Cole 2011. 26 

Food Labor Ethics   511

What Should Be Done in Response to This Morally Bad Situation? And Why Is This a Complex Question? Some issues discussed here are international issues. Some are national issues. Others are local issues. Still others are interpersonal. Some issues are easy (e.g., some farms falsify how long their workers work).29 This is easy in two ways: first, it is clear what is being done is morally wrong; second, it is clear what should be done and doing it is straightforward. This is not always the case. Some treatment that might, at first, look morally wrong is not, on closer inspection, wrong. Closer inspection reveals a context that renders that treatment permissible. For example, two people punching each other might seem morally wrong, but be permissible when closer inspection reveals the fighters are boxers sparring for consensual fun. The boxing example is useful because, as we said, typically, it is morally wrong to inflict suffering on others, but it is generally considered permissible in certain cases. Boxing matches are typically such cases as boxers agree to the risk of harm. Consider the frameworks through which the treatment of farmworkers is at times considered morally permissible: some might consider it permissible to inflict various costs on them because they are understood to have freely chosen that work and permissible to impose costs on people that they might freely agree to.30 There are two questions here:  Do workers consent to their treatment—​is simply repeatedly showing up for work consent? If so, does this consent render treatment permissible? We follow Wertheimer (2003) in assuming that consent is transformative—​something that makes treatment go from impermissible to permissible—​only if (a) informed about risks, benefits, and alternatives and (b) not coerced. There are clearly cases in the fields in which consent is not informed and so (a) is not satisfied:  migrant farmworkers do not give informed consent to pesticide risks, since those risks are not explained in any detail in a language that is well-​understood

29 

This is morally objectionable as well as illegal. Yet illegal treatment of food workers is common. Paul Thompson writes, “A 2009 report found that roughly 23% of grocery stores and 18% of restaurants in the U.S. violate labor or employment regulations” (2015, 57; cites Bernhardt et al. 2009). For illegality in slaughterhouses, see Schlosser 2001; Pachirat 2011. 30  Consent might matter in other way: what looks like exploitation or treating as a tool might not be. It might be that exploitation requires a lack of consent or that treating as a tool requires a lack of consent.

512    Tyler Doggett and Seth Holmes by workers.31 (This is one way in which they are treated like small children or animals, beings whom we sometimes deceive without moral qualms.) There are also clearly cases in which it is plausible that (a) is satisfied and workers are informed about those aspects. They know that the work will be long, monotonous, and painful. They know that the work has produced long-​term maladies in co-​workers. Their repeatedly showing up for this work could be considered a form of informed consent to related conditions. Earlier, we discussed whether Triqui workers are coerced into taking various positions. If so, this is morally objectionable in itself—​coercing of morally responsible agents is objectionable—​but it is also significant since if they are coerced, then their consent is not transformative any more than your consent is when you give your wallet to a mugger who will kill you if you do not do so. If so, condition (b) for transformative consent is not met. While the consent given to some suffering in the field—​knee pain, back pain—​seems to us informed and clear-​headed, it is also arguably coerced: workers have relatively little choice of job. This lack of choice does not issue from some prior free choice. It does not issue from some state of nature. Rather, it issues from a structure of society, economy, and government, a structure that, for example, Triqui migrant workers have relatively little role in constructing or choosing, though there are clearly ways in which Triqui people are active in negotiating and organizing in relation to this reality. It is a hard question to what extent there is transformative consent here. In many ways, it appears plainly coerced. Because of this, it is questionable that the physical suffering inflicted on Triqui farmworkers is permissible. This issue of questionable permissibility crops up in farm work in general, in slaughterhouses, and in restaurants. In each of these areas of food work, it is reasonable to argue that treatment should be changed in many of the specific areas pointed out so far.

What Are the Alternatives to Current Treatment of Workers? Why Is the Issue of Whether Certain Treatment Is Morally Objectionable Complex? Physical suffering and monotony are endemic to this sort of repetitive work. Workers could be better compensated for this, which would increase the price of food in ways

31  McMillan reports that she signed a contract saying she had taken a food safety training course that she had not taken. Everyone she worked with signed on, too (2012b, 73). In his fieldwork, Holmes signed a form that stated he and his co-​workers would not organize. They signed forms all in English that no one except for Holmes could easily read.

Food Labor Ethics   513 that would require changes in consumer habits and in societal values in the United States (one of the countries in which residents pay very little per capita relatively for their fruits and vegetables). Similar remarks apply to shortening worker hours or improving worker housing. Indeed, people in the United States would need to start valuing more (including in practice) their food and the laborers who provide that food. The relatively low value currently conceived of for food work in the United States can be seen in the legal category of farm labor as “unskilled” or “low skilled” despite research indicating directly otherwise (Holmes 2013, 184). As Holmes writes: Over the course of my fieldwork, many of my friends and family who visited me in the labor camp quickly blamed the farm management for the poor living and working conditions of berry pickers. They automatically assumed that the growers could easily rectify the situation. That supposition is supported by other writings on farmworkers, many of which describe the details of pickers’ lives but leave out the experience of growers. . . . The stark reality and precarious future of the farm serve as reminders that the situation is more complex. The corporatization of US agriculture and the growth of international free markets . . . many of the most powerful inputs into the suffering of farmworkers are structural, not willed by individual agents. (2013, 52)

Partly generating the problems of low pay and rank housing are structural features—​ laws, economic systems, patterns of xenophobic treatment of poor foreigners—​that farm bosses did not cause or originate. Farm bosses cannot easily change such large, structural features on their own. At the same time, aspects of these working and living conditions issue clearly from decisions made by farm owners and bosses such that there clearly is a layer of responsibility at the level of the owners and bosses and another at the level of political and economic structures and all of us located within and complicit with them. Likewise, while it is straightforward to stop using racial slurs, and people who use them are responsible for doing so, other sorts of racism (e.g., a lack of indigenous language translators in hospitals) are built into the structures of things in a way that makes that racism more complex, though very important, to change. The difficulty in improving various conditions matters because while it is clear that certain aspects of farmworker jobs are morally objectionable, some people argue that they are permissible because those conditions are the best realistic conditions for those workers, that a system in which there was less suffering is simply too far-​off in social and political space. For some, that will be sufficient to show that conditions in the field (and in hospitals, with regard to housing, etc.) might be considered permissible.32 Yet we should be careful about assuming conditions are immutable. In food work, there are important case studies in improvement: United Farm Workers, Pineros Campesinos Unidos contract farms, a lawsuit by Familias Unidas por la Justicia changing piece rate payment in Washington State, Coalition of Immokolee Workers producing contracts 32 

Two exemplars: Brennan and Jaworski 2015; Krugman 1997.

514    Tyler Doggett and Seth Holmes for better farmworker payment at the level of grocery chains, Equitable Food Initiative Labels (though some organizations argue this should have gone further) linked to specific products, and the work of Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (ROC) and Food Chain Workers Alliance. It is important for consumers to understand how these actions succeed and what they attain over different time frames. And it is important for consumers, voters, and politicians, with different kinds of responsibility for and complicity with the treatment of food chain workers, to support such important change.

Conclusion There are all sorts of bad jobs. There is a comic literary genre of stultifyingly boring, coercive, exploitative office work. There is a comic literary genre of pointless, life-​sucking, exploitative, coercive academic work. There is a genre of exposés of furious, monotonous, stupidifying work from warehouses to bureaucracies. We have focused on food workers and somewhat more narrowly on farmworkers in the United States, most of them immigrants from Mexico and some of them native people. Their work is bad in various ways. Their work is painful. They are exploited and coerced into performing it. They are commonly treated like machines or animals or children. They are systematically treated sexistly, racistly, classistly, and xenophobically. Their having only these jobs reflects racist segmentation of work. In part because of this, they lack mobility and control over their jobs and much of their life outside of their jobs. It could be that this badness is something like an organic unity—​worse than the sum of its parts.33 At the same time, it is important to remember the many ways in which these people work to create “inhabitable spaces of welcome” for themselves, their families, and others (Willen 2014), including the ways in which they produce important change through organizing and advocacy. The food system comprises a great diversity of workers, some of whose conditions are very different from native Mexican immigrant pickers, some of whose conditions are very similar, and many of whose conditions share some commonalities. The discussion here straightforwardly has ethical implications for workers on small, family farms or on large, corporate farms, for workers in slaughterhouses, in grocery stores, and in restaurants. It straightforwardly has implications for cases that have nothing to do with food: migrant laborers building soccer stadiums in Qatar, migrant sweatshop workers in Moscow.34 Like Triqui farmworkers, these workers are coerced, exploited, treated as

33 

Some loci classici of organic unity discussions—​the name comes from G. E. Moore—​are Bourgois 1988, Crenshaw 1989, and Moore 1994. For discussion of Crenshaw’s work with respect to the food movement, see Jeff Sebo’s contribution to this volume. 34  Iris Marion Young’s description of sweatshop work is uncannily like descriptions of food work: The vast majority of garment workers worldwide are women . . . who are readily accessible and relatively pliant from the employers’ point of view. Shifts are commonly at least ten hours, six days a week, and forced overtime is common. Factories usually have strict rules, which often

Food Labor Ethics   515 machines or as animals, and made to suffer. It is clear that some of these workers—​like some farmworkers in the United States—​are enslaved. There are implications, too, for food work in the home, but these are less straightforward. What should be changed about these jobs and about food work in particular? Most obviously, improvements in food work conditions will also require better laws, including more fair trade policies and practices and better worker protections, as well as, crucially, better enforcement of these laws. As citizens, residents, voters, and immigrants, we can push for these. As consumers, we can push against mistreatment of farmworkers by supporting farms that do not mistreat and withhold support from those that do. As friends, family, or community members, we can push against unequal narratives or unfair representations that justify mistreatment (symbolic violence in the words of Bourdieu [2000]). Finally and importantly, we can seek ways to support the work of food chain worker organizations as they work toward a better, more equal future.35

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518    Tyler Doggett and Seth Holmes Marks, A. R., K. Harley, A. Bradman, K. Kogut, D. B. Barr, C. Johnson, and B. Eskenazi. 2010. “Organophosphate Pesticide Exposure and Attention in Young Mexican-​American Children: The CHAMACOS Study.” Environmental Health Perspectives 118:1768–​1774. Marosi, Richard. 2014. “Product of Mexico.” Los Angeles Times, December 7. http://​graphics. latimes.com/​product-​of-​mexico-​camps/​. Martin, Adrienne. 2015. “Factory Farming and Consumer Complicity.” In Chignell et al. (2015). Marx, Karl. 1844. “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts.” https://​www.marxists.org/​ archive/​marx/​works/​1844/​manuscripts/​labour.htm. McGuire, S., and J. Georges. 2003. “Undocumentedness and Liminality as Health Variables.” Advances in Nursing Science 26:185‒196. McMillan, Tracie. 2012a. “As Common as Dirt.” American Prospect, September 10. http://​traciemcmillan.com/​wp-​content/​uploads/​2012/​09/​McMillan_​Prospect_​AsCommonAsDirt_​ 09112012.pdf. —​—​—​. 2012b. The American Way of Eating. New York: Scribner. —​—​—​. 2013. “Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: The Human Cost of American Agriculture.” Civil Eats. http://​traciemcmillan.com/​articles/​fresh-​fruit-​broken-​bodies-​the-​human-​cost-​of-​ american-​agriculture/​. —​—​—​. 2014. “What I Learned in the Garlic Fields.” Public lecture. http://​traciemcmillan.com/​ blog/​what-​i-​learned-​in-​the-​garlic-​fields/​. McWilliams, Carey. 1939. Factories in the Fields. Boston: Little, Brown. Metzl, J.  M., and D.  E. Roberts. 2014. “Structural Competency Meets Structural Racism.” Virtual Mentor 16:674–​690. Mills, Paul, Jennifer Dodge, and Richard Yang. 2009. “Cancer in Migrant and Seasonal Hired Farm Workers.” Journal of Agromedicine 14:185–​191. Mines, Rick, and Sandy Nichols. 2009. “Final Report of the Indigenous Farmworker Study.” http://​www.indigenousfarmworkers.org. Minkoff-​ Zern, L.-​ A. 2014. “Challenging the Agrarian Imaginary:  Farmworker-​ led Food Movements and the Potential for Farm Labor Justice.” Human Geography 7(1). http://​www. hugeog.com/​index.php/​component/​content/​article?id=303:v7n1-​minkoffzern. Mintz, Sidney. 1985. Sweetness and Power. New York: Viking. Mobed, K., E. Gold, and M. Schenker. 1992. “Occupational Health Problems among Migrant and Seasonal Farm Workers.” West J Med 157:367–​385. Moore, G. E. 1994. Principia Ethica. Revised ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Morales Waugh, Irma. 2010. “Examining the Sexual Harassment Experiences of Mexican Immigrant Farmworking Women.” Violence Against Women 16:237–​261. Morduch, Jonathan, and Rachel Schneider. 2016. “The Hidden Lives of America’s Poor and Middle Class.” Stanford Social Innovation Review. http://​ssir.org/​articles/​entry/​the_​hidden_​ lives_​of_​americas_​poor_​and_​middle_​class. Nahmias, Rick, ed. 2008. The Migrant Project. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH). 2015. “Pesticide Illness and Injury Surveillance.” https://​www.cdc.gov/​niosh/​topics/​pesticides/​. Nussbaum, Martha. 1995. “Objectification.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 24:249–​291. O’Neill, Onora. 1985. “Between Consenting Adults.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 14:252–​277. Organista, Kurt. 2008. “The Plight and Fight of Migrant Farm Workers in the United States.” In The Migrant Project, edited by Rick Nahmias, 103‒114. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Pachirat, Timothy. 2011. Every Twelve Seconds. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

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chapter 23

T he Moral Bu rde ns of Tem p orary Fa rmwork Sabine Tsuruda

Introduction Employers in wealthy countries seem to have difficulty attracting enough domestic workers to perform farmwork, either because wages are too low or the work is simply too unpleasant.1 Farmwork can be physically and psychologically demanding. Farmworkers slice, pick, and bag under the hot summer sun.2 The demand for agricultural labor may vary by season, thus making farmwork a potentially unstable and precarious line of work.3 Farming is also often undertaken in isolated rural areas, which 1  See, e.g., Philip Martin and Douglas B. Jackson-Smith, “Immigration and Farm Labor in the U.S.,” SSWA Faculty Publications, paper 440 (2013), https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/sswa_facpubs/440. (“Since farm work [in the United States] is more physically demanding and less well compensated than nonfarm jobs requiring similar skills, it is increasingly difficult to attract domestic workers willing to take farm jobs. This is one reason why farm employers have increasingly relied on foreign workers.”); see also infra Part I. 2  See Eric Hansen and Martin Donohoe, “Health Issues of Migrant and Seasonal Farmworkers,” Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved 14 (2003): 153 (discussing the long-​term health consequences of farmwork produced by the demandingness of the manual labor, exposure to pesticides and other chemicals, and social and geographic isolation). 3  For a discussion of precarity and farmwork, see, for example, Janet McLaughlin and Jenna Hennebry, “Pathways to Precarity: Structural Vulnerabilities and Lived Consequences in the Everyday Lives of Migrant Farmworkers in Canada,” in Producing and Negotiating Non-​Citizenship: Precarious Legal Status in Canada, ed. Luin Goldring and Patricia Landolt (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2013), 175. Unstable and insecure employment patterns are certainly not limited to farmwork. See Arne L. Kalleberg, Good Jobs, Bad Jobs: The Rise of Polarized and Precarious Employment Systems in the United States, 1970s to 2000s (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2011); Gillian Lester, “Careers and Contingency,” Stanford Law Review 51 (1998): 78–​86 (discussing challenges of analyzing “contingent” employment due to its heterogeneity). For an analysis of the social-​political dimensions of widespread precarious employment, see Guy Standing, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (London: Bloomsbury Academic: 2011) (discussing how neoliberal economic policies from the 1970s have given rise to a global social class characterized by livelihood insecurity).

522   Sabine Tsuruda may compromise farmworkers’ access to healthcare4 and leave farmworkers vulnerable to stress and depression due to related social isolation.5 The product of that hard work is, of course, absolutely necessary; food is a nonnegotiable basic need.6 But instead of raising wages, reimagining food production, or encouraging permanent immigration to meet indefinite needs for food production, countries such as the United States have adopted agricultural guest worker programs to “import” foreign labor for short periods of time (normally one to two years) to perform farmwork.7 In practice, the programs are often riddled with civil and human rights violations.8 The programs can be hard to enforce (and may even be purposefully underenforced),9 and

4 

See, for example, Heidi Bircher, “Prenatal Care Disparities and the Migrant Farmworker Community,” American Journal of Maternal Child Nursing 34 (2009): 303 (explaining that geographic isolation is one factor contributing to difficulty farmworkers face in accessing prenatal care). 5  See, e.g., Ann E. Hiott et al., “Migrant Farmworker Stress: Mental Health Implications,” Journal of Rural Health 24 (2008): 36 (explaining that social isolation, in comparison to other factors such as work conditions, family, and substance abuse by others, had the “strongest potential effect on farmworker anxiety”); Joseph D. Hovey and Cristina G. Magaña, “Suicide Risk Factors among Mexican Migrant Farmworker Women in the Midwest United States,” Archives of Suicide Research 7 (2003) (identifying geographic and social isolation as a “stressor” for migrant farmworkers). 6  For a discussion of the relationship between food and political and economic stability, see, for example, United Nations Development Programme, Africa Human Development Report 2012: Towards a Food Secure Africa (New York, 2012). Food production is, of course, only part of responding to a society’s need for food security. See “Food Security—​A Conceptual Framework,” International Fund for Agricultural Development, http://​www.ifad.org/​hfs/​thematic/​rural/​rural_​2.htm. Famines, for example, may occur even in the absence of a food shortage. See Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981). 7  U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act, 8 U.S.C. §§ 1188(a)(1) (2012) (specifying that the U.S. Attorney General may grant a “petition to import an alien as an H-​2A worker . . . [when] there are not sufficient workers who are able, willing, and qualified, and who will be available at the time and place needed, to perform the [agricultural] labor or services involved in the petition”); see also 8 C.F.R. § 214.2(h)(5)(viii) (C) (2014). The United States’s agricultural guest worker program operates through the H-​2A visa. See 8 U.S.C. §§ 1101(a)(15)(H)(ii)(a), 1188; 8 C.F.R. § 214.2(h)(5). Former temporary farmworkers may reapply for temporary farmworker status after remaining outside the United States for an uninterrupted period of three months. See 8 C.F.R. § 214.2(h)(5)(viii)(C). There is no formal limit on how many times the worker can apply for readmission as a temporary farmworker, but there is no guarantee that the worker will secure readmission through the same employer, as the employer must show each time that the job is only temporary. See 8 C.F.R. § 214.2(h)(5)(iv). The employer must also show that the prospective temporary farmworker qualifies for that status, and hence, that the prospective worker has “a residence in a foreign country which he has no intention of abandoning.” See 8 U.S.C. §§ 1101(a)(15)(H)(ii)(a); 8 C.F.R. § 214.2(h)(5)(i)(D). This intent element likewise limits a temporary farmworker’s ability to return. For a description of the H-​2A program, see generally “H-​2A Temporary Agricultural Workers,” U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, last accessed October 8, 2015, http://​www.uscis.gov/​working-​ united-​states/​temporary-​workers/​h-​2a-​agricultural-​workers/​h-​2a-​temporary-​agricultural-​workers. 8  See, e.g., Human Rights Watch, “I Already Bought You”: Abuse and Exploitation of Female Migrant Domestic Workers in the United Arab Emirates, last accessed October 22, 2014, https://​www.hrw.org/​ report/​2014/​10/​22/​i-​already-​bought-​you/​abuse-​and-​exploitation-​female-​migrant-​domestic-​workers-​ united (describing human rights violations of domestic workers under the UAE’s kafala system). 9 See H-​2A Visa Program: Meeting the Growing Needs of American Agriculture? Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Immigration Policy and Enforcement of the Committee on the Judiciary House of Representatives, 111th Cong. 1–​2, 3–​4 (2011) (statement of Rep. Zoe Lofgren) (explaining that there are

The Moral Burdens of Temporary FarmWork    523 may have other features—​such as linking lawful presence to continued employment—​ that leave guest workers vulnerable to abuse and exploitation.10 Even so, commentators argue that the programs enable receiving countries to find willing workers to produce food at a low cost,11 while giving people from poorer countries access to higher wages than they could command at home.12 Agricultural guest worker programs may therefore seem like good solutions to agricultural labor shortages, so long as receiving countries can better protect workers from abuse. Much of the critical commentary on such programs has accordingly focused on the extent to which genuine improvements are actually possible.13 But we should also be asking a more fundamental question: why is it reasonable to ask nonresidents to repeatedly and temporarily relocate to perform farmwork to begin with? I argue here that relying on temporary workers for a nontemporary need is problematic because it asks nonresidents to disrupt their personal and political associations for the benefit of our own. Were we to ask our own residents to perform the same work, or invite nonresidents to permanently immigrate, those disruptions would be less severe. We could also understand our own farmwork as part of pursuing a larger shared project of producing the food security needed to maintain our society. I begin by explaining that current agricultural guest worker programs are in some respects an improvement over their predecessors—​agricultural guest worker programs that permitted unlimited stay within receiving countries without the option of applying for citizenship. Workers under such programs often spent most of their adult lives in receiving societies without the status and protections of lawful permanent residence

“two signs at the [U.S.] border[:]‌[o]ne says ‘no trespassing,’ and the other says, ‘help wanted’ ” (citation omitted)) (hereinafter H-​2A Congressional Hearing). Overstay risks in the United States may emanate from a longstanding practice of lax immigration enforcement. See Hiroshi Motomura, Immigration Outside the Law (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), ch. 1 (explaining that immigration enforcement by deportation has historically been highly selective and discriminatory in part because of competing political and economic pressures); Hiroshi Motomura, “Immigration Outside the Law,” Columbia Law Review 108 (2008): 2049–​2055. 10 

See, e.g., H-​2A Congressional Hearing, supra note 9, 19–​22 (statement of Arturo S. Rodriguez, President, United Farmworkers of America) (explaining how H-​2A workers fear reporting unlawful employer behavior because their authorization status is tied to continued employment with their sponsoring employer, that H-​2A workers have suffered from abuses “ranging from the minor to very serious trafficking in human beings,” and that the government has “rarely enforced the protections of the H-​2A program”). 11  See, e.g., H-​2A Congressional Hearing, supra note 9, 35–​36 (2011) (statement of Rep. Elton Gallegly, Chairman, Subcomm. on Immigration Policy and Enforcement, and written statement of James S. Holt, agricultural labor economist). Arguments for guest worker programs in the United States are complicated by historical and massive undocumented migration. For discussions of the potential for temporary admissions to operate as an alternative to undocumented migration in light of such a history, see Motomura, Immigration Outside the Law, supra note 9, ch. 7; Hiroshi Motomura, “Designing Temporary Worker Programs,” University of Chicago Law Review 80 (2013): 269–​274. 12  See, e.g., Javier S. Hidalgo, “An Argument for Guest Worker Programs,” Public Affairs Quarterly 24 (2010): 25–​26, 29–​30. 13 See infra text accompanying notes 43–​50.

524   Sabine Tsuruda or citizenship. Supporters of temporary farmworker programs thus argue that the temporary programs not only produce mutually beneficial financial arrangements, but also avoid creating an underclass of workers. In Part II, I explain that an intuitive way commentators have resisted that conclusion is by arguing that temporary farmworker wages are always too low, either because of sector or employer restrictions, or because of inequality in bargaining power between wealthy receiving societies and prospective guest workers. Yet the wage is only one part of the bargain. An offer of work is not just an offer of money for some unspecified labor; it is a request to have a person do a particular kind of work, to give her life a particular shape and content. I thus argue that whether temporary farmworker programs are morally sound depends not only on the wage, but on whether we are justified in asking nonresidents to perform migrant farmwork to begin with. Hence, in Part III, I turn to the burdens and aims of the work itself. I argue that the physical demands, temporariness, and relative isolation of the farmwork compromise guest workers’ moral interests in having stable access to networks of intimate, civil, and political associations.14 Not only is this a burden for workers, but the programs risk impoverishing associational life in major sending countries. Performing farmwork within one’s own society may admittedly produce some of the same moral burdens. But I argue that as citizens and residents of the same country, we likely share a duty to ensure a stable food supply for one another. Insofar as farmwork must be done to satisfy that duty, it may be reasonable to ask one another to perform farmwork. In contrast, absent some further explanation, there is generally no relationship between citizens and residents of one country and those of another that can explain why the former may demand that the latter grow the formers’ food.15 Rather, the 14  In so arguing, I principally discuss the United States’s temporary farmworker program, but my arguments also apply to countries with similar programs. Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (CSAWP), for example, permits Canadian growers to hire Mexican and Caribbean nationals for temporary farmwork. See “Hiring Seasonal Agricultural Workers,” Employment and Social Development Canada, http://​www.esdc.gc.ca/​eng/​jobs/​foreign_​workers/​agriculture/​seasonal//​index. shtml. The program is negotiated through a number of bilateral “administrative” Memorandums of Understanding with sending countries. See, e.g., Agreement for the Employment in Canada of Seasonal Agricultural Workers From Mexico in British Columbia for the Year 2015, http://​www.esdc.gc.ca/​eng/​ jobs/​foreign_​workers/​agriculture/​seasonal/​sawpmc2015-​bc.pdf (permitting Canadian growers to hire Mexican nationals for temporary agricultural work for up to eight months); Canada-​Mexico Joint Action Plan 2010–​2012, last accessed October 8, 2015, http://​embamex.sre.gob.mx/​canada/​images/​mexico-​jap. pdf (reaffirming both countries’ commitment to the CSAWP). For a historical overview of CSAWP, see Laura A. Hernández, “The Constitutional Limits of Supply and Demand,” Stanford Journal of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties 10 (2014): 267–​281. For an overview and comparative analysis of guest worker programs in a variety of countries and sectors, see Philip Martin et al., Managing Labor Migration in the Twenty-​first Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), Part II; “Guest Worker Programs,” The Law Library of Congress (2013), http://​www.loc.gov/​law/​help/​guestworker/​2013-​008925%20 FINAL091013.pdf. 15  In making these arguments I assume that a society has some interests in regulating the number and identity of the people it admits. Border regulation of course raises pressing philosophical issues of its own. For example, border regulation may be in tension with equality norms against national origin discrimination. See Howard F. Chang, “Guest Workers and Justice in a Second-​B est World,”

The Moral Burdens of Temporary FarmWork    525 primary motive for the programs seems to be receiving societies’ unwillingness to perform farmwork or take on the (perceived) costs of permanent immigration. And such bare preferences are not enough to justify asking nonresidents to perform migrant farmwork. The request itself treats nonresidents’ interests in associational life as less valuable than our own. In turn, incentivizing nonresidents to take on the life-​shaping burdens of the work risks subordinating nonresidents and reifying global wealth inequality. Temporary farmworker programs are thus distinguishable from other types of guest worker programs motivated by a shared project or aim. In Part IV, I explain how, for example, visiting academic positions, student exchange programs, and the like, may be justified by the value of cultural and intellectual exchange between different societies. I close by discussing policy implications of the moral problems with temporary farmworker programs. My objections to the programs recommend ultimately dismantling many extant temporary farmworker programs. But simply terminating the programs would likely yield continued compromised social conditions for nonresidents’ moral agency, leaving nonresidents potentially more destitute and trapping them in seriously unjust societies. The moral defects of the programs would therefore be better remedied by creating a path to citizenship for temporary farmworkers.

I.  Rationales for  and Common Critiques of Temporary Farmworker Programs Societies have ongoing needs for food, but those needs are not always matched by a willing domestic workforce.16 It is not that receiving societies do not have enough University of Dayton Law Review 34 (2008): 10–​11 (explaining that the cosmopolitan norm of “equal concern” may imply that immigration restrictions unjustly discriminate on the basis of national origin). Immigration restrictions also pose pressing questions about the extent to which national identity may be a justification for regulating who to let in. See Samuel Scheffler, “Immigration and the Significance of Culture,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 25 (2007): 93 (recommending “that we avoid using culture and cultural preservation as central analytic categories in thinking about the challenges posed by immigration”); Charles R. Beitz, “Cosmopolitan Ideals and National Sentiment,” Journal of Philosophy 80 (1983): 591. For a discussion of the rights citizens may have against the presence of noncitizens within their borders, see generally Michael Blake, “Immigration, Jurisdiction, and Exclusion,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 41 (2013): 103; David Miller, “Immigrants, Nations, and Citizenship,” Journal of Political Philosophy 16 (2008): 371. For a comprehensive treatment of moral and policy issues raised by immigration, see Joseph Carens, The Ethics of Immigration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 16 See supra note 1. Such a gap between need and will is not unique to farmwork, but rather includes a variety of hard work that tends to be regarded as unprestigious. See Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 56.

526   Sabine Tsuruda people to do the work;17 indeed, countries that have agricultural guest worker programs may also have substantial unemployment rates.18 The mismatch between need and labor is rather likely due to unwillingness to pay higher wages to attract domestic workers or residents’ unwillingness to perform the work for a lower wage.19 It is not surprising that such a gap between need and will might exist in wealthy countries. Consider the United States. US farmworkers typically “harvest and inspect crops by hand,” “move shrubs, plants, and trees with wheelbarrows or tractors,” “spray fertilizer or pesticide solutions,” “irrigate farm soil and maintain ditches or pipes and pumps,” and “harvest . . . pack[,]‌and load crops for shipment.”20 For their hard work, farmworkers are paid an estimated average of $10.01 per hour, or $20,820 per year,21 less than half of the average wage for all US workers.22 Not to mention, much of the farmwork is seasonal, and the demand for labor may vary by year, depending on factors such

17 

Historically, however, genuine labor shortages—​caused, for instance, by WWI and WWII—​were used as public justifications for certain well-​known guest worker programs. For a discussion of how the Bracero program and its predecessors were originally enacted out of labor shortage fears, see Temporary Worker Programs: Background and Issues, Congressional Research Service, The Select Committee on Immigration and Refugee Policy, 96th Cong., 1–​15 (1980). But some scholars, have indicated that if the labor shortage explanation was ever valid, it was valid only for a short period of time, and eventually alleged labor shortages became a pretext for exploiting Mexican workers. See, e.g., Marsha Chien, “When Two Laws Are Better Than One: Protecting the Rights of Migrant Workers,” Berkeley Journal of International Law 28 (2010): 15; Leobardo F. Estrada et al., “Chicanos in the United States: A History of Exploitation and Resistance,” Daedalus 110 (1981): 118–​120. 18  The mean unemployment rate in the United States, for example, has been approximately 6.8 percent over the last decade. See “Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey, Unemployment Rate for Persons 16 Years and Over, January 2005 to September 2015,” Bureau of Labor Statistics, US Department of Labor, data extracted on October 8, 2015, http://​data.bls.gov/​timeseries/​LNS14000000. 19  See H-​2A Congressional Hearing, supra note 9, 1–​4; Joseph Carens, “Live-​in Domestics, Seasonal Workers, and Others Hard to Locate on the Map of Democracy,” Journal of Political Philosophy 419 (2008): 431; Walzer, Spheres of Justice, supra note 16, 56. 20  “Occupational Outlook Handbook, 2014‒2015 Edition, Agricultural Workers,” Bureau of Labor Statistics, US Department of Labor, http://​www.bls.gov/​ooh/​farming-​fishing-​and-​forestry/​agricultural-​ workers.htm#tab-​2. 21  See “Occupational Employment and Wages: 45-​2092 Farmworkers and Laborers, Crop, Nursery, and Greenhouse (May 2014),” Bureau of Labor Statistics, US Department of Labor, http://​www.bls.gov/​ oes/​current/​oes452092.htm. 22  The mean US hourly wage is $22.71, and $47,230 for yearly wages. “May 2014 National Occupational Employment and Wage Estimates,” Bureau of Labor Statistics, US Department of Labor, last updated March 25, 2015, http://​www.bls.gov/​oes/​current/​oes_​nat.htm#00-​0000. The Bureau’s Occupational Labor Statistics survey is a semiannual survey. In California, the US state with the most farmworkers, the estimated average farmworker is $9.59 per hour, or $19,950 annually, compared with $25.91 hourly and $53,890 annually for all Californians. See “May 2014 State Occupational Employment and Wage Estimates, California,” Bureau of Labor Statistics, US Department of Labor, last updated March 25, 2015, http://​www.bls.gov/​oes/​current/​oes_​ca.htm#45-​0000. For comparative data on the number of farmworkers employed in each state, see “Occupational Employment and Wages: 45-​2092 Farmworkers and Laborers, Crop, Nursery, and Greenhouse (May 2014),” Bureau of Labor Statistics, US Department of Labor, http://​www.bls.gov/​oes/​current/​oes452092.htm.

The Moral Burdens of Temporary FarmWork    527 as weather.23 Consequently, farmwork is often short term and unstable. Farmwork in the United States is thus hard, precarious,24 and low-​paid relative to other US employment opportunities. To close the gap between need and will, many wealthy societies have, at one point or another, adopted agricultural guest worker programs.25 These programs authorize noncitizens to reside in the “host” or “receiving” society for employment purposes. Guest workers are “guests” in that they are not invited to permanently immigrate and indeed may be required to show that they maintain a “permanent” residence outside of the receiving society.26 The programs thus permit societies to expand their search for qualified workers without adding to their permanent citizen population. Guest worker programs that authorize unlimited stay are clearly in tension with democracy. First, the programs encourage typically poorer noncitizens to migrate to a receiving country to do work for higher wages (or under better conditions) than they could access back home. Over time, guest workers set down roots, forming families and joining communities,27 working and living alongside receiving society citizens for perhaps the whole of their adult lives.28 But the workers’ nonimmigrant status excludes them from the legal status that would entitle them to the full rights and benefits of membership:​citizenship.29 By denying such de facto members the full panoply of political liberties (such as the right to vote), the programs bring about a form of tyranny between citizens and guest workers.30 “These guests experience the state as a pervasive 23  See Alex Nowrasteh, Cato Institute, “How to Make Guest Work Visas Work,” Policy Analysis 719 (2013): 6 (explaining that a variety of factors such as droughts can affect the need for labor each season). 24 See supra note 3. 25  See “Guest Worker Programs,” The Law Library of Congress, supra note 14. 26  The United States’s and Canada’s temporary farmworker programs, for example, do not offer temporary farmworkers a path to citizenship. See 8 U.S.C. §§ 1101(a)(15)(H)(ii)(a) (explaining that eligible non-​nationals must have “a residence in a foreign country which he has no intention of abandoning”); “Hiring Seasonal Agricultural Workers,” Employment and Social Development Canada, http://​www.esdc.gc.ca/​eng/​jobs/​foreign_​workers/​agriculture/​seasonal//​index.shtml. 27  “[W]‌e asked for workers but people came.” Max Fisch, Überfremdung I, in Schweiz Als Heimat? 219 (1990) (describing workers of Turkish ancestry under Germany’s Gastarbeiter [guest worker] program). 28  See Walzer, Spheres of Justice, supra note 16, 59. 29 See id. 30  Id. 58–​59; see also Cristina M. Rodríguez, “Guest Workers and Integration: Toward a Theory of What Immigrants and Americans Owe One Another, University of Chicago Legal Forum (2007) (arguing that the United States should not adopt a large-​scale guest worker program in part because of the risk of thereby facilitating the creation of an immigrant underclass). The force of the tyranny objection is even stronger in societies that also lack birthright citizenship. For example, during the era of Germany’s Gastarbeiter program, Turkish guest workers often remained in Germany not just for the whole of their adult lives, but their children also had no right to citizenship. Gastarbeiter thus created a multi-​generational class of “guest workers” who had no right to vote, let alone an unconditional right to stay, in the country in which they were born and lived. For an overview of the program and parallels to the United States’s guest worker programs, see Nicole Jacoby, “America’s De Facto Guest Workers: Lessons from Germany’s Gastarbeiter for U.S. Immigration Reform,” Fordham International Law Journal 27 (2004). Gastarbeiter-​style programs are the central target of Michael Walzer’s critique of guest worker programs. See Walzer, Spheres of Justice, supra note 16, 56–​61. The UAE’s kafala (visa sponsorship) system is a particularly disconcerting modern analogue of Gastarbeiter. See Human Rights Watch, supra note 8.

528   Sabine Tsuruda and frightening power that shapes their lives and regulates their every move—​and never asks for their opinion.”31 Lacking an unconditional right to stay in the receiving society, the workers are also vulnerable to deportation, and hence, are at risk of being torn away from decades-​old social ties.32 In contrast, guest worker programs with limited authorization periods may require workers to leave sometime before they manifest the full marks of membership in the receiving society.33 The United States’s H-​2A temporary farmworker program authorizes participants to stay for a maximum consecutive period of three years; Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program provides for an eight-​month authorization period.34 Temporary farmworker programs thus seem to avoid the antidemocratic features of programs with unlimited authorization periods. In light of the substantial financial benefits the programs may provide both receiving societies and temporary workers, supporters urge that temporary farmworker programs are a morally and economically attractive tool for societies to close the gap between their need for farmwork and their willingness to perform the work.35 Consider, for example, the potential merits of the US H-​2A visa program. The program permits domestic growers to hire noncitizens to perform farmwork when there are not enough US workers “able, willing, qualified, and . . . available” to do the work,36 thereby producing a mutually beneficial arrangement: The program gives nonresidents access to US markets in which they may be able to command higher wages than in their home countries. For instance, in Mexico, one of the top “sending” countries,37 average agricultural wages may be as low as $1 per hour.38 Mexican temporary farmworkers in 31 Walzer, Spheres of Justice, supra note 16, 59. 32 

Hiroshi Motomura discusses a similar set of problems with deporting undocumented workers in the United States. See Motomura, Immigration Outside the Law, supra note 9, ch. 3; Hiroshi Motomura, “We Asked for Workers, But Families Came: Time, Law, and the Family in Immigration and Citizenship,” Virginia Journal of Social Policy & the Law 14 (2006). 33  Joseph Carens proposes that programs with authorization periods that last just several years fall within this category (although, as I explain in Part II, Carens thinks that limiting temporary workers to one sector, such as agriculture, can be problematic because such restrictions depress temporary worker wages). See Joseph Carens, The Ethics of Immigration, supra note 15, 113–​115. David Miller likewise contends that guest workers that come to receiving countries on a truly temporary basis have no claim to citizenship. See David Miller, “Irregular Migrants: An Alternative Perspective,” Ethics and International Affairs 22 (2008): 195–​196; “Immigrants, Nations, and Citizenship,” Journal of Political Philosophy 16 (2008): 377 (suggesting that guest worker programs with definite and short time limits may be compatible with democratic values). 34 See supra note 14. 35  See Hidalgo, “An Argument for Guest Worker Programs,” supra note 12. 36  See 8 U.S.C. § 1188(a)(1)(A). 37  In 2014 alone, Mexico sent over eighty-​four thousand H-​2A workers, the most of any eligible sending country. See US Department of State, Nonimmigrant Visa Issuances by Visa Class and by Nationality, FY2014, http://​travel.state.gov/​content/​dam/​visas/​Statistics/​Non-​Immigrant-​Statistics/​ NIVDetailTables/​FY14NIVDetailTable.pdf. 38  See Nicole Akoukou Thompson, “50,000 Mexican Farmworkers Have Gone on Strike in Baja California, Demand Overtime Pay, Breaks, Healthcare and Water,” Latin Post, April 1, 2015, http://​www. latinpost.com/​articles/​45297/​20150401/​50-​000-​mexican-​ farmworkers-​have-​gone-​on-​strike-​in-

The Moral Burdens of Temporary FarmWork    529 the United States may therefore earn almost ten times as much as they would otherwise.39 Meanwhile, the program provides domestic growers with a flexible supply of agricultural workers without necessarily adding to the permanent population. The need for farmworkers may fluctuate from year to year,40 and Americans often feel that adding to the permanent population strains public resources, such as social security.41 Further, by keeping agricultural labor costs low, the program may enable Americans to keep their food prices relatively low.42 The enduring and wide base of support for temporary farmworker programs in aspirationally democratic societies is nonetheless troubling. A worker’s authorization not only ends after she completes the work for which she was hired, but may also be terminated if she is fired. Wielding the deportation stick, employers have historically engaged in a variety of abuses, from wage theft to rape and battery.43 Critics further explain that

​ aja-​california-​demanding-​overtime-​pay-​breaks-​healthcare-​and-​water.htm. Philip Martin and J. Edward b Taylor have suggested that there is some evidence that Mexican farmworkers are becoming increasingly likely to say home, due to wages raising in agricultural and other sectors in Mexico. See “Ripe with Change: Evolving Farm Labor markets in the United States, Mexico, and Central America,” The Regional Migration Study Group, Migration Policy Institute (2013): 18. 39 See supra text accompanying note 21. Indeed, temporary farmworkers may sometimes have a

right to higher wages than domestic farmworkers. Under the United States’s temporary farmworker program, farmworkers must be paid “at least the highest of the following applicable wage rates in effect at the time work is performed: the adverse effect wage rate (AEWR), the applicable prevailing wage, the agreed-​upon collective bargaining rate, or the Federal or State statutory minimum wage.” “Fact Sheet #26: Section H-​2A of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA),” Wage and Hour Division, US Department of Labor, http://​www.dol.gov/​whd/​regs/​compliance/​whdfs26.htm. For a table of AEWRs, see “Adverse Effect Wages—​Year 2015,” Wage and Hour Division, US Department of Labor, http://​www.foreignlaborcert.doleta.gov/​adverse.cfm. The rationale for this baseline is to ensure that hiring temporary farmworkers does not depress domestic farmwork wages. Whether that measure accomplishes its goal is another matter. 40  See Nowrasteh, “How to Make Guest Work Visas Work,” supra note 23. Hence there is neither a floor nor a ceiling on how many H-​2A workers are to be admitted to the United States each year. 41  See, e.g., Jens Hainmueller and Michael J. Hiscox, “Attitudes Towards Highly Skilled and Low-​ Skilled Immigration: Evidence from a Survey Experiment,” American Political Science Review 104 (2010): 61 (explaining that anti-​immigrant sentiment as to low-​skilled workers is in part motivated by fears of constraints on welfare benefits). It is not clear whether such fears are well-founded in the long run. Although immigrants with less than a high school education may have a long-​ term negative fiscal impact, those with a high school education may have a positive net impact, especially when the impact of both groups’ descendants are taken into consideration. See National Research Council, The New Americans: Economic, Demographic, and Fiscal Effects of Immigration, ed. James P. Smith and Barry Edmonston (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1997), 334. 42  Of course, relying on agricultural guest worker programs is not the only way a society might ensure that all of its members can pay for sufficient food. A society could decide to pay the higher wage to draw co-​citizens and, through redistributive policies, ensure that all segments of society can still afford quality food notwithstanding higher farmworker wages. 43  See generally Farmworker Justice, Report, “No Way to Treat a Guest: Why the H-​2A Agricultural Visa Program Fails U.S. and Foreign Workers” (2011), https://​www.farmworkerjustice.org/​sites/​default/​ files/​documents/​7.2.a.6%20No%20Way%20To%20Treat%20A%20Guest%20H-​2A%20Report.pdf; Mary Bauer, “Close to Slavery: Guestworker Programs in the United States,” Southern Poverty Law Center (2007), http://​www.splcenter.org/​sites/​default/​files/​legacy/​pdf/​static/​SPLCguestworker.pdf. Michael

530   Sabine Tsuruda the risk of employer abuse is exacerbated by the fact that, although temporary farmworkers may have practically the same substantive labor and employment rights as resident farmworkers, temporary farmworkers have substantially weaker enforcement and remedial rights.44 And thus, even though temporary farmworkers may have a fairly robust set of rights on paper, the workers may lack a meaningful remedy for the violation of those rights. Meanwhile, workers may stay beyond their authorization periods,45 resulting in an even more vulnerable undocumented population, the members of which may resemble citizens in practically every respect besides their legal status. Temporary farmworker programs are therefore susceptible to producing the same kinds of problems that characterize guest worker programs with no authorization time limits.46 And all of this—​the abuse, poor remedial rights, and overstay risks—​may be experienced through or in conjunction with pervasive racial,47 national origin,48 and sex Walzer distinguishes problematic guest worker programs from permissible ones on more general vulnerability grounds. See Walzer, Spheres of Justice, supra note 16, 60. In the permissible cases—​such as that of visiting professors—​Walzer explains the participants have skills in higher demand, or simply are wealthier, and so are able to leave more easily if things go bad while abroad or are “able to call upon the protection of their home states if they ever need it.” Id. 44  For a discussion of how exclusion from farmworker employment legislation undermines US temporary farmworker rights enforcement, see Michael Holley, “Disadvantaged by Design: How the Law Inhibits Agricultural Guest Workers from Enforcing Their Rights,” Hofstra Labor & Employment Law Journal 575 (2001). In addition to being excluded from key employment legislation, it is also not clear whether US temporary farmworkers have a right to back pay for work performed after their authorization period ends. See Hoffman Plastic Compounds, Inc. v. N.L.R.B., 535 U.S. 137 (2002) (holding that the National Labor Relations Board could not award back pay for labor rights violations to an undocumented worker who was never legally authorized to work in the United States). 45  The fact that overstaying is common is not always an unintended consequence of temporary farmworker programs. Hiroshi Motomura, for example, explains that overstaying and other forms of “immigration outside the law” is common in the United States in part because of lax immigration enforcement, coupled with widespread domestic economic incentives and known historical migratory patterns. These factors, he explains, effectively amount to an informal policy of relying on the labor of undocumented immigrants. See Motomura, Immigration Outside the Law, supra note 9, ch. 1. Motomura explains that if temporary worker programs must be adopted as “second-​best” measure, historically defective coercive enforcement (and countervailing incentives to stay) might be supplemented or replaced by a policy of providing non-​coercive incentives—​such as a “financial bonus” or creating “economic development initiatives” in sending countries—​to entice workers to return to their home country. See Motomura, “Designing Temporary Worker Programs,” supra note 11, 285–​286. 46  See Motomura, Immigration Outside the Law, supra note 9, ch. 3 (discussing how undocumented persons in the United States might be understood as “Americans in Waiting” in light of their contributions and social ties to the United States over many years and the United States’s de facto policy of tolerating unauthorized migrants to work and live within its borders). 47  See, e.g., The Human Cost of Food: Farmworkers’ Lives, Labor, and Advocacy, ed. Charles D. Thompson Jr. and Melinda F. Wiggins (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), ch. 9. 48  See, e.g., U.S. E.E.O.C. v. Global Horizons, Inc., 7 F. Supp. 3d 1053, 1069 (D. Haw. 2014) (holding that Global Horizons, a labor contractor that recruited Thai H-​2A workers to work for farmers in the United States, discriminated in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by harassing and abusing Thai workers on the basis of stereotypical beliefs that Thai workers were “more compliant” than H-2A workers from other countries, such as Mexico).

The Moral Burdens of Temporary FarmWork    531 discrimination.49 It is hard to see how a policy that tends to leave people vulnerable in these ways could be compatible with democracy and its basic commitments to equality and the inviolability of the person. Yet however persistent and predictable these problems may be, they are contingent problems that, at least in theory, could be eliminated. Supporters of the programs hence argue that better enforcement and monitoring mechanisms are possible and ought to be adopted, that the programs could radically minimize employer abuse by decoupling authorization from maintaining employment with a particular employer (or by making it easier to switch to a new employer), that labor and employment rights could be strengthened by extending federal labor and employment legislation to cover temporary farmworkers, and that overstay risks could be mitigated by creating noncoercive incentives to return home.50 Regardless of whether these are workable solutions, they point to a moral limit of common criticisms of the programs: the criticisms leave it an open question whether, assuming the abuse, rights asymmetry, and overstay risks could be ameliorated, the programs could be morally sound.

II.  Is the Problem That Wages Are Too Low? Even if the variety of abuses associated with temporary farmworker programs could be prevented, an intuitive way philosophers have tried to show what would still be wrong with temporary farmworker programs is by arguing that temporary farmworkers’ wages are simply too low. Joseph Carens, for example, explains that the problem with temporary farmworker programs is that they restrict the workers to one sector, effectively “forc[ing] foreign temporary workers to perform tasks for wages that are lower than they could command if they were free to compete on the entire [receiving society’s] labour market.”51 Although I do not dispute that temporary farmworker wages may be too low, I have reservations about Carens’s explanation. First, I am not sure why temporary farmworkers would be able to command a higher wage if they were free to so compete. Why wouldn’t members of the receiving society simply be able to offer temporary workers similarly low wages in other sectors, given that nonresidents can be incentivized to accept offers of farmwork for wages lower than what residents would accept? 49 

See, e.g., Sara Obeidat, “Female Farm Workers Awarded $17 Million in Florida Abuse Case,” PBS Frontline, September 15, 2015, http://​www.pbs.org/​wgbh/​pages/​frontline/​immigration-​2/​rape-​in-​ the-​fields/​female-​farm-​workers-​awarded-​17-​million-​in-​florida-​abuse-​case/​ (discussing five migrant farmworkers’ victory in a sex discrimination suit and explaining that such sex discrimination is rampant on US farms though rarely reported to law enforcement officials). 50  See, e.g., Motomura, “Designing Temporary Worker Programs,” supra note 11, 285–​286; Nowrasteh, “How to Make Guest Work Visas Work,” supra note 23. 51 Carens, Ethics of Immigration, supra note 15, 124.

532   Sabine Tsuruda There is, admittedly, evidence that increasing guest workers’ labor mobility within their receiving society may raise their wages.52 But that phenomenon may be limited to “incumbent” guest workers, workers who have already been working in the receiving society and who may plan to stay for a long time.53 Increased temporary farmworker labor mobility may therefore not produce increased wages, since a purported virtue of temporary farmworker programs is that they do not permit long-​term residency in the receiving country.54 Further, even if the programs did authorize working for longer periods, the wages of new guest workers may actually fall when guest worker labor mobility increases.55 Second, assuming that temporary farmworkers would be able to command higher wages but for their sector limitation, Carens’s argument is incomplete without a theory of why it is morally wrong for receiving societies to offer nonresidents wages below the rate at which residents require to perform similar work. Further difficulties confront giving such a theory. For example, why would that rate be the morally relevant baseline? While it is possible that the rate might reflect whatever amount is objectively fair to pay, the rate may also reflect residents’ choices to unreasonably withhold their labor and thereby drive up the price of agricultural labor.56 And, perhaps more fundamentally, why would paying a higher wage justify asking nonresidents to take on burdens of hard work and transiency? This last question is, I think, absolutely central. The wage is not the only aspect of temporary farmworker programs that is open to criticism and in need of justification; it is but one part of the bargain. Perhaps, however, the moral objection is not to the wage itself but to pressure to accept the bargain. The problem, one might argue, is that offers of temporary farmwork are accepted out of quasi-​coercive pressure produced by indigence,57 and the lower wage

52 

Recent reforms of the UAE’s kafala system no longer require migrant workers to obtain approval from their sponsoring employer in order to work for another firm in the UAE, thus increasing migrant workers’ labor mobility in the UAE. See Suresh Naidu, Yaw Nyarko, and Shing-​Yi Wang, “Monopsony Power in Migrant Labor Markets: Evidence from the United Arab Emirates,” Journal of Political Economy 124 (2016): 1738–​1739. While such reforms may increase wages for incumbent migrant workers, they may also decrease demand for, and hence, may decrease hiring and wages of new migrant workers. See id. 53  See Naidu et al., “Monopsony Power in Migrant Labor Markets,” supra note 52, 1739. 54 See supra Part I. 55  See Naidu et al., “Monopsony Power in Migrant Labor Markets,” supra note 52, 1739. 56  For a discussion of reasonable incentives, see G. A. Cohen, Rescuing Justice and Equality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), esp. Part I; Seana Valentine Shiffrin, “Incentives, Motives, and Talents,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 38 (2010):111–​142; Liam Murphy, “Institutions and the Demands of Justice,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 27 (1999): 251–​291; A.J. Julius, “Basic Structure and the Value of Equality,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 31 (2003): 321–​355; Joshua Cohen, “Taking People As They Are,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 30 (2002): 363–​386. For a discussion of what a society may do in response to citizens who unreasonably withhold their labor, see generally Lucas Stanczyk, “Productive Justice,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 40 (2012): 144. To be clear, this is not to say that resident farmworker wages are sufficiently high today. That they are, on some morally relevant measure or another, too low may well explain why so few residents are drawn to farmwork. See supra Part I. 57  “Sufficientarian” accounts of guest worker exploitation are an example of such an approach. See Robert Mayer, “Guest Workers and Exploitation,” Review of Politics 67 (2005): 318–​327.

The Moral Burdens of Temporary FarmWork    533 is a manifestation of that pressure. Yet many temporary farmworkers do not come from the very poorest strata of their society. Temporary farmworkers may already have access to living wages within their countries and may simply be seeking out the work to, for example, help support a family member’s (or their own) university education.58 Hence, temporary farmworker programs do not depend on people being rationally compelled on pain of survival (or, less dramatically, on pain of not having a living wage) to accept offers of temporary farmwork. Further, even if there were quasi-​coercive pressure to accept, the pressure cannot be doing the moral work. Without an explanation of why the content of the temporary farmwork offer is morally problematic, such an account would seem to condemn making any offers to indigent people if the offer would leave them better off—​including offers of food, shelter, asylum, and citizenship—​since their indigence would give them strong if not sufficient reason to accept.59 Consequently, neither the wage on its own nor pressure to accept the wage seem to be able to fully explain what, if anything, might be morally wrong with temporary farmworker programs. Rather than further explore the possibility of a fair wage for temporary farmworkers, it may be more fruitful to inquire about the burdens involved in performing temporary farmwork. An offer of paid work is after all not merely an offer of a wage; it is a request to have a person do a particular kind of labor, to enlist her help by having her give her life a particular kind of shape and content. Instead of starting with the wage, I thus propose starting with the labor, and then asking whether the wage—​or anything else—​could justify asking another person to perform that kind of labor, in this case, temporary farmwork.

III.  What’s Wrong with Temporary Farmworker Programs Temporary farmwork is physically exhausting, transient, and socially isolating. As such, I will now argue, temporary farmworker programs undermine temporary farmworkers’ moral interests in having ongoing access to stable intimate, civil, and political associations. Asking nonresidents to take on such burdens can neither be justified by a 58  See Lea Ypi, “Taking Workers as a Class: The Moral Dilemmas of Guestworker Programmes,” Migration in Political Theory: The Ethics of Movement and Migration, ed. S. Fine and L. Ypi (Oxford: Oxford University Press) (explaining that guest workers often already have a minimally decent standard of living, and hence, sufficientarian accounts of worker exploitation cannot explain in many cases what, if anything, is morally wrong with guest worker programs). 59  Sufficientarian theories might respond to my objection by adding that what makes the content of the offer problematic is that it proposes something that the noncitizen would not accept if she already had a minimally decent standard of life (see id.). But that is not truly a response, as a person who has a minimally decent standard of living might also reasonably decline to accept food or shelter, or even citizenship in another country, if she is happy where she is and does not want to take on the additional burdens of citizenship elsewhere.

534   Sabine Tsuruda receiving society’s bare preference to avoid performing farmwork nor by the offer of a valuable wage. On the contrary, such a motive and incentive risks subordinating noncitizens to wealthier societies and reifying global wealth inequality.

A. Compromised Associational Ties Although the length of stay permitted by temporary farmworker programs is substantially shorter than under programs with unlimited authorization periods, the length of stay is not trivial. Moving to a new place for a few years can challenge and compromise one’s relationships back home. For example, intimate relationships may require regular face time and physical presence to remain stable and grow. While such relationships are not impossible to maintain while abroad, not seeing one’s child or partner for years at a time can be and often is damaging to those relationships. The risk of damage is compounded for the many nonresidents who perform repeated tours of temporary farmwork. Of course, it is conceivable that family members could accompany temporary farmworkers. But then similar problems are reproduced for those members—​what of their projects and attachments back home? Temporarily moving to another country can also destabilize other relationships that may require physical presence and regular interaction, such as relationships with civil organizations (worship at a particular church, for instance) and the relationship a person has to her state through her ongoing political participation. A few years may also be ample time to form new meaningful relationships in the receiving society. It is not unreasonable for people to fall in love and form friendships and community affiliations during such a time span. Thus, even if temporary farmworkers do not develop all of the marks of membership in the receiving society by the end of their service, workers may still form new meaningful ties in the receiving society, the severance of which may be quite painful. Nor is it any consolation if temporary farmworkers tend to not form new relations. Migrant farmworkers are susceptible to social isolation. If a particular crop is especially exhausting or stressful to grow and harvest, workers may be left with little energy to pursue much of a social life at the end of the day.60 The location of the work can also be a barrier to forming new relationships. Consider, for instance, California’s San Joaquin Valley,61 one of the most productive agricultural regions in the world62: 60  Stressful working conditions are a substantial factor in producing a high (potentially 40%) rate of clinical depression among migrant farmworkers in the United States. See Hiott et al., “Migrant Farmworker Stress: Mental Health Implications,” supra note 5, 37. 61  California employs the most farmworkers of any US state. See “May 2014 State Occupational Employment and Wage Estimates, California,” Bureau of Labor Statistics, US Department of Labor, last updated March 25, 2015, http://​www.bls.gov/​oes/​current/​oes_​ca.htm#45-​0000. 62  Philip Vera Cruz, Craig Scharlin & Lilia V. Villanueva, Philip Vera Cruz: A Personal History of Filipino Immigrants and the Farmworkers Movement, ed. Craig Scharlin and Lilia V. Villanueva (Los Angeles: UCLA Labor Center and UCLA Asian American Studies Center, 1992), xxii.

The Moral Burdens of Temporary FarmWork    535 There are no rolling green hills, quaint farmhouses, red barns, or picturesque villages. It was once a vast desert, transformed into an agricultural mega-​factory only when water was brought in by massive state and federally funded irrigation projects . . . . The farms and ranches throughout the valley are so vast, the land so flat, that as you gaze into the horizon, your line of sight only dissolves into the industrial haze, a by-​product of large-​scale farming.63

Geographic isolation can produce social isolation if it is difficult to access social centers in the receiving society. And even then, familiar social forms may simply not exist in the receiving society. “No longer is La Plaza—​a central gathering place in town for community interaction and fellowship in their countries of origin—​available to [Mexican and Central American migrant farmworkers].”64 Further, temporary farmworkers and receiving society residents may not speak the same languages and farmworkers may accordingly suffer communicative isolation.65 The life of a temporary farmworker can therefore be quite isolating along many dimensions of social life. Indeed, for migrant farmworkers in the United States, social isolation may be the single most important cause of anxiety.66 Temporary farmworkers thus must rupture existing intimate, civil, and political relations, to then come to a place and either not establish new relations or rupture the new ones when their work authorization expires. And while they are in the receiving society, the workers perform hard, exhausting labor,67 labor that because of its physical demandingness and geographic isolation may be detrimental to workers’ health.68 It is a lot to ask of people that they take on such burdens.69 It may at this point be objected that these burdens are not actually burdens for temporary farmworkers. Temporary farmworkers may come from countries or circumstances that are so awful as to make such temporary migration and work highly attractive. One might therefore conclude that for such people, participation in the programs is hardly burdensome. On the contrary, participation may be a welcomed improvement. 63 

Id. Eduardo González Jr., “Migrant Farm Workers: Our Nation’s Invisible Population,” Cornell University Cooperative Extension, http://​www.extension.org/​pages/​9960/​ migrant-​farm-​workers:-​our-​nations-​invisible-​population. 65  Temporary farmworkers may also not speak the same languages as each other. 66  See Hiott et al., “Migrant Farmworker Stress: Mental Health Implications,” supra note 5, 37. 67  James “Shorty” Spencer Jr., describing what it takes to be a good migrant farmworker: 64 

Potatoes? If you can run to the truck every fifteen minutes with about seventy-​five pounds of potatoes, then you’s a good one. Cutting cabbages? If you can pick that cabbage up and sling it at that truck while the wagon’s moving, I tell you, you’s a good one. Orange picker? You reach out there and snatch your orange, grab the limb and shake it down to the ground, and fill that back up in fifteen minutes, you’s a good one. Daniel Rothenberg, With These Hands: The Hidden Work of Migrant Farmworkers Today (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998), 3. 68 See supra notes 2, 4–5. 69  The burden is especially acute for US-​style programs that permit former temporary farmworkers to reapply for temporary farmworker status indefinitely, so long as they leave the country for a few months. See 8 C.F.R. § 214.2(h)(5)(viii)(C).

536   Sabine Tsuruda I agree that participating in the programs may indeed be better than staying at home.70 Yet that fact does not negate or diminish the moral burden the programs place on temporary farmworkers. Consider two respects in which something may be a burden for someone. First, something can be a burden insofar as it is an obstacle to satisfying a preference. For example, an employment law may burden the founders of Uber by making it difficult to classify Uber drivers as independent contractors and thereby reducing Uber’s profits.71 Temporary farmworker programs do not necessarily impose burdens with respect to a variety of temporary farmworkers’ preferences—​such as workers’ preference for a higher income than that available to them back home—​since the programs likely satisfy some of those preferences. Second, something can also be a burden by undermining an interest she has as a person generally, regardless of whether she has a preference for protecting that interest. Consider a case of indentured servitude. Among other things, indentured servants in the colonial United States were not permitted to marry without the consent of their employer. Regardless of whether a particular indentured servant wanted to marry (not everyone wants to get married), that consent requirement compromised the fundamental interest indentured servants had as persons in being able to freely determine the form and composition of their intimate associations. The hard work and risks of rupture required by temporary farmworker programs are burdens in this second sense. As persons, we have a fundamental interest in being able to access a network of intimate, civil, and political associations. Such networks are central contexts in which we develop and exercise our moral agency. By “moral agency,” I mean a person’s capacity to craft and pursue a self-​directed life, and to cooperate with others under fair terms of social cooperation (and to be moved by the fairness of those terms to do her part).72 First, we develop projects and life plans, and the values that inform the creation of those plans, through our cooperative and deliberative activity with others.73 For 70 

And this fact may generate duties on wealthier societies to provide asylum (in the worst cases), to adopt a more open stance on immigration, or to adopt development policies targeted at particular countries. See Motomura, “Designing Temporary Worker Programs,” supra note 11, 285–​286 (suggesting that the United States should help Mexico develop infrastructure and public services so as to minimize some of the incentive to migrate to or remain in the United States without lawful status). 71  The California Labor Commissioner recently found that an Uber driver should be classified as an employee, not as an independent contractor, in part because the driver’s “car and her labor were her only assets” and “had no investment in the business,” while Uber provided the iPhone application,” set prices for her labor, vetted her as a driver, and “controlled the tools” she used by requiring her to register her car. See Uber Technologies, Inc. v. Berwick, No. 11-​46739, *9 (Cal. Labor Commissioner, June 3, 2015). Shortly thereafter, a federal court certified a group of Uber drivers as a class in a misclassification suit against Uber. See O’Connor v. Uber Technologies, Inc., No. 13-​cv-​03826-​EMC (N.D. Cal., Dec. 9, 2015). See uberlawsuit.com for ongoing updates as to this and related litigation. 72  See John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971), §§ 3–​4; Seana Valentine Shiffrin, Speech Matters: On Lying, Morality, and the Law (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014): 168–​169. 73  See Rawls, Theory, supra note 72, § 77; Shiffrin, Speech Matters, supra note 72, 9–​11 (arguing that we depend on sincere communication with one another to develop our understanding of our moral

The Moral Burdens of Temporary FarmWork    537 example, we learn and develop our sense of morality in social contexts such as the family, religious and other civil organizations, and the larger legal-​political structure of our society. We learn about history, social possibilities, and the physical world by thinking and deliberating with others in a variety of formal (school) and informal (family, civil association, friendship) contexts. What we learn about our physical world and the limits of practical possibility in turn shapes our understanding of what it means to live well and what we owe to one another.74 Such associational networks are also central contexts in which we concretely exercise our moral agency. People realize values and aims through their activity in the world. Many people seek happiness and emotional enrichment through intimate associations of family, friendship, marriage, and the like. People also act on and express values like beneficence and gratitude by, for example, helping friends through difficult times and volunteering in their community. Social-​moral concerns about, for instance, the environment and poverty may arise from and be acted on through political participation (voting, canvassing, protesting) and through voluntary associations (community beach cleanup projects, OXFAM). And we often pursue our private ends through educational and career choices. Networks of intimate, civil, and political associations are also potential contexts for developing and exercising cooperative capacities,75 and thus, for developing the skills and understanding we need to relate to one another as equal moral agents. Whether a person has access to a stable associational network, and the extent to and respect in which she is integrated in such a network, therefore shapes the development

relations); Seana Valentine Shiffrin, “Race, Labor, and the Fair Equality of Opportunity Principle,” Fordham Law Review 72 (2004): 1663 (“[W]‌hat is implicit behind the liberal starting point of social cooperation is the assumption that social cooperation is the necessary context in which [moral agency] may be developed and fully realized.”); John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, ch. 2 (explaining that a person’s capacity for enjoyment is a “very tender plant” that “speedily dies away if the occupations to which their position in life has devoted them, and the society into which it has thrown them, are not favourable to keeping that higher capacity in exercise”); Immanuel Kant, What Does It Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking? (“How much and how correctly would we think if we did not think as it were in community with others to whom we can communicate our thoughts, and who communicate theirs with us!”); Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. W. D. Ross, Book II (explaining that a person’s sense of morality and the good life is developed through both individual contemplation and interaction with others). 74  John Rawls explains that “probing the limits of practical possibility” can enable us as citizens to develop an idea how to bring about a more just social order. See John Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, ed. Erin Kelly (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001), 4. With such an idea in front of us, Rawls hopes, we may be able to affirm our role as citizens in concretely striving toward such a “realistic[] utopia,” rather than resign ourselves to an unjust status quo. Id. at 3–​4. Hence, such inquiries into the limits of practical social possibilities contribute to the development of a person’s sense of what it means to live well as a citizen. 75  See Rawls, Theory, supra note 72, 474, 501 (discussing how the development of a person’s capacity to cooperate with others under fair terms and to be moved by those fair terms depends in large part on how a person—​through her experiences in her relations with others—​comes to feel that her society supports and respects her as a person).

538   Sabine Tsuruda of that person’s moral personality, the content of her life plans, and the extent to which she is able to advance those plans autonomously and as an equal.76 To be clear, I do not mean to suggest that we all develop the same values or realize them in exactly the same contexts. Some of us may need religion and politics; others may need family, seclusion, or private enterprise. My point is rather that having access to a stable network of intimate, civil, and political associations generally provides the rich set of opportunities and contexts for learning for yourself what you need for living a full moral life and acting on such aspirations. Temporary farmworker programs ask noncitizens to compromise such interests in developing and accessing associational ties by asking (and incentivizing) noncitizens to perform hard and isolating work as a transient member of society. That temporary farmworkers may indeed prefer to put some of their associational ties at risk—​or that some temporary farmworkers do not have any ties to such associational networks, as may be the case for truly migrant farmworkers—​therefore does not change that fact.77 And the moral burdens associated with such work are not limited to those incurred by the workers. Sending countries may also incur moral losses. Having many transient citizens may undermine political participation and the stability of political and other social ties in sending countries. In response to my concerns, one might argue that the burdens of temporary farmwork would be lessened if authorization periods were really short, say, six months or just a growing season. Societies with temporary farmworker programs could also make farmwork less exhausting through wage and hour regulation and investments in labor-​ saving technology. And temporary farmwork might be less isolating if workers were placed at farms that were close to social centers, rather than in bleak industrial farming regions like California’s San Joaquin Valley. But the mutual financial benefit rationale for the programs sets a limit on the extent to which we can imagine such improvements without rendering the programs ineffective under that rationale.78 Making the programs much shorter would shorten the time growers have to recover the costs of training temporary farmworkers,79 and implementing far-​reaching changes to the structure of farmwork would likely be costly. At a certain point, it may be just as (if not more) costly to recruit and hire nonresidents to temporarily perform farmwork.

76 

The idea of autonomy advanced here is thus a social-​political idea, not a metaphysical conception of freedom of the will. See Rawls, Justice as Fairness, supra note 74, 23. 77  One might object that it would be paternalistic to interfere and prevent noncitizens from performing temporary farmwork and thereby furthering their own preferences. But at this point, I have not yet argued that it is wrong to ask temporary farmworkers to compromise their agency in these ways. I discuss this paternalism objection in Part III.C., after so arguing. 78  See Anna Stilz, “Guest Workers and Second-​Class Citizenship,” Policy and Society 29 (2010): 296. 79  See Nowrasteh, “How to Make Guest Work Visas Work,” supra note 23, 7 (explaining that increasing authorization periods for temporary workers in the United States would enable employers to “capture some of the benefit of migrants’ American-​acquired skills”).

The Moral Burdens of Temporary FarmWork    539 Moreover, shortening authorization periods may actually exacerbate the moral risks of temporary farmworker programs by creating pressure to migrate more frequently. Temporary farmworker programs are not “working holiday” programs,80 nor are they cultural exchange or education or technical certification programs; the principal incentive to migrate and perform the work is the wage. Hence, it is not clear why people would be incentivized to perform only one or two tours of temporary farmwork; it is rather more likely that the many people who need the wages would be incentivized to migrate multiple times a year. Shorter authorization periods thus risk increasing the frequency of migration and making it even more difficult for temporary farmworkers to develop and maintain associational ties (whether abroad or at home). Of course, such a migration pattern is unlikely to result if only one or two societies adopt a temporary farmworker program (and did not, as the United States does, permit former temporary farmworkers to reapply for temporary worker status81). But if we assume, as supporters urge, that the programs are morally sound, we must also be prepared to assume that many societies might have temporary farmworker programs. It would be a problematic form of exceptionalism for a society to adopt a policy and yet hold that other similarly situated societies may not adopt like policies.82 Thus, even if no one country’s choice to implement such a program would facilitate more frequent migration, wide adoption of the programs likely would. Consequently, simply shortening authorization periods would likely not ameliorate the moral burdens of temporary farmworker programs. I now want to turn to whether asking people to take on those burdens can be justified.

B. Can Citizenship Make a Difference? So far I have been arguing that temporary farmworker programs ask nonresidents to take on potentially agency-​compromising burdens of hard work and transiency. But much of the work that we may need to perform even as citizens of the same society may be similarly compromising. We may need to mine for minerals in order to secure the raw materials to build homes, and manufacture plastics for medical supplies. And, of course, we need food, and hence, may need to perform farmwork. Even when such work does not involve temporary migration, the work may still be isolating and taxing. Yet it

80  Australia, for example, has a “working holiday” program that permits nonresidents between the ages of 18 and 30 to work in Australia for up to twelve months for purposes of “shar[ing] your culture, knowledge and skills whilst discovering [Australia’s] unique landscape.” See “Working Holiday in Australia,” Australian Department of Immigration and Border Protection, http://​www.border.gov.au/​ Trav/​Visi/​Visi-​1. 81 See supra note 7. 82  For discussions of wrongfully making an exception of oneself in the interpersonal case, see, e.g., Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, rev. ed., trans. and ed. Mary Gregor and Jens Timmermann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 4:424.

540   Sabine Tsuruda does not always seem unreasonable to ask fellow citizens to perform such hard work.83 Why should it be any different to ask nonresidents to perform similar work? The difference, I propose, is that shared obligations may flow from a relationship of reciprocal citizenship that make it permissible to ask—​perhaps even to expect—​that co-​ citizens perform such socially necessary work. As citizens of the same society, we are plausibly each under a duty to do our part in ensuring that our society becomes or continues to be a fair cooperative scheme supportive of moral agency. Ensuring that everyone has a stable supply of food is a critical element of that goal. People need food not just to survive but also to have energy to develop skills and capacities, to take up a variety of projects and form stable social relationships. Malnutrition depletes people of such energy, and, in the absence of a secure food supply, the search for food risks eclipsing all other projects.84 Having enough food is essential to the well-​being and deliberative space needed for a full, self-​directed life and is a precondition for sustaining the variety of institutions within which that life is lived.85 There are, of course, many ways a society might go about securing enough food. It might trade with other societies or it could automate its food production processes (or pursue some combination of the two). It might also grow some of its own food, particularly when it has neither the technology nor the resources to automate.86 Hence, for some societies, a scheme in which everyone is doing their part may well be a scheme in which some citizens are performing farmwork. Under such circumstances, it may be reasonable to ask and expect that at least some co-​citizens will actually do their part by performing some farmwork. This is not to say that reciprocal citizenship is the only relationship that could justify asking people to grow food. For example, it may be that global inequality in 83  This is not to say that mining and factory work are always and necessarily kinds of work to be avoided. It may well be that such work better fits some of our life plans than more stereotypically intellectual jobs, especially if it meant having more free time to engage in nonmarket projects than, say, being a surgeon would permit. Much may depend on how the work is organized and regulated. But the choice to perform work that involves taking on burdens similar to temporary farmwork is nonetheless a weighty one in light of the risks the work may pose to maintaining access to association. 84  Consider Joseph Raz’s description of a woman “hounded” on a deserted island by “a fierce carnivorous animal”: “H‌er mental stamina, her intellectual ingenuity, her willpower and her physical resources are taxed to their limits by her struggle to remain alive. She never has a chance to do, or even to think of anything other than how to escape from the beast.” Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 374. A person’s own hunger can function much like such a beast. Ensuring food security is, of course, not the only morally significant aspect of collectively managing our need for food. Seana Shiffrin’s contribution in this volume, “Deceptive Advertising and Taking Responsibility for Others,” discusses moral challenges associated with relying on others—​such as corporate entities—​for our knowledge about the quality and source of our food. 85  Hence Rawls suggested that moderate—​rather than persistent and severe—​resource scarcity is a precondition of justice. See Rawls, Theory, supra note 72, § 22. 86  People might also want to perform agricultural labor because of that labor’s cultural significance. See, e.g., Jan Douwe Van de Ploeg, The New Peasantries: Struggles for Autonomy and Sustainability in an Era of Empire and Globalization (London: Earthscan, 2008); “What Is La Via Campesina?” La Via Campesina: International Peasant’s Movement, http://​viacampesina.org/​en/​index.php/​organisation-​ mainmenu-​44/​what-​is-​la-​via-​campesina-​mainmenu-​45.

The Moral Burdens of Temporary FarmWork    541 natural resources or historical trade patterns place some societies in relationships of mutual dependency that recommend sharing productive burdens across borders and trading a variety of goods. But between receiving societies and nonresidents generally, there seems to be no relationship or shared project that explains why nonresidents may reasonably be asked to take on the moral burdens of temporary farmwork so that receiving societies can fulfill their food production aims. Rather, the motive for asking noncitizens to perform temporary farmwork seems to amount to a preference on the part of the receiving society to not perform farmwork.87 Such a bare preference cannot justify such a request. When we enlist someone’s help in pursuing our projects, we shape some part of that person’s life. When I ask you to do something for me because it would satisfy a desire of mine—​to not have to grow my own food, for instance—​I am asking you to give your life a particular content, to play a particular kind of role for my purposes and to likely put other projects on hold. But the fact that your labor would serve my aims cannot independently justify asking you to shape your life to my aims. That we are moral equals means that my likes and dislikes do not have priority over your interests in developing and exercising moral agency, and hence, in having access to an associational life. In treating my preferences as having such a special standing, I risk subordinating others to my projects. There are, of course, many contexts in which it seems morally sound to treat the fact that one does not want to do something as a reason to ask others to do something potentially burdensome, albeit often less burdensome than temporary farmwork. I might not feel like taking out the garbage tonight, and so might ask my husband to do it this time. You may not feel like hosting Thanksgiving this year, and so might ask your sibling to do so instead. I may not feel like representing the local unit of our labor union this year, and so may instead nominate you. But a key feature of these cases is that the preference is expressed within a relationship that explains why communicating (and expecting responsiveness to) the preference may be reasonable, even valuable. For example, preferences expressed between intimates—​ between family, friends, spouses—​occur within relationships and in the course of pursuing projects whose value depend in part on both parties being mutually sensitive to and supportive of each other’s wants and needs. Part of being intimate with someone involves communicating your tastes and preferences to that person and feeling secure in your belief that your associate will treat at least some of those preferences as reasons for action (and your associate should be able to expect the same from you). A preference thus does not on its own permit asking you to take out the garbage, but rather, only in conjunction with a variety of facts about our relationship—​that we are living together,

87 

Or a preference to not adopt other measures, such as raising wages or a universal basic income, that could give farmworkers a more attractive standard of living. See supra Part I. For a discussion of the possibilities of and liberal justifications for a universal basic income, see Philippe Van Parijs, “Why Surfers Should be Fed: The Liberal Case for an Unconditional Basic Income,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 20 (1991): 101.

542   Sabine Tsuruda and that the nature of our intimacy recommends sharing household tasks in a way we feel is mutually supportive.88 The story is similar in the organizational case. As members of the same local labor union, it seems plausible that we are responsible for the effective administration of that unit and that we are each individually under a correlative duty to do our part.89 Yet for each of us to satisfy that duty, we perhaps need not do exactly the same thing. Indeed, there may be good reasons to have a division of labor. We have limited time and personal resources to do work, so it may make sense for me to help with organizing activities this year while you represent us in negotiations with our employer. Further, who ought to do what may be underdetermined by the nature of our union duties and individual commitments. In such a case, a policy of relying on our preferences may be a perfectly good way to share the work. Some preference-​sensitivity may even be required to ensure that union participation leaves ample room for each of us to pursue our own projects within and outside of the union.90 In such an organizational context, it may therefore be permissible for me to ask you to be our union representative in part because I do not want to fill that role. A relationship of reciprocal citizenship may likewise explain the salience of citizens’ preferences to perform (or not perform) certain kinds of work. For each of us to do our part in ensuring that our society becomes (or continues to be) a fair cooperative scheme, we need not all perform the same kind of work. Some of us might grow food for a time, while some of us mine, while still others study the nature of the universe and take care of future generations. Similar to the union case, we might facilitate free choice of employment by adopting a preference-​sensitive division of labor to ensure that the labor-​ demands of citizenship do not wholly define what we leave behind as our life’s work.91 The extent to which any scheme of sharing burdens can be sensitive to preferences has its limits. As between union members, if a preference-​based system for satisfying union duties disparately impacts certain members of the union (say, women), or enables some members to systematically avoid doing their part, then that may be a reason for

88 

Of course, the particular features of our relationship and preferences are not the only considerations that bear on how to share household duties. There may, for instance, be political and social values that count strongly against having a traditional gendered division of labor in the home, even if no party to that division of labor personally objects. 89  For a discussion of the relationship between joint and individual requirements, see A. J. Julius, “The Possibility of Exchange,” Politics, Philosophy & Economics 12 (2013): 369. 90  For a related discussion of the need for the law to accommodate the exercise of moral agency, see Seana Valentine Shiffrin, “The Divergence of Contract and Promise,” Harvard Law Review 120 (2007): 713–​7 18. 91  See generally Vicki Schultz, “Life’s Work,” Columbia Law Review 100 (2000), for a discussion of the potential for the paid workplace to be a transformative context with respect to both an individual’s conception of the good and whether people come to regard one another as equal citizens. See also Rawls, Theory, supra note 72, 417 (“[When] an individual decides what to be, what occupation or profession to enter, say, he adopts a particular plan of life. In time his choice will lead him to acquire a definite pattern of wants and aspirations (or the lack thereof), some aspects of which are peculiar to him while others are typical of his chosen occupation or way of life.”).

The Moral Burdens of Temporary FarmWork    543 moving to some other scheme for sharing the work. Communicating preferences to your intimate associates also has its limits. Doing all the listening and cleaning may indicate that your friend or spouse exercises a problematic form of authority over your life, and hence, that you and your associate should probably rethink the ways in which you support one another. Similar considerations apply to a society’s scheme of labor. If that scheme permits some people’s preferences (those of the wealthiest people, or whose talents are in high demand) to dominate and systematically leaves the least advantaged people performing dangerous or otherwise agency-compromising work, then that may be a reason for rejecting the scheme as incompatible with our equal moral status. My point is thus not that citizenship, union membership, intimacy, and the like, license us to ask our compatriots and associates to take on burdens for us whenever we want and because it is what we want. Rather, the relationships permit us to make certain requests of one another because of the nature of our shared projects, such as endeavoring to sustain our society, or living a life together. And it is the value of the project—​fair cooperation, intimacy—​and the ways in which our respective roles may express our equal moral status that ultimately set the standards for what demands we may reasonably make of one another, not any one person’s or group’s preferences. In contrast, there is no value or background relationship between temporary farmworkers and receiving societies generally that can help explain either the salience of the receiving society’s preferences to not perform as much farmwork (or to avoid the (perceived) costs of immigration),92 or why it might be reasonable to expect nonresidents to share the burdens of growing the receiving society’s food. Nonresidents generally are strangers for purposes of growing the receiving society’s food.93 Just as I may not reasonably ask you, a mere passerby strolling through my neighborhood, to take out the garbage when I am not in the mood, so it seems I cannot reasonably ask a nonresident to grow tomatoes for me because I do not like that sort of work. In the absence of any justifying relationship or project, it therefore seems unreasonable to ask nonresidents to take on the burdens of temporary farmwork.

C. Wages and Wealth Inequality Of course, temporary farmworkers do not work for free. From the worker’s point of view, the reason to perform temporary farmwork is surely not to further the receiving 92 See supra Part I. 93 

To be sure, some temporary farmworker programs are created through bilateral agreements between receiving and sending societies, such as Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program. See supra note 14. The noncitizens targeted by the programs may therefore not be “strangers” to the receiving society. Although I cannot fully explore how bilateral agreements can make a difference, I will note a few moral problems that such agreements may nonetheless pose. If, for instance, the terms of the agreement are merely the product of each society’s relative bargaining power, then the terms of those agreements may simply serve to express and reify wealth inequality between the receiving and sending societies. In such a case, although the citizens of sending societies may not be strangers to the receiving society, it

544   Sabine Tsuruda society’s goals, but rather to access a valuable wage. Hence, even if noncitizens have no reason to grow receiving societies’ food, they may certainly have a reason to accept offers of money to grow receiving societies’ food. Indeed, commentators have contended that temporary farmworker programs might be understood as antipoverty policies because of the financial benefits that redound to poorer noncitizens.94 As mutually beneficial antipoverty policies, might not a temporary farmworker program be understood as a shared project of meeting one another’s basic needs, and thus, as creating a reciprocal relationship that could justify requests for farmwork? First, as intuitively appealing such a characterization may be, it may be misleading to characterize temporary farmworker programs as antipoverty policies. An initial difficulty is that the programs do not target the truly indigent. It takes resources and time to seek out the temporary work opportunities and to pay the costs of travel.95 Further, even if the programs were designed to make it easier for the poorest of the poor to access temporary farmwork, the programs would create a dilemma for such noncitizens: either they must live with insufficient money at home or with a compromised moral life abroad. Either way, the noncitizens are left with compromised access to critical social and material conditions for moral agency. Second, the wage offer itself may further problematize temporary farmwork. Temporary farmworker programs are premised on wealth inequality. The programs can fulfill their gap-​bridging function only if there are nonresidents who are substantially poorer than receiving society residents, and hence, nonresidents who can be incentivized to perform the work for substantially less than receiving society residents.96 Offers of paid temporary farmwork therefore create a state of affairs in which poverty supplies a compelling reason for nonresidents to perform the work and to thereby compromise their moral agency. The wage offer thus transforms a merely unreasonable request for work into one that exploits and expresses wealth inequality.97

may still be unreasonable to ask those citizens to do temporary farmwork, as the resulting bargain may arbitrarily favor the preferences of the receiving society. 94 

See, e.g., Hidalgo, “An Argument for Guest Worker Programs,” supra note 12. Ypi makes a similar point in “Taking Workers as a Class,” supra note 58. 96  Notice that this is still compatible with paying temporary farmworkers potentially more than some resident farmworkers. The residents performing farmwork may have so few employment opportunities that they are willing to accept substantially lower wages than paid to residents working in other sectors. The key for temporary farmworker programs is that the wage is lower than that needed to incentivize enough residents—​not merely some residents—​to perform the farmwork. 97  This kind of exploitation thus differs from standardly discussed forms of exploitation, according to which an agreement between A and B is exploitative when A benefits disproportionately or when B is effectively coerced into accepting. For a thoughtful discussion of both conceptions of exploitation, see Stilz, “Guestworkers,” supra note 78, 299–​302. Similar to Stilz, I contend that receiving societies should not “leverage circumstances of political repression to induce people to agree to [guest worker] contracts,” but further conclude that societies should not leverage global wealth inequality either. Id. 302. As I have been arguing, exploitation is not, however, the heart of the problem, but rather a downstream feature of incentivizing acceptance of offers of temporary farmwork that unjustifiably privilege receiving society residents to begin with. 95 

The Moral Burdens of Temporary FarmWork    545 Even so, one might accept the exploitative character of the programs and yet still endorse the programs on antipaternalism grounds. It should be largely up to the person to decide how best to advance her particular aims, and deciding whether to relocate for work to seek better financial opportunities—​even at the cost of personal and political associations—​seems to fall within the scope of that authority. It may therefore seem objectionably paternalistic to deny nonresidents the opportunity to continue making such choices to improve their material wellbeing out of concern for their moral wellbeing. I agree that nonresidents (and people generally) have moral authority over choices about where to live and what kind of work to perform, but deny that this paternalism objection applies to my concerns with temporary farmworker programs. First, this paternalism objection assumes an unwarranted binary: that receiving societies must either offer temporary farmwork or close their borders. But the universe of possibilities is not so small. Receiving societies could extend a path to citizenship to temporary farmworkers or adopt broader policies for permanent immigration, in which case nonresidents could continue to perform migrant farmwork if they so choose. Indeed, it would be a perverse kind of moral formalism for receiving societies to simply terminate their programs and close their borders in response to the concerns articulated here if doing so would further imperil nonresidents’ moral agency.98 Adopting such expanded immigration policies are certainly not politically easy options. It may take social mobilization and a change in political will. But the fact that these alternatives are challenging does not justify turning a blind eye to the moral defects of temporary farmworker programs, nor does it justify giving up on aspiring to a better state of affairs. Second, this paternalism objection misunderstands the target of my objections to the programs. It is the receiving society’s request and offer of migrant work that is unreasonable, not a nonresident’s acceptance of that offer. My criticisms do not deny that nonresidents may have perfectly good reasons to perform temporary farmwork. Finally, although I cannot fully develop a theory of paternalism here, I understand paternalism to involve an exercise of power over an aspect of another person’s life that is properly within the scope of that other person’s authority.99 So, for instance, I suspect it is paternalistic to require someone to quit smoking because deciding whether to smoke is something within the legitimate scope of a person’s authority over herself. But I do not think it is paternalistic to ask people to refrain from smoking in public spaces because exposing other people to smoke is not within a person’s legitimate authority. Just as it is paternalistic for me to decide for you not to smoke, so it is wrong for you to decide for me to effectively become a smoker. It is likewise not within the legitimate authority of receiving societies to use their greater wealth to shape nonresidents’ choices about where to live and what kind of work 98  For a similar point, see Margaret Jane Radin, Contested Commodities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 51; Stilz, “Guestworkers,” supra note 78, 297. 99  This is not meant to be a sufficient condition for something’s being paternalistic. For a discussion competing accounts of paternalism and a view of paternalism to which I am sympathetic, see Seana Valentine Shiffrin, “Paternalism, Unconscionability Doctrine, and Accommodation,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 29 (2000): 211–​221.

546   Sabine Tsuruda to do. As receiving societies have no reasonable basis to ask nonresidents move to their country and grow their food, they surely have no right to leverage nonresidents’ relative poverty to encourage them to accept that request. It is therefore not paternalistic to claim that receiving societies should not request and incentivize temporary farmwork, as receiving societies never had the authority to do so to begin with.

IV.  Implications for Other Guest Worker Programs To be sure, many apparently permissible immigration, education, and work policies involve people taking on burdens similar to those of temporary farmworkers. Emergency relief workers take on extraordinary burdens of dangerous work and transiency. Student exchange programs require that students temporarily migrate to a new country and then leave once their visas expire. Visiting professors and ambassadors likewise are at risk of rupturing a variety of their personal and social relations because of their temporary (and potentially quite long) visit to and stay in a new country. And the work that exchange students, visiting professors, and ambassadors do may be quite difficult and stressful, albeit for different reasons than temporary farmworkers. But temporary farmworker programs are not programs for cultural exchange, nor are they (at least in their current form) programs for sharing skills and knowledge. There is nothing inherent in producing food that recommends inviting nonresidents to play that productive role. Temporary farmworker programs are also quite unlike emergency relief programs, as the temporary farmworker programs are motivated largely by preference rather than exigency, and the need for farmwork that motivates temporary farmworker programs is indefinite. Recognizing the moral defects of temporary farmworker programs thus does not entail a repudiation of guest worker programs and cross-​border cooperation more broadly. But the moral problems of temporary farmworker programs do recommend scrutinizing the motives for and structure of guest worker programs. Consider, for example, a hypothetical visiting academic position. Under the terms of the position, a nonresident academic is invited to temporarily join the department of a university in a receiving society for purposes of sharing research and perspectives across borders. For such a program to be responsive to those purposes, it seems reasonable to expect that the visiting professor will do more than work on her research in the isolation of her lab or office. It may be reasonable to ask that the visitor teach a class so as to learn from and share ideas with the student body and other members of the receiving society who might sit in on the course. It may also be reasonable to ask that the visitor interact with faculty by, for instance, participating in workshops or giving a departmental talk. A policy of temporarily employing academics may also unreasonably burden participating nonresidents. Universities might, for example, create short-​term (one to two

The Moral Burdens of Temporary FarmWork    547 year) academic positions that require participants to teach heavy course loads—​without any guarantees that participants will have time or opportunities to develop relationships with or learn from members of the department and larger academic community—​in order to reduce the costs of providing tenure. Similar to temporary farmworker programs, such a short-​term hiring practice may create market pressures for nonresidents (and residents) to adopt a transient lifestyle that compromises their access to stable associational networks.100 The transiency likewise seems unrelated to any shared project or value between receiving universities and participants. Indeed, a policy of short-​term hiring may be in tension with university values of intellectual freedom and education if the policy compromises the security of employment needed to freely explore a variety of subjects and opinions and to mentor students. Rejecting temporary farmworker programs is thus compatible with embracing cross-​ border cooperation and exchange, but the moral defects of the programs should lead us to critically examine such policies.

Conclusion I began this chapter by explaining that common criticisms of temporary farmworker programs target morally objectionable but contingent features of the programs, such as workers’ vulnerability to employer abuse. I argued that even if such features could be eliminated, temporary farmworker programs would still be morally defective. The programs ask and incentivize poorer nonresidents to compromise their existing intimate, civil, and political ties to perform work in a new country and to then rupture the new ties they form when they are forced to leave (if they can form any new ties at all). Adopting such programs to avoid having to perform as much farmwork, or to avoid the (perceived) costs of permanent immigration, treats guest workers’ interests in associational life as less valuable than the like interests of host-​country residents. As such, the programs are incompatible with the basic democratic premise that people are equal moral agents. My objections to temporary farmworker programs thus reveal that reform is an inadequate aim. Societies should instead strive to move toward a state of affairs where they no longer have temporary farmworker programs. I want to close by briefly discussing how the agency values that underpin my objections might guide transitioning away from temporary farmworker programs.

100  Of course, for residents the character of the burden on associational life is distinguishable from temporary farmworkers. Residents have a right to stay, unlike temporary farmworkers. For a discussion of competing theories of what produces contingent work more broadly, see generally Lester, “Careers and Contingency,” supra note 3, 73 (arguing that “New Keynesian” accounts of underemployment in labor markets can help explain the rise of contingent employment notwithstanding that category’s heterogeneity).

548   Sabine Tsuruda First, many people have come to rely on temporary farmworker programs to help further their aims—​to help educate a family member or escape poverty (or mitigate the risk of future poverty). Ending those programs by closing borders would likely have the perverse effect of further imperiling the moral agency of nonresidents by seriously compromising their livelihood and potentially trapping them in failed (or failing) states. The moral defects of temporary farmworker programs therefore recommend abandoning or radically revising current programs by extending to guest workers a path to citizenship. Second, societies that have historically sent their citizens abroad to perform temporary farmwork may have become so economically enmeshed with the receiving society as to have a claim to continued cooperation with the receiving society. While I cannot fully explore the matter here, such circumstances may provide further reason to transition away from current temporary farmworker programs by adopting open borders policies, such as permanent immigration programs for sending-​country citizens. Long-​ standing relationships between receiving and sending countries may also limit the extent to which a receiving country may legitimately and unilaterally modify those relationships. Transitioning away from current temporary farmworker programs may thus need to be a joint effort between receiving and sending countries. Third, dismantling temporary farmworker programs should be responsive to the potential effect on food prices, both domestically and abroad. If receiving societies were to extend a path to citizenship to guest workers, such societies may eventually have to pay the higher wage to incentivize new and other residents to perform farmwork. It is therefore possible that food prices in those societies (and in international markets) would increase. In the absence of domestic and global redistributive policies, such a consequence would be especially hard on poorer populations. Abolishing the programs out of a concern for the moral interests of temporary farmworkers may hence have the paradoxical effect of undermining the like interests of similarly situated (if not the same) people. The project of remedying the defects in temporary farmworker programs is thus likely much broader than changing labor and immigration policies, and may require adopting domestic and global redistributive policies. Finally, there remains the problem of receiving-society residents’ willingness to perform farmwork. Even if receiving societies extend a path to citizenship to guest workers, if guest workers immigrate they may become less interested in performing farmwork in light of the availability of better economic opportunities. Thus, the economic challenge that motivated temporary farmworker programs would reemerge. In the course of my arguments, I have suggested that even between citizens of the same society, the choice of how to share the burdens of farmwork is morally fraught. There still must be a non-​arbitrary basis for asking co-​citizens to take on the burdens of farmwork, and the preferences of dominant social classes to perform other kinds of work cannot provide that basis.101 Citizens must be able to understand themselves as doing their part as moral equals, and not as doing their part as subordinates of others. While simply

101 See supra Part III.B.

The Moral Burdens of Temporary FarmWork    549 raising farmworker wages may attract enough people to perform farmwork, in a society with substantial wealth inequality it may still be the case that the burden of performing farmwork falls disparately and unreasonably on the shoulders of the less privileged. In light of all the moral risks involved in having people grow food, should a society simply aim to mechanize and industrialize as much food production as possible? I am not sure, but I have some reservations. Industrial farming—​because of its current reliance on fossil fuels—​may not be sustainable.102 Farmwork may also be tied to particular conceptions of the good and rural cultures. Rather than aim to eliminate manual farmwork, a society might consider revising the way it encourages people to perform farmwork. For example, a society might consider making farmwork temporary (such as by restricting people’s freedom of employment to perform farmwork for more than a year) or voluntary. Making farmwork temporary is a (though I do not claim the only) way of ensuring that people do not ask or incentivize one another to undermine their health or devote their professional life to an activity that may compromise their moral agency. Making the work wholly voluntary is also a way of mitigating the risk that financial incentives will systematically induce the least advantaged members of society to perform farmwork. Of course, the problem of people’s willingness to perform the work would remain. Must a society then resort to conscription schemes? Perhaps not.103 Ensuring that enough people perform the work is a problem only if we assume that the primary motive to perform farmwork is private—​that people will only be motivated to perform farmwork by, for instance, their desire or need for money. That need not be the case. Many people volunteer and perform work for much lower wages than they might otherwise be paid for extended periods of time. Consider Doctors Without Borders and the Peace Corps. People might come to understand performing farmwork in a way analogous to such civic, humanitarian, and voluntary work. To be sure, such a farming ethos is unlikely to arise anytime soon and societies are unlikely to create a path to citizenship for guest workers any time soon. But in the interim, there is a lot we can do to improve conditions for farmworkers, domestic and temporary alike. We could improve internal labor mobility for temporary farmworkers by decoupling their right to stay from employment with their initial sponsor.104 We could also raise farmworker wages and engage in social activism to raise awareness about the challenges of migrant work. We could support farmworker unions to enable farmworkers to combine their economic and political power to have a meaningful voice in the policies that affect their life prospects.105 And we could, of course, work on all 102  See generally Tony Weis, “The Accelerating Biophysical Contradictions of Industrial Capitalist Agriculture,” Journal of Agrarian Change 10 (2010): 315. 103  But if it did, it is not clear that a coercively enforced conscription scheme would be impermissible. Indeed, if a voluntary scheme, as in the union example (see supra Part III.B.), disproportionately burdened one class of people, conscription might be one way to ensure that farmwork was shared on a fair basis. See Stanczyk, “Productive Justice,” supra note 56. 104  See, e.g., Stilz, “Guestworkers,” supra note 78, 304. 105  Unionization may empower contingent workers more broadly. See Lester, “Careers and Contingency,” supra note 3, 143–​144.

550   Sabine Tsuruda the improvements that the standard critiques of employer abuse, remedial insufficiency, and overstay risks suggest.

Bio Predoctoral Fellow in Law and Philosophy, UCLA School of Law. Ph.D. Candidate, UCLA Department of Philosophy. B.A., Stanford University; J.D., UCLA School of Law.

Acknowledgments I am grateful for help and comments from Aslı Bâli, Nico Cornell, Kristen Eichensehr, Barbara Herman, A.J. Julius, Hiroshi Motomura, Amy Sepinwall, Seana Shiffrin, Alan Strudler, Eugene Volokh, Adam Winkler, and participants in the UCLA Ethics Workshop.

Pa rt  V I

G E N DE R , B ODY I M AG E , A N D “H E A LT H Y ”  E AT I N G

chapter 24

Eat Y ’Self Fi t t e r Orthorexia, Health, and Gender Christina Van Dyke

Diet is an ambiguous and powerful tool, too unclear and emotionally charged for comfort, too powerful to be ignored. —​Steven Bratman, Health Food Junkies1

We tend to think of eating disorders in very personal terms. They affect individuals we love: family members, friends, and us. We warn our teens and other at-​risk groups about the dangers of anorexia and bulimia; we offer programs aimed at educating people about what “healthy eating” would look like for them and how they can achieve and maintain a “healthy” weight. Treatment programs for eating disorders focus on individual and small-​group therapy. Eating disorders, after all, are very personal. They affect us on a visceral, embodied level—​the level at which we often feel most vulnerable and most alone. An exclusive focus on eating disorders at this level, however, makes us like the person in the famous story who keeps pulling people from a stream without wondering what upstream is making them all fall in. In this essay, I investigate what is happening upstream in the case of orthorexia, a condition in which the subject becomes obsessed with identifying and maintaining the ideal diet, rigidly avoiding foods perceived as unhealthy or harmful.2 In so doing, I join the feminist scholars who have contributed in the past decades to our understanding of the sociocultural and historical contexts in

1  Steven Bratman, with David Knight, Health Food Junkies: Orthorexia Nervosa: Overcoming the Obsession with Healthful Eating (New York: Broadway Books, 2000). 2  For a concise summary and early discussion of this condition, see Jennifer Mathieu, “What Is Orthorexia?” Journal of the American Dietetic Association 105, no. 10 (October 2005): 1510–​1512.

554   Christina Van Dyke which eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia flourish.3 As these scholars have made clear, in order to uproot eating disorders, we need first to identify and address the ideologies that ground them. Orthorexia in particular deserves philosophical attention right now for at least two reasons. First, evidence suggests that the current prevalence rate of orthorexia in the general population is higher than those of anorexia and bulimia combined.4 Second, orthorexia appears to be an “equal opportunity” eating disorder, affecting men and women at roughly equal rates and across a wide variety of ages (unlike anorexia and bulimia, which remain concentrated in adolescent female populations).5 To address orthorexia on a practical level “downstream,” we need an “upstream” account that explains these facts. This essay offers just such an account. In the first section, I explain in more detail what orthorexia is and why its status as a diagnosable eating disorder has remained controversial. In the second section, I examine widespread cultural factors that provide particularly fertile ground for the development of orthorexia (such as dramatic increases in the variety of available foods, growing awareness of the health impact of environmental contamination, and the widespread use of marketing strategies that generate anxiety about food “toxins” and promote “superfoods”). In the third section I  draw out social and historical connections between religion and orthorexia (which literally means “righteous eating”), also addressing how ambiguities in the concept of “health” make it particularly prone to take on quasi-​religious significance. In the fourth section, I discuss how gendered ideals of eating and health contribute to the development of orthorexia in different populations while simultaneously masking important commonalities. I conclude in the final section by arguing that what makes this sort of disordered eating destructive to both men and women is ultimately a common urge to transcend rather than to embrace the realities of embodiment. In sum, I believe that orthorexia is best understood as a manifestation of age-​old anxieties about human finitude and mortality—​anxieties which current dominant sociocultural forces prime us to experience and express in unhealthy attitudes toward healthy eating. 3 

Kim Chernin’s The Obsession: Reflections on the Tyranny of Slenderness (New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1981) and Susie Orbach’s Fat is a Feminist Issue (New York: Random House, 1978 [vol. 1]; 1982 [vol. 2]) are two of the most influential early treatments of this topic. Susan Bordo’s Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993) also contains several excellent papers on the cultural grounds for anorexia and bulimia. See, in particular, “Whose Body Is This? Feminism, Medicine, and the Conceptualization of Eating Disorders” (45–​70), “Hunger as Ideology” (99–​138), “Anorexia Nervosa: Psychopathology as the Crystallization of Culture” (139–​164), and “The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity” (165–​184). 4  A 2013 study estimates orthorexia’s prevalence rate at 6.9% and rising. See Márta Varga, S. Dukay-​ Szabó, and F. Túry, “Evidence and Gaps in the Literature on Orthorexia Nervosa,” Eating and Weight Disorders—​Studies on Anorexia, Bulimia and Obesity 18, no. 2 (June 2013): 103–​111. 5  As we will see in the first section, although research on orthorexia that yields statistically significant results is still in its infancy, what research there is indicates that orthorexia impacts men and women at generally equal rates, with several studies indicating that men are actually more likely than women to suffer from the condition. See Varga et al., “Evidence and Gaps.”

Eat Y’Self Fitter   555

Signs and Symptoms: What Is Wrong with Healthy Eating? Like a soldier you righteously follow the orders of your commander (your mental paradigm), not being influenced by the people around you and sacrificing hundreds of possibilities for your cause. You bail out of all the extremities of pleasure, rebellion, and experimentation when they are offered to you. It’s this 100% management, this nutritionally perfect goal, which can ultimately pull down the experience of the rest of your life. —​Edward Yuen, recovering orthorexic6

My interest in orthorexia is not clinical. I happily leave to others discussions about the best way to categorize, quantify, and diagnose its precise nature. Rather, my interest lies in understanding orthorexia as one end of a continuum that includes everyone who worries about how healthy their diet really is, or who has cut out gluten (or sugar or dairy or fat . . .) to avoid toxins, or who “juices” or “cleanses” to flush out their system, or who has a family member or close friend that does any of these things—​that is, virtually everyone who will be reading this. We live in a society obsessed with “healthy eating”: small wonder that some people embody that obsession more literally than others. It is important for us to examine more closely what that obsession looks like, then, and in what specific ways it proves harmful. The term “orthorexia nervosa” was coined by Steven Bratman, a holistic medical practitioner, in 1997 for an article for Yoga Journal to describe a condition he was seeing frequently in the alternative community he treated (and had suffered from himself).7 Modeled on the term “anorexia nervosa,” from the Greek for “no appetite/​eating obsession,” orthorexia nervosa literally means “correct appetite/​eating obsession.” Bratman writes: “To be perfectly honest, I intended the term somewhat tongue in cheek, as a kind of sassy way to surprise clients who were proud of their obsession and make them think twice about it. I assumed that the condition was fairly rare and that the only reason I saw it so often was that I practiced alternative medicine. . . . But I was not quite right.”8 Instead, the article hit a cultural nerve. Today, most eating disorder centers offer programs specifically aimed at overcoming orthorexia, psychologists and the medical community take it seriously, and there is increasing public recognition that the zeal for healthy eating can go too far.9 6 

Edward L. Yuen, Beating Orthorexia and the Memoirs of a Health Freak (Place: Publisher, 2015), 81–​ 82; http://​beatingorthorexia.co.uk. 7  “Health Food Junkie,” Yoga Journal (September/​October 1997): 42–​50; http://​www.orthorexia.com/​ original-​orthorexia-​essay. 8 Bratman, Health Food Junkies, 21. 9  Orthorexia has its own page on the National Eating Disorders website now, for instance (see https://​ www.nationaleatingdisorders.org/​orthorexia-​nervosa). Sometimes there is a distinction made between “orthorexia,” identified as obsession with eating only pure, natural, or healthy foods to the detriment of

556   Christina Van Dyke As the name indicates, orthorexia is an obsession with eating “correctly.” As with anorexia, the subject becomes fixated on food and their diet; unlike anorexia, orthorexia is concerned primarily with the quality rather than quantity of the food they eat. The anorexic tends to focus on an ideal weight or body size; the orthorexic tends to focus on identifying and maintaining an ideal diet. This goal is strongly associated with terms like “transcendence” and “purity.” As I discuss in the third section, this can take on an almost religious feel for the orthorexic, whose identity becomes increasingly centered on eliminating any potentially dangerous ingredient from their diet (additives, preservatives, genetically modified products, gluten, dairy, grains, meat—​anything perceived as a “toxin”) in order to attain a state of perfect health through their diet. As the condition intensifies, orthorexics resort to taking pre-​prepared food with them wherever they go and avoiding social situations that involve eating or drinking other people’s food, worried about what might be ingested in food they did not prepare. Stricter diets, fasting, and “cleanses” are often used to rid the body of the impurities of any unhealthy food that is consumed. In addition to obsession with a pure, healthy diet and corresponding behavioral restrictions, orthorexia also tends to involve a sense of moral superiority that subjects gain from both thinking about and adhering to their idealized diet. As Bratman puts it: “Unlike other eating disorders, orthorexia disguises itself as a virtue. Anorexics may know that they are hurting themselves, but orthorexics feel nothing but pride at taking care of their health in the best possible way.”10 Anorexia or bulimia are usually a source of deep shame and secrecy for its subjects, but the orthorexic subject is vocal about what they are or are not eating, and why—​namely, health. They see their chosen diet as the healthy ideal and are concerned to share their beliefs with others. A recent study by Márta Varga et al. summarizes the main elements of orthorexia nervosa as follows: The preoccupation with quality of food and eating healthy comprise the principal elements of this disorder. The pathological obsession with biologically pure food and shops which sell it leads to a special lifestyle. Stringent dietary restrictions and eating plans, combined with a personality and attitude of superiority and obsessive-​phobic behavioral characteristics define the core of ON [orthorexia nervosa]. Transgressing the dietary rules leads to intense anxiety, feelings of guilt and shame and is followed by even more stringent dietary restrictions.11

This spiral of “dietary restriction, failure, guilt and depression, increased dietary restriction, failure, guilt and depression, even more dietary restriction” is characteristic one’s mental and emotional health, and “orthorexia nervosa,” which includes extreme dietary restriction that can lead to malnutrition, harmfully low body weight, and death. Because these conditions are often run together, and because my interest lies primarily in the cultural underpinnings of both conditions, I will be using the more general term in this essay. 10 Bratman, Health Food Junkies, 2.

11  Márta Varga, B. K. Thege, S. Dukay-​Szabó, F. Túry, and E. F. van Furth, “When Eating Healthy Is Not Healthy: Orthorexia Nervosa and Its Measurement with the ORTO-​15 in Hungary,” BMC Psychiatry 14, no. 1 (2014): 59.

Eat Y’Self Fitter   557 of other eating disorders as well. Subjects experience guilt and depression when they fail to adhere to their chosen diet and frequently impose further restrictions as self-​ punishment. In addition to putting the subject at risk for malnutrition, orthorexia also involves a distortion of priorities, where the subject gradually places “eating healthy” above other previously dominant values, thinking constantly about food: what they will eat, when they will eat it, what food is “safe,” and so on. Eventually, the quality of what they consume and the purity of their diet become more important to the orthorexic than “personal values, interpersonal relations, career plans, and social relationships,” as food becomes the sole focus of their life.12 Who is at risk for this disorder? For once, it is not pre-​pubescent or adolescent girls. Orthorexia as a life-​disrupting disorder is particularly likely to occur in communities that are engaged in conversations about health: dieticians, athletes, performance artists, college and post-​college educated adults, and the aging.13 In fact, older men appear particularly likely to develop orthorexia, as they face increasing health concerns and their own mortality. Yet, in a sense, everyone who participates in a culture that holds “health” up as the dominant social value—​that is, everyone who lives in twenty-​first-​ century Western culture—​is prone to obsess about healthy eating and the ideal diet. In the remainder of this essay, I address how orthorexia should be seen as a deeply understandable reaction to current social anxieties. The prevalence of general social concern with diet and health makes orthorexia a more controversial condition than, say, anorexia or bulimia.14 (Orthorexia is currently classified by the American Psychiatric Association in the DSM under the catch-​all “Avoidant/​Restrictive Food Intake Disorder” label in the DSM.15) Some people object to the idea that a focus on health should be seen as unhealthy, or that it is inappropriate to take healthy food as one’s highest value. Some people see orthorexia as expressing a legitimate desire to live longer, or as a way of caring for bodies that just goes a bit too far, or even as providing people with meaning in their lives. For anyone who has studied the disorder, it is hard to dismiss its effects as not meriting serious attention. Yet a look at Bratman’s original proposed diagnostic tool, designed to identify people at risk for orthorexia, gives insight into why there continues to be 12  Anna Brytek-​Matera, “Orthorexia Nervosa—​An Eating Disorder, Obsessive-​Compulsive Disorder or Disturbed Eating Habit?” Archives of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy 1 (2012): 55–​60. This article also contains a breakdown of the gender difference discovered between orthorexic men and women in various studies in different countries; in general, men were found to be more at risk for orthorexia than women. 13  See, e.g., C. Segura-​Garcia, M. Papaianni, F. Caglioti, et al., “Orthorexia Nervosa: A Frequent Eating Disordered Behavior in Athletes,” Eating and Weight Disorders 17, no, 4 (2012): 226–​233. For an overview of the different populations affected, see also Varga, “Evidence and Gaps.” 14  See, for instance, Walter VanderEycken, “Media Hype, Diagnostic Fad or Genuine Disorder? Professionals’ Opinions about Night Eating Syndrome, Orthorexia, Muscle Dysmorphia, and Emetophobia,” Eating Disorders: The Journal of Treatment and Prevention 19, no. 2 (2011): 145–​155. 15  For a discussion of how best to classify orthorexia, which also contains helpful citations to other studies, see Bryter-​Matara, “Orthorexia Nervosa—​An Eating Disorder, Obsessive-​Compulsive Disorder or Disturbed Eating Habit?”

558   Christina Van Dyke resistance to acknowledging it as a distinct disease. The questionnaire poses the following set of questions, asking the reader to score positive responses with a point; it suggests that a score of four or more points indicates that the reader should reevaluate their relationship with food and their diet: • Do you spend more than three hours each day thinking about food? (For four hours, give yourself two points.) The time measurement includes cooking, shopping, reading about your diet, discussing (or evangelizing) it with friends, and joining Internet chat groups on the subject. • Do you plan tomorrow’s food today? • Do you care more about the virtue of what you eat than the pleasure you receive from eating it? • Have you found that as the quality of your diet has increased, the quality of your life has correspondingly diminished? • Do you keep getting stricter with yourself? • Do you sacrifice experiences you once enjoyed to eat the food you believe is right? • Do you feel an increased sense of self-​esteem when you are eating healthy food? Do you look down on others who don’t? • Do you feel guilt or self-​loathing when you stray from your diet? • Does your diet socially isolate you? • When eating the way you are supposed to, do you feel a peaceful sense of total control?16 Bratman himself is clear that this is not meant for clinical use but for personal reflection.17 Even so, several things about these questions are worth noting. First, we live in a culture where it would be completely normal to answer “yes” to several of the questions. I will come back to this when I talk about the cultural conditions that ground the prevalence of orthorexia in the second section, but feeling better about oneself for eating “healthy” food and experiencing guilt for eating the “wrong” things is almost endemic in contemporary Western culture. Second, caretakers and people who bear primary responsibility for feeding their families (especially large families) will score disproportionately highly on this test. They will almost always spend more than three hours each day thinking about and preparing food, and they will also plan meals at least a day in advance. Since women make up a disproportionate number of the people who bear primary responsibility for feeding their families, this test would consistently predict that women are at greater risk for orthorexia than men. 16 Bratman, Health Food Junkies, 47–​52.

17  Work is ongoing to develop a reliable diagnostic tool for clinical use. See, e.g., L. M. Donini, D. Marsili, M. P. Graziani, et al., “Orthorexia Nervosa: Validation of a Diagnosis Questionnaire,” Eating and Weight Disorders—​Studies on Anorexia, Bulimia, and Obesity 10 (2005): e28–​e32 (doi:10.1007/​ BF03327537) and Varga et al., “When Eating Healthy Is Not Healthy.”

Eat Y’Self Fitter   559 Third, this questionnaire does not distinguish between people who restrict their diet for moral reasons (such as the commitment to not harm animals, to eat local, or to minimize their environmental impact) and people who restrict what they eat out of fear of toxins or in hopes of attaining the perfect diet. As with anorexia and bulimia, there is a continuum from mild to severe forms of the disorder; orthorexia can exist in tandem both with other disorders—​and with moral motivations to avoid certain foods and food groups. The overlap between moral issues and control issues is a particularly murky area, both conceptually and experientially. It is not uncommon, for instance, for orthorexics to be vegan. Veganism is a lifestyle that is frequently identified as “pure” and “clean” and promoted as maximally healthy. The link between veganism and orthorexia has been highlighted in media reactions to the popular Instagram and blog queen Jordan Younger, “the Blonde Vegan,” announcing in 2014 that she had orthorexia and was rebranding herself “the Balanced Blonde.”18 Headlines about this revelation frequently blamed the disorder on Younger’s veganism, with taglines such as, “How Going Vegan Triggered this Instagram Star’s Orthorexia.”19 This, not surprisingly, sparked impassioned responses from within the vegan community, which was keen to defend itself against such claims and tends to be leery of discussions of orthorexia in general.20 Younger herself was careful to attribute her orthorexia not to her veganism, but to her “all or nothing” obsessive-​compulsive personality. She describes herself as using veganism as an excuse to avoid certain foods and to restrict food intake. This fits with recognition in the medical community that at times “vegetarian diets may be selected to camouflage an existing eating disorder.”21 It is vital to stress here that veganism itself is not orthorexia, nor does not it cause orthorexia. The direction the causal link appears most often to go is from obsessive personality (and a tendency toward orthorexia) toward veganism as a socially acceptable way of restricting food intake and avoiding 18 

For her discussion of her condition and recovery, see theblondevegan.com, especially http://​www. theblondevegan.com/​2014/​07/​13/​recovery-​update-​orthorexia-​is-​no-​fun/​. 19  http://​www.womenshealthmag.com/​life/​jordan-​younger-​the-​blonde-​vegan, June 30, 2014. 20  Younger received death threats from rabid vegans, some of who accused her of never really having been a vegan in the first place, of pretending she has an eating disorder to widen her fan base, and even of not really being blonde(!). This backlash itself created intense conversation within the vegan community. Vegan Street Blog’s Marla Rose, for instance, who was vocal in her negative assessment of Younger’s announcement (calling it “a crock” and dismissing her announcement as an attempt to generate media attention), then turned around to soundly denounce current trends within veganism that play on obsessive tendencies. In “The Orthorexia Dilemma: Is Veganism an Eating Disorder,” she writes: “This trend within veganism to employ tactics that manipulate anxieties around fat, nuts, fruits, grains and who knows what else can aggravate someone who is already on overload and we, as a movement that is rooted in nonviolence, justice and kindness, should play no part in this.” http://​veganfeministagitator. blogspot.com/​2014/​07/​the-​orthorexia-​dilemma-​is-​veganism.html. 21  W. J. Craig, A. R. Mangels, American Dietetic Association, “Position of the American Dietetic Association: Vegetarian Diets,” J Am Diet Assoc 109, no. 7 (2000): 1266–​1282. See also A. M. Bardone-​ Cone et al., “The Inter-​Relationships between Vegetarianism and Eating Disorders among Females,” Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics 112, no. 8 (August 2012): 1247–​1252.

560   Christina Van Dyke foods the orthorexic perceives as unhealthy. Developing an obsession with the quality and purity of one’s diet is not the same as avoiding certain foods or even eliminating entire food groups from one’s diet for moral reasons, such as environmental sustainability or a commitment to non-​harm. Yet, in the public eye, orthorexia and veganism often go hand in hand, and this can make discussions of the disorder both socially and politically loaded.

Social Norms and Cultural Disorders Whether we look at hysteria, agoraphobia, or anorexia, we find the body of the sufferer deeply inscribed with an ideological construction  .  .  .22 emblematic of the period in question. —​Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight23

Our attitudes toward healthy eating and dietary choices are increasingly important components of how we conceive of (and judge) both ourselves and others. Orthorexia thus represents an extreme manifestation of sociocultural norms that we are all being pushed toward. In this section, I take a closer look at some of those norms—​particularly as they relate to a popular twofold marketing strategy of creating anxiety about common foods and promoting “superfoods” as a healthy solution. To appreciate the cultural ground in which orthorexia takes root today, however, I want first to look briefly at how dominant social norms have related to the prevalence of certain psychological disorders in the past. In 1994, Susan Bordo situated anorexia in its cultural framework, arguing that hysteria, agoraphobia, and anorexia nervosa can each be seen as taking the dominant social norms for women at a particular time to their logical extreme.24 As she pointed out, hysteria became a prevalent disorder for a certain class of women in the Victorian period (mid-​to late 1800s), just when social norms for women involved being delicate, emotional, focused on the minutiae of daily domestic life, and above base desires of the flesh. With their fainting and vapors, their nervous instability, their obsessive concern for minor details, and their frigidity, hysterics embodied these norms to an extreme. By the 1950s, hysteria was virtually unheard of in the United States, but agoraphobia (fear of public places, most commonly manifested in refusal to leave the home) had become surprisingly prevalent, just as post-​WWII culture emphasized the role of women as devoted wives and mothers who should be content to stay in their domestic realms

22 

The original quote has “of femininity” here. I have removed it, however, since Bordo’s point is more broadly applicable and since orthorexia is a disorder that inscribes its ideology of health on the bodies of both men and women 23 Bordo, Unbearable Weight, 168. 24  Bordo, “The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity,” in Unbearable Weight, 165–​184.

Eat Y’Self Fitter   561 rather than have careers. In the 1980s, agoraphobia had all but disappeared, but incidence rates of anorexia in young women had begun to skyrocket—​at precisely the same time that dominant social norms for women had begun to include being disciplined and in tight control (and more “masculine-​looking” as they made strides into the corporate world). In each case, cultural conditions appear to have shaped the expression of group social anxiety and impacted the development of particular psychological disorders in susceptible individuals. This framework helps explain the current prevalence of orthorexia. Eating is one of the central micro-​practices that human beings engage in, and the buzzword for the new millennium is “healthy.” Programs like Michelle Obama’s Healthy Hunger-​Free Kids Act have put the importance of good diets and health squarely in the public eye, while media coverage of the US’s obesity epidemic has increased awareness of the harm a poor diet can cause. I am in no way attempting to downplay the importance of a good diet or of paying attention to what one eats. As other articles in this volume discuss, we live in a world of “fake” food both devoid of nutritional content and packed with ingredients whose long-​range effects we do not yet know, and we have every reason to be concerned about that. At the same time, playing on our rational worries about the environment, cancer-​ causing agents, and the monolithic Food Industry has become its own industry. We live in a constant state of anxiety over what we are putting in our bodies, and the messages we are getting from nutritional science, wellness, and preventative medicine both heighten that anxiety and leave us bewildered with their conflicting claims. Telling people what to eat and what not to eat has become a billion-​dollar industry, and everyone is pushing their own line and their own brand for their own profit, telling us not to trust what everyone else is saying and to listen to them instead. Naked Food Magazine, for instance, trumpets such warnings as: “The goal of food industry giants is to create and maintain the consumer completely confused. Words such as natural, non-​GMO, trans-​fat free, or kosher don’t mean what we believe.”25 Juicing advocates and “cleanse programs” also promote the fear of “chemicals” and their harmful effects, promising to eliminate dangerous toxins from your system if you follow their instructions.26 Indeed, at the time that I am writing this, the most recent entry on the enormously popular FoodBabe blog is promoting a “sugar detox” on the grounds that One of the most insidious ways the food industry poisons us is by dousing all sorts of foods with “added sugar” . . . Added sugar is one of the biggest perpetrators of our current health crisis, and can be implicated in many cases of obesity, type-​2 diabetes, heart disease, and even cancer—​but its detrimental effects can take years to surface.

25  “The 13 Most Misleading Food Label Claims,” Naked Food Magazine, http://​nakedfoodmagazine. com/​13-​most-​misleading-​food-​label-​claims. 26  The current popularity of Bikram (“hot”) yoga classes is closely related to this push toward “detoxifying” oneself and promotes regular cleanses and juicing.

562   Christina Van Dyke It’s the hidden link to so much pain and suffering. You are probably eating WAY more added sugar than you think you are.27

In other words, the food industry is actively poisoning us, you are probably suffering from the effects of this poison even if you currently feel fine, and you need to pay attention right now to her instructions in order to avoid dire consequences. The FoodBabe’s main message is fear, and it is a common message in discussions about healthy eating. The flip side of generating anxiety about what is in regular food is promoting the positive qualities of miraculously healthy “superfoods” foods. In this popular marketing move, the incredible health effects of foods like blueberries, broccoli, kale, pomegranate, chia seeds are routinely “discovered” and then promoted as increasing energy levels, reducing cravings, burning fat, and healing diseases. According to The Master Plants Cookbook: The 33 Most Healing Superfoods for Optimum Health,28 for instance: Food isn’t just food, it can be medicine! A whole food, plant-​based diet can help prevent and even reverse chronic diseases such as cancer, diabetes, and heart disease, while also promoting a healthy weight. . . . The Master Plants Cookbook, complied by the founder and editor of Naked Food magazine, features the 33 essential superfoods that can help readers achieve that optimum health. Even better, it also offers more than 100 mouthwatering and easy recipes that are detoxifying, anti-​allergen, immune-​boosting, and promote weight loss. From avocados and beets to sweet potatoes and spinach, The Master Plants Cookbook will inspire readers to try these health-​promoting, radiant super foods—​and spark a new love for real, organic cuisine that pack a powerful healing punch.

Dangling modifiers aside, this litany of health-​promoting effects is both stunning and telling. It explicitly draws on the lure of optimal health and hits virtually all the hot buttons for the health-​conscious crowd: disease prevention and reversal, weight loss, increasing immune function, detoxification, and allergen-​avoidance. When used in tandem with the anxiety-​generating strategy, these sorts of claims pack quite the punch. To see this twofold strategy in action, you need only look at the marketing blurbs for any book in the “health and wellness” section of your local bookstore, or to google “healthy eating.” Take a recent publication, modestly titled The Healthiest Diet on the Planet.29 Its self-​description is a paradigm of the twofold strategy I have just discussed: High in calories and cholesterol, animal fats and proteins too often leave you hungry and lead to overeating and weight gain. They are often the root causes of a host

27 

http://​foodbabe.com, January 8, 2017 (bold in original). Margarita Restrepo and Michele LaStella, The Master Plants Cookbook: The 33 Most Healing Superfoods for Optimum Health (Philadelphia, PA: Running Press Publishers, 2016). 29  John McDougall, MD, recipes by Mary McDougall, The Healthiest Diet on the Planet: Why the Foods You Love—​Pizza, Pancakes, Potatoes, Pasta, and More—​Are the Solution to Preventing Disease and Looking and Feeling Your Best (New York: Harper One, 2016). 28 

Eat Y’Self Fitter   563 of avoidable health problems—​from indigestion, ulcers, and constipation to obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and cancer. . . . The Healthiest Diet on the Planet helps us reclaim our health by enjoying nutritious starches, vegetables, and fruits. McDougall takes on the propaganda machines pushing dangerous, high-​fat fad diets and cuts through the smoke and mirrors of the diet industry. He offers a clear, proven guide to what we should and shouldn’t eat to prevent disease, slow the aging process, improve our physical fitness, be kind to the environment, and be our most attractive selves.

The first message here is “be worried about the health effects of what you’re eating—​and don’t trust what you’re hearing from others.” The second message is “there are foods that can prevent disease, slow aging, and make you simultaneously more fit, moral, and attractive—​you just have to listen to me.” Unfortunately, these two claims are the same ones that everyone else is making, albeit with wildly varying specific content. In this general context of heightened fear, confusion, and hope—​all directed at our dietary choices—​it is especially significant that we in the affluent West have a range of dietary choices unparalleled in human history. What fruits and vegetables are available to us at the grocery store is no longer dependent on either the season of the year or the region in which we live. Even the smallest of convenience stores is likely to have a number of items labeled as “healthy alternatives,” and larger stores contain a vast and bewildering display of foods our grandparents never imagined. One social change this has contributed to is an increased sense of relation between one’s diet and one’s identity. Now that our diets are not constrained by geographical limitations, what we eat, when we eat, and how we eat speak volumes about who we are—​or at least who we want to be. This shift shows up in linguistic practice as well. Instead of saying “I don’t eat gluten” or “I don’t eat sugar,” for instance, a person today is likely to say “I’m gluten-​free,” or “I’m sugar-​free.” Today, food is political; food is social; food is a deep expression of one’s identity. In this context, an obsession with the ideal diet for optimal health makes all the sense in the world. Yet, as Bordo pointed out with respect to hysteria, agoraphobia, and anorexia, “the symptoms of these disorders isolate, weaken, and undermine the sufferers; at the same time they turn the life of the body into an all-​absorbing fetish, beside which all other objects of attention pale into unreality.”30 The same is true, as we have seen, in the case of orthorexia: the literal embodiment of the conflicting sociocultural norms surrounding “healthy eating” ultimately render their subject nonfunctional.31

30 Bordo, Unbearable Weight, 168. 31 

The fact that orthorexia fits so neatly into the explanatory framework that Bordo provides also supports her argument in “The Body” that we should not read disorders such as hysteria and anorexia as successful—​even if unconscious—​protests against prevailing social norms. She stresses the “counterproductive, tragically self-​defeating (indeed, self-​deconstructing) nature” of whatever sort of protest might be involved in these disorders (Unbearable Weight, 176). The unconscious protest involved in orthorexia would have to be posed against contemporary constructions of health, or of the particular constructions of health for men and women, but that does not seem to fit with the disorder’s phenomena (or phenomenology).

564   Christina Van Dyke

Healthy Eating as the New Religion The effortful act of eating the right food may begin to invoke a sense of spirituality. As orthorexia progresses, a day filled with wheat grass juice, tofu, and quinoa biscuits may come to feel as holy as one spent serving the destitute and homeless. —​Steven Bratman, Health Food Junkies32

The connection between food and our sense of individual identity brings up another key feature of the social ground in which orthorexia flourishes—​namely, the spiritual significance food has taken on in contemporary culture. In this section, I briefly address the relation between religion and food, and I then argue that ambiguities in current concepts of “health” make us particularly prone to move from seeing food as important for biological functioning to viewing it as the key to the sort of whole-​life flourishing that religions often promise. Although the term “orthorexia” is new, the idea that we can (and should) purify ourselves via our diet is hardly a new phenomenon. From the ancient Pythagoreans to the mystery cults that flourished in the early Roman Empire, from medieval religious orders in Europe to the Transcendentalist movement in nineteenth-​century America, what we ingest has long been imbued with spiritual significance.33 We live now in a largely “post-​ religious” culture, but our speech about food retains religious overtones, and diet and food occupy a place in our lives that sometimes takes on salvific significance. So strong is this association that diet can take on such significance even in evangelical culture that already preaches a Savior, resulting in books with titles such as What Would Jesus Eat and Slim for Him.34 There is, of course, an inextricably intimate relation between food, health, and life. The childhood chant “You are what you eat!” rings true to us in a visceral way: eating is a primal act through which we connect with the world around us, literally taking into 32 Bratman, Health Food Junkies, 9.

33  I talk about the religious significance of eating in Christina Van Dyke, “Eating as a Gendered Act: Christianity, Feminism, and Reclaiming the Body,” in Readings in the Philosophy of Religion, 2d ed., ed. K. Clark (Peterborough, ON, Canada: Broadview Press), 2008. See also Rudolph Bell’s Holy Anorexia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985) examines the significance that food takes on for medieval nuns; Catherine Walker Bynum has since written several books detailing the religious significance of food and eating in the medieval period. See, e.g., Holy Feast and Holy Fast (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988) and many of the essays in Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1991). For a general overview of religious movements that have given diet—​particularly a vegetarian diet—​spiritual significance, see Carol Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist Vegetarian Critical Theory (New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 1990; new material in the 10th anniversary edition, 2000), chs. 6 and 7. 34  I discuss this phenomenon in “Eating as a Gendered Act,” 482–​484. For a book-​length discussion of the complex relation between food, religion, and diet in American Christianity, see Marie Griffith, Born Again Bodies: Flesh and Spirit in American Christianity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).

Eat Y’Self Fitter   565 ourselves part of what was around us. We also frequently talk about food and eating in religiously and morally loaded terms, saying that we were “bad” after eating potato chips, or refusing the offer of dessert because we are “trying to be good,” and experiencing guilt for “cheating” on one’s diet is practically ubiquitous. Marketing has picked up and run with this tendency; the side of every case of the enormously popular LaCroix sparkling water, for instance, currently has text that reads “Naturally Essenced:  0—​ Calorie, 0—​Sweetener, 0—​Sodium = INNOCENT.” Small wonder that a culture that is increasingly focused on the health effects of one’s diet would yield a corresponding increase in people who seek purity and transcendence through that diet. This trend seems particularly predictable in the cultural absence of belief in a God who grants eternal life. One of the persistent appeals of salvific religions, after all, is the promise of immortality; the fear of death is a powerful motivator. The conceptual link between disease and death heightens the relevance of eating healthy, when what is being promised by these diets is no less than a longer, happier, disease-​free existence. Platforms that promote the idea of “food as medicine,” for instance, easily take on religious overtones when they promise that the right diet will reverse or prevent not just such common conditions as type-​2 diabetes, cancer, and heart disease but also autism, “sexual problems,” and “anxiety and stress.”35 Diets that claim to increase longevity and to halt or reverse the signs of aging are endemic: not only do we not want to die, but we also want our bodies to function perfectly as we continue to live. There is an additional, key factor at work in the way that diet has assumed such monumental importance, I believe—​one that requires us to look more closely at the overlapping but distinct conceptions of “health” at play in contemporary Western culture. Everyone knows what “health” and “healthy” mean, at least until they are asked to put that knowledge into words. At that point, it becomes clear how many complex and moving parts there are to what we think health is, and what we want our talk of health to mean. As Rebecca Kukla notes: “Health is an intuitive notion and not a technical term. . . . It has proven surprisingly difficult to come up with a rigorous definition of health that accommodates all our core intuitions about what work the notion should do for us.”36 The concept of health is central to medicine and related practices; it is also central to social-​political ideas of what we justly care about and to what services we believe societies should provide. It is not clear, however, to what extent the concepts important to the medical community and the concepts important to socio-​political discussions converge and diverge, in part because they often possess differing vocabularies and focal points.37 35 

See the Naked Food website, “Food as Medicine” tab, which includes all these conditions and many more as healable by the proper diet: http://​nakedfoodmagazine.com, as of January 10, 2017. 36  “Medicalization, ‘Normal Function,’ and the Definition of Health,” in Routledge Companion to Bioethics, ed. J. Arras, E. Fenton, and R. Kukla (New York: Routledge, 2015), 515–​530, at 515. 37  For an excellent overview of the various issues at stake in this discussion and of the different positions taken, see Elselijn Kingma, “Contemporary Accounts of Health,” in Health: The History of a Concept, ed. Peter Adamson (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). The other papers in this volume provide important historical perspectives on the concept of health, covering a variety of cultures.

566   Christina Van Dyke For my purposes, one aspect of this ambiguity proves particularly significant: namely, the fact that health can be taken (and sometimes does) refer to both statistically normal biological function (as in the influential “biostatistical theory” offered by Christopher Boorse38) and to “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-​being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity” (as the constitution of the World Health Organization famously defined health in 1948).39 There is, of course, a world of difference between total well-​being on the physical, psychological, and social levels and “normal” biological functioning, and it is that world in which orthorexia flourishes.40 In specialized philosophical discussions, we find accounts of health that range from Carel’s “feeling of being at home in one’s body,”41 to Boorse’s purportedly value-​neutral concepts of health as absence of disease and proper biological function, to Canguilhem’s account of health as flexibility, “in the sense that a healthy organism can tolerate environmental impacts, adapts to new situations and possesses a store of energy and audacity.”42 Other accounts of health characterize the healthy person as someone who is able to meet her goals successfully, at which point the discussion turns to whether there should be restrictions on what appropriate goals might be.43 Further complications arise when we see that physical health and mental health are just as often distinguished as they are grouped together in general discussions of “health.” In more recent philosophical literature, moreover, the concept of goal-​implementation and satisfaction is often discussed under the label of “well-​being” or “wellness,” and health is taken to be one aspect of what constitutes a person’s well-​being. This is by no means an exhaustive record of attempts to provide an adequate account of “health,” but it—​and the fact that each of these accounts has some cultural resonance—​is sufficient for demonstrating why health proves such a fraught concern

38 

Christopher Boorse’s 1977 article, “Health as a Theoretical Concept” (Philosophy of Science 44:542–​ 573) represents one of the most important attempts to capture the concept of “health” for theoretical purposes; his 100-​page “A Rebuttal on Health,” in What Is Disease?, ed. J. M. Humber and R. F. Almeder (Totowa, NJ: Humana Press, 1997), 3–​143, rather exhaustively covers both the development of his own theory and objections and responses to it. 39  Preamble to the Constitution of WHO as adopted by the International Health Conference, New York, June 19‒July 22, 1946; signed on July 22, 1946 by the representatives of 61 states (Official Records of WHO, no. 2, p. 100) and entered into force on April 7, 1948. The definition has not been amended since 1948. Available online at http://​www.who.int/​suggestions/​faq/​en/​. 40  Madison Powers and Ruth Faden argue strongly, for instance, for the importance of distinguishing between health and well-​being. See their Social Justice: The Moral Foundations of Public Health and Health Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). 41  Havi Carel, for instance, takes a phenomenological approach to the concepts of health and illness. See Havi Carel, “Can I Be Ill and Happy?” Philosophia 35 (2007): 95–​110; and Havi Carel, Illness: The Cry of the Flesh (Dublin: Acumen, 2008). 42  Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological, trans. C. R. Fawcett (New York: Zone Books, 1991). The original work was published in 1943. 43  See, e.g., Caroline Whitbeck, who talks about health in goal-​oriented terms, where a person’s ends are left non-​restricted and thus apply to “goals, projects and aspirations in a wide variety of situations” (620), in “A Theory of Health,” in Concepts of Health and Disease: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, ed. A. L. Caplan and H. T. Engelhardt Jr. (Reading, MA: Addison-​Wesley, 1981), 611–​626.

Eat Y’Self Fitter   567 for the orthorexic. If your stated goal is health and your increasingly monolithic focus is what diet will optimize that health, the fact that that word can mean anything from normal biological functioning (which itself can be spelled out in any of a variety of ways) to the feeling of being at ease in one’s body to complete physio-​psycho-​social flourishing provides a wealth of ways to slide between conceptions. In this context, what you are putting in your body as fuel can easily also be viewed as what will make you comfortable in your own skin or provide you with a flourishing life as a whole. This ambiguity proves particularly problematic in the sorts of discussion that conflate health with wellness; wellness has taken on even broader implications in contemporary culture, adding environmental, occupational, and spiritual flourishing to existing conceptions of health as physical, emotional, intellectual, and social flourishing. Health as a social construct, then, is a highly slippery concept, loaded up with all sorts of cultural ideals. Even when we attempt to (or claim that we are) using “health” in a non-​value-​ laden way, we implicitly smuggle in all sorts of social values—​a fact that becomes clear whenever “being attractive” is equated with “being healthy.”44 Many of the implicit values at play in these discussions of health are deeply gendered; in the following section, I address the way in which gender is linked up with different conceptions of health and, thus, how we should expect orthorexia to manifest differently for men and for women.

Gendered Eating and the Quest for “Health” I Didn’t Let Cancer Stop Me from Getting to a Healthy Weight! —​Headline from Women’s Health Magazine, February 201545

Eating disorders have traditionally been coded as “female” and associated with weight and body image in young women. As we have seen, however, orthorexia is a disorder that appears to affect men and women at roughly equal rates and across a wide range of ages. Given the discussion of the previous two sections, however, this should come as no surprise. “Health” is presented as a universal goal, and the language of toxins and transcendence reaches across the gender divide. We live in a world where gender and food are closely intertwined, however, and thus expectations for the ideal manifestation 44 

For a four-​part debate about “health” as a value-​neutral versus value-​laden term, see Health, Science, and Ordinary Language, ed. Lennart Nordenfelt (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1987). See also Lennart Nordenfelt, On the Nature of Health: An Action-​Theoretic Perspective, 2d ed. (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1995). 45  “I Didn’t Let Cancer Stop Me from Getting to a Healthy Weight!” by Julie Letsos, as told to Ashley Oerman, February 20, 2015. The subheading is “Julie Letsos’s Amazing Story Will Inspire—​and Motivate—​You!” See http://​www.womenshealthmag.com/​weight-​loss/​ julie-​letsos-​weight-​loss-​success-​story.

568   Christina Van Dyke of health for individual human beings are also gendered (as is the act of eating, attitudes toward appetite, and food itself).46 As I discuss in this section, for men, health is equated primarily with strength and endurance, whereas for women, health is equated with being attractive (i.e., thin) and “empowered.” These gendered conceptions of health in turn make it likely that the obsession with healthy eating and the perfect diet will often take on different forms for men and women. Understanding how men and women are expected to perform health differently is thus vital to understanding how orthorexia develops and manifests in different populations. Cultural myths surrounding women and food are well known to be deeply fraught. The central myth, of course, is that women need to maintain tight control over their food intake because they are in constant danger of gaining weight—​and of binging when they let their guard down.47 The tight connection between food consumption and unacceptable weight gain makes eating an inherently dangerous activity for women: one that involves a great deal of thought and planning. The very existence of physical appetite is constructed as problematic for women: hunger has always been the central enemy in the myth of female eating. Not surprisingly, cultural myths surrounding “women’s health” also center on the dangers inherent in female appetite. Being healthy is cashed out in terms of energy, youthfulness, and—​above all—​slenderness. The FoodBabe, for instance (discussed in the third section), promises that following her diet tips will help you “break free from the toxins in your food, lose weight, look years younger and get healthy today.”48 “Lose,” “shrink,” “slim,” and “drop” are the common buzzwords on women’s health sites. Hunger is something to be “beaten” or “conquered,” and health is a matter of looking and feeling “great.” The foods that women are most encouraged to eat for their health are typically described as low-​fat, low-​calorie, and almost anything that includes the descriptor “free”: gluten-​ free, dairy-​free, and so on. Organic vegetables and fruits are endemic in recommendations for promoting female health, a fact that only reinforces the long-​standing association of women with the natural world and the connection of women with vegetarianism.49 46  For detailed discussion of these issues as they pertain to constructions of both masculinity and femininity, see Van Dyke, “Eating as a Gendered Act” and “Manly Meat and Gendered Eating: Correcting Imbalance and Seeking Virtue,” in Philosophy Comes to Dinner: Arguments about the Ethics of Eating, ed. A. Chignell, T. Cuneo, and M. Haltemann (New York: Routledge Press, 2016), 39–​55. 47  It is important to note here that these cultural myths are not meant to characterize or capture the individual experiences of many—​or even most—​of the people living in the culture. Rather than describing actual, lived experiences, cultural myths tell persuasive stories about how things are for everyone else. In so doing, they present a “norm” against which people in that culture are meant to evaluate themselves and their behavior. This creates a framework in which people (and their actions) gain cultural intelligibility. When you buy a minivan after the birth of your first child, for example, or eat a pint of ice cream after a break-​up, your actions have a particular significance because of the cultural myths surrounding those actions. 48  Vani Hari, The Food Babe Way: Break Free from the Hidden Toxins in Your Food and Lose Weight, Look Years Younger, and Get Healthy in Just 21 Days! (New York: Little, Brown, 2015). 49  A number of ecofeminists have explicitly advocated for a rejection of animal products and the consumption of animal flesh. See, e.g., Greta Gaard, “Ecofeminism and Native American Cultures,” in her edited collection Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, and Nature (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1993); Lori Gruen, “Dismantling Oppression: An Analysis of the Connection between Women

Eat Y’Self Fitter   569 Men live in a different world when it comes to social constructions of hunger and appetite. First, men are expected to display robust appetite. In fact, a “healthy” appetite is central to constructions of masculinity, and the appropriate response to such an appetite is frequent and hearty eating. “Eating healthy” for men is a matter of attaining and demonstrating strength and virility. Although for women, “diet” is a term synonymous with restriction and repression of appetite, for men “diet” is usually cashed out in terms of power, strength, and endurance. Men are exhorted to “Power Up Your Diet!”, to “Tackle Hunger,” and to eat “12 Perfect Muscle Foods.” The most common buzzwords in discussions of male health are “build,” “fight,” “power up,” and comparatives like “bigger,” “faster,” and “harder.” Men are not expected to give up meat for their health unless they are aging and trying to avoid heart disease and problems with high cholesterol: vegetarian and vegan men thus often take pains to prove their masculinity, frequently describing their lifestyles in terms such as “extreme” and performance-​enhancing.50 In this connection, it is worth noting that a current google image search of “orthorexia” turns up stock photo after stock photo of young, thin, attractive women (mostly white) cavorting with mounds of fruits and vegetables—​frequently with tape measures or scales included to indicate the slimming effects of these foods. There are, in fact, only two males pictured in the first fifty images: the first is a young boy rejecting a bagel because it is not “paleo” and the second is a very thin, non-​standardly-​attractive man with painted-​black fingernails and tattoos looking anxious and holding an avocado. Despite the fact that orthorexia is a condition that can negatively impact sufferers’ mental, emotional, and physical health, the contemporary cultural mythology surrounding food, appetite, and gender is (as yet) unable to accommodate the idea that striving for the ideal diet via obsession with consuming only “healthy” foods is (1) an actual problem, and (2) a problem that might affect men as well as women.

Facing Our Finitude Perfectionism is one way our muscles cramp. In some cases, we don’t even know that the wounds and the cramping are there, but both limit us. They

and Animals” (in the same collection); and Marti Kheel, “The Liberation of Nature: A Circular Affair,” Environmental Ethics 7 (1985): 135–​149, and “Vegetarianism and Ecofeminism: Toppling Patriarchy with a Fork,” in Food for Thought: The Debate over Eating Meat (New York: Prometheus Books, 2004), 327–​343. Catharine MacKinnon summarizes these sentiments in “Of Mice and Men: A Feminist Fragment on Animal Rights,” in Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions, ed. C. Sunstein and M. Nussbaum (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). 50 

See, e.g., “Vegans and Masculinity: Plant-​Powered Bodybuilder Debunks Myths,” The Scavenger, November 2013 (http://​www.thescavenger.net/​social-​justice-​to-​all/​social-​justice-​for-​animals/​862-​ vegans-​and-​masculinity-​plant-​powered-​bodybuilder-​debunks-​myths.html); and “For These Vegans, Masculinity Means Saving the Planet,” The Salt: What’s on Your Plate, NPR, July 2014 (http://​www.npr. org/​templates/​transcript/​transcript.php?storyId=332329709).

570   Christina Van Dyke keep us moving . . . in tight, worried ways. They keep us standing back or backing away from life, keep us from experiencing life in a naked and immediate way. —​Anne LaMott, Bird by Bird51 Where before there had been tough fibers, hardness, and held breath, now there were mud, dirt, water, air, mess—​and I felt soft and clean. —​Anne LaMott, Traveling Mercies52

Ideals of health are gendered, and women and men are thus sometimes portrayed as though they are striving toward radically different goals in the elusive quest for perfect health. In this concluding section, however, I want to suggest that we should not let gendered conceptions of health blind us to an extremely important commonality—​namely, that what makes orthorexia destructive to both men and women is ultimately a common urge to transcend rather than to embrace the realities of embodiment. Whether cashed out in “male” or “female” terms, I believe that the self-​defeating obsession with healthy eating and the optimal diet masks a deep underlying fear of embodiment, what Elisabeth Spelman has termed “somatophobia” or body-​loathing.53 This might at first seem counterintuitive. How can the ideals of respecting your body by eating for its health and being kind to yourself by optimizing your well-​being actually be manifesting a distaste of physicality? What about the people who claim that their interest is in maximizing the amazing power of the body as an incredible thing capable of transcendent experiences? Doesn’t that indicate that orthorexia is really a love for the body that goes too far, rather than displaying a fear or loathing of embodiment? In response, I  would repeat Susan Bordo’s memorable comment that “we may be obsessed with our bodies, but we are hardly accepting of them.”54 That is, we should not assume that self-​proclaimed respect for our bodies actually indicates love for our physicality. If anything, the idea that we are trying to maximize the health of our bodies so that they can function as better tools for our purposes seems to indicate an underlying identification of us as not those bodies, of us as trying to move beyond the limitations of human embodiment. After all, as we saw in the second section, one of the main characteristics of orthorexia is that the subject’s quest for the perfect diet and ideal health ultimately detracts from rather than enhances their overall well-​being. As the focus on disciplining one’s appetites and controlling one’s diet intensifies, the subject subordinates previous values and life-​goals to “righteous eating,” avoiding situations in which they cannot control

51  Anne LaMott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (New York: Anchor Books, 1994), 30 52  Anne LaMott, Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith (New York: Anchor Books, 1999), 265. 53  See Elizabeth Spelman, “Race & Gender: The Ampersand Problem in Feminist Thought,” ch. 5 in Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1988), 114–​132. 54 Bordo, Unbearable Weight, 15.

Eat Y’Self Fitter   571 what they ingest and punishing themselves for failure with fasting, cleansing, and further restrictions. This, it seems to me, displays precisely the sort of effort at controlling and subduing one’s body that is central to discomfort with embodiment. It is important to stress that I am not implying that all forms of attention to health and a healthy diet display somatophobic tendencies—​indeed, far from it! Rather, the connection that I am drawing between orthorexia and somatophobia is meant to illuminate how an interest in healthy eating can develop into an unhealthy obsession. Despite its emphasis on health and well-​being, orthorexia’s focus on purity and an idealized state of being (frequently described in terms of enlightenment, unity, and peace) and its rigid opposition to anything perceived as a threat to that goal reinforces rather than undermines the somatophobia that is one of the hallmarks of Western culture. In short, I believe that orthorexia is best understood as a manifestation of age-​old anxieties about human finitude and mortality—​anxieties which current dominant sociocultural forces prime us to experience and express in unhealthy attitudes toward healthy eating. The current, ubiquitous quest for a healthy lifestyle should not, then, be accepted at face value as a positive move forward in Western culture. It should be examined carefully, and the underlying values in our discussions of “health” examined carefully and cautiously. In particular, I  believe that we should resist the push toward moralizing “healthy” food choices as somehow morally (as opposed to merely nutritionally) superior to their alternatives.55 If we do otherwise, we risk entrenching somatophobia even more firmly in cultural consciousness—​continuing to search for the transcendence of what we secretly loathe.56

55 

This should be understood as applying only to the moralization of food choices taken for their own sake. I am not in any way implying that we not recognize and grapple with the wide range of pressing normative issues surrounding food production, access, consumption, and so on. 56  As usual, I owe so many people thanks for their input that I run the risk of forgetting some, so please forgive me if your name should be here but isn’t. Special thanks, though, to audiences at the University of Colorado-​Boulder, the 2015 Food Ethics workshop at University of Vermont, the 2015 Rocky Mountain Ethics Congress, Hong Kong University, and Boise State University for their feedback on earlier versions of this paper. Discussions with Rebecca Chan, Ben Hale, Megan Maguire, and Tyler Doggett proved particularly helpful; finally, my son David and my partner Andrew have both heard me wax eloquent on this topic to the point where I feel the need to thank them for their continued affection.

chapter 25

Fo od Insec u ri t y Dieting as Ideology, as Oppression, and as Privilege Tracy Isaacs

In 1990 when I was a graduate student in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I saw a film called Eating, by filmmaker Henry Joglam about a woman’s 40th birthday party. All the characters were women, all quite obviously upper middle class, and almost all were in a fraught relationship with food. The one European woman in attendance is presented as perplexed at the anxiety most of the women show about food. The film had a lasting impact on me because it captured exactly how lots of the women I knew (myself included) felt around food—​nervous and excited at the same time—​insecure and potentially out of control. You can see the trailer, which does an excellent job of capturing the sad sense of inner conflict most of the women at the party are experiencing, on YouTube.1 The final scene of the trailer says it all: they are cutting the cake and passing the pieces around. The first piece goes from person to person to person, all the way around the group until it ends up back where it started. No one will take a slice of birthday cake. There are lots of things to say about the film but I start with it because, as the tagline of the film says, it is “a serious comedy about women and food.” If, as viewers, we laugh, it is mostly nervous or uncomfortable laughter. The women are in anguish for most of the film and yet this action all takes place at what should be a happy occasion. They are experiencing one kind of food insecurity brought on by pervasive North American cultural messages about dieting for weight loss. In this essay, I want to talk about this idea of “food insecurity” in the context of a pervasive trope in the twenty-​first-​century Western world—​dieting as a way of life. This is not a new feminist issue. Some of the essay will involve a review of what, to some, will be familiar feminist and popular literature on this topic. The most familiar and obvious feminist claim about women and weight loss is that dieting and the pursuit of thinness are the result of oppressive forces operating in women’s lives, the result of social pressure

1 

“Eating Trailer,” https://​www.youtube.com/​watch?v=A9IaXVH8nn8.

Food Insecurity   573 to conform to a particular feminine aesthetic. Slenderness is the most highly prized feature of this aesthetic, which also includes white or light skin and a flawless complexion. Lately, a more toned and athletic look has been promoted, but the pursuit of that within the boundaries of acceptable femininity is arguably more challenging than the pursuit of thinness alone. In all cases, it helps to be tall, with long legs and what has come to be called a “thigh gap”2—​both of which play to the ideal of thinness sought after with such fervor. It is part of my argument that dieting or at least restrictive eating is embraced as ideology in the West, an assumed way of life that people, and women especially, are expected to conform to. I am going to argue that, on the one hand, it is difficult to quarrel with the feminist arguments that the obsession with thinness is the result of oppressive social forces operating on women, and, therefore, that dieting and the pursuit of thinness constitute an oppressive ideology. On the other hand, if we take a more global view, then it starts to look like an ideology of privilege. In a global context, where food insecurity has a much different meaning for a great many people who live in conditions of scarcity, restrictive dieting by choice in order to lose weight is an unimaginable luxury. I am not claiming that just because some people are worse off and struggling with scarcity, we cannot acknowledge that many women in the West live in anguish, hating their bodies and involved in an unhappy and obsessive relationship with food. But it is important that we take a larger view when it comes to food, engaging in a kind of “zooming out.” When we do that, it is possible for us to recognize that global food systems serve up a different and more urgent kind of food insecurity that makes the kind of obsession depicted in Eating and lurking behind all the weight loss feature articles in women’s magazines, seem embarrassingly self-​indulgent. Focusing only on the situation of privileged women’s obsession with food and thinness also renders invisible our affluent society’s complicity in the global capitalist systems that lead to food insecurity and have become the focus of a new movement, food sovereignty, that seeks to protect people from the damaging results of agribusiness, seed patents, and other consequences of the global food economy. The essay will unfold as follows. First, I cover some ground that might be familiar to some, in order to develop the idea that restrictive eating and dieting for weight loss exists as a powerful ideology in the West. I explain how feminist analysis provides compelling reasons to think of it as an ideology of oppression. Much of my philosophical analysis here will involve references to popular media, including social media, since those media both represent and perpetuate the dieting and weight loss ideology. Next, I introduce the concepts of food security and food sovereignty. These concerns provide a perspective on food in a global context that might suggest that the ideology of dieting and restrictive eating in the West could, with a more global view, appear to be more an 2  The “thigh gap” is a catch-​phrase among young women seeking to be thin. It is considered desirable to have a “natural” space between the thighs when standing normally. I will have more to say about this shortly, when I discuss online communities that support eating disorders as lifestyle choices rather than illnesses.

574   Tracy Isaacs ideology of privilege than of oppression. Finally, I argue that an intersectional framework can help us understand the way different dimensions of oppression and privilege interact such that the same ideology can be one of both privilege and oppression.

Restrictive Dieting as  an Ideology of Oppression In her popular book Fat Is a Feminist Issue, first published in 1978, Susie Orbach asks if slimness is “the new God.”3 The idea of dieting to be thin has since then become a major feminist issue, alongside other Second Wave Feminist concerns such as employment equity, pay equity, and abortion. In Susan Bordo’s 1993 collection, Unbearable Weight,4 she makes the case, through careful attention to messages in mainstream advertising, that normatively speaking women are supposed to be thin, eat very little, be in control of their eating, and be hungry all the time. Her research shows that food is marketed very differently to women than to men. If the mainstream media depict women getting pleasure out of eating, it is usually represented as a guilty pleasure, where women are “indulging” in something “decadent” like chocolate or ice cream. Bordo maintains, in short, that in our contemporary Western culture hunger is ideology. By ideology, I mean a set of beliefs that strongly influences the way people behave such that, when dominant, it normalizes or naturalizes certain claims and conditions so they are accepted as the way things are, not questioned.5 Following the influential work of both Marilyn Frye and Iris Marion Young on oppression, I understand oppression as structural or systemic disadvantage, “an enclosing structure of forces and barriers which tends to the immobilization and reduction of a group or category of people.”6 In this usage, oppression is not necessarily intentionally disadvantaging, but it is a bad thing insofar as it refers to “the vast and deep injustices some groups suffer as a consequence of often unconscious assumptions and reactions of well-​meaning people in ordinary interactions, media and cultural stereotypes, and structural features of bureaucratic hierarchies and market mechanisms—​in short, the normal processes of everyday life.”7 To the extent that systemic injustice is a constitutive 3 

Susie Orbach, Fat Is a Feminist Issue (New York: Berkeley Publishing, 1978). Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993). 5  The relevant definition in the Oxford English Dictionary is: “A systematic scheme of ideas, usually relating to politics, economics, or society and forming the basis of action or policy; a set of beliefs governing conduct. Also: the forming or holding of such a scheme of ideas,” from “ideology,” definition 4, Oxford English Dictionary online, http://​www.oed.com/​view/​Entry/​91016?redirectedFrom=ideology. 6  Marilyn Frye, “Oppression,” in The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory (Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press, 1983), 1–​16, at 10. 7  Iris Marion Young, “Five Faces of Oppression,” reprinted in Theorizing Feminisms: A Reader, ed. Elizabeth Hackett and Sally Haslanger (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 3–​15, at 4. 4 

Food Insecurity   575 feature of oppression, there is no positive or even harmless manifestation of oppression under this way of thinking about it. If restrictive dieting for weight loss operates as an oppressive ideology, it is a normalized and unquestioned set of practices and beliefs that creates systemic disadvantage for members of a particular social group. Because feminine appearance ideals valorize thinness, women are disproportionately negatively affected by this ideology because the pursuit of these normative standards is a demanding project that consumes a great deal of time and energy, and is for many women a project with goals that are impossible to meet. Since Bordo’s work on this issue in the 1990s, the rise of “thinspiration” through online social media, such as tumblr.com, has reinforced both the normative expectation of thinness as the ideal feminine body type and the restrictive approach to eating that is required to achieve and maintain it. Thinspiration, also known as “thinspo,” uses photos of thin women to motivate women to stick to their diets and lose weight or, for those who are already thin, to stay there. For example, a blog called Thinspiration Pictures: Thinspiration Photos of Real Girls, Models and Celebrities is designed to inspire women who are trying to lose weight to keep at it.8 Many of the pictures are “before and after” shots that state how much weight the person lost, reminiscent of the “Success Stories” that have come to be associated with programs such as Weight Watchers or Jenny Craig. On the more extreme end of the spectrum, social media is sometimes used to promote anorexia and bulimia as lifestyle choices, not illnesses. The “pro-​ana” and “pro-​mia” movements create online community spaces that offer mutual support for people, mostly young women, who wish to pursue ultra-​thinness as a way of life. For example, the site Pro-​Ana Lifestyle Forever is a collection of photos of very thin women. In one photo, a partially clothed woman whose face is not visible lies on a bed with her back arcing up, torso exposed, and ribcage visible. The words “I want to see my bones” appear over the picture. In another on the same site, a boney young woman, wearing haute couture, poses for the camera. The caption reads, “Eating is not very Chanel,” making reference to the renowned Parisian high fashion designer, Coco Chanel.9 Tumblr adopted a policy against explicitly pro-​ana or pro-​mia sites. But they have been replaced by thinspiration websites promoting the thinness and “thigh gap.” The “thigh gap” is usually code for anorexia or ultra-​thinness, where young women especially think that if they could just lose enough weight so that their legs do not rub together, they will be all set. One of the most popular posts on Fit Is a Feminist Issue, the feminist fitness blog I co-​founded with my colleague Samantha Brennan, is a post entitled “Why the Thigh Gap Makes Me Sad.”10 The sole reason for its popularity is that the 8 See Thinspiration Pictures, http://​thinspiration-​pictures.blogspot.ca/​. 9 

The Pro-​Ana Lifestyle Forever, https://​theproanalifestyleforever.wordpress.com/​thinspiration/​. Tracy Isaacs, “Why the Thigh Gap Makes Me Sad,” http://​fitisafeministissue.com/​2013/​02/​19/​why-​ the-​thigh-​gap-​makes-​me-​sad/​. 10 

576   Tracy Isaacs term “thigh gap” appears in the title. Since so many young women are desperate to get thigh gaps, “thigh gap” is a popular search term. The preoccupation with this body feature persists, despite that whether someone’s legs rub together or not is as much about genetics and bone structure as body shape. Some women would have to have no body fat before they would have anything approximating a thigh gap. Recently, thinspiration has been joined by “fitspiration” or “fitspo,” which uses images of athletic looking women for a similar purpose, that is, to motivate women to stick with their grueling workouts with the goal of achieving that elusive body type—​slender, yet muscular. These pictures are usually accompanied by motivational sayings such as “Strong is the new skinny” and “Sore? Tired? Out of breath? Good! It’s working,” and “Don’t wish for a new body, work for it.”11 The women in fitspiration images are often sexualized as well as athleticized. It is not the least bit unusual for women who are athletes to be sexualized. Popular media often represents them in such a way that their sexuality or at least their appearance takes priority over their athleticism.12 Feminist commentators have criticized these images and their purpose, both in scholarly journals and in popular and social media. Some condemn fitspiration, claiming that “fitspo is the new thinspo.”13 This is meant to suggest that fitspo perpetuates an unhealthy norm of femininity, almost impossible to attain and even more difficult to maintain. These norms of appearance keep women in a state of body anxiety and, because of the time and attention it takes to achieve the normative ideal, divert women’s energy away from participating equally in their private, social, and public lives. Not only that, feminists, myself included, have questioned whether the images and allegedly motivational sayings have any inspirational value at all. Blogger Jessi Kneeland claims, for example, that, among other things, fitspo “encourages us to compare ourselves to impossible standards” and “a lot of fitspo is just thinspo in disguise.”14 An article in the xoJane asks, “Is ‘Fitspo’ the New Thinspo?” with the subtitle, “Heather, My Love, There’s a New Unreasonable Idealized Body Standard in Town.”15 In “The Inspirational Dis-​Value of Fitspo,” I maintain that “the inspirational content of fitspo images comes largely from the beautiful (youthful, slim, ripped) bodies depicted in the photos. It’s

11 

For some examples of fitspo, see the following tumblr sites: Oh So Fitspo, http://​ohsofitspo.tumblr. com/​; Stay Fit, http://​-​fitspo.tumblr.com/​; A Fitspo Girl, http://​afitspogirl.tumblr.com/​. 12  For some excellent work on this topic, see articles by Charlene Weaving, including “It Is Okay to Play as Long as You Wear Lingerie (or Skimpy Bikinis): A Moral Evaluation of the Lingerie Football League and Its Rebranding,” Sport in Society: Cultures, Commerce, Media, Politics 17, no. 6 (2014): 757–​ 772; and P. Sailors, S. Teetzel, and C. Weaving, “No Net Gain: A Critique of Media Representation of Women’s Olympic Beach Volleyball,” Feminist Media Studies 12, no. 3 (2012): 1–​5. 13  For a popular and representative feminist critique, see Jennipher Walters, “Is ‘Strong Is the New Skinny’ Really Sending a Good Message,” HuffPost Healthy Living, http://​www.huffingtonpost.com/​ jennipher-​walters/​body-​image-​messages-​_​b_​3785898.html. 14  Jessie Kneeland, “Fitspo Sucks,” Remodel Fitness, http://​jessikneeland.com/​fitspo-​sucks/​. 15  Lesley Kinzel, “Is ‘Fitspo’ the New Thinspo?” xoJane, http://​www.xojane.com/​issues/​ fitspo-​new-​thinspo.

Food Insecurity   577 demoralizing to work hard and not ‘see’ visible results in the way the body looks. So inspiration and motivation can turn to demoralization and disillusionment over time.”16 Some have called for a more realistic ideal, advocating “moderate fitspo,” which alters fitspo motivational sayings to deliver a more relaxed message. For example, lean girl in training devotes a whole tumblr to this revisionary fitspo. Instead of “If you aren’t going all the way, why go at all?” she scribbles out the last bit and replaces it with “going halfway is still better than not going at all. You’ll get there!” And she changes, “It doesn’t get easier, you just get better” to “It does get easier, you also get better.” And “You will regret eating that cookie, you will not regret running that mile” becomes “You will enjoy eating that cookie, cause it’s okay to enjoy it (it’s just a f***ing cookie), you will not regret running that mile.” And so on.17 Nevertheless, for the most part, fitspiration is taken at face value, welcomed uncritically by women all over the Western world as the inspiration it is meant to be. A simple Internet search for “fitspo images” will yield thousands of results. A search for fitspo tumblrs will likewise yield pages and pages of websites devoted to fitspiration. The prevalence of these kinds of images in ads and social media is due in no small part to the ease with which people can connect over the Internet. Whole communities have sprung up online whose sole purpose is to help women continue to starve themselves or work out too much—​to take Weight Watchers’ familiar “eat less and move more” motto to extremes not originally intended. But social media does not simply provide community for those with eating disorders. Even more moderately, restrictive dieting as a way of life is the focal point of many online communities and social media groups. The message that you do not hear among the members of these communities and yet that really goes to the heart of the matter is that, for all the focus on dieting for weight loss, diets do not work. Research study after research study has shown that dieting, even so-​called sensible diets like the one promoted by Weight Watchers, do not in the typical case result in long-​term weight loss. Indeed, most diets result in weight gain over the longer term. After an initial weight loss, participants go back to normal eating, loosen the restrictions that kept them rule-​bound for the period of weight loss, and slowly or quickly but in a majority of cases, inevitably, the weight comes back on. According to a recent study, “those who succeed in long-​term weight loss maintenance describe remaining vigilant and constantly applying specific strategies to control their weight, whereas regainers describe discontinuing the effort to regulate body weight.”18 The study goes on to say that it “appears that the ‘normal’ course following weight loss is regaining and possibly weight recycling.”19 16  Tracy Isaacs, “The Inspirational Dis-​Value of Fitspo,” Fit Is a Feminist Issue, http://​ fitisafeministissue.com/​2012/​12/​20/​the-​inspirational-​dis-​value-​of-​fitspo/​. 17  Lean girl in training, http://​legit-​fitness.tumblr.com/​post/​64465401632/​fabstroid-​this-​is-​my-​fitblr-​ i-​love-​this-​safe. See also Tracy Isaacs, “Moderate Fitspo Works for Me,” Fit Is a Feminist Issue, http://​ fitisafeministissue.com/​2013/​10/​31/​moderate-​fitspo-​works-​for-​me/​. 18  Costas A. Anastasiou, Eleni Karfopoulou, and Mary Yannakoulia, “Weight Regaining: From Statistics and Behaviors to Physiology and Metabolism,” Metabolism, Clinical and Experimental 64, no. 11 (November 2015): 1395–​1407, at 1396. 19 Ibid.

578   Tracy Isaacs Some research indicates that most people end up heavier after dieting. It may not be right away, and most weight loss programs do not publish any statistics about how people who lost successfully on their plans are maintaining years after their initial weight loss, but the studies that do exist show that within three to five years, many people are heavier than when they started. In “Dieting: Proxy or Cause of Future Weight Gain?” M. R. Lowe says: Weight loss appears to induce compensatory regulatory responses in the realms of both metabolism (1,7) and intake (8,9). One type of evidence for this conclusion is the regularity with which obese individuals who lose weight through lifestyle change programmes regularly regain it, regardless of the specific type of intervention used to induce weight loss. It appears that starting body weight (or body fat) represents a largely inflexible threshold beneath which long-​lasting weight reductions are extremely difficult to achieve.20

There are a number of reasons for the difficulty of achieving long-​term weight loss, both psychological and physical. Psychologically, food deprivation increases food obsession. The Minnesota Starvation Experiment was a study in human starvation, conducted at the University of Minnesota in 1944. In this study, the thirty-​six subjects were healthy young men who had responded to a recruitment brochure that asked, “Will You Starve That They Be Better Fed?” Against the backdrop of the end of World War II, physiology professor Ancel Keys, “asked how civilians would be affected physiologically and psychologically by such a limited diet” as what many Europeans subsisted on during the war—​little more than bread and potatoes.21 The purpose of the study was to determine the impact of food deprivation and establish what the best way to refeed a starving population would be. After a three-​month period of “standardization” wherein the volunteers received around 3,200 calories a day, researchers subjected the volunteers to a semi-​starvation diet of 1,800 calories a day for six months. After that “the final 3 mo were a nutritional rehabilitation period.”22 Each man was expected to lose 25% of his body weight during the period of semi-​starvation and rations were adjusted weekly to keep them on track to that goal. A careful account of the study and its findings was published in a two-​volume tome, The Biology of Human Starvation.23 During the semi-​starvation period, in which it is important to note that the men received 600 calories more per day than the typical 1,200 calorie recommendation for

20 

M. R. Lowe, “Dieting: Proxy or Cause of Future Weight Gain,” Obesity Reviews 16, Supplement 1 (2015): 19–​24, at 20, doi: 10.1111/​obr.12252. 21  Leah M. Kalm and Richard D. Semba, “They Starved So That Others Be Better Fed: Remembering Ancel Keys and the Minnesota Experiment,” Journal of Nutrition 135, no. 6 (June 1, 2005): 1347–​1352, at 1347. 22 Ibid., 1349. 23  Ancel Keys, Josef Brozek, Austin Henschel, Olaf Mickelsen, and Henry Longstreet Taylor, The Biology of Human Starvation, Vols. 1 and 2 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1950).

Food Insecurity   579 most weight loss diets today, the study found that the men grew “increasingly irritable and impatient with one another.”24 They reported a range of changes, from becoming more introverted and less energetic to developing a decreased tolerance for cold temperatures and feeling an absence of libido.25 They “experienced dizziness, extreme tiredness, muscle soreness, hair loss, reduced coordination, and ringing in their ears. Several were forced to withdraw from their university classes because they simply didn’t have the energy or motivation to attend and concentrate.”26 They also became obsessed with food, developing new eating rituals to make the food last longer. Several began to collect cookbooks. Many reported thinking of food all the time, saying “food became the one central and only thing in one’s life.”27 During the re-​ feeding phase, they had difficulty moderating their intake, sometimes overeating to the point of making themselves sick. One participant had to have his stomach pumped.28 The findings in the Minnesota Starvation Experiment go a long way to explaining how harmful consistent and deliberately eating below one’s physical needs can be. And yet typical diets offered in widely read magazines and through popular programs recommend eating about 1,200‒1,500 calories per day.29 These findings have been confirmed over the decades since the experiment, not in the context of trying to understand those starved by war, but more in the context of both scholarly and popular writing about the physical and psychological harms of weight loss diets. In their study on “Dieting, Perceived Deprivation, and Preoccupation with Food,” researchers Gayle M. Timmerman and Elizabeth K. Gregg, cite the Minnesota experiment’s finding that “participants were found to be obsessed or preoccupied with food and engaged in binge eating even after an adequate food supply was available.”30 They reported on subsequent research concerning “restrained eaters” (i.e., dieters) who tend to engage in cycles of weight gains and losses, namely, that “if dieting has adverse psychological effects, then weight cycling with its repeated dieting attempts would result in similar or worse psychological effects.”31 In the self-​help book Intuitive Eating, nutritionists Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch outline the harms of chronic dieting.32 They attribute to dieting a number of physical harms, including that it teaches the body to retain more fat (the famine response), slows 24 

Kalm and Semba, “They Starved So That Others Be Better Fed,” 1349. Ibid., 1349. See also Rick Kausmann, If Not Dieting, Then What? (Crowsnest, Australia: Allen and Unwin, 1998). 26  Kalm and Semba, “They Starved So That Others Be Better Fed,” 1349. 27 Ibid., 1349. 28 Ibid., 1351. 29  See, e.g., “A 7-​Day, 1200-​Calorie Meal Plan,” Good Housekeeping, October 15, 2015, http://​www. goodhousekeeping.com/​health/​diet-​nutrition/​advice/​a20559/​lose-​weight-​meals-​oct04/​; popular weight loss program, Jenny Craig, notes on its website that its “lowest calorie level” for clients is 1,200 calories per day, http://​www.jennycraig.com/​site/​how-​it-​works/​help#eight. 30  Gayle M. Timmerman and Elizabeth K. Gregg, “Dieting, Perceived Deprivation, and Preoccupation with Food,” Western Journal of Nursing Research 25, no. 4 (2003): 405–​418, at 406. 31 Ibid., 406. 32  Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch, Intuitive Eating, 3d ed. (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2012). 25 

580   Tracy Isaacs the rate of weight loss each successive diet, decreases the metabolism, increases binges and cravings, increases the risk of premature death and heart disease, interferes with natural satiety cues, changes the body shape, making chronic dieters more likely to regain weight in their abdominal area, which increases risk of heart disease, and leads to headaches, irregular periods, fatigue, dry skin, and hair loss.33 And those are just the physical harms. They maintain further that dieting is linked to eating disorders, may cause stress or make the dieters more vulnerable to the effects of stress, makes the dieter more vulnerable to loss of control when violating the diet’s rules—​the binge response, gradually erodes confidence and self-​trust, and makes people feel like failures.34 Physically, one explanation of why diets fail to work in the long run is that they compromise our metabolic health by inducing what has come to be called “the famine response” and also by making us want to eat, not just psychologically but also physically. Citing the Minnesota study and other research, Nancy Clark argues that so many regain weight lost through dieting because “the body perceives a diet as a famine and strives to protect itself from starving to death by signalling hunger.”35 Citing studies with a range of different subject demographics, from normal-​weight men to middle-​school children, Clark states that “dieting tends to create more long-​term problems than it solves.”36 In order to function adequately, our metabolism needs to be stoked like a fire. For that, it requires a number of things, including adequate sleep and an adequate amount of calories. Since most weight-​loss diets encourage restricted calories that are much lower than what most dieters require, the metabolism slows down in an adaptive response.37 It scales back when faced with adverse conditions of food scarcity to maximize our ability to get by on the very few and precious calories dieters provide their bodies for fuel.38 But in most diet literature, we do not hear about metabolic health. The average low-​ calorie weight loss diet is about 1,200 calories a day (even the Weight Watchers plan, which dresses calories up in new clothing in their trademark “points” system and makes dieting into a game, is in the 1,200‒1,500 range). But for most people, if they ran their stats through a good calculator,39 they would find they need a lot more than that. In my 33 

Ibid., 48–​49.

35 

Nancy Clark, “Dieting Gone Awry,” Palaestra 25, no. 1 (2010): 47–​48.

34 Ibid., 49. 36 Ibid.

37  See Josephine Connolly, Theresa Romano, and Marisa Patruno, “Selections from Current Literature: Effects of Dieting and Exercise on Resting Metabolic Rate and Implications for Weight Management,” Family Practice 16, no. 2 (1999): 196–​201. 38  Ibid.; Leanne M. Redman, Leonie K. Heilbronn, Corby K. Martin, Lilian de Jonge, Donald A. Williamson, James P. Delaney, and Eric Ravussin, “Metabolic and Behavioral Compensations in Response to Caloric Restriction: Implications for the Maintenance of Weight Loss,” PLoS ONE, February 9, 2009, http://​journals.plos.org/​plosone/​article?id=10.1371/​journal.pone.0004377; Matt Stone, Diet Recovery: Restoring Hormonal Health, Metabolism, Mood, and Your Relationship with Food, Kindle ed. (Archangel Ink, 2013). 39  For example, see the Health-​Calc at http://​www.health-​calc.com/​diet/​energy-​expenditure-​ advanced, which takes into account height, weight, age, sex, activity level, and sleep time to determine energy expenditure in calories.

Food Insecurity   581 case, for example, as a 51-​year-​old woman who leads an active life but is by no means an athlete, my energy expenditure on an average day, measured in calories, is between 2,400 and 2,600. Some of the more popular literature on this topic recommends “diet recovery programs” that focus on metabolic health, like the one outlined in Amber Roger’s Taking Up Space, and in Matt Stone’s Diet Recovery and Diet Recovery 2. Both authors urge approaches that are meant to kick-​start the diet-​induced slower metabolisms of chronic dieters. As Matt Stone says in Diet Recovery, he wants to outline the reasons to quit dieting and explain “how you can go about rehabilitating your body from past diets.”40 Besides usually not working to achieve the desired end of long-​term weight loss, dieting has another sinister side, which is that it encourages obsession with food, weight, exercise, and usually both springs from and perpetuates poor body image. In the 1990s, a spate of self-​help literature about “overcoming the obsession” encouraged people to get off the merry-​go-​round of restrictive dieting, followed by cycles of binging and gaining, and instead to try a more intuitive approach to eating. Different versions of this approach can be found in books by Geneen Roth, such as Breaking Free from Compulsive Eating and Feeding the Hungry Heart, and in Overcoming Overeating by psychotherapists Jane Hirshmann and Carol Munter, and Intuitive Eating by nutritionists Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch. Hirshmann also wrote Transforming Body Image and When Women Stop Hating Their Bodies.41 Still today, these books carry a radical message that goes against the received view, that is, the view that we should always be vigilant about food, always trying to lose weight, or, for those who have lost lately, maintain the weight loss. As an example, in January 2013, I declared publicly in a blog post on Fit Is a Feminist Issue that, following the advice outlined in Intuitive Eating I was going to stop weighing myself and stop dieting.42 A chorus of skepticism and concern poured forth in the comments, with lots of people saying that the approach would not “work for them.” Some said that they could not control their eating enough to consider attempting that sort of thing. Others recommended being more concerned about nutrition. All of this was offered as well-​meaning advice. Some urge further that we ought not to be concerned only about nutrition, but about sports nutrition. This is supposed to be an improvement; but just as fitspiration is not much better than thinspiration, sports nutrition is only marginally better than dieting. It may be that at some point athletes need to think about getting more of certain foods and less of others if they want to optimize performance, but a lot of sports nutrition advice resembles diet advice. The readers’ reaction to my post about getting off the diet track resulted in a eureka moment, when it became clear that dieting and controlled eating are not just things

40 Stone, Diet Recovery, 10. 41 

Geneen Roth, Feeding the Hungry Heart (New York: Penguin Books, 1982); Geneen Roth, Breaking Free from Compulsive Eating (New York: Penguin Books, 1989); Jane Hirshmann and Carol Munter, Overcoming Overeating (New York: Ballantine Books, 1996); Tribole and Resch, Intuitive Eating. 42  Tracy Isaacs, “No More Weigh-​Ins: On Putting away the Scale,” Fit Is a Feminist Issue, January 2, 2013, http://​fitisafeministissue.com/​2013/​01/​02/​no-​more-​weigh-​ins-​on-​putting-​away-​the-​scale/​.

582   Tracy Isaacs people do, they are social practices with enormous power. Moreover, most people embrace them without criticism. We do, of course, see some explicitly feminist criticisms, such as those outlined at the outset, but on a personal level even feminists with an explicitly body-​positive agenda can be susceptible to social messaging. It is difficult to escape the pressure of dominant ideologies. Cressida Heyes explains it well in the opening of her paper, “Foucault Goes to Weight Watchers,” when she explains how she came to be writing the paper at all: “I was both interested in losing weight, embarrassed by that desire, and curious about institutionalized weight loss programs.”43 Overcoming Overeating, a popular book that has achieved a prominent place in the intuitive eating movement, outlines well the main tenets—​the rules—​of the ideology of dieting and weight loss: “Fat is bad; fat people eat too much; thin is beautiful; eating requires control; criticism leads to change.”44 And these are all part of a larger “game” the authors call “Change Your Shape, Change Your Life.” Sadly, it is not so simple to change your shape or your life. While these tenets are all prominent parts of the ideology, the notion that eating requires control is so entrenched in our social world that it can hardly be contested.45 We are conditioned to believe that we will be out of control around food if we do not consciously cut back, eat things we do not really want to eat, even track our food. Diet programs including Weight Watchers invariably include tracking—​that is, keeping an electronic or paper record of the food you eat—​as a necessary part of the program so that we can see on paper (or the screen) exactly what we are doing. You can track calories, fat grams, carb grams, protein grams, or Weight Watchers points. You can add activity and a calculation will show you how much you have burned and how much you need. You can put in your current weight and goal weight and run it through a calculator to tell you what you need to eat each day to lose X pounds per week. In other words, there are gadgets, apps, programs, and plans available, for money or for free, designed to help everyone to monitor their eating so that it does not get out of control. Tracking is very much like the panopticon. The panopticon is the prison design that we owe to Jeremy Bentham, wherein the inmates cannot tell when they are being watched.46 The idea behind it is that since the prisoners in the panopticon are uncertain of when they are under surveillance and when they are not, they start to monitor and check their own behavior all the time. Instead of needing guards to maintain the control, the prisoners maintain control over themselves. The panopticon is sinister in its purpose, the purpose of exerting power over people. Foucault picked up on this idea

43 

Cressida Heyes, “Foucault Goes to Weight Watchers,” Hypatia 21, no. 2 (Spring 2006): 126–​149, at 127. 44  Hirshmann and Munter, Overcoming Overeating. 45  Ann Cahill, “Getting to My Fighting Weight,” Hypatia 25, no. 2 (Spring 2010): 485–​492. 46  Jeremy Bentham, The Panopticon; or, the Inspection House (London: T Payne at the Mews Gate, 1791), Electronic resource, Eighteenth Century Collections Online: Range 16134, University of London’s Goldsmiths’ Library.

Food Insecurity   583 as a metaphor for our social and political world.47 Self-​policing operates alongside, and sometimes in place of, policing by others when we internalize social norms and power structures. Sandra Bartky, developing Foucault’s point in a specifically feminist way, argues that women internalize the norms and practices of normative femininity themselves.48 We live in a social system wherein women are both policed and police themselves so much that it is not noticed, appearing normal and unremarkable instead of extraordinary and oppressive. Tracking is just like that. People who do it defend it with enthusiasm and devotion as a necessary method of keeping themselves “in check.” But like the panopticon, it constricts, restricts, and oppresses. As if its oppressive qualities are not bad enough, tracking is a dieting tool, and the research indicates that diets do not work. Not only do they not work, as the Minnesota Starvation Experiment shows and as more recent research supports, they actively cause harm. This idea—​that without some external rules or controls people will eat everything in sight and be unable to stop themselves—​is a main message of the diet industry, which brings in billions of dollars each year. It is the fundamental premise of the popular television program The Biggest Loser, which adds competition, fat-​shaming, and abuse to the repertoire of tools needed for people to lose weight. Putting this idea in the larger context of neoliberalism (to be understood as the political economic system that emphasizes free markets, privatization, and a minimal regulatory state), personhood (particularly the shift, within the neoliberal state, toward understanding the person as “the consumer” rather than the more politically minded notion of a citizen), and the “war on” the “epidemic” of obesity, Julie Guthman and Melanie DuPuis argue that neoliberalism produces a tension between persons as citizens and persons as consumers that “encourages (over)eating at the same time that neoliberal notions of discipline vilify it.”49 The challenge of control in the face of temptation is a recurring narrative not limited to prime time television and the popular media. The induction into this ideology of dieting and weight loss starts early and continues throughout life unless conscious steps are taken to address it, and even then, standing up to it is a long-​fought battle that requires enormous effort in the face of relentless media messages that if we do not already look a certain way then we ought to be trying our best to get there. The ideology of diet and weight loss is more harmful to women than to men because much more social value is placed on women’s appearance than on men’s. This state of affairs keeps women busy. Women spend a lot of time and energy obsessing about food, weight, and body image; it is time and energy that could be better spent in more 47 

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 202–​203. Sandra Bartky, “Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power,” in Femininity and Domination Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression, by Sandra Bartky (New York: Routledge, 1990), 63–​82. 49  Julie Guthman and Melanie DuPuis, “Embodying Neoliberalism: Economy, Culture, and the Politics of Fat,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 24 (2006): 427–​448. Many thanks to Anne Barnhill for drawing this article to my attention. 48 

584   Tracy Isaacs empowering ways. Seen in that light, we might understand it as an ideology of oppression insofar as it involves systemic social forces that operate in a way that has a disproportionate impact on a particular social group. So far, the discussion supports the view that in the Western social context, dieting for weight loss is part of an oppressive ideology that has a disproportionately harmful impact on women. In what follows, a more global view will reveal that there is a different kind of food insecurity at play in the world, and it makes the Western ideology of dieting appear not just to be an ideology of oppression, but rather an ideology of privilege.

Food Security and Food Sovereignty Delegates at the World Food Summit of 1996 defined food security as existing “when all people at all times have access to sufficient, safe, nutritious food to maintain a healthy and active life.”50 Food security includes both physical and economic access to food that not only meets people’s dietary needs but also fulfills their food preferences. Food security is built on three pillars: food availability, food access, and food use. These are outlined on the WHO website as follows: • Food availability: sufficient quantities of food available on a consistent basis. • Food access:  having sufficient resources to obtain appropriate foods for a nutritious diet. • Food use: appropriate use based on knowledge of basic nutrition and care, as well as adequate water and sanitation.51 There are roughly 1 billion food insecure people in the world today, living in chronic hunger because food is unavailable to them, or unaffordable, or they are too unhealthy to make use of it.52 Lest we think that food security is only an issue for people in “other parts” of the world, the issue of food availability is not confined to impoverished economies overseas. Canadian food banks serve tens of thousands of Canadians each month. See these 2014 Canadian statistics from Hunger Count 2014:53 • Close to 850,000 Canadians use food banks each month • 88,000 people each month access a food bank for the first time • 310,000 of those turning to food banks are children and youth

50 

World Health Organization, “Food Security,” http://​www.who.int/​trade/​glossary/​story028/​en/​.

51 Ibid.

52  Marshall Burke and David Lobell, “Climate Effects on Food Security: An Overview,” in Climate Change and Food Security, ed. David B. Lobell and Marshall Burke (New York: Springer, 2010), 13–​30, at 13. 53  “Hunger Count 2014: A Comprehensive Report on Hunger and Food Bank Use in Canada, and Recommendations for Change” (Food Banks Canada, 2014).

Food Insecurity   585 • Food bank use is 25% higher than before the 2008 recession • There is a high level of food insecurity in the North As we can see from these statistics, even in a prosperous nation like Canada, some people are “food insecure” and need to use food banks if they are to eat. There is no reason to think the situation is not similar in the United States, Europe, and Australia. In the United States, for example, the US Department of Agriculture defines food insecurity as, “limited or uncertain availability of nutritionally adequate and safe foods or limited or uncertain ability to acquire acceptable foods in socially acceptable ways.”54 Their questionnaire, designed to determine if a household is food insecure, links food insecurity to the ability to afford to eat.55 A USDA report says that in 2013, 14% of US households (5.6 million) were food insecure at some point during the year, with 5.6% of those being “very food insecure,” which means that “the food intake of one or more household members was reduced and their eating patterns were disrupted at times during the year because the household lacked money and other resources for food.”56 Some Food Studies scholars and agricultural organizations argue that the notion of food security does not go far enough because it is unpoliticized, not sufficiently critical of the capitalist food production system. They urge the more politicized idea of food sovereignty. Food sovereignty, as defined by the grassroots organization La Via Campesina, is: the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems. It develops a model of small scale sustainable production benefiting communities and their environment. It puts the aspirations, needs and livelihoods of those who produce, distribute and consume food at the heart of food systems and policies rather than the demands of markets and corporations.57

Food sovereignty is not just about the provision of food but also about production. Whereas food security is an important idea because there is no denying that the goal of seeing to it that people have access to sufficient healthy food is essential, food sovereignty argues that the politics of food production cannot be pried apart from food 54  “Food Security in the US,” US Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service, http://​ www.ers.usda.gov/​topics/​food-​nutrition-​assistance/​food-​security-​in-​the-​us/​measurement. aspx#measurement. 55  Thanks to Anne Barnhill, for drawing my attention to the USDA Food Security Survey and for highlighting the point that food security is not merely or even mostly geographical, but is closely tied to poverty, and that the USDA definitions differ from the WHO in making that link explicit. 56  Alisha Coleman-​Jensen, Chris Gregory, and Anita Singh, “Household Food Security in the United Stated in 2013,” Economic Research Report No. 173 (September 2014), Economic Research Service, US Department of Agriculture, i (abstract). 57  “La Via Campesina: International Peasant’s Movement,” http://​viacampesina.org/​en/​index.php/​ organisation-​mainmenu-​44.

586   Tracy Isaacs security. Food sovereignty is an explicitly political perspective and movement. Food Secure Canada’s policy paper, “Resetting the Table: A People’s Food Policy for Canada,” outlines what food sovereignty might look like in Canada.58 The group aligns itself with La Via Campesina seeking to combat injustice in the global food system. In taking the perspective of political activism and adopting the language of rights, the group explicitly fights for “women’s rights and against land grabs and the spread of GMOs.” The food sovereignty movement explicitly challenges food systems and means of production, arguing that the capitalist forces of agribusiness that drive our global food systems are a big part of the problem. There are a number of ways that, according to advocates of food sovereignty, the global capitalist system compromise food at the level of production and distribution.59From patents to landgrabbing, there is much evidence that the agribusinesses that dominate food production are changing the global food landscape.60 In contrast to agribusiness and factory farms, food sovereignty seeks to promote and develop environmentally sustainable agriculture and small-​scale production.61 The food sovereignty movement, then, argues for a complete reformation of food systems globally. I bring the issues of both food security and food sovereignty into the discussion because they offer a different perspective on the kinds of “food insecurity” issues I raised at the outset, concerning the culture of weight loss and restrictive dieting that we in the West find ourselves immersed in. Although there is no denying that ideologically speaking, a culture that is preoccupied with weight loss is insidiously oppressive, in a more global context this preoccupation is one that can only exist where there is abundance. People who embark on dieting as a weight loss strategy are able to choose not to eat, to choose to go hungry, to choose to eat these foods rather than those foods. It is only in an environment of abundance that such a choice even makes sense. That environment also explains why dieting is thought to be so very difficult that dieters need support groups and coaching—​they live in a world where they are surrounded not just by choices, but by tempting and delicious choices. The very notion of having an abundance of choice in our diets oozes privilege. My contention then is that the ideology of dieting is not only an ideology of oppression but also one of privilege. In the following section, I suggest that one way of explaining how the same ideology can be of oppression and of privilege is through the notion of intersectionality. Moreover, in drawing attention to the way systemic privilege and disadvantage intersect, we highlight the ways in which patterns of consumption combined with the dominance of agribusiness in the global food economy constrain choice and place limits at the level of production. 58 

“Resetting the Table: A People’s Food Policy for Canada,” The People’s Food Policy Project, Food Secure Canada (Creative Commons, 2011). 59  “La Via Campesina: International Peasant’s Movement,” http://​viacampesina.org/​en/​index.php/​ organisation-​mainmenu-​44.; Food Secure Canada, Ibid. 60  La Via Campesina, “Main Issues,” http://​viacampesina.org/​en/​index.php/​ main-​issues-​mainmenu-​27. 61 Ibid.

Food Insecurity   587

Intersectionality Intersectionality has become an essential part of the standard toolbox in women’s studies and feminist studies ever since African American legal scholar, Kimberlé Crenshaw, first introduced the term in 1991 to describe how different forms of oppression, for example, racist oppression and sexist oppression, can intersect in a way that is not simply additive, but uniquely disadvantaging.62 Her paper focuses on several legal cases in the United States in which Black63 women were unable to access their rights through discrimination law because they were not recognized as a group. In seeking to make claims about employment discrimination against Black women, they repeatedly faced the response that there were enough women and enough Blacks represented in the relevant employment groups. But the legal complaints these women wanted to make were specifically about the underrepresentation of African American women. The root of their claim picks up on the theme of the title of an early contribution to Black feminism, the essay collection, All the Women Are White, All the Blacks are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave.64 Feminist philosopher Ann Garry states, in a more recent paper, that “intersectionality is, minimally, the idea that various forms of oppression interact with one another in multiple complex ways.”65 In their classic paper “Have We Got a Theory for You!” feminist philosophers Maria Lugones and Elizabeth Spelman spell out the ways that feminist theory falsely generalizes about the plight of all women, offering imperialistic theories that respond only to the interests of the most privileged women—​white, educated, English-​speaking, middle to upper middle class—​who create the theories. This is a familiar challenge to feminism and feminist theory: that it is just not responsive enough to a broad enough range of women’s experiences. Indeed, scholars like Lugones and Spelman challenge the very idea of a feminist theory that makes any generalizations about women and women’s experiences.

62  Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (July 1991): 1241–​1299. 63  I have followed Crenshaw in capitalizing “Black,” for reasons she explains in Crenshaw 1991, as follows: “I use ‘Black’ and ‘African American’ interchangeably throughout this article. I capitalize ‘Black’ because ‘Blacks,’ like Asians, Latinos, and other ‘minorities,’ constitute a specific cultural group and, as such, require denotation as a proper noun.” Crenshaw, supra note 3 at 1332 n.2 (citing Catharine MacKinnon, Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: An Agenda for Theory 7 SIGNS, 515, 516 (1982)). By the same token, I do not capitalize “white,” which is not a proper nouns, since whites do not constitute a specific cultural group. For the same reason I do not capitalize “women of color.” (Crenshaw, Ibid., note 6, 1244). 64  Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith, eds., All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies (Old Westbury, NY: The Feminist Press, 1982). 65  Ann Garry, “Intersectionality, Metaphors, and the Multiplicity of Gender,” Hypatia 26, no. 4 (Fall 2011): 826–​850, at 826.

588   Tracy Isaacs It should come as no surprise that there is diversity among women and that women do not constitute a homogeneous group. It would be difficult to deny the reality of significant differences between women, including different experiences of oppression. Yet feminist theorizing can gloss over these differences. In attempting to represent all voices, theorizing about “women” can end up excluding many. In her work as an anti-​racist, anti-​capitalist, transnational, Third World feminist scholar, Chandra Mohanty claims that feminists must respond to the phenomenon of globalization as an urgent site for the recolonization of peoples, especially in the Two-​Thirds World. Globalization colonizes women’s as well as men’s lives around the world, and we need an anti-​imperialist, anticapitalist, and contextualized feminist project to expose and make visible the various overlapping forms of subjugation of women’s lives.66

Mohanty recommends a feminist pedagogy and research model that she calls “the feminist solidarity model” or “the comparative feminist studies model.” Rather than positioning Black women, Third World women, Indian women, Indigenous women, or disabled women as objects or even subjects of study, this model “requires one to formulate questions about connection and disconnection between activist women’s movements around the world. Rather than formulating activism and agency in terms of discrete and disconnected cultures and nations, it allows us to frame agency and resistance across the borders of nation and culture.”67 Taking this idea of interconnectedness to the context of food, we can see immediately that global capitalist forces highly influence world food systems at the levels of production and of distribution. For example, multinational corporations control quotas and patents on seeds, buy up and control agricultural land in developing countries, and determine standards for all sorts of things, including how produce should look.68 The economic structures of the global food system push in the direction of agribusiness and industrialized farming practices, while moving away from small farms, family farms, and local distribution. We can see, further, that the interests of rural women working the land in developing nations, or rural and urban poor women who struggle to feed themselves and their children, are different from, but not independent of, the interests of women living in more affluent economies and who are susceptible to the cultural messages of diet, weight loss, and hyper-​control over food intake, on the one hand, while surrounded by 66  Chandra Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes Revisited,” Feminism without Borders (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 221–​251, at 236. 67 Ibid., 243. 68  As an example of this last point, in March 2016, Loblaws Canada announced that it would allow “less than perfect” produce at a reduced price as an experiment: “The company launched its Naturally Imperfect line last March, offering ugly apples and potatoes to Ontario and Quebec shoppers as part of a trial run that later expanded to select stores in other provinces.” See “Imperfect Groceries Can Make Perfect Sense for Budget-​Minded Shoppers, Loblaws Bets,” http://​www.cbc.ca/​news/​business/​ loblaw-​imperfect-​grocery-​1.3473996.

Food Insecurity   589 abundance, excess, and temptation, on the other hand. Their respective interests are not independent of each other because the global forces of capitalism inevitably link the affluent to practices of exploitation elsewhere. Consider as an example the controversy that arose over quinoa and its surge in popularity over the past decade. This ancient grain grown in the Andes is now making an appearance on trendy tables everywhere. It is high in protein, low in fat, and gluten-​free. A couple of years ago, an article entitled, “Can Vegans Stomach the Unpalatable Truth about Quinoa,” made the rounds in popular social media.69 According to new reports, global demand for quinoa had driven its price up so much that locals in Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador, where 90% of the world’s quinoa supply is produced, can no longer afford it. Imported foods that are less healthy are, according to the reports, more affordable. A second article calls this analysis into question, saying that in fact the quinoa situation is more complicated than that.70 It is not that people cannot afford it, but rather that as its value increases, quinoa is seen as too lucrative a commodity to eat. Rice and pasta, by contrast, are cheaper. But also the association of quinoa traditionally as a subsistence food gives it a lower status even as it becomes a global commodity. “Western” imports, such as white rice and Coca-​Cola, bring with them a higher status. Additionally, however, the profitability of quinoa means that more and more land in the Andean highlands where it has traditionally been grown is being dedicated to quinoa, with less set aside as pastures for grazing llama.71 Meanwhile, there are initiatives afoot to produce quinoa globally, outside of the Andean locales in which it originated. If that takes hold and global demand for exported quinoa drops, that could mean trouble for Andean farmers who expanded their production to meet global demand.72 Quinoa is just one example that highlights the way in which global demand increasingly directs not just local production but even the consumption patterns of people. This type of impact of globalization is exactly the state of affairs that has led to the food sovereignty movement, the more politicized alternative to food security that focuses on production, local food, and protection of small farmers and the rural poor. Raj Patel’s work draws attention to a similar connection. He notes that the seemingly unlimited need for choice among “we,” the privileged, creates harm among the people who produce the food and, in a different way, harm among those who consume it, too.73 With over ten thousand new food products appearing on supermarket shelves each year, life without choice seems unimaginable to a small percentage of the world’s people.74 69  “Can Vegans Stomach the Unpalatable Truth about Quinoa,” The Guardian, January 16, 2013, http://​ www.theguardian.com/​commentisfree/​2013/​jan/​16/​vegans-​stomach-​unpalatable-​truth-​quinoa. 70  “Quinoa: Good, Evil, or Just Really Complicated?” Mother Jones, January 25, 2013, http://​www. motherjones.com/​tom-​philpott/​2013/​01/​quinoa-​good-​evil-​or-​just-​really-​complicated. 71 Ibid. 72  “Quinoa Should Be Taking over the World. This Is Why It Isn’t,” Washington Post, July 11, 2013, http://​www.washingtonpost.com/​news/​wonkblog/​wp/​2013/​07/​11/​quinoa-​should-​be-​taking-​over-​the-​ world-​this-​is-​why-​it-​isnt/​. 73  Many thanks to Anne Barnhill, whose excellent comments helped me draw a tighter, more nuanced connection between Patel’s work and my discussion. 74  Raj Patel, Stuffed and Starved (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House Publishers, 2007), 14.

590   Tracy Isaacs But we in these contexts of abundance fail to reflect either on how our need for choice is generated or on what impact it has on food producers trying to insert themselves into the global food market. Not only does excess in some corners of the world breed poverty in others, the abundance of choice is itself a method of manipulating consumers. People fill their shopping carts with unhealthy, low-​priced foods made to look and taste appealing through the use of chemical additives that are rarely called into question by the consumers that ingest them. According to Patel’s analysis, the structure of the global food system inextricably connects rich and poor, but despite the positive connotations of choice and abundance, those experiencing the most measurable material benefits of the system are the large corporations that control it.75 Abby Wilkerson links the so-​called obesity crisis, which she views more as a political phenomenon than an actual health crisis, “in relation to the industrialized agro-​ food system” and what she calls “The Thin Contract.”76 In contrast to the Racial Contract and the Sexual Contract, in which systemic injustice is a function of race or sex, respectively, the Thin Contract “focuses on body vulnerabilities and variations normalized in health, ability, and fitness terms.”77 This contract promotes especially severe systemic disadvantage in the lives of disabled people or those considered obese.78 It “transforms persons into flexible bodies” and links political subjecthood to the bodily ideals, captured in the pervasive norms of health, fitness, and ability.79 Wilkerson’s analysis draws a connection between global food systems and global political, social, and economic inequity. In relation to the broader topic of this paper, Wilkerson’s discussion highlights that the preponderance of feminist work on “women’s consumption practices in the Global North” has not paid nearly enough attention to production practices.80 Some may think that to claim that, in a global context, ideologies of dieting and the Western culture of weight loss are actually ideologies of privilege, is overly harsh. It might seem so because, in fact, many women find these cultural imperatives debilitating and live in anguish as a result. How can an ideology that causes so much pain be one of privilege? Returning to the idea of intersectionality and the way that different forms of oppression interlock and intersect, we must also recognize that few people are wholly oppressed or wholly privileged. If intersectionality is a useful concept for deepening our understanding of existing power structures and how they work to marginalize people in different ways, then it is also a helpful way to understand that sometimes privilege and oppression can intersect.

75 Ibid., 16.

76  Abby Wilkerson, “‘Obesity,’ the Transnational Plate, and the Thin Contract,” Radical Philosophy Review 13, no. 1 (2010): 43–​67, at 43. 77 Ibid., 46. 78 Ibid. 79  Ibid., 43–​44. 80 Ibid., 51.

Food Insecurity   591 Shuddhabrata Sengupta talks about intersectional identities as “negotiated minefields” and weapons that we might wield depending on context. He challenges readers to think of their own complicated place in power structures: Are you the white working-​class woman, perhaps a single mother, who is herself a victim of insidious sexism within the military and within working-​class subcultures, who nevertheless becomes a willing enforcer of the apparatus of humiliation in the Abu Ghraib prison? Are you the rich Indian racist who thinks that white women were made white in order for him to harass them on the streets of New Delhi? Are you the British exchange student of Nigerian origin in an Indian city who can’t find a room to rent because of her color and who listens patiently to stories about how Indians suffer racism in the city where she grew up?81

Sometimes we forget that just about everyone occupies multiple social locations or has complicated social identities, defined by race, gender, class, (dis)ability, age, sexuality, religion, ethnicity, nationality, education, and the intersections of these. We only get at half of the picture when we think about intersectionality in terms of the way various forms of oppression intersect. Rather, we gain a more accurate representation of our complex world when we think of it as recognizing the way various forms of oppression and privilege intersect. A privileged identity is still an identity, a privileged social location is still a location—​white is a race, male is a gender, nondisabled is an ability/​disability category, heterosexual is a sexual orientation—​and these intersect not just with other forms of privilege but with forms—​or as Sengupta nicely puts it, “indices”—​of oppression as well. Not only do these indices intersect in the lives of individuals, making it possible for them simultaneously to occupy privileged and disadvantaged social locations, but these examples also make salient the way the abundance of apparent choice that we see in more affluent parts of the world reverberates globally. My purpose in this section has been to provide an account, using intersectionality as a framework, for understanding how we can find oppression and privilege in the same ideology. The ideology of dieting is an example of such an ideology.

Conclusion This is not the sort of discussion that yields a tidy conclusion. My main goal has been to draw attention to the manner in which having food choices is itself a privilege. Consequently, for all of its oppressive features, the ideology of dieting for weight

81 

Shuddhabrata Sengupta, “I/​Me/​Mine—​Intersectional Identities as Negotiated Minefields,” Signs 31, no. 3 (Spring 2006): 629–​639, at 630.

592   Tracy Isaacs loss—​that almost unquestioned feature of our relationship to food in the West, particularly for women—​cannot exist outside of relative affluence. Taking a global view, the privilege of choice that drives and supports global food systems has created the need for food security, food sovereignty, and food justice; the global capitalist economy has had a far-​reaching impact. Among other things, it has damaged traditional ways of life in rural communities on every continent and produced systemic disadvantage for poor and vulnerable people.82 Not only that, it generates oppressive body norms, diminishes the social and political agency of those who do not fit into those norms, and produces an abundance of nutritionally vacuous food choices. I have argued that the idea of intersectionality, understood not just as intersecting forms of oppression but as intersecting forms of oppression and of privilege, can help to explain how the same ideology can have its source in and produce both oppression and privilege. It bears emphasizing how important it is to see it as both. Moreover, we must not lose sight of the global systems that govern our food production. Being oppressed by cultural attitudes concerning food does not give anyone a free pass in the context of global food systems.83

82  For example, Canadian cheese producers have expressed great alarm over the European Free Trade Agreement, which would double the amount of European cheese allowed in to Canada. See “Canada’s Dairy Farmers ‘Angered and Disappointed’ by EU Trade Deal That Would Double Cheese Imports,” National Post, October 16, 2013, http://​news.nationalpost.com/​news/​canada/​dairy-​farmers-​angered-​by-​ reports-​canada-​close-​to-​eu-​trade-​deal-​that-​would-​allow-​more-​cheese-​imports. 83  Many thanks to Anne Barnhill and Mark Bryant Budolfson for their comments on an earlier version of this essay. Thanks also to audiences who provided feedback in lively Q and A when I presented earlier versions in plenary sessions at the Canadian Society for Women in Philosophy, held at Trent University in October 2014 and at the Philosophy Student Conference at Windsor University in March 2015, as well as at a meeting of the Minorities and Philosophy chapter at University of Toronto, March 2015.

chapter 26

Sham e, Sedu c t i on, and Charac t e r in Fo od Mes s ag i ng Rebecca Kukla

In this essay, I explore the rhetorical and ethical structure of our public communications and representations concerning food, eating, health, and obesity, which I will shorten to “food messaging.” We are surrounded by such food messaging, from formal Public Service Announcements (PSAs) designed to stem the “obesity epidemic,” to material concerning a wide variety of diets that supposedly come with ethical or health benefits, to the kind of informal messaging around norms of food, bodies, and eating that permeate our experience online and in other media. While much of health communication ethics focuses exclusively on PSAs and other formal missives, it is a central methodological principle for me that we should attend to the entire communicative and representational environment in which people find themselves. Formal health communication only has its force and meaning in relationship to the rest of the food messaging around us—​in blog posts, advertisements, online quizzes, music videos, and so forth. I see no evidence that as consumers of food messages, we single out formal communications and take them as having special or isolatable force. Rather, we receive them as parts of holistic meaning-​and communication-​rich environments. I will explore this holistic picture: What kinds of norms of eating, body weight, and health are communicated to us as we move through social space and how? What do these communicative transactions actually achieve, and when might they threaten or preserve autonomy, self-​esteem, and well-​being? As we will see, the dominant mode of food messaging holds individuals accountable for making “lifestyle” choices that keep them thin and healthy, and shames those who fail to do so. Yet voluminous evidence repeatedly supports the conclusion that food choices are elaborately determined, and that the causal relationships between eating practices, weight, and health are endlessly complex. Fat and ill health are not

594   Rebecca Kukla linked in any simple or unidirectional way, and it is not at all clear that in general, being “overweight” by official standards is unhealthy. Likewise, there is no simple story to be told about the relationship between will, motivation, and eating practices, or between these and health or these and weight. The determinants of behavior, health, and weight are a complicated cocktail of social, genetic, situational, psychological, and structural factors.1 Eating and weight patterns are highly correlated with broad demographics such as education, region, and race, which tells against individualized, motivation-​based explanations of food choice, while empirical researchers such as Brian Wansink (Wansink 2004; Wansink et al. 2006) have repeatedly found that situational cues such as the size and transparency of food containers affect eating choices dramatically. We know that, in general, public health messaging designed to discourage certain kinds of choices by inducing negative emotions has little to no positive effect on behavior; it has particularly little impact on those whose health is most at risk (Armstrong 2008; Craig Lefebvre 1995; Kukla 2010; Puhl, Peterson, and Luedicke 2013; Ringold 2002; Saguy 2014). In particular, we know that shame-​based messaging harms more than it helps. For instance, Brennan and Binney (2010) ran a qualitative study that indicated that the use of shame in a PSA is more likely to cause inaction and self-​ protective retreat than compliance, while Puhl (2013) found that audiences found PSAs that stigmatized those who made “poor choices” to be unmotivating and sometimes countermotivating. Many scholars have argued that much of food messaging is organized around shame and individual accountability, and that we have little reason to think such messaging will be helpful. My claim will be stronger and more specific. I will argue that we actually receive a tension-​ridden and conflicting set of messages, whose upshot is that any eating practices in which we might engage are at risk of being shamed. There is no normatively safe way to eat in our culture—​no set of eating practices that makes one more or less immune from shaming and criticism. Moreover, I will claim, our eating practices are routinely portrayed as having characterological significance, so there is no right kind of person to be in our culture, when it comes to food. Food messaging, I will claim, follows a broadly pornographic logic, in which images of sin, disgust, temptation, risk, safety, perversion, pleasure, and recklessness are mixed together in a fundamentally incoherent way. Finally, I want to claim that these are not merely messages, or bits of meaning or advice that can in principle be ignored. Rather, our eating norms are socially and materially scaffolded in important ways. We cannot just use willpower to ignore or overcome them. Negotiating the social world requires that we acknowledge the force of these damaging and contradictory norms. Thus, we are left in a practically and ethically untenable situation when it comes to eating.

1 

Exploring and defending this complexity is not my project here, and it has been done amply elsewhere, including in other essays in this volume.

Shame, Seduction, Food Messaging    595

Personal Responsibility and the Logic of Character in Food Messaging While the determinants of eating practices and the relationship between these practices and “health” (however we define it) are complex and multidimensional, our food messaging overwhelmingly promotes a characterological logic of personal responsibility. According to this logic, individuals make choices that spring from their will, which is in turn based in their character. These choices are framed as healthy or unhealthy, but they are also deeply moralized. Good people with the right character make good choices. Any other determinants of eating are marginal pressures that can be overcome by sufficiently virtuous eaters. Those with proper attitudes and characters will have that propriety reflected on their normatively shaped bodies. Gibson and Dempsey point out that the Food Network “functions as a 24-​hr promotional machine centered on equating food-​related consumption practices with life fulfillment” (2015, 47). Talia Welsh calls attention to a recent book subtitled, 21 Spiritual Lessons for Surrendering Your Weight Forever; here, she points out, “extra fat is a result of a type of spiritual problem” (Welsh 2014, 262). Many PSAs focus on how bad eaters who make bad choices will be punished with death and physical suffering, social ostracization, or both. A recent American health campaign shows a man having a heart attack; as he is intubated, a nurse intones, “5'9", 300 pounds, 32 years old,” and a doctor responds in an openly disgusted voice, “How the hell does that happen?” We then see how it happened through a series of the man’s self-​hating flashbacks, which show him gorging himself since early childhood, eating instead of being a productive or disciplined citizen. The PSA serves double duty, chastising obese adults for their poor character manifested in their food choices and chastising parents for inculcating bad habits and poor character in their children.2 A 2012 Georgia campaign produced by Strong4Life, called “Stop Sugarcoating It” uses the same double barrel, showing miserable, awkward, socially ostracized fat children asking their fat parents directly, “Why am I fat?”3 In both cases, the links between eating habits, parenting choices, fat, shame, irresponsibility, and physical and emotional misery is explicit. Neither makes any attempt to situate eating or health within any kind of larger social context, nor do they explore micro-​or macro-​structural determinants of what children eat.4 2  “Watch: Powerful Video May Change the Way You View Healthy Eating,” Fox 4 Newsroom, August 10, 2014, http://​fox4kc.com/​2014/​08/​10/​watch-​powerful-​video-​may-​change-​the-​way-​you-​view-​healthy-​ eating/​. 3  Emma Gray, “Georgia Anti-​Obesity Ads Say ‘Stop Sugarcoating’ Childhood Obesity,” Huff Post, January 3, 2012, http://​www.huffingtonpost.com/​2012/​01/​03/​georgia-​anti-​obesity-​ads-​stop-​ sugarcoating_​n_​1182023.html. 4  For instance, following Wansink (2004), why not have a campaign encouraging parents to serve their kids’ meals on smaller plates or to keep snacks out of their line of vision? After combing through every eating PSA I could find, I have never seen one anything like this. Yet such small steps are available even

596   Rebecca Kukla The same characterological, individualized logic extends to informal food messaging as well. We routinely admire and congratulate people who diet successfully or make “healthy” food choices, treating them as inspirational. Reality television shows like Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution (in which a celebrity chef tries to cajole kids into making better food choices) and The Biggest Loser (in which, notoriously, morbidly obese people compete to lose the most weight through extreme dieting and exercise regimes, while being abused by coaches) turn the shaming of those who make poor choices and the exaltation of those who change their “lifestyle” into literal spectacles. These shows function as prurient morality plays, which perform for their audience how to judge character based on eating.5 Domoff et al. (2012) showed that people who watched an episode of The Biggest Loser not only had more anti-​obesity bias than a control group but also stronger beliefs that individuals can manage their weight through their choices. Viewers with normal BMIs had the largest increases in negative attitudes. Similarly, Yoo (2013) found that exposure to The Biggest Loser was positively associated with seeing internal factors as controlling weight, with concern about weight, and with the association of obesity and personal responsibility. Yoo also found that anti-​obesity attitudes and attributions of obesity to personal responsibility co-​traveled. Thus, the television show helps inculcate not only a specific kind of causal story about individual choices but also a moralization of that story; its characterological message is, after all, built into its title’s double-​entendre. This focus on individual responsibility and lifestyle extends to the representation of the obesity “epidemic” by policymakers, the food industry, and commercial media outlets. Boyd Swinberg and his colleagues argue, “Deregulation and the shift of health responsibilities to the individual are core narratives in the present dominant climate of neoliberal politics and economics. The food industry’s initiatives to reduce obesity have focused on the establishment of voluntary marketing codes and product reformulation, promotion of physical activity and community-​based initiatives, and provision of information for consumers about the nutritional benefits of their food products through health and nutrition claims. . . . Government approaches to obesity prevention largely favour industry’s preferences for a focus on individual responsibilities and soft approaches” (Swinberg et  al. 2015, 2534‒2535). Colleen Barry and her colleagues (2011) found that news stories on obesity predominantly focused on “solutions” to obesity that involved individual lifestyle changes. Television news stories were the most likely to showcase solutions that target individual choices and behaviors; newspapers were somewhat more likely to identify systems-​level solutions that targeted neighborhoods, industry, food policies, and the like. It is significant that television messaging was the most focused on individual choice and responsibility, given that economically to parents with very limited money and time, and they have been shown to influence eating significantly. Instead the campaigns focus simply on the shameful and miserable results of making bad choices. 5  Gibson and Dempsey argue in detail that “Food Revolution reflects a long tradition of lifestyle make-​ over programs promoting themes of choice and responsibility” (2015, 50), while passing over structural causes of childhood obesity, such as industry lobbies, in silence.

Shame, Seduction, Food Messaging    597 vulnerable and immigrant populations, who are also the most likely to experience structural pressures that track obesity, will disproportionately consume those messages. I assume that the logic of individual choice and responsibility and the politics of shame is familiar to most readers of this essay, and hence that I need not give an extended or exhaustive argument for its dominance. My goal is to remind the reader of its pervasiveness and power. Against that background, I want to further excavate the specific norms that are supposed to govern proper eating choices and characters.

Shame, Purity, Disgust, and Temptation in Food Messaging As we have started to see, food messaging often portrays “unhealthy” food choices—​ those perceived as linked to obesity—​as shameful and disgusting. This semiotics of disgust extends in multiple directions—​to the food itself, to the eating and lifestyle practices, and to the character of the eater. An Australian PSA shows a chubby man choosing a sugary soda over other drinks (thereby underscoring the theme of free, accountable choice). The camera zooms in on his hanging belly as he drinks, and then dives into his body, showing slimy, bloody fat, while the voiceover warns that the soda will turn into “toxic fat” (whatever in the world that is).6 A similar New York anti-​soda PSA shows a man drinking globs of shining fat directly out of a soda can, and another in the same series shows a man downing packets of sugar while onlookers seated near him regard him with disgust.7 Meanwhile an ad from MediaWise tagged “Too much screen time, too much kid” shows a fat, slack-​jawed, clearly miserable child playing video games while hardly moving, oblivious as a slimy ogre crawls out of his large belly; here “poor lifestyle choices” are associated not only with fat and with disgust, but with oblivious stupidity.8 Thus, there is a pervasive cultural association between non-​normative eating and fatness not only with irresponsibility and poor character, but also with an aesthetics of disgust. This is underscored by less formal messaging, which routinely shows television sitcom characters revolted by accidentally seeing a fat person naked or semi-​naked. Multiple Internet sites are dedicated to shaming fat people for eating and for showing their body, treating their mere visibility as a supposed aesthetic assault on “normal” people, and so forth.9 “Bad” eating choices and the bodies that supposedly result from them are represented as not just abnormal but as gross, in a moralized and aesthetic sense of gross. Here we can see an analogy with our representation of non-​normative sexual practices, which are also represented both as indicative of bad, “perverted” character and 6 

“Eat Brighter, Live Lighter,” https://​livelighter.com.au/​Tools-​and-​Resources/​Advertisements. “Man Drinking Fat,” https://​www.youtube.com/​watch?v=-​F4t8zL6F0c. 8  “Too Much Screen Time, Too Much Kid,” https://​www.youtube.com/​watch?v=C5KknIUJyug. 9  For example, “Fat Is Not Attractive,” http://​fatisnotattractive.tumblr.com/​. 7 

598   Rebecca Kukla as aesthetically disgusting. Deborah Lupton (2014) points out that disgust is linked with impurity and unnaturalness—​we are disgusted by things we imagine as breaching the boundaries of the body in inappropriate ways that go against the “natural order” somehow (drinking urine, anal sex, etc.). If this is right, then messages that associate “improper” eating with such disgusting breaches (drinking fat, having an ogre burst through one’s belly) are cathected almost directly onto a set of implicit moral valuations. Portraying someone as engaged in impure, unnatural, disgusting acts (whether gustatory or sexual) is an assault on their dignity and value as a person. But the analogy with sexual perversion can also allow us to see the rich counterpart to this set of messages and images. A companion set of images and messages portrays “bad” eating practices and “bad” food as tempting, seductive, pleasurable, and rewarding. Just as with taboo sexual practices, our disgust and moralism over improper eating goes hand in hand with a deep aesthetic valorization of the very same practices. The same sugary and fried foods that turn into globs of “toxic fat” and other such targets of disgust in PSAs are the ones that tend to show up on “food porn” sites as forbidden but seductive temptations. It is no surprise that in erotic logic, disgust and shame are inextricably tied to pleasure and temptation. However, it is less recognized that this same logic importantly governs our attitudes toward food and eating. This is significant, because it means that messages that focus on disgust and shame enable and in various ways probably trigger the apparently opposite valorization of exactly the practices and foods that are their targets. Lupton makes vivid this close link between disgust and temptation, and likewise between the shame that accompanies a lack of discipline and the pleasure of indulging. “Loss of control of the body, the opportunity to engage in revelry, to use pleasurable substances, to invite the grotesque and transgressive body to take over the ‘civilised’ body for at least a short while, can often be very enticing,” she writes, and “in such a context the capacity for disgust to motivate self-​discipline is weakened significantly” (2014, 9‒10). The lines between indulgence and disgust, seduction and irresponsibility, are fragile and permeable. My point is not just that shame and disgust are the necessary mirrors of seduction and pleasure. More strongly, I claim that just as we aesthetically and morally denigrate those who indulge in unusual, or frequent sexual or gustatory pleasure, we inseparably and correspondingly valorize them as brave and impressive risk-​takers unafraid of pleasure. Conversely, we stigmatize “prudes” and “frigid” people who are overly pure and self-​controlled, at the same time as we hold them up as paragons of appropriate self-​discipline. We are familiar with this point in the sexual domain. This broad picture is deeply textured by gender, race, and much more, but I think almost all of us are at least partially bound up in this inescapable sexual paradox. Pornography and kink, and all forms of transgressive sexuality, consistently play with the line between shame and attraction, disgust and seduction. We see the same logic in food messaging. Those who eat too much or too often or the wrong things are shamed and treated as objects of moral and aesthetic disgust. But at the same time, those who are disciplined, who do not “indulge”

Shame, Seduction, Food Messaging    599 or who regulate their diets, are portrayed as uptight, unattractive, rigid, and incapable of pleasure. Consider how vegans, for instance, are often portrayed as distinctively austere and incapable of pleasure, where this supposed aesthetic deficit is framed as a moralized character flaw.10 Conversely, we valorize unhealthy and excessive eating as bold, as indicating a love of pleasure and a rejection of pointless social norms, while simultaneously demanding self-​regulation and asceticism. Even as we shame those who make “unhealthy” eating choices, we set up fattening, high-​calorie, maximally unhealthy foods as fetishistic objects of desire, and the wanton consumption of such food as a signal of bravery, fortitude, and passion; we demand moderate, controlled eating, and yet associate it with cold and unerotic asceticism. “Food porn” sites almost always feature “decadent” foods that we would feel bad about actually eating, much as regular porn sites do for sex acts. A sign I saw recently in a burger joint reads “Calorie: A unit used to measure how delicious food is.” Foods portrayed as lust-​worthy include both “junk” food and elaborately prepared “decadent” food, but they are unified by their unhealthiness. Eating dessert is portrayed as both shameful and seductive.11 Foods coded as celebratory are almost exclusively among those also coded as unhealthy and shameful. Anne Barnhill and her colleagues point out that this means that there are values to eating such foods that are quite separate from their health impacts; eating them allows us to participate in important traditions and celebrations (Barnhill et al. 2014). But we can turn the point around, and ask why these are the foods that are framed as celebratory. The fact that we almost unreflectively think of such foods as “indulgent” and “decadent,” and the way we speak of “treating” and “rewarding” ourselves with them, already underscores the pornographic logic: almost definitionally the foods that are seen as pleasurable are those that we are not supposed to eat. Correspondingly, those who are willing to take the plunge and bravely indulge are valorized at the same time as they are shamed, while those who abstain are objects of both admiration and contempt. For instance, the KFC hot dog wrapped in deep fried, cheese-​ stuffed chicken is named the “Double Down Dog,” a name that both associates the product with resolve, strength of character, and an odd kind of insistence on integrity in being willing to eat such a thing, and contains a vague sexual entendre (figure 26.1). To make things yet more complicated, often one and the same message will both shame and idealize reckless, “unhealthy” eating. Adele’s smash 2015 hit, “Hello,” is a disturbing yet clearly erotic ballad about a stalker who cannot let go of her past love. In a recent video parody, a string of overweight people sing a version of the song in which they express their romantic and erotic love for donuts and other high-​calorie foods, and in effect stalk the foods. The chorus, “Hella cravings for some fries” is belted out with full romantic torch song fervor. Eating “bad” food is presented as the only possible form 10 

Thanks to the editors for this nice example. See for instance “Fifteen Women Who Feel Really Guilty about Eating Dessert,” Huff Post, August 26, 2013, http://​www.huffingtonpost.com/​2013/​08/​26/​women-​who-​feel-​guilty-​about-​dessert-​photos_​n_​ 3798396.html. 11 

600   Rebecca Kukla

Figure 26.1  The double down dog

of happiness, while healthy foods and exercise are associated with sobbing misery and self-​abnegation.12 The extended joke is utterly mundane, an instance of routine pablumy office humor that we take for granted. But I think we rarely stop to consider the weirdness of a culture that takes for granted the erotic or at least quasi-​erotic allure of “unhealthy” foods while also routinely shaming and marking as disgusting those who eat them regularly or in large portions. In both the food and the sexual domain, our job, as managers of our own lifestyle, is always to “make good choices,” and the main thrust of social interventions and communications is to encourage such “good choices.” But at the same time, making “bad” choices is linked indelibly, in both domains, with full-​throated pleasure and indulgence. Throwing caution to the wind and “indulging” is essentially tempting and seductive. Spontaneous eating and sex that we do not actively choose are frequently targeted as irresponsible, risky, and immoral. According to our cultural ethos, “proper” eating and sexual choices are made in a self-​disciplined way, on the basis of full information, and in accordance with prevailing aesthetic and cultural norms; anything else is “disgusting” and morally dangerous. We are supposed to plan our meals and track our calories, while extra unplanned eating counts as an “indulgence” or “being bad” or “cheating” (while at the same time, those who are overly rigid about their eating are no fun and aesthetically challenged). Sex is supposed to be a negotiated, planned safe practice involving explicit 12 

“Adele -​Hello Parody (Hella Cravings),” https://​www.youtube.com/​watch?v=lQ6-​nCLeDsI.

Shame, Seduction, Food Messaging    601 contractual consent and a small number of partners.13 Jeremy Iggers (1996), for example, draws a parallel between the aesthetics of eating and sex that is superficially similar to mine, but uses this link to argue that we should be mindful and self-​disciplined and restrained in our eating, as we should be with our sexuality. Now, of course, many people reject this ethos and are happy to be indulgent in either or both of the gustatory and sexual domains; after all, it is central to my argument that this set of norms is contradictory and two-​sided. But it seems to me that even those who do recognize that they are in some sense choosing to transgress—​that “proper” eating and “proper” sexuality are supposed to involve a narrow range of self-​disciplined behavior. Anna Kirkland points out that two features of our widespread sexual attitudes include “sex negativity” and our attachment to a moralized “value hierarchy.” That is, we associate sex with sin, danger, and risk, and we also morally privilege some sex acts (heterosexual missionary position sex over anal sex or group sex, for instance) without any particular ethical justification. Analogously, she argues, not only do we associate eating with risk and indulgence, but we allow some foods (fresh farmers’ market vegetables, for instance, or baguettes) to take on a moralized patina of righteousness in comparison to nearly nutritionally identical foods that we associate with devalued lifestyles (canned vegetables, Wonder Bread). Kirkland suggests that what drives such judgments is not health concerns but an elitist essentialism about food values that mimics sexual logic (Kirkland 2011, 475, 474). Thus, in both the food case and the sex case, the “risks” we are supposed to manage include not just actual health risks, but various kinds of socially manufactured aesthetic risks. These include eating “junk” foods that do not fit with elitist aesthetic norms and enjoying sexual positions and activities that are “perverted” relative to heterocentric, monogamist, “vanilla” norms. As Welsh (2014) discusses, all of our encounters with food begin with consumer practices, mediated by marketers, corporations, and various other food-​image-​managers, all of whom have in effect colluded in creating this tension-​ridden dynamic. The consumption of formal and informal food messaging inducts us into a logic of purity, sin, temptation, and indulgence; in this logic, pleasure and shame, and boldness and weakness, are sutured together despite undermining one another. Our messages around food produce the gustatory analogues of sluts, perverts, prudes, players, and uptight bitches. A puritanical, risk-​averse, shame-​based ethics of food and eating seems as unhelpful as it has been in the sexual domain, when it comes to protecting health and human flourishing. In both the eating and sexual domains, we face concrete risks. Sex can bring disease, unwanted pregnancy, emotional harm, and other damages. Eating can poison us, give us allergic reactions, damage our metabolism, cause unwanted weight gain, and so forth. But in both cases, we have a widespread cultural tendency to distort and exaggerate these risks, to treat both as somehow essentially risky, precarious activities, 13  Within a monogamous relationship, unplanned sex might be acceptable as long as it is sex of a very narrow normative form, but even for monogamous couples we take it as “obvious” that women, at least, will generally stop wanting spontaneous sex unless they are “sluts.” (Standard joke: “What’s the world’s most potent anti-​aphrodisiac? Wedding cake!”)

602   Rebecca Kukla rather than as routine pleasurable activities that involve risks to be managed within reason, and sometimes reasonably ignored. “Responsible” eating and sex are never simply pleasurable; they are always exercises in continuous self-​surveillance and risk management; any other kind of eating or sex is wanton and indicative of a character flaw.14 Kirkland quotes Nikolas Rose, who argues that the “ethics of lifestyle maximization . . . generates a relentless imperative of risk management . . . through daily lifestyle management, choices of where to live and shop, what to eat and drink, stress management, exercise, and so forth” (Kirkland 2011, 478). When so many dimensions of everyday life become subject to this kind of risk management imperative, we open up room for moral panic. A moral panic is a broadly distributed social phenomenon, wherein a specific source of purported risk—​typically a kind of person—​comes to be seen as a severe threat to our basic social order and security. Moral panics are characterized by simplistic causal stories, risk distortion, and a moralistic, characterological condemnation of the type of person involved. Over the last few decades, moral panics have focused on “welfare moms,” people with HIV, consumers of pornography or rap music, “crack babies,” and other targets. As Paul Campos and others have pointed out, the standard social response to a moral panic is to try to eliminate the kind of person posing the risk (through drastically cutting welfare, criminally penalizing pregnant drug users, or whatever it might be), rather than exploring harm reduction strategies, for instance. Any “solution” that might eliminate the purported threat is seen as legitimate, even or perhaps especially if it involves shame and punishment of the targets, who are seen as threatening the social fabric through their bad choices. It does not seem a stretch to say that obesity and fat people are at the center of a moral panic. The obesity “epidemic” is charged with threatening to destroy our health care system, our social security system, and our children’s chances at having happy and fulfilling lives, and such claims are typically cut free from evidence and statistics. Campos (2009) claims that “we are in the midst of a moral panic over fat, which has transformed the heavier than average into folk devils, to whom all sorts of social ills are ascribed.” Fat bodies must be forced to become thin bodies, through shaming or whatever other means. Like slutty girls, pregnant women who do not eat/​wear/​listen to the right things, and black boys who talk and dress wrong, fat people and undisciplined eaters show up as perpetrators of an “epidemic” that will cause chaos and social collapse.

14 

Interestingly, Eric Finkelstein and Laurie Zuckerman (2008) have argued in detail that for many people, eating high-​calorie foods and letting oneself be “overweight” according to official standards actually maximizes their cost-​benefit balancing. At the micro-​level, eating more and higher calorie foods is often cost-​efficient, and at the macro level, being “overweight” may be an appropriate trade-​off that maximizes overall quality of life according to one’s values. To the extent that this is right, the charge of “wantonness” against those who eat in ways that lead to obesity is not evidence-​based; rather, such eaters might in fact be good economic calculators and decision-​makers. Many thanks to the editors of this volume for reminding me of this point and suggesting this reference.

Shame, Seduction, Food Messaging    603

Interpellation, Identity, and the Pragmatics of Food Messages So far, I  have focused on the content of the formal and informal messages around us about the norms of food and eating. But in order to understand our practical relationship to these messages and the impact they have on us, we need to look at their performative force and not just their semantic content. Messages do not work just by transferring pure information into their receivers; different messages address their audiences in different ways and have different pragmatic shapes and impacts. (Consider, for instance, the difference in force between a message that is presented as an imperative—​“Don’t text and drive; it’s the law!”—​and one that is presented as a warning or as helpful advice—​“Drinking during pregnancy may lead to birth defects” or “5 tips for getting your picky kids to eat more vegetables!”). Implicit in all of the discussions of health communication is the assumption that food messages do more than convey pure semantic information, if such a thing even makes sense; rather, we assume that the messages will bring about behavior and attitude change, which is why we bother to disseminate some and try to counteract others. Despite this obvious point, there has been little attention to the performative structure and effects of food messages. In this section, I consider how the pragmatic structure of food messages constitutes and solidifies the kind of power they have over us. When we look at the force of messages, we need to look not just at their intended impact but also at their complex, unintended, and often unexpected performative effects. For example, we saw that many food messages are designed to induce shame, with the hope or presumption that this shame will in turn bring about behavior change. We also saw reasons to be suspicious of this causal assumption. But such shaming messages also have a host of other effects on those they target. H. Cho and C. T. Salmon document eleven types of unintended effects of shaming messages, including “obfuscation, dissonance, boomerang, epidemic of apprehension, desensitization, culpability, opportunity cost, social reproduction, social norming, enabling, and system activation” (2007, 298). I have discussed how we treat eating practices as essentially tied to character, and thus as displaying our moralized identities. Many of our formal and informal food messages function by recognizing and hardening these identities. They call on us to see ourselves as their targets, by recognizing ourselves as the kind of person to whom they speak. In giving uptake to these messages—​in recognizing them as properly aimed at us—​we thereby solidify these identities; we inhabit the character of food addict, undisciplined sloth, puritanical food snob, or whatever it may be, and this becomes ossified as part of our core self. This is the process that Louis Althusser names “interpellation.”15 Interpellation is the process whereby speakers—​or representations of speakers—​with social authority 15 

Althusser’s most developed and iconic discussion of interpellation and its constitutive power is in his “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” (1971).

604   Rebecca Kukla “hail” a target audience. In interpellating someone with a hail, I recognizing them as already having a certain kind of identity, which includes a set of values and character traits and is manifested in certain patterns of behavior. In recognizing themselves as recognized by these authoritative hails, subjects thereby take themselves as really the kinds of people at whom the hail was directed, and this in turn ossifies that identity. Through interpellation, Althusser claims, subjects are “recruited” into particular subject positions and come to identify with specific characters and normative commitments. Althusser’s main example involves hearing a police siren and recognizing that “I am the one” being called by it, and thereby taking up an identity as potentially guilty and as properly subject to police authority, whether or not I think I have done anything wrong. A nicely explicit example of interpellation is roll call: when a teacher takes attendance in class, the students recognize themselves as recognized and called one by one. They also recognize themselves as called upon to respond as students do—​for instance by raising their hand and saying “here” rather than by starting a conversation about the weather. In recognizing themselves as being recognized as students, they also recognize themselves as bound by the norms that go along with that identity, and this in turn helps constitute their identity as students; by responding they inhabit the identity of a student. There need not be any literal embodied hailer in order for interpellation to do its work. Representations with the right kind of social authority can interpellate. We are interpellated each time we recognize which bathroom door we are supposed to go through by the icon on the door, and each time an advertisement asks, in the second person, “Are you worried about your family’s safety?” or “Are you upset by premature wrinkles?” In such calls, we recognize ourselves as really the ones being called, and we thereby are inducted into the norms governing that particular identity (responsible family man, early middle-​aged woman who still takes care of herself, etc.). The point is that interpellation functions pragmatically to solidify identities as manifested in accompanying “lifestyle” choices. It binds people to specific norms, and shapes and entrenches values. It does this by using the social authority behind the hail to call for its audience to recognize themselves as already properly recognized by the representation of themselves in the hail. Often (though not necessarily), interpellative messages speak in the second-​person voice; rather than neutrally describing a situation, they call upon YOU, the intended audience, to recognize that YOU are the one being spoken to. But whether or not they use the literal grammatical second person, they have a second-​ personal structure. Because we so deeply associate eating practices and body shape with character, with who we “really are,” it seems to me that interpellative messages about food and eating are well-​positioned to be especially powerful. Indeed, formal PSAs concerning eating and health typically have an openly interpellative structure. They are second-​personal rather than impersonally descriptive, and they mobilize images of specific identities, or of who you “really are,” and associate that with a set of “lifestyle choices.” For instance, the PSA in figure 26.2 is not only in the second-​person voice, but it calls viewers to recognize

Shame, Seduction, Food Messaging    605

Figure 26.2  You are what you eat

themselves in either the person on the left or the person on the right, each of whom is quite literally essentially constituted by their eating choices.16 The interpellative power of food messaging is intense, even when it is not coming from official sources or packaged quite so transparently. The Adele parody video I discussed in an earlier section does not grammatically employ the second-​person voice; it is sung in the first person. Nevertheless it seems clear that it seeks to derive its humor value from inviting watchers to identify with the anti-​exercise, pro-​gluttony, shame-​ ridden characters in the video. It constructs a specific social identity and character with a specific relationship to eating, and frames that as what “normal” people “like me” actually feel and do. It presents itself as expressing what you, the viewer, know you feel “on the inside.” The accompanying YouTube comments from viewers (which are mostly of the “LOL yeah that is totally me!” variety) make its interpellative power quite clear. We saw how most food messages focus on individual character, lifestyle choices and accountability, as opposed to structural change or institutional and corporate responsibility. The interpellative form of food messaging also buttresses and works in tandem with 16 

“Sample PSA Posters,” https://​www.pinterest.com/​libraryps54k/​sample-​psa-​posters/​.

606   Rebecca Kukla this focus. It is in the nature of interpellation that it hails individuals as individuals, and even more specifically as individual choosers whose identity is manifested and confirmed by their choice to conform to a set of social norms that make up a “lifestyle.” It calls upon us to recognize ourselves as the kind of person who acts like this, has these values, and so forth. Interpellative messages play a large role in creating the social space of possible identities, even when we inhabit those identities only transgressively or imperfectly. One powerful feature of interpellation is that recognizing the message as properly recognizing me, I have already accepted the identity it imputes, even if I now push back against the norms that purportedly go with that identity. So if I see an ad that shames me for being the kind of person that makes disgusting food choices—​as in the PSA featuring someone drinking toxic fat—​I might consciously reject the idea that my food choices ought to be shamed; but at the same time in doing so I have already recognized I am the kind of person at whom socially authoritative messages of shame are directed. I thus need to engage with these norms as norms that apply to me, even if I do so through resistance. Thus, our current complicated network of food messages, along with the problematic identities it carves out—​weak and lazy disgusting glutton, food slut, food prude, and so forth—​plays a powerful constitutive role in producing the kinds of subjects it represents.

Shaming, Being Shamed, and Transactional Identities Almost all discussions of health communication focus on the impact of messages upon their intended targets: How will a PSA about Fetal Alcohol Syndrome impact pregnant women’s drinking? How will a website for teens about smoking impact teen smoking rates? And so forth. Yet most public messages will also be seen by people who were not their targets, and we need to consider their impact on these others as well. Likewise, interpellation works most directly and clearly on its constructed target—​on the “you” to whom it speaks. But complex messages often interpellate multiple implied audiences, albeit perhaps less directly. For example, The Biggest Loser markets itself as inspirational viewing for the obese, but we saw that it also changes the attitudes of those with lower body weights toward obesity and its causes. I suggest that it does this partially by way of indirect interpellation. The contestants on The Biggest Loser are presented not only as obese, but as monstrously large, as objects of visual curiosity and as targets of extreme disgust. The visual and rhetorical construction of the show is such that the bodies on it are there to be looked at and to be disciplined. This creates multiple interpellated subject positions, including the positions of aesthetic and moral judges and of disciplinarians, as well as “better” subjects who take care of themselves “properly,” rather than making spectacles of themselves. Thus, not only obese viewers are interpellated but so are

Shame, Seduction, Food Messaging    607 self-​righteous and disgusted onlookers; they are interpellated by differentiating themselves from what they see, as well as through their vicarious participation in disciplining and shaming the bodies on display.17 It is unsurprising that the measurable impact on the attitudes of non-​obese viewers is profound. More generally, when we communicate that those who make “poor” food choices or have non-​normative bodies are to-​be-​shamed or even to-​be-​admired, we position them in social relations to shamers and admirers. Food messages can interpellate viewers into the positions of judges, disciplinarians, envious admirers, and so on, just as they interpellate them into the position of proper or improper eaters. I argued earlier that we treat eating practices as manifestations of characters. But we now see as well that the norms governing these practices do not just apply to individuals; they are often transactional or interpersonal norms, such as norms of shaming, empathizing, or admiring. Thus, food messages generate and ossify multiple identities, not just the identities most obviously represented in the message. We witness this, for instance, on social media, where posts about weight loss inevitably elicit strings of comments admiring the person’s will power and courage, expressing envy, and the like; posts on food indulgence elicit sympathetic identification. Together these processes enhance and solidify not just the identities and characters of eaters, but a concrete network of transactional norms for how we view and treat one another.

Food Messaging, Social Scaffolding, and Niche Construction In the face of my argument that our food messages construct damaging, internally tension-​ridden subject positions, one might think that the best approach is just to try to ignore those messages. Perhaps we should just do our best to make choices and construct practices that do not buy into the logic of shame, indulgence, and perversion that dominate our cultural images. In this section, I want to argue that this kind of voluntaristic solution is implausible. It rests on an incorrect picture, in which food messages convey contents to us that we just need to be strong or smart enough to reject as needed. But in fact, these messages are embedded in social and material scaffolding that we have no choice but to navigate.18 We cannot simply choose other values or norms or identities because these things are built into the concrete social environment that we have to live in. If we try to bootstrap ourselves out of these normative positions, then our actions will be in friction with the spaces and people around us. 17  See my extended discussion of how we can be interpellated as viewers of the grotesque in “Talking Back: Monstrosity, Mundanity, and Cynicism in Television Talk Shows” (Kukla 2002). 18  I take this way of putting the point from Merritt (forthcoming).

608   Rebecca Kukla Welsh writes, “Why is changing what and how one puts in one’s mouth difficult? Because it isn’t the singular motion that is the challenge, but the way in which that action is the result of an entire constellation of behaviours, histories, and influences that have created a way of living . . .  . One’s embodied freedom is deeply constituted by “complexes” or styles of being that are as much cultural experiences as they are physical ones” (2014, 272). The issue here is not just that our choices are embedded in larger entrenched individual patterns and habits of living; rather, everything about our social world holds us in these patterns. Our transactions with others only make sense and run smoothly if we cleave to the available roles and norms. Even more strongly, because eating is framed as essentially tied to character and identity, our choices are not just embedded within larger ways of living. We experience our eating practices as intimate manifestations of who we are, and others perceive them this way third-​personally as well; hence, changing them can be a major disruption to our personal and social identity. The entrenchment of our eating practices is not just a matter of having deeply internalized, recalcitrant desires or motivations or tastes, but of how we can live in the world. Michele Merritt (forthcoming) argues that eating disorders are socially scaffolded rather than just dysfunctions of individual psychologies. We have traditionally tried to understand eating disorders in terms of an individualist metaphysics of internal feelings or constellations of the will. But in fact, Merritt argues, anorectic (and other eating disorder) identities are sustained by practices that are inherently transactional and situated. Some anorectics, for instance, will actively use the gaze of other people to control their eating; they will eat only in front of others both in order to give the appearance of normalcy and in order to avoid binging. Some social environments and patterns of interaction (for instance, among young ballet dancers) specifically interpellate and enable anorectic identities and make other, healthier attitudes toward food concretely difficult to sustain. Merritt describes this process as one of niche construction. Disordered eating practices and identities are co-​constitutive with social and material environments that support them, and these environments sediment the disordered practices and thereby make those identities the “natural” ones to inhabit. I think her analysis applies more broadly to eating practices in general; or perhaps it is more accurate to say that I think all of our social scaffolding supports only disordered eating identities. Earlier I pointed out that Barnhill et al. (2014) explore the various social values other than health that can attach to eating certain foods. Foods can be celebratory, or they can carry on family or diasporic regional traditions, for instance. They argue that when we treat people’s choices to eat such “unhealthy” foods as simply irrational, we fail to note these alternative legitimate values. I want to enhance their argument by pointing out that such values are not just a matter of psychological attachment. Rather, these values are built into the social and material environment that we negotiate, and hence we are not free to merely make a meta-​decision to change them. Because the norms around eating are not merely individual but transactional, anyone’s failure to follow these norms is potentially socially destabilizing. Conversely, it is personally destabilizing not to receive smooth social recognition and uptake for one’s identity. Furthermore and more mundanely, eating differently and with different attitudes can be materially difficult, as

Shame, Seduction, Food Messaging    609 grocery store aisles, menus, and social events are set up to channel people through fixed normative eating narratives. For example, if I decide that I do not want to treat sugary deserts as valued celebratory foods, the consequence is not just that I cannot participate fully in celebrations (although this is already a concrete effect that goes beyond mere psychology). My choice can seem hostile, antisocial, or even incomprehensible to others. Because eating practices are so tightly tied to identity, people often respond defensively when someone breaks with established food practices and attitudes. With respect to celebratory desserts, the “proper” social attitude is indulgence combined with guilt—​failing to manifest either of these can lead to social hostility or confusion. Thus, it can be socially disruptive not to accept these values in practice. Stepping outside of the eating “characters” that we have socially constructed and reinforced through messaging has repercussions for both the self and the social whole. What we learn from both Merritt and Barnhill et al. is that part of what it is to live in a social space is to enact recognizable narratives of eating and food valuation practices, where this includes not just what we eat but our expressed attitudes toward food. If we try to break out of these canalized paths, we find ourselves with an identity that does not fit well in its found niche or receive smooth uptake.19 But, at the same time, the niches that are available to us are deeply tension-​ridden and in some ways ill-​suited to mental or physical well-​being. We are supposed to lust after “bad” foods and to “indulge” and also to be shamed for our lack of control. As consumers, we are not given a reasonable path toward enacting the food values we are asked to have. At this point, it might seem that I have strayed from my discussion of food messaging. But formal and informal food messages are concrete and integral parts of the environments in which we operate. I have argued that food messages have powerful pragmatic force; they interpellate people into specific identities bound by particular norms. Thus, food messages are not just representations that serve to inform or motivate. They are both part of the scaffolding that holds us in particular, socially recognizable identities and to particular norms and values, and part of the machinery of niche construction that builds that scaffolding.

The Ethics of Food Messaging Many of the informal food messages I  have considered in this essay—​music videos, memes, and the like—​are not strategically planned as interventions into people’s health 19 

A personal anecdote: I worked in a female-​dominated office in which it was traditional for people to share cookies once a week. This involved eating cookies while talking about how bad one feels about oneself for eating cookies, and about how one shouldn’t be eating the cookies. Generally these were store-​bought cookies that weren’t especially good. I don’t enjoy mediocre cookies and didn’t want to eat them. I was also uncomfortable giving uptake to the various conversations about the shameful level of

610   Rebecca Kukla practices. PSAs and other official communications, on the other hand, are specifically designed to change behavior. In this final section, I want to consider briefly some ethical suggestions concerning such formal food messages. A great deal of work in the ethics of health communication presumes that such formal messages are self-​standing interventions, but my analysis has suggested that they are parts of a much larger and more complex process of niche construction, not all of which is neatly controllable. Thus, the ethics of formal food messaging needs to be considered in this messier context. It seems abundantly clear that shame-​based messaging, despite being our dominant mode of health communication, does a potentially large amount of harm and little to no detectable good. More broadly, messages that focus on individual accountability for “lifestyle” underscore and ossify a metaphysics of character and choice that is unhelpful and distorted. Such messages shift the moral burden for eating “properly” onto individuals, but without addressing any of the systemic and contextual features of our niches that support some kinds of eating and not others. We also often forget that there is no clear argument for why anyone has a moral responsibility to eat “well,” even to the extent that they do control their eating practices. Meanwhile, emphasizing an aesthetics of austerity and discipline and contrasting it with indulgence is likely to feed into rather than undermine dominant narratives that associate indulgence with pleasure and inevitable seduction. If my analysis is correct, then those designing formal food messages should give critical attention to the interpellative force and power of messages. Second-​personal messages that interpellate people into identity categories linked with eating practices will further entrench the metaphysics and ethics of character and individual choice. And in a cultural context in which our options for eating identities are already seriously dysfunctional, such interpellative messages are likely to enhance the problematic scaffolding in which we are already embedded. PSAs and the like can deliver high-​quality scientific information about links between eating practices and health—​including in vivid, aesthetic, grippy ways—​without taking the form of interpellative hails. Persuasion, including emotional persuasion, need not be unethical or interfere with agency unless it distorts our reasoning in some way.20 The idea that we should only convey “pure” information to people so as to preserve their autonomy relies on philosophically untenable conceptions of communication and information. There is no way to distill informational contents and deliver them in a purely neutral way. Even if we just stick to facts, we know that how we deliver those facts (as a graph or a table, as a relative or an absolute risk, using what exact wording, in what sort of space and tone of voice)

cookie consumption going on. This obviously hurt people’s feelings, and people would feel free to both push the cookies and also tell me how they “hated me” for being able to resist the cookies. And, in fact, my refusal to participate in this tension-​ridden practice of indulgence and self-​shaming was, in effect, antisocial and unfriendly of me. I ended up just avoiding the office altogether on cookie days, which was a rather drastic solution not available to everyone. 20 

This is a fairly solid consensus in the literature on the ethics of health communication. See, for instance, Rocha 2012; Faden 1987.

Shame, Seduction, Food Messaging    611 will affect how people reason about and use that information.21 So we cannot object to food messaging merely on the grounds of its emotional or motivational impact. More generally, we cannot assume that just because these communications are designed to alter behavior, they are therefore unacceptably paternalistic. As has been discussed at length in the literature on the ethics of nudges, there is no such thing as a neutral choice environment. All environments shape the actions and choices we make within them, and people routinely design environments that help control actions. Every door or TV screen or toilet flush we place does this. Hence, designed features of our environment that “nudge” behavior are not inherently unethical.22 I  have tried to portray food messages and communications as concrete, material features of the niches in which we live. Hence, they should not be considered different in kind from other nudges that make up the architecture of choice, and they cannot be ruled unethical just because they may shape our actions in ways other than via pure rational argumentation. Messaging that distorts our reasoning or our capacity to express our agency is ethically problematic, however. Current food messages, including many PSAs, are distorting along several ethically unacceptable dimensions. Factually, they are distorting in that they imply that people can control their eating and their weight entirely through acts of will and self-​discipline, which we know to be misleading at best. Correspondingly, by focusing entirely on “good lifestyle choices” as the route to avoiding obesity and ill health, they in effect misrepresent the complex causal relationships between eating decisions, actual eating practices, and health status, by covering over almost all of this complexity. They artificially isolate one causal thread even though it cannot be isolated in practice. Meanwhile, not all ethically problematic distortions are factual distortions. Agency and autonomous choice can also be compromised by moral and attentional distortions (Kukla 2010). That is, even if a message does not present or imply false information, it might focus our attention or skew our moral reasoning inappropriately, so as to lead us to act and choose in ways that do not represent our real values or our best reasoning. By focusing on individual choices, food messages distort our attention (and not just our causal understanding) in ways that compromise our reasoning and hence our agency. These messages call on us to focus on isolated acts of will, rather than on the social niches that we need to negotiate. So, for instance, we end up feeling like guilty failures when we have a piece of cake at a birthday party, rather than recognizing that we acted in a way that was non-​disruptive and in keeping with local norms and possibilities. Social niches can be intelligently rebuilt or renegotiated, to an extent, if we recognize that they are not serving us well. But a relentless focus on isolated individual acts of will distorts our attention to the situations in which we 21  There is an enormous literature exploring such effects, going back most notably to Tversky and Kahnemann (1974). 22  See, for instance, Thaler and Sunstein 2008; Selinger and Whyte 2011; and Saghai 2013.

612   Rebecca Kukla find ourselves and does not clarify for us the ways in which we might need or wish to change our environment. Messages that create a moralized sense of personal accountability for food choices, linking eating practices with character, also cause moral distortion. Such messages misrepresent the moral structure of agency, identity, and responsibility, and thereby undermine good quality moral reasoning. They also cause us to misattribute responsibility, including to ourselves, which is a straightforward moral error. In addition to producing agency-​impeding moral distortion these food messages also can do direct moral harm by demeaning their recipients. Deborah Lupton (2014) points out that in the domain of public health we tend to assume that any images or messages that succeed in increasing health are ethical. But, she argues, even if food messages did increase health, they can be unethical if they degrade or dehumanize their targets or assault their dignity. Shaming messages and messages that treat certain kinds of eaters as disgusting and degenerate are unethical on this ground. Good quality, ethical, effective food messaging that does not generate tension-​ridden, unhealthy identities and practices will require not just message change, but widespread culture change. As in the sexual domain, the logic of seduction, indulgence, disgust, and shame is not conducive to the creation of sustainable food values, identities, and eating practices.23

Bibliography Althusser, L. 1971. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” In Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. B. Brewster, 127–​186. New York: Monthly Review Press. Andrews, J. C. 1995. “The Effectiveness of Alcohol Warning Labels: A Review and Extension.” American Behavioral Scientist 38(4): 622–​634. Armstrong, E. 2008. Conceiving Risk, Bearing Responsibility: Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and the Diagnosis of Moral Disorder. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Barnhill, A., et  al. 2014. “The Value of Unhealthy Eating and the Ethics of Healthy Eating Policies.” Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 24(3): 187–​217. Barry, C. L., et al. 2011. “News Media Framing of Childhood Obesity in the United States from 2000 to 2009.” Pediatrics 128(1): 132–​145. Brennan, L., and W. Binney. 2010. “Fear, Guilt, and Shame Appeals in Social Marketing.” Journal of Business Research 63(2): 140–​146. Campos, Paul. 2009. “America’s Moral Panic over Obesity.” Interview with Megan McArdle, The Atlantic. http://​w ww.theatlantic.com/​business/​archive/​2009/​07/​americas-​moral-​ panic-​over-​obesity/​22397/​. Cho, H., and C. T. Salmon. 2007. “Unintended Effects of Health Communication Campaigns.” Journal of Communication 57:293–​317. 23  Many thanks to Samantha Brennan, Megan Dean, Bryce Huebner, Tracy Isaacs, Elliot Kukla, and Michele Merritt, all of whom influenced my thinking about food, eating, health, and weight, both through direct conversations and through their blog posts and Facebook posts. This kind of writing often shapes my thinking in ways that run deep but are difficult to cite specifically.

Shame, Seduction, Food Messaging    613 Craig Lefebvre, D., et al. 1995. “Use of Data Marketing and Consumer Based Communication in Message Design: An Example from the Office of Cancer Communications.” In Designing Health Messages, ed. E. Maibach and R. L. Parrott. London: Sage. Domoff, S. E., et al. 2012. “The Effects of Reality Television on Weight Bias: An Examination of The Biggest Loser.” Obesity 20(5): 993–​998. Faden, R. 1987. “Ethical Issues in Government Sponsored Public Health Campaigns.” Health Education and Behavior 14(1): 27–​37. Finkelstein, E. A., and L. Zuckerman. 2008. The Fattening of America: How the Economy Makes Us Fat, If It Matters, and What To Do about It. New York: Wiley. Gibson, K. E., and S. E. Dempsey. 2015. “Make Good Choices, Kid: Biopolitics of Children’s Bodies and School Lunch Reform in Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution.” Children’s Geographies 13(1): 44–​58. Iggers, Jeremy. 1996. The Garden of Eating: Food, Sex, and Morality. New York: Basic Books. Kirkland, A. 2011. “The Environmental Account of Obesity: A Case for Feminist Skepticism.” Signs 36(2): 463–​485. Kukla, R. 2002. “Talking Back:  Monstrosity, Mundanity, and Cynicism in Television Talk Shows.” Rethinking Marxism 14(1): 67–​96. —​—​—​. 2010. “The Ethics and Cultural Politics of Reproductive Risk Warnings: A Case Study of California’s Proposition 65.” Health, Risk, and Society 12(4): 323–​334. Lupton, D. 2014. “The Pedagogy of Disgust: The Ethical, Moral, and Political Implications of Using Disgust in Public Health Campaigns.” Critical Public Health 25(1): 1–​11. Merritt, M. Forthcoming. “Any Body Not My Own: Collective Emotions and the Constitution of Eating Disorders.” Frontiers in Psychology, Special Issue on Affectivity beyond the Skin. Puhl, R., J. L. Peterson, and J. Luedicke. 2013. “Fighting Obesity or Obese Persons? Public Perceptions of Obesity-​Related Health Messages.” International Journal of Obesity 37:774–​782. Ringold, D. J. 2002. “Boomerang Effects in Response to Public Health Interventions: Some Unintended Consequences in the Alcoholic Beverage Market.” Journal of Consumer Policy 25(1): 27–​63. Rocha, O. J. 2012. “Autonomous Abortion: The Inhibiting of Women’s Autonomy through Legal Ultrasound Requirements.” Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 22(1): 25–​58. Saghai, Y. 2013. “Salvaging the Concept of a Nudge.” Journal of Medical Ethics 39(8): 487–​493. Saguy, E. 2014. What’s Wrong with Fat? New York: Oxford University Press. Selinger, E., and K. Whyte. 2011. “Is There a Right Way to Nudge? The Practice and Ethics of Choice Architecture.” Sociology Compass 5(10): 923–​935. Swinberg, B., et al., 2015. “Strengthening of Accountability Systems to Create Healthy Food Environments and Reduce Global Obesity.” The Lancet 385:2534–​2545. Thaler, R., and C. Sunstein. 2008. Nudge:  Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Tversky, A., and D. Kahnemann. 1974. “Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases.” Science 185:1124–​1131. Wansink, B. 2004. “Environmental Factors that Increase the Food Intake and Consumption Volume of Unknowing Consumers.” Annual Review of Nutrition 24:455–​479. Wansink, B., K. van Ittersum, and J. E. Painter. 2006. “Ice Cream Illusions.” American Journal of Preventative Medicine 31(3): 240–​243. Welsh, T. 2014. “Fat Eats: A Phenomenology of Decadence, Food, and Health.” In Food and Everyday Life, ed. T. Conroy and N. Beckham, 257‒275. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Yoo, J. H. 2013. “No Clear Winner: Effects of The Biggest Loser on the Stigmatization of Obese Persons.” Health Communication 28(3): 294–​303.

chapter 27

Obesit y a nd Resp onsi bi l i t y Beth Dixon

Introduction There is almost no accounting for personal responsibility. People should be (and I believe they are) capable of not consuming everything the market throws their way. —​Julie Guthman, Weighing In: Obesity, Food Justice, and the Limits of Capitalism1

In this essay, I take a closer look at what personal responsibility means in connection to the “problem” of obesity and recommended solutions.2 What we find in obesity discourse is that the language of personal responsibility sometimes has a moral dimension to it; although the attribution of moral responsibility rarely comes equipped with any clear criteria of application. This is true across a wide range of settings where the expression ‘personal responsibility’ is employed by academics, policy analysts, representatives of the food industry, or by ordinary citizens. This supplies us with sufficient rationale for engaging in a conceptual analysis of moral responsibility and how it applies in these contexts. As I will argue, such an analysis reveals that many who are classified as obese are actually exempt from moral responsibility, contrary to popular opinion. 1 

Student comments as reported by Julie Guthman, Weighing In: Obesity, Food Justice, and the Limits of Capitalism, California Studies in Food and Culture (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California, 2011), 50–​51 2  Identifying obesity as a “problem” (trend or epidemic) is itself contestable. See, e.g., Pat Lyons, “Prescription for Harm: Diet Industry Influence, Public Health Policy, and the ‘Obesity Epidemic,’” in The Fat Studies Reader, ed. Esther Rothblum and Sondra Solovay (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 75–​87; Guthman, Weighing In; and Kirkland, “The Environmental Account of Obesity: A Case for Feminist Skepticism.”

Obesity and Responsibility    615 A second reason for demanding clarity about the concept of moral responsibility as it applies to obesity discourse is that we may be able to use such an account to resist a false dichotomy about moral agency.3 A prevalent idea about responsibility and obesity seems to suggest one of two possibilities. Either individuals are unequivocally responsible for their condition of being obese or individuals are excused from moral accountability because their condition of obesity is owed primarily to external conditions, namely, the “toxic” food environment, social institutions, public policy, the corporate food industry, or more fundamental unjust structural conditions.4 As an example of the first position, when defenders of freedom of choice resist the regulation of processed foods and foods high in salt, sugar, and fat, they assume a much too expansive and liberal account of moral agency. They suppose (or want to convince us) that individual consumers already enjoy complete knowledge about the health dangers of processed food, and that they have an ideal kind of freedom to choose what to eat and how much to eat.5 However, it is more realistic to suppose that moral agents are actually embedded in situations that, to a greater or lesser degree, constrain their knowledge of ethically salient features of the world which influence the control they have over their actions. Alternatively, when basic structural features of the world are implicated as part of a causal explanation for obesity, we are better able to focus on those social and political background conditions that disadvantage populations of people.6 These contexts, to a greater or lesser degree, limit a person’s access to knowledge and create obstacles to eating healthy food. But, by exclusively emphasizing these structural conditions, it is easy to lose sight of the agency of individuals; what they know and how they can choose

3 In Responsibility for Justice, Young makes a similar comment when she discusses personal responsibility in the context of public policy discourse about poverty and welfare reform. She criticizes Charles Murray and Lawrence Mead for assuming that individual responsibility and structural explanations of poverty are mutually exclusive explanations (17). Here I do not charge any one author with the same kind of mistake. What is still problematic is that emphasizing structural conditions in causal accounts of obesity risks understating or neglecting individual agency, which most of us believe continues to operate even when choices and opportunities are limited. See Charles Murray, Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950‒1980 (New York: Basic Books, 1984); and Lawrence M. Mead, Beyond Entitlement: The Social Obligations of Citizenship (New York: Free Press, 2006). 4  See, e.g., Marian Nestle, Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California, 2002); and Kelly D. Brownell et al., “Personal Responsibility and Obesity: A Constructive Approach to a Controversial Issue,” Health Affairs 29, no. 3 (March 2010): 378–​386. 5  For example, consider what Congressman Ric Keller says in defense of the Personal Responsibility in Food Consumption Act.

We believe there should be common sense in a food court, not blaming other people in a legal court whenever there is an excessive consumption of fast food. . . . We think that most people understand that its common sense that if you eat unlimited amounts of supersize fries and milkshakes and Big Macs . . . that can possibly lead to obesity and things like diabetics [and] cardiovascular disease (quoted in Adam Benfarado, Jon Hanson, and David Yosifon, “Broken Scales: Obesity and Justice in America,” Emory Law Journal 53 [October 1, 2004]: 1645–​1806). 6 

See, e.g., Guthman, Weighing In; and Kirkland, “The Environmental Account of Obesity: A Case for Feminist Skepticism.”

616   Beth Dixon to act within the spheres of opportunity open to them. To capture this more realistic idea we should try to formulate a precise way of describing the kind of situated moral agency of individuals that continues to operate even in circumstances that constrain choices and limit opportunities.7 A practically useful theory of moral responsibility should allow us to apply this account to the case study of obesity. Such an account should do the following: (1) identify what features of individuals matter for assessing moral responsibility. This should include what kinds of conditions count as exemptions from responsibility and blame; (2) allow us to say something specific about environmental circumstances that are salient to the issue of obesity. Since the food environment plays a significant role in discussions about the causes of and solutions to obesity, our theory of moral responsibility should be sensitive to features of these contextual background conditions; (3) specify the relevant kind of individual agency that makes sense of our way of talking about persons who are capable of giving reasons for what they do, and who are capable of exhibiting the relevant kind of control over their actions; and (4) identify a way of extending responsibility ascriptions beyond individual agents to collectives who may be suitable targets for moral blame as institutional or corporate “players” that contribute significantly to producing obesity in particular populations. Here I employ a particular theory of moral responsibility formulated by Manuel Vargas in order to explain what it means to say that an individual is morally responsible for being obese (or not).8 Vargas holds what he calls a “revisionist reasons” account of moral responsibility.9 What is central to reasons accounts, in general, is that in order for a moral agent to be morally responsible for an action she performs, she must have the capacity to respond to reasons.10 First, she must be capable of having the

7 

An additional rationale for seeking clarity about obesity and moral responsibility is that some kinds of obesity prevention policy recommendations may depend on targeting those populations of people who are believed to freely and knowingly undertake risks with their health. See, e.g., the discussion of fairness in Daniel Wikler, “Who Should Be Blamed for Being Sick?” Health Education Quarterly 14, no. 1 (Spring 1987): 11–​25; and John H. Knowles, “The Responsibility of the Individual,” in Doing Better and Feeling Worse: Health in the United States, ed. John H. Knowles (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 57–​80; Robert Crawford, “You Are Dangerous to Your Health: The Ideology and Politics of Victim Blaming,” International Journal of Health Services 7, no. 4 (1977): 663–​680; Robert Crawford, “Healthism and the Medicalization of Everyday Life,” International Journal of Health Services 10, no. 3 (1980): 365–​388; Robert M. Veatch, “Voluntary Risks to Health,” Journal of the American Medical Association 243, no. 1 (January 4, 1980): 50–​55. 8  Manuel Vargas, Building Better Beings: A Theory of Moral Responsibility (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Manuel Vargas, “Situationism and Moral Responsibility: Free Will in Fragments,” in Decomposing the Will, ed. Andy Clark, Julian Kiverstein, and Tillman Vierkant (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 325–​349. 9  The theory is “revisionist” in the sense that it requires relinquishing some common sense intuitions about responsibility. See Vargas, Building Better Beings: A Theory of Moral Responsibility, 2. 10  With some variation, the following views may qualify as reasons accounts: Susan Wolf, Freedom Within Reason (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); R. Jay Wallace, Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994); John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza, Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility (New York: Cambridge University Press,

Obesity and Responsibility    617 relevant kind of knowledge about herself and the world to recognize good reasons for acting. And second, she must be capable of responding to reasons by exerting the relevant kind of freedom and control over her actions. In other words, the agent must have the capacity to translate these reasons into motivations for acting and successfully perform an action based on these reasons. I will not argue for Vargas’s theory, per se, but I believe that it is independently plausible and, furthermore, possesses suitable resources for addressing the complexity of the case study of obesity.11 This is so because it allows us to include in our assessment of individual responsibility those particular features of the environment that are relevant to an individual’s knowledge about, and control over, what she eats. This kind of situated agency is important for preserving our intuitions about how and why people act in practical and real world settings.12

Finding Fault In ordinary discourse about obesity and personal responsibility, we can detect a moral complaint about those who are obese and how they came to be that way. Consider the following student comments as reported by Guthman: I think the people who eat the fast food are to blame. It is their choice to pull up to the drive-​through, or to “supersize” their meal . . . . Although I agree that advertising and the food industry is partly at fault for advertising snack foods, I still feel that it is ultimately an individual choice to eat these foods. It basically comes down to will power. There are always temptations in life, but that doesn’t mean we have to go after those temptations.13

In this context, what personal responsibility means is not merely that an obese person is the proximate cause of her condition, but that she bears some moral responsibility for those actions that lead to being obese. A related moral criticism takes the form of impugning the obese person’s moral character as intemperate (excessive in appetitive desires), lacking in self-​discipline, or lazy. On this view, it might be thought that individuals who are obese are morally responsible for their condition because they have not 1998); Nomy Arpaly, Unprincipled Virtue: An Inquiry into Moral Agency (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Dana Nelkin, “Responsibility and Rational Abilities: Defending an Asymmetrical View,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 89 (2008): 497–​515. 11  See also Vargas’s motivations for adopting a reasons account in Building Better Beings, ch. 5, “The Primacy of Reasons,” 135–​157. 12  Following Ciurria, we might classify Vargas’s account as “psychological externalism” about moral responsibility. See Michelle Ciurria, “Moral Responsibility Ain’t Just in the Head,” Journal of the American Philosophical Association 1, no. 4 (Winter 2015): 601–​616. 13 Guthman, Weighing In, 50–​51.

618   Beth Dixon tried hard enough, or simply have not opted to live in a healthy way. One of Guthman’s students articulates the concern this way: I believe in this day and age, people know exactly what they are eating. . . . [M]‌y argument is that people do know, many times they simply choose not to live healthy lifestyles, and this is the major cause of obesity.14

In other words, choosing not to improve oneself or to live a healthy lifestyle is reason to morally fault the character of an individual person for poor choices over a long period of time. Perhaps the ideal target of these moral criticisms about unhealthy eating is a person I will call “Alex.” Alex is determined to adopt a healthier lifestyle. She believes that she can do so by limiting her consumption of salty, sugary, and fatty foods, exercising more by riding her bike, walking to work, and by attending a weekly Zumba class at the gym where she is a member. As part of her research about nutrition, Alex learns that a 12 oz. can of Coke or Pepsi contains 9 teaspoons of sugar. Because of this bit of knowledge, she comes to believe that soda is not part of a healthy diet. She forms the intention to avoid buying and consuming soda despite her desire to do so. Nonetheless, on a particular occasion in context C1, Alex is out to lunch with her friends at Applebee’s and she orders a Coke to go with her salad. Is Alex morally responsible for this action in context C1? Applying a particular theory of responsibility to this basic illustrative example about Alex can help us see how to answer this question more precisely.

A Theory of Moral Responsibility We might plausibly begin by saying that an individual person is morally responsible for her condition of obesity only if she has the knowledge to make informed choices as well as the relevant kind of freedom and control over her actions. But most of us will see straight away that knowledge, freedom, control, and choice are highly contestable philosophical concepts that require some definitional precision in order to be put to use in a convincing way. If we are to make distinctions in ascribing responsibility, then we must try to specify how the two central concepts of knowledge and control function as conditions for individual responsibility for action. Beyond being obese, there are many features about individuals and their circumstances that we will want to know more about when we apply the concepts of knowledge, control, and freedom of choice. Consider how Vargas formulates the following conditions for responsible agency (RA): (RA) An agent S is a responsible agent with respect to considerations of type M in circumstances C if S possesses a suite of basic agential capacities implicated in effective 14 Ibid., 51.

Obesity and Responsibility    619 self-​directed agency (including, for example, beliefs, desires, intentions, instrumental reasoning, and generally reliable beliefs about the world and the consequences of action) and is also possessed of the relevant capacity for (A) detection of suitable moral considerations M in C and (B) self-​governance with respect to M in C.15

(RA) captures a basic intuition about responsible agency. In order to be morally responsible for an action, agents must be capable of knowing and understanding morally relevant reasons for acting and also be capable of successfully acting on these moral reasons by exhibiting self-​governance or volitional control. The epistemic and control conditions in (A) and (B) are further explained by specifying that the capacity for detection and self-​governance may be realized in (i) the actual world, or in (ii) possible worlds where the agent is in a context “relevantly similar” to context C, and, in a suitable number of these worlds, the agent will successfully detect the relevant moral considerations and acquire the motivation to act accordingly, and does successfully act accordingly (214). I examine conditions (A) and (B) more carefully in subsequent sections. What is interestingly different about (RA) compared to other reasons accounts of responsibility is that moral agents are judged responsible (or not) based on satisfying the detection and self-​governance conditions in a particular set of circumstances, C. By adopting what he calls “circumstantialism” about capacities, Vargas thus rejects some standard assumptions that characterize other accounts of responsibility. One is the idea that agents are the kinds of beings that have free will because they have an intrinsic feature or property like a real self or rationality, which may be characterized as a “cross-​ situationally stable mechanism” specifiable in isolation from the agent’s external social or physical environment. This more standard view about responsibility allows us to say, for example, that both infants and schizophrenics are exempt from responsibility, presumably, because they lack this global and intrinsic ability to reason. Instead Vargas recommends that we conceive of responsible agency as a local and context-​sensitive capacity that is realized (or not) in actual or possible situations. In other words, our rational capacities and our capacities for self-​governance are not enjoyed independently of circumstances and situations, but are contingent on these circumstances.16 In order to illustrate how to use and apply (RA), let us return to hypothetical Alex in our basic example. Is Alex morally responsible for her action in context C1—​consuming the Coke? Alex appears to satisfy condition (A) having the capacity for detecting relevant moral considerations M in circumstances C. The morally relevant considerations M in this example likely include: Alex’s intention to adopt a healthier lifestyle, her belief that eating nutritional food contributes to that goal, the particular knowledge Alex has about the sugar content in soda, and her belief that she ought to avoid drinking soda if she wants to lose weight and to live a healthier lifestyle. Does Alex satisfy condition (B) having the capacity for volitional control or self-​governance with respect 15 Vargas, Building Better Beings: A Theory of Moral Responsibility, 213–​214. 16 

For a more complete explanation of the standard features of reasons accounts that Vargas rejects (atomism and monism), see 204–​209.

620   Beth Dixon to the moral considerations M in circumstances C1? Let us suppose that Alex is sufficiently aware of these moral considerations at the time she is ordering lunch such that she is motivated to pursue a course of action that these moral considerations favor. Even though Alex seems to satisfy the detection condition in (RA), she fails to perform the action that these moral considerations favor (not buying the soda). The reason why this does not exempt her from moral responsibility is that there may be “relevantly similar” contexts in which Alex exercises the capacity for volitional control. Let’s pursue the matter just a bit further. Later that week Alex finds herself in a different setting C2 at the grocery store to do her weekly shopping. At this time, it would seem that Alex is in a context “relevantly similar” to C1 the restaurant. At the grocery store, Alex continues to recognize and to endorse all of the relevant moral considerations cited previously in C1 about the value of health, the importance of eating nutritional food, and the high sugar content of soda, in particular, the belief that she ought not to drink soda if she wants to lose weight and to become healthier. She remembers her resolution to purchase healthier food and avoids the soda aisle altogether. At this time, she does not buy a six-​pack of Coke because she believes that in order to live a healthier lifestyle—​a value she endorses—​ she ought not to drink sugary beverages. So, even though Alex does not exhibit volitional control or self-​governance with respect to her action in C1 at the restaurant, we see that she is capable of doing so in a context that is relevantly similar to the restaurant setting; a context where she is also faced with the decision about whether to buy and to consume sugary drinks. And let us further suppose that there are a “suitable proportion” of contexts where Alex does detect the moral considerations cited, is motivated to act for those reasons, and acts accordingly. Hence, Alex is morally responsible for her action of purchasing the soda in the context C1 at Applebee’s in spite of what appears to be a temporary lack of control.17 So far, so good. But for many other obese individuals, the circumstances that affect choices about what to eat, and how much, are more complicated. In the next section, I consider another example about “Joyce” whose circumstances make her a candidate for exemption from moral responsibility for two reasons; she fails to satisfy the detection condition of (RA), and she fails to satisfy the volitional control condition of (RA).

The Detection Condition According to (RA), a moral agent’s responsibility may be compromised by circumstances in which the agent cannot detect the moral considerations that are relevant to the context in which she finds herself. Vargas states the detection condition of (RA) in the following way: 17 

In order to keep this basic illustrative example relatively uncomplicated, I do not include a discussion about whether Alex is blameworthy for her action.

Obesity and Responsibility    621 (A)  The capacity for detection of the relevant moral considerations obtains when: i.  S actually detects moral consideration of type M in C that are pertinent to actions available to S; or ii. In those possible worlds where S is in a context relevantly similar to C, and moral considerations of type M are present in those contexts, in a suitable proportion of those worlds S successfully detects those considerations.18

Intuitively, what (A) says is that moral agents have the capacity for detecting reasons for action by what relevant moral considerations they can detect in circumstances C of the actual world, or in relevantly similar circumstances of other possible worlds. In this section, I explore reasons for believing that some situational conditions may well interfere with an agent’s ability to detect moral considerations connected to buying and consuming unhealthy food. I call this “food situationism.” Food situationism is made plausible by reference to a body of social psychology research known as “situationist” research. Let us start with a representative example from the situationist literature, and then consider how food situationism might interfere with detecting the moral considerations relevant to buying and consuming unhealthy food. One rather well-​known example of the situationist research is called “Good Samaritan.”19 John Darley and Daniel Batson tested seminary students on their proclivity to help a stranger in need. Groups of students were instructed to either prepare a talk on occupations for seminary students or to prepare a talk on the Good Samaritan parable. All groups were subsequently told to walk to another location to present their talks to an audience. But, in some cases, students were informed that they were late for their presentations and needed to hurry to the next building. The findings from this experiment revealed that the late students were less likely to help a citizen (experimenter) in clear view slumped in a hallway who appeared to need medical assistance.20 18 Vargas, Building Better Beings: A Theory of Moral Responsibility, 216. 19 

John Darley and Daniel Batson, “‘From Jerusalem to Jericho’: A Study of Situational and Dispositional Variables in Helping Behavior,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 27 (1973): 100–​108. 20  Other similar experiments that comprise the situationist literature include: Stanford Prison Experiment (Craig Haney, Curtis Banks, and Philip Zimbardo, “Interpersonal Dynamics in a Simulated Prison,” International Journal of Criminology and Penology 1 [1973]: 69–​97); Honest School Children (Hugh Hartshorne and Mark May, Studies in the Nature of Character: Studies in Deceit, vol. 1 [New York: MacMillan, 1928]); Dime in the Phone Booth (Alice Isen and Paula Levin, “Effect of Feeling Good on Helping,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 21 [1972]: 384–​388); Helping Behavior in the Waiting Room (Bibb Latane and Judith Rodin, “A Lady in Distress: Inhibiting Effects of Friends and Strangers on Bystander Intervention,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 5 [1969]: 189–​202); Matching Lines (Solomon Asch, “Effects of Group Pressures upon the Modification and Distortion of Judgment,” in Groups, Leadership, and Men, ed. Harold Guetzkow [Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie Press, 1951], 177–​190); and Shocking Behavior (Stanley Milgram, “Behavioral Study of Obedience,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 67 [1963]: 371–​378).

622   Beth Dixon How exactly does this kind of research apply to reasons accounts of moral responsibility, in particular?21 One threat to responsibility that situationism seems to create is an epistemic one. Agents in situationist experiments seem to lack knowledge about the situational factors that affect their choices and behaviors. If agents in situationist experiments fail to see the situational factors that influence their behavior, then they do not act for reasons that they themselves can identify.22 More problematically, they may well act for bad reasons. In his review and analysis of the situationist literature Vargas comes to a similar conclusion. Vargas agrees that there is a genuine threat to reasons accounts of responsibility because the “situational inputs” influence the agent’s behavior and actions but without the agent’s awareness of these situational factors. In other words, the agent’s deliberation and decision is irrelevant or non-​operative in the production of action. And if it is the context and situation that predicts and explains the agent’s behavior instead, this suggests that “our agency is somewhat less than we presume.” 23 About the Good Samaritan, Vargas suggests that subjects may be described as suffering a “loss of capacity” to recognize moral reasons for helping. Specifically, subjects failed to see that someone needed help because of the situational forces operating at the time. Likewise, we might venture about food situationism that if agents cannot discern the relevant background conditions that influence their food choices, then this lack of knowledge interferes with acting on good reasons. The ordinary consumer is not unfamiliar with the fact that the food industry devotes a great deal of time, money, and research into determining how best to influence our purchases. What perhaps is less well understood is the extent to which they are successful in producing environments that do influence our “choices.”24 Background conditions exert a force on our consumption of unhealthy food by advertising the fact that processed food is cheap, available always and everywhere, as well as fast and convenient for busy people living busy lives. We are moved to buy bigger portions and to eat these larger amounts without understanding what situational factors influence this choice; 21 

For a discussion of how situationism affects attributions of responsibility for virtues and vices of moral character, see Michelle Ciurria, “Situationism, Moral Responsibility and Blame,” Philosophia 41 (2013): 179–​193. 22  See, e.g., Dana K. Nelkin, “Freedom, Responsibility and the Challenge of Situationism,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 29 (2005): 181–​206. 23  Vargas, “Situationism and Moral Responsibility: Free Will in Fragments,” 327. 24  Some social psychology research indicates that subjects will consume more if the container (popcorn, jelly beans, soda) is larger even though this is not a deliberate or conscious decision by the subject. See, e.g., Brian Wansik, “Environmental Factors That Increase the Food Intake and Consumption Volume of Unknowing Consumers,” Annual Review of Nutrition 24, no. 1 (2004): 455–​479; Brian Wansik, Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think (New York: Bantam Books, 2006). This research suggest that agents are acting “non-​autonomously” because they are motivated to consume more food but are doing so without being fully informed or without voluntarily choosing to consume more food. Barnhill et al. use this kind of example to explore whether policies designed to address obesity by limiting unhealthy eating count as justified paternalism. But the same kind of example is relevant to assessing whether agents are morally responsible. See Anne Barnhill et al., “The Value of Unhealthy Eating and the Ethics of Healthy Eating Policies,” Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 24, no. 3 (2014): 187–​217.

Obesity and Responsibility    623 from background music, price, and packaging, to disguised portion sizes and unspecified added amounts of sugar or calories. The “toxic environment” is more insidious still when it targets children by TV ads, cartoon characters, and by school districts buying into cafeteria fast-​food outlets when educational resources are scarce. Food situationism includes all of these situational background conditions that affect what the consumer buys and eats. What impact does food situationism have on attributions of moral responsibility? Suppose Joyce has only a short period of time before she starts her next shift at work. On her way, she stops at McDonald’s to order a “value-​sized” meal that includes a Big Mac, large fries, and a 20 oz. Coke. Joyce does want to eat better food and believes that she should also lose weight (she is morbidly obese), but she has trouble implementing these desires and goals. Is Joyce morally responsible for buying and consuming unhealthy food on this occasion? Condition (A) directs our attention to Joyce’s capacity to detect moral considerations relevant to her action in C1 purchasing a McDonald’s meal. These moral considerations surely include her knowledge that the “value-​sized” meal is not a healthy food choice. But it is not clear that this bit of general knowledge exhausts the content of what is morally relevant to her motivation to act. Recall the seminary students in the research experiment, “Good Samaritan,” who failed to help an ailing confederate of the experiment who needed medical attention. What these students presumably could claim to know, if asked at any time during the experiment, is the general moral prescription that one ought to help those in need of medical attention. But in this case the seminary students failed to notice a particular moral consideration, namely, the need of the person they hurriedly passed. Dana Nelkin describes this failure as a local one when she conjectures that the seminary students failed to “pick up on morally salient features of the environment, a failure whose consequence is a failure to respond to reasons.”25 Likewise, in C1, Joyce may fail to see the particular moral considerations that bear on her purchasing the fast-​food meal, even though she knows generally that it is unhealthy. For example, she does not know how many total calories she is consuming or how many calories overall she should be consuming per day. She does not know what counts as a “serving size” of fries, nor does she specifically know the nutritional content of what she consumes. In her experience at McDonald’s, there is nothing like a warning label that alerts her to these details (like the warning on a pack of cigarettes). The food is delivered to her quickly with a smiling Ronald beaming at her in the background. If we say that the seminary students are not responsible for failing to help a person in medical need because the situation unduly influenced their capacity to see and to detect the relevant moral considerations that included, “this person needs help,” then perhaps we should say about Joyce that she is not responsible for choosing to eat the fast-​food meal. After all, she fails to see the particular circumstances that constitute the relevant moral considerations influencing her actions, not by the intentional design of a social psychologist researcher but by the intentional design of the food industry. 25 

Nelkin, “Freedom, Responsibility and the Challenge of Situationism,” 204.

624   Beth Dixon But additionally, according to (A)(ii), Joyce’s capacity to detect the moral considerations relevant to her action in C1 (purchasing and eating the “value” meal at McDonald’s) should be determined by whether she can detect these moral considerations in a suitable proportion of worlds or contexts that are relevantly similar to context C1. In my hypothetical example, Joyce will also fail to detect particular facts about the nutritional content of what she eats in a large number of similar contexts where she is buying and consuming food. There are plausible reasons for this conjecture. One is that she is not devoted to learning about nutrition, per se. (Compare Alex who knows from her research exactly how many teaspoons of sugar are in a 12 oz. can of Coke.) Another reason why Joyce will probably not detect these moral considerations relevant to her favoring healthy food is that this information is hard to interpret and hard to understand in a wide variety of contexts; in the fast-​food line or at a convenience store, or even at a large grocery store where, for example, the word “natural” applies to anything and everything, including processed food. Food situationism correctly describes most of the contexts in which Joyce buys and consumes unhealthy food. If the particular information that Joyce needs to make better food choices is opaque to her, then it would be unreasonable to hold Joyce morally responsible for eating unhealthy food. It is important to include in this story about Joyce certain facts about why she is exempt from moral responsibility in context C1 and in a suitable proportion of worlds that are similar to C1. This will be so when her failure to detect the relevant moral considerations is owed to deceptive advertising and marketing, or by manipulation of the situation in a suitable proportion of worlds that are similar to C1; the circumstances surrounding the purchase of a McDonald’s “value” meal. If these are the reasons that Joyce fails to have the capacity to detect moral considerations in favor of purchasing healthy food, then this failure of capacity is not owed to some obvious defect of her detection capacities overall. (RA) allows us to see that moral agents are situated in contexts that may well contribute to diminishing their capacities to detect relevant moral considerations. I believe that food situationism is one kind of context that degrades the epistemic capacities of Joyce and many other consumers who buy and consume unhealthy food. If so, then enhancing the epistemic capacities of Joyce, and other consumers like ourselves, involves changing the contexts that contribute to our abilities to detect the particular considerations in favor of eating healthy food. This point has obvious implications for obesity prevention policies, since we might emphasize that the circumstances that create obstacles to detecting what counts as a healthy food choice need to change, rather than the individual consumer herself. Policy recommendations that create enhanced conditions for detecting the relevant moral considerations about food choices might include, for example, better labeling of foods or improved regulation of deceptive marketing and advertising by the food industry. Still, one might be tempted to say that Joyce’s (and others’) epistemic failure can be easily addressed. For example, Michael Moss recommends to the consumer to arm herself with knowledge as she confronts the grocery store “battlefield” riddled with landmines

Obesity and Responsibility    625 of salt, sugar, and fat in every aisle.26 Moss rallies the consumer (soldier) by claiming that once we are armed with such knowledge about unhealthy ingredients, we have the power to make choices. This recommendation assumes that if the detection condition were satisfied in our hypothetical example, then Joyce could freely choose to eat healthy food. However, Joyce may not be able to translate knowledge about healthy food into motivations that lead to successfully buying and consuming healthy food. And this will be true for a large population of people who are obese but fail to have the capacity for self-​governance through no fault of their own. I discuss these additional circumstances in the next section.

The Volitional Control Condition It is sometimes argued that what may count as a moral excuse for blaming some individual eaters for being obese is that their freedom to choose healthy food is diminished when certain environmental conditions constrain and limit food choices. These conditions connected to diminished freedom and choice include lack of access to healthy and nutritious food (no transportation or limited mobility), prohibitive cost of healthy food, little time to cook meals at home, absence of retail grocery stores, and so on, in combination with the ubiquitous presence of unhealthy fast food both in schools and in low-​income neighborhoods.27 To explore the issue of diminished freedom and control, we might ask: Does Joyce have the capacity for volitional control to be held morally responsible for eating unhealthy food? Vargas specifies the conditions for this capacity in the following way: (B) The capacity for volitional control, or self-​governance with respect to the relevant moral considerations M in circumstances C obtains when either: i.  S is, in light of awareness of M in C, motivated to accordingly pursue courses of action for which M counts in favor, and to avoid courses of action disfavored by M; or ii. When S is not so motivated, in a suitable proportion of those worlds where S is in a context relevantly similar to C a.  S detects moral considerations of type M, and b. in virtue of detecting M considerations, S acquires the motivation to act accordingly, and c.  S successfully acts accordingly.28

Intuitively, what (B) says is that moral agents have the capacity for volitional control if either these agents are motivated to act on relevant moral considerations in a context C 26 

Michael Moss, Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us (New York: Random House, 2013). See, e.g., David Zinczenko, “Don’t Blame the Eater,” New York Times, November 23, 2002, sec. Opinion. 28 Vargas, Building Better Beings: A Theory of Moral Responsibility, 222–​223. 27 

626   Beth Dixon of the actual world, or agents can successfully act on these moral considerations in possible contexts that are relevantly similar to C. In circumstances C1 where Joyce buys and eats the “value” meal at McDonald’s, she is generally aware that the food is unhealthy, but she buys it anyway. We have considered the way in which food situationism might operate here, effectively interfering with her detection of the particular moral considerations that favor resisting the temptation for the fast-​food meal. But condition (B)(ii) alerts us to other obstacles that might interfere with Joyce’s successfully making healthy choices about food. Even though Joyce is not motivated to act in accordance with moral considerations M in C1, there may be other similar worlds or contexts (C2, C3 . . .) where Joyce is faced with choices about what to eat, and she chooses to buy and eat healthy food. If so, then Joyce would demonstrate that she has the capacity for volitional control and, hence, that she is morally responsible for her action in C1. However, in this hypothetical example the contexts that are relevantly similar to C1 also prevent Joyce from successfully acting in accordance with her motivation to eat healthy food. This is so for a number of reasons. Consider these additional facts about Joyce and how she lives. Joyce is a single mother of two young children. She works long hours at two part-​time jobs that pay minimum wage and which barely cover her monthly expenses for herself and her family. Additionally, she cannot afford a car, and she has no easy transportation to retail grocery stores. She uses public transportation that requires her to travel by bus on several routes to a larger shopping center. This means that most of the time she must shop for food at a corner convenience store and gas station that stocks mostly processed food, or she is able to buy quick cheap meals at the many fast-​food restaurants that populate her neighborhood. In other words, even if Joyce were able to detect the relevant moral considerations that favor the action of purchasing healthy food, she would be unable to successfully act accordingly because in a suitable proportion of similar contexts she is constrained by mobility, access, cost, time, and the lack of other resources. This means that with respect to her purchase and consumption of the McDonald’s meal at C1, Joyce has not satisfied condition (B)(ii) the capacity for volitional control in the circumstances described. So she is exempt from moral responsibility for her food choice in that context.

An Objection A recent issue of Parade magazine was devoted to the popular TV reality show, The Biggest Loser.29 In the accompanying article, this year’s trainers (Jen, Bob, and Dolvett) recommend various ways to lose weight by resisting temptation. Some of these “temptation busters” include: identifying and avoiding triggers to overeating, stocking your

29 

Alison Ashton, “The Temptation Busters,” Parade Magazine, January 3, 2016.

Obesity and Responsibility    627 kitchen with only healthy foods, creating small exercise goals, and working out with a friend for extra motivation. There is nothing surprising here. In fact, these recommendations capture a very plausible intuition; we are in charge of our health. And if we just try hard enough, then we might be more successful in losing weight or adopting a healthier lifestyle. What is correct about this widespread belief is that the population of obese individuals consists of moral agents whose general capacities are intact for making free and informed choices. Nothing I have said about situated agency directly contradicts this very plausible idea. If so, a critic might insist about Joyce that she really does have the capacity for detecting moral considerations relevant to consuming healthy food, as well as the capacity for volitional control that results in her action of consuming healthy food. Since (RA) specifies that the detection and volitional control conditions are satisfied in possible worlds where the agent is in a “context relevantly similar to C,” the challenge then is to say more about what it means for Joyce to satisfy the detection and control conditions in a “suitable proportion of relevantly similar contexts” to the actual circumstance of C1 (buying the “value” meal at McDonald’s). So what counts as a “relevantly similar context” to C1? Let us imagine another context C2 that might be a suitable candidate for being a relevantly similar context to C1. Suppose that in context C2 Joyce engages in research about nutrition to inform herself about the moral considerations relevant to purchasing healthy food. Maybe she reads about the “toxic environment” or even reads the definitive book on fast food, Fast Food Nation.30 In this set of circumstances C2, she understands in detail how environmental conditions or cues influence her eating behavior, and she also understands the poor nutritional quality of fast food. As a result, she chooses not to buy the value meal. If this is a relevantly similar context to C1 (and there are a sufficient number of these contexts), then Joyce does have the capacity for detection of moral considerations relevant to her choice of food. Additionally, suppose that in context C2 there is a farmer’s market nearby and in that place fruits and vegetables are cheap and plentiful. In this context, Joyce would buy and make meals from this produce for healthy meals at home instead of buying dinner at McDonald’s. If this is a relevantly similar context to C1 (and there are a sufficient number of these contexts), then Joyce does demonstrate the capacity for volitional control, and in combination with satisfying condition (A)(ii) about the capacity for detection, it will be reasonable to suppose that she is morally responsible for her food choice at C1. Are these circumstances described in C2 “relevantly similar” to the context C1? To answer this question suppose we judge relevant similarity of context by imagining the number and kinds of facts about the actual world that must change in order to situate Joyce in the context C2 as described.31 Here we should guard against oversimplifying the more general structural conditions that locate Joyce in C1 the actual world. 30  Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-​American Meal (New York: HarperPerennial, 2005). 31  This is consistent with how Vargas explains judgments about similarity of contexts. See Vargas, Building Better Beings: A Theory of Moral Responsibility, 218–​219.

628   Beth Dixon Does Joyce have time to inform herself about the details of the nutritional quality of food she buys? Well, maybe if she did not work two part-​time jobs. But this kind of employment is necessary for her because she is paid minimum wage. These jobs do not include health care insurance and her rent for housing comprises much of her monthly income. If Joyce did have a farmer’s market in her neighborhood, perhaps she might still not have the money or time to shop there and to prepare the food at home. Can she increase her earning potential so that she could afford to buy fresh produce? Only if she managed to attend college to retrain for other kinds of employment and only if there are sufficient jobs available in her area. But who would take care of her children and pay the rent while she was in school? And so on. These details are intended to remind the reader about the social, economic, and political distance between circumstances in C1 the actual world, and C2 the world in which Joyce is able to successfully act on moral considerations that favor healthy eating. The dissimilarity between these contexts is owed to poverty and inequality, and the relative distance in the “social and cultural circumstances of our agency” between C1 and C2 is vast.32 What we should conclude is that Joyce’s situated agency is a function of fundamental structural conditions that include social and economic policies which create and sustain unequal opportunities in employment, education, health care, housing, and so on. These conditions limit choices and opportunities to function for populations or sub groups. As it turns out, (RA) and specifically condition (A)(ii) about the capacity for detection of moral considerations and condition (B)(ii) about the capacity for volitional control, are able to capture how an individual’s capacities for detection and volitional control are affected by these structural conditions. (RA) implies that individuals who occupy this social and political position are not morally responsible for their failure to eat healthy food as well as their condition of obesity if this is, in fact, a consequence of their food choices. They are like Joyce in this respect. But (RA) also allows us to say something intuitively plausible about the moral agency of Joyce and others that are similarly affected by structural inequalities. Individuals within this demographic may not be morally responsible for unhealthy eating. But their moral agency, in general, is not globally compromised by their social and political location since there are many kinds of actions they can perform in a variety of other contexts that satisfy the detection condition (A) and the volitional control condition (B) of (RA). What is wrong or, at least, misleading about the “temptation busters” recommendations is that by exclusively profiling the agent’s individual responsibility for resisting temptations we lose sight of the way in which agents are situated in circumstances that diminish the agent’s particular capacities for detection and control over healthy food choices. To reply to the critic, we should draw attention to these more fundamental structural conditions that degrade Joyce’s (and others’) capacity to detect moral considerations that favor purchasing healthy food, as well as her capacity for volitional control that results in successfully buying and consuming healthy foods. For some obese people, like Joyce, the temptation

32 

Guthman makes a similar point in Weighing In, 196.

Obesity and Responsibility    629 buster’s recommendations will be ineffectual; but not because they have not tried hard enough to resist temptation.

Extending the Scope of Responsibility One advantage of employing the analysis of responsibility recommended by (RA) is to bring into clearer focus those background conditions that compromise moral agency. By seeing what contributes to diminished moral agency, we can more easily extend the scope of responsibility beyond individuals to institutions, policies, and corporate players. In particular, it is important to recognize that societies, states, and cultures all structure our actual capacities. Being raised in an antiracist context plays a role in enhancing sensitivity to moral considerations tied to antiracist concerns. Similarly, being raised in a sexist, fascist, or classist culture will ordinarily shape a person’s incapacities to respond to egalitarian concerns. Such considerations may suggest that we need to ask whether societies or states have some kind of moral, practical, or political obligation to endeavor to shape the circumstances of actors in ways that insulate them against situational effects that degrade their (moral or other) reasoning. We might go on to ask whether societies or states have commensurate obligations to foster contexts that enhance our rational and moral agency. If they do, it suggests that free will is less a matter of science than it is of politics or morality.33

Here Vargas asks a general rhetorical question about whether states and societies may be morally implicated in structuring our capacities to detect moral considerations and for self-​governance. But the question has critical bite in the context of this real world issue about obesity. Institutions and states design and implement public health policies, allow for corporate manipulation of consumers by the food industry, tolerate fundamental inequities that sustain conditions of poverty and inequality (health care, education, housing, toxic food, and polluted environments, etc.). To the extent that these policies, corporate actors, and representatives of government create obstacles to moral agency, they are morally blameworthy.34 Of course, this claim reaches beyond obesity discourse and obesity prevention policies. The point of demanding that such conditions be honored is to optimize the circumstances necessary for all moral agents to exercise their agency; not just those who are overweight. 33 

Vargas, “Situationism and Moral Responsibility: Free Will in Fragments,” 343. In this case, the function of moral blame will be different than it is when directed to individual moral agents, since as Vargas remarks, institutions and collectives do not have “our ordinary capacities to recognize and respond to moral considerations” (Vargas, Building Better Beings: A Theory of Moral Responsibility, 243). 34 

630   Beth Dixon Vargas uses the expression “moral architecture” to refer to the possibility of intentionally shaping and cultivating those conditions that structure our actual capacities that are conducive to responsible agency.35 How might moral architecture be implemented in our particular study of obesity and responsibility? One insight from our discussion of food situationism is that moral agents need help in order to enhance their capacities to see the situations that influence their consumption of unhealthy food. Another epistemic obstacle specific to the discourse about obesity and responsibility is the general population’s inability to see and to understand how structural conditions circumscribe agency, and in some cases exempt individuals from moral responsibility. One mechanism for addressing both kinds of obstacles is what I have elsewhere called a “food justice narrative.”36 These are stories that include the particular circumstances of a person’s life that illustrate how an individual is situated in, and influenced by, structural conditions that constrain choices and limit opportunities to act. This kind of story reminds us that particular populations of people retain their agency even as their choices are limited by the combined effect of these structural conditions.37 In this context, the real explanatory value of such stories will be to reveal how our consumption of food is shaped by conditions that are largely unseen and undetected.

Conclusion Let us return to the two main reasons for seeking greater clarity about how the concept of moral responsibility is used in obesity discourse. One rationale for doing so is that in these settings the concept of responsibility rarely comes equipped with any criteria of application. Now that we have introduced a revisionist reasons account of responsibility, we see how the knowledge and control conditions for being responsible can be used to decide how moral responsibility applies to obese populations. In previous sections, I have argued that Joyce is exempt from moral responsibility for 35 

Ibid., 246–​247. Beth Dixon, “Learning to See Food Justice,” Agriculture and Human Values 31, no. 2 (2014): 175–​184. 37  Vargas is sympathetic to using narratives in this way. He says, 36 

How we conceive of our agency, and the powers we take agents to ordinarily have, will play some role in whether or not we are responsible agents in a given context, because of the power of such narratives to structure our agency. By promulgating narratives of control in those circumstances that test our control, we might (at least sometimes) make it the case that agents come to have enough self-​control to be responsible agents. Similarly, by promulgating narratives of incapacity, of the inevitability of caving in to nigh-​irresistible desires and temptations, we run the risk of self-​fulfilling narratives here too (246). The possible worries about narratives used in this way to shape agency is that some narratives may have built into them gender, racial, or class stereotypes that degrade individuals and their group identities. Hilde Lindemann Nelson calls these “master narratives.” See Hilde Lindemann Nelson, Damaged Identities, Narrative Repair (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001).

Obesity and Responsibility    631 two kinds of reasons. First, it is plausible to suppose that food situationism diminishes Joyce’s capacity to detect the considerations that favor buying and eating healthy food in a wide range of relevantly similar contexts. Second, Joyce’s social and political location contributes to undermining her capacity for volitional control in a wide range of contexts where she may recognize reasons for choosing to eat healthy food but cannot act accordingly. While not every individual who is obese can be exempted from moral responsibility for their food choices, hypothetical Joyce surely represents a large population of actual people who find themselves in a similar set of circumstances. What is significant about this conclusion is that contrary to what some believe, the property of being obese does not single out a class of individuals who are also morally responsible for their condition of obesity. Instead the way we determine attributions of responsibility is owed to (RA) where the relevant features are having the capacity to detect moral considerations relevant to action, and having the capacity for volitional control over the actions that these moral considerations favor. Additionally, attributions of responsibility are made about an agent’s capacities as these are exercised in actual and possible circumstances that are relevantly similar. So if moral exemptions apply in the way I have argued, then a large number of individuals who are obese do not deserve to be the targets of moral blame nor do they deserve the moral indignation that is sometimes directed toward them. This account of situated agency also meets the second demand for the project undertaken here which is to resist the false dichotomy of saying either that individuals are morally responsible for being obese or that individuals are exempt from responsibility. Specifying and describing the circumstances of situated agents in judging attributions of responsibility allows us to include in our moral appraisal structural background conditions that limit knowledge and constrain freedoms and opportunities. But in doing so there is no need to choose between either holding a person morally responsible or blaming the food environment or structural conditions instead. The situated agency of individuals allows us to make this contextual analysis without forcing a choice between these two extreme positions about responsibility. In other words, (RA) offers us a more nuanced way of understanding how to assign moral responsibility to an agent who is situated in contexts that variously affect that agent’s ability to detect moral considerations and to act successfully in accordance with these moral considerations. I conclude with the following disclaimer. Hypothetical “Joyce” only incompletely represents the lives of actual obese people who decide what to eat and attempt to act on their food choices. By this example, I do not pretend to capture all of the real world circumstances relevant to the moral appraisal of this population. Even so the analysis here suggests that we have sufficient theoretical resources to resist the presumption that all obese individuals are appropriate targets for moral disapprobation.38

38 

My thanks to Anne Barnhill, Mark Bryant Budolfson, and Tyler Doggett for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

632   Beth Dixon

Bibliography Arpaly, Nomy. Unprincipled Virtue: An Inquiry into Moral Agency. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Asch, Solomon. “Effects of Group Pressures upon the Modification and Distortion of Judgment.” In Groups, Leadership, and Men, edited by Harold Guetzkow, 177–​190. Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie Press, 1951. Ashton, Alison. “The Temptation Busters.” Parade Magazine, January 3, 2016. Barnhill, Anne, Katherine F. King, Nancy Kass, and Ruth Faden. “The Value of Unhealthy Eating and the Ethics of Healthy Eating Policies.” Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 24, no. 3 (2014): 187–​217. Benfarado, Adam, Jon Hanson, and David Yosifon. “Broken Scales:  Obesity and Justice in America.” Emory Law Journal 53 (October 1, 2004): 1645–​1806. Brownell, Kelly D., Rogan Kersh, David S. Ludwig, Robert C. Post, Rebecca M. Puhl, Marlene B. Schwartz, and Walter C. Willett. “Personal Responsibility and Obesity: A Constructive Approach to a Controversial Issue.” Health Affairs 29, no. 3 (March 2010): 378–​386. Ciurria, Michelle. “Moral Responsibility Ain’t Just in the Head.” Journal of the American Philosophical Association 1, no. 4 (Winter 2015): 601–​616. —​—​—​. “Situationism, Moral Responsibility and Blame.” Philosophia 41 (2013): 179–​193. Clark, Andy, Julian Kiverstein, and Tillman Vierkant, eds. Decomposing the Will. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Crawford, Robert. “Healthism and the Medicalization of Everyday Life.” International Journal of Health Services 10, no. 3 (1980): 365–​388. —​—​—​. “You Are Dangerous to Your Health: The Ideology and Politics of Victim Blaming.” International Journal of Health Services 7, no. 4 (1977): 663–​680. Darley, John, and Daniel Batson. “‘From Jerusalem to Jericho’:  A Study of Situational and Dispositional Variables in Helping Behavior.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 27 (1973): 100–​108. Dixon, Beth. “Learning to See Food Justice.” Agriculture and Human Values 31, no. 2 (2014): 175–​184. Fischer, John Martin, and Mark Ravizza. Responsibility and Control:  A Theory of Moral Responsibility. Cambridge Studies in Philosophy and Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Guthman, Julie. Weighing In:  Obesity, Food Justice, and the Limits of Capitalism. California Studies in Food and Culture. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California, 2011. Haney, Craig, Curtis Banks, and Philip Zimbardo. “Interpersonal Dynamics in a Simulated Prison.” International Journal of Criminology and Penology 1 (1973): 69–​97. Hartshorne, Hugh, and Mark May. Studies in the Nature of Character: Studies in Deceit. Vol. 1. New York: MacMillan, 1928. Isen, Alice, and Paula Levin. “Effect of Feeling Good on Helping.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 21 (1972): 384–​388. Kirkland, Anna. “The Environmental Account of Obesity: A Case for Feminist Skepticism.” Signs 36, no. 2 (2011): 463–​485. Knowles, John H. “The Responsibility of the Individual.” In Doing Better and Feeling Worse: Health in the United States, edited by John H. Knowles, 57–​80. New York: W. W. Norton, 1977. Latane, Bibb, and Judith Rodin. “A Lady in Distress: Inhibiting Effects of Friends and Strangers on Bystander Intervention.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 5 (1969): 189–​202.

Obesity and Responsibility    633 Lyons, Pat. “Prescription for Harm:  Diet Industry Influence, Public Health Policy, and the ‘Obesity Epidemic.’” In The Fat Studies Reader, edited by Esther Rothblum and Sondra Solovay, 75–​87. New York: New York University Press, 2009. Mead, Lawrence M. Beyond Entitlement: The Social Obligations of Citizenship. New York: Free Press, 2006. Milgram, Stanley. “Behavioral Study of Obedience.” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 67 (1963): 371–​378. Moss, Michael. Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us. New York: Random House, 2013. Murray, Charles. Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950‒1980. New York: Basic Books, 1984. Nelkin, Dana K. “Freedom, Responsibility and the Challenge of Situationism.” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 29 (2005): 181–​206. Nelson, Hilde Lindemann. Damaged Identities, Narrative Repair. Ithaca, NY:  Cornell University Press, 2001. Nestle, Marian. Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California, 2002. Nussbaum, Martha. “Non-​Relative Virtues: An Aristotelian Approach.” In The Quality of Life, edited by Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen, 242–​269. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. Schlosser, Eric. Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-​American Meal. New York: HarperP erennial, 2005. Vargas, Manuel. Building Better Beings: A Theory of Moral Responsibility. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. —​—​—​. “Situationism and Moral Responsibility:  Free Will in Fragments.” In Decomposing the Will, edited by Andy Clark, Julian Kiverstein, and Tillman Vierkant, 325–​349. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Veatch, Robert M. “Voluntary Risks to Health.” Journal of the American Medical Association 243, no. 1 (January 4, 1980): 50–​55. Wallace, R. Jay. Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994. Wansik, Brian. Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think. New York: Bantam Books, 2006. Wikler, Daniel. “Who Should Be Blamed for Being Sick?” Health Education Quarterly 14, no. 1 (Spring 1987): 11–​25. Wolf, Susan. Freedom Within Reason. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Young, Iris Marion. Responsibility for Justice. Oxford Political Philosophy. Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2011. Zinczenko, David. “Don’t Blame the Eater.” New York Times. November 23, 2002, sec. Opinion.

Pa rt  V I I

F O OD A N D S O C IA L I DE N T I T I E S , C U LT U R A L P R AC T IC E S , A N D  VA LU E S

chapter 28

I E at, Therefore  I  A m Disgust and the Intersection of Food and Identity Daniel Kelly and Nicolae Morar

Introduction A poetic old saw has it that “you are what you eat.” The idea has found resonance in radically different schools of thought down through the ages, but whether one chooses to focus on its early Christian expression as a proverb (Gilman 2008) or on the intriguing recent attempts to understand the metabolic relations between the foods that people consume and the ways in which they behave (McKeith 2005), the common thread is that food habits are part and parcel of what makes someone the person that he or she is. How and what one eats informs the construction and performance of identities and is thus expressive, in some small way, of a person’s conception of and orientation toward the Good. Diet has been an object of philosophizing for millennia, with philosophers of many schools sharing the assumption that proper culinary habits are a vital component of living well, and that flouting them could have pernicious effects that go beyond merely spoiling physical health (see essays by Katja Vogt, Henrik Lagerlund, and Aaron Garrett and John Grey, in this volume). Pythagoreans were famously against eating beans, but as Aristotle (supposedly) points out, this guideline is just one part of a larger vision of life that prescribed physical exercise and meditation, together with a disciplined dietary program detailing what, when, and how much to eat (Thompson 2015, 25–​26). More generally, the Greeks believed in a strong association between eating and well-​being, and saw a rigorously balanced daily food routine as a form of care of the self and expression of excellence. As Thompson also notes, the core Greek virtue of temperance grows out of this orientation toward food, coalescing into “the framework for philosophical dietetics in the medieval world” (2015, 26) and providing the central reason for resisting the simple gratification of personal preferences and the excesses of gluttony.

638    Daniel Kelly and Nicolae Morar Later philosophers and other researchers would highlight different aspects of the relation between eating and identity. In the mid-​nineteenth century in his review of Moleschott’s Theory of Nutrition, Ludwig Feuerbach famously stated “Der Mensh ist was er isst” (“Man is what he eats”). Feuerbach’s view on these matters evolved as he developed it (see Harvey 2007), but it is clear that his interest was less on the contributions of food to individual well-​being and more on the relationship between diet, class, and the ordering of society. Indeed, Feuerbach held that food, and at times even details of the chemical composition of diet, had a direct relation to the ways in which social identities were made and enacted. During his time, potatoes constituted the main diet of the working class; as Harvey notes, given that “potatoes lack phosphorescent fat and protein necessary for the brain, the working class could only hope for revolution by a change in diet.” Others like Elias ([1939] 2000) explored the connection between eating and identity by focusing on the cultural evolution and social function of dining etiquette, and the so-​called civilizing aspect of disgust in policing boundaries between different groups, especially between classes (also Nichols 2000). In light of such work, it becomes evident that statements like Jean Anthelme Brillat-​Savarin’s “tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are” are about much more than nutrition and sustenance; food and dining put immediate roots into signaling behavior, group membership, social boundaries, and the identities of people who must navigate them. Chemistry offers a very different but not incompatible perspective. From a metabolic point of view, there is more than a grain of literal truth to “you are what you eat”: the energy and basic biochemical materials by which your body is created, replenished, and maintained come in large part from what you consume. Whether some food preferences and choices are biologically constrained (e.g., the inability to assimilate certain foods in cases like lactose intolerance) or strongly genetically influenced (e.g., the innate human preference for sweets), food chemistry provides another way of appreciating the ways in which food contributes to and changes the biochemical composition of our bodies. This, in turn, opens new avenues for exploring the ways we are inevitably embodied (Shapiro 2010), and how our personal and social identities are informed by our biological and physical identities. The space of inquiry surrounding these issues has traditionally been populated by dieticians and nutritionists, but their treatment of them has recently come under criticism for contributing to a misleading, overly reductionist way of thinking about food (Pollan 2008, esp. section 3 “Getting over Nutritionism”). So for a long time there has been a kind of allure about the idea that food and identity are intimately bound together. Indeed, we are told that a form of magical thinking common to many primitive cultures included the belief that you could take on the properties of the organisms you ate, including even the fighting prowess of vanquished warriors from a rival tribe.1 Perhaps vestiges of such magical thinking still lurk in the modern mind, waiting to be exploited by clever advertisements. A commercial by Carl’s Jr. and

1 

For psychological research on magical thinking and its connection to disgust, see Nemeroff and Rozin 2000.

I Eat, Therefore I Am    639 Hardee’s promoting their Western X-​Tra Bacon Thickburger depicts a female Mystique (of X-​Men fame) shapeshifting into a bearded man while taking her first bite; such, we are invited to infer, is the transformative power of the Thickburger’s manly aura (see Adams 2015). In the contemporary environment, the poetic saw has also acquired less florid, more abstract, but nevertheless real and important connotations as well. It can be used to express something about loyalties to a brand (whether you are a Coke or a Pepsi drinker), about socioeconomic status (your insistence that the fruit you eat be organic), or about your values in general (forgoing any factory-​farmed meat or fish on moral grounds). It is this latter class of connections that we will be mainly concerned with in this essay. More specifically, we will unpack the set of relations that hold between food and cuisine, eating and dining, and norms, social roles, and identities. Our aim is to express these ideas crisply and in a way that is and can continue to be informed by current work in empirical moral psychology, broadly construed. In the second section, we unpack how we will construe identities, focusing on a core component of them, namely the set of social roles that an individual occupies. Next, in the third section, we unpack the notion of a social role in terms of social norms, the often unwritten rules that regulate behavior and social interactions, and describe recent empirical work that illuminates the power and psychological underpinning of norm-​based cognition. This discussion, in turn, will allow us in the fourth section to remark on the peculiar, expanded role that the emotion of disgust has come to play in human moral psychology, regulating dining practices, and thus helping shape and maintain personal and social identities; you are what you eat, but the flip side of this may be just as telling: you are what you won’t eat, too. Finally, in the fifth section, we briefly discuss the implications this perspective might have for thinking about food norms, the potential avenues and prospects for changing them, and the class of identity-​based ethical considerations that different strategies might raise. An important upshot is that in light of the connections between food, norms, and identities, attempts to alter a person’s eating habits can run up against deep and distinctive forms of psychological resistance because they are in part attempts to change who he or she is.

Identities and Social Roles For our purposes, to say that you are what you eat is to say, roughly, that the food you consume (or refuse) and the reason and practices surrounding your consumption (or refusal) of it bear some set of interesting and important connections to your identity. A person’s identity is an encapsulation of who that person is.2 Broadly construed, 2  Put another way, descriptions of a person’s identity can serve as an answer to what Marya Schechtman (1996) calls the characterization question, which she clearly and correctly distinguishes from answers to Locke’s problem of personal identity (or persistence) through time, which she calls the reidentification question. However, see White (1989) for arguments that identity in the first and second

640    Daniel Kelly and Nicolae Morar identities include a person’s personality and sense of themselves, as well as other people’s sense and recognition of who they are. These senses are typically expressed by and reflected in actions, stories, expectations, and interactions. Hilde Lindemann sketches a concise picture: Identities function as counters in our social transactions, in that they convey understandings of what those who bear them are expected to do. If an answer to “Who are you?” is “the bartender,” for example, I expect you to know how to mix a martini; if the answer is “a practicing Muslim,” I don’t. Moreover, identities also convey understandings of how those who bear them may be treated. If you’re my three-​year-​old son, I can remind you to use the toilet, but if you’re my boss, I’d better not. Personal identities thus make intelligible not only how other people are supposed to act, but how we are supposed to act with respect to them. (Lindemann 2014, 5–​6, italics in original)

Later she stresses that while identities often serve to compress information and help people make sense of themselves and others, they are not merely descriptive: “identities are normatively prescriptive—​they tell you what you are supposed to do and how others may, must, or mustn’t treat you” (87, italics added). As Lindemann’s sketch illustrates, crucial to an individual’s identity are the variety of parts she plays and positions she occupies, and the expectations and guidelines that attach to and make up those parts and positions. We can unpack these core elements of identities in terms of the notion of a social role and that of a social norm. The notion of a social role may be a familiar one, but it is worthwhile to flesh out the general idea a bit. Typical examples of social roles that individuals might occupy include overt ones such as their profession (bartender, lawyer, community organizer), religion (practicing Muslim, lapsed Catholic), marital or family status (husband, divorcée, great aunt, son), and membership in various organizations (citizen of Costa Rica, treasurer of the local chapter of PETA, goalie on the soccer team). Other social roles are more covert, less explicitly or obviously social roles. Examples of these might include membership in a particular race, ethnicity, gender, or category of mental illness.3 Any given individual typically occupies many different social roles at once (a Tico mother who is a bartender and goalie), and the set of social roles an individual senses have more in common than typically thought, especially if one accepts the kind of social role and social norm centric account of identities we are working with. 3  Views that categories such as these are socially constructed can be expressed in terms of social roles; for the discussion and development of such a view about race, see Mallon and Kelly 2012. As we note presently in the main text, different social roles vary along a number of dimensions, and one important way that social roles like race and gender, for example, differ from more obviously socially constructed ones is that occupancy in the former is often not optional or chosen by the individual occupying it. This feature, in turn, can lend intuitive support to the type of view the social constructivist rejects, namely that membership in the category is based on some intrinsic, non-​social (perhaps biological) feature of individuals. As many theorists point out, occupation of these non-​voluntary social roles is too often accompanied by systematic oppression and prejudice (for discussion, see Young 2004).

I Eat, Therefore I Am    641 occupies typically changes over the course of a lifetime (one can become a father, leave the legal profession to become a chef, or resign from the NRA). Note that given the inclusive sense in which we are using the notion here, other features of social roles can vary along a large number of dimensions as well. They can range from the very general (bartender, Muslim, woman) to the very specific (weekend day shift bartender at the Tiny Tap, interim treasurer of the local chapter of PETA), from the voluntary and overt (bassist in a garage band) to the involuntary and covert (Latino man) and from those that come with a very specific set of expectations and guidelines (starting goalie on the soccer team) to those that have very few (lapsed Catholic). Moreover, the social roles an individual occupies can be more or less central to her sense of herself and to how others understand and respond to her. However they might vary on these kinds of dimensions, social roles share some general features. Occupying a social role means being a member of a socially recognized category, being treated and thought of as an instance of that category by members of the wider cultural community (including, often but not always, the occupier of the social role herself), and thus being subject to many of the same sorts of norms and social pressures as other individuals who occupy that social role. While there are obviously many nuances involved in thinking about identities (for overviews and a broad range of perspectives, see Appiah 2007; Korsgaard 2009; Witt 2012; Lindemann 2014; cf. Shoemaker 2016), we will use this characterization of social roles to capture the core part of an individual’s social identity, of who she is, that is made up of the set of social roles she occupies (and, assuming personal history contributes to identity, she has occupied in the past). Social roles can be further analyzed in terms of different kinds of psychological entities, about which a wealth of empirical research can be brought to bear to help illuminate details about different aspects of identities.4 Of particular importance, especially given that identities are action guiding and tailored to specific roles and groups, we focus on the key category of social norms.

4  Ron Mallon’s work (e.g., 2003, 2014, 2016) can be used to characterize social roles more precisely and explicitly in terms of many theoretical entities of contemporary cognitive science:

(1) There is a conception of the role that includes (a) a term, label, or mental representation that picks out a category of individuals R (b) a cluster of informational states (beliefs, stereotypes, exemplars, scripts) about that category R and the individuals who occupy it (c) a cluster of social norms centered on that category R (2) Many or all of the informational states and social norms that make up the conception are widely shared by members of a community, as is the knowledge that they are widely shared, and so forth; the conception of R is common knowledge. (3) Since the descriptive elements help in identifying and determining expectations about instances of the category, and the normative elements prescribe and proscribe behaviors in situations likely to arise in interactions with occupiers of the social role, conceptions are action guiding. Put another way, conceptions not only help recognize members of R as such but also specify appropriate behavior by and toward members of R.

642    Daniel Kelly and Nicolae Morar

Social Norms A venerable tradition in philosophy sees significance in the fact that, from a subjective viewpoint, some rules seem to impress themselves upon us with a distinctive kind of authority or normative force: one feels their pull and is drawn to act in accordance with such rules, and violations seem charged, egregious. Although the first person experience of it can be mystifying, there is reason to think this phenomenology is just one aspect of the operation of a psychological system crucial to morality, ethical thought, and sense of self. Recent research on human capacities for moral judgment and social behavior sheds light on the psychological machinery underpinning social norms (see Boyd and Richerson 1985, 2005; Chudek and Henrich 2011; Henrich 2015). These are the often unwritten rules of social life, rules that may or may not also be codified in formal institutions, but that either way deeply and directly influence our moral intuitions, judgments, and actions. This “suite of genetically evolved cognitive mechanisms for rapidly perceiving local norms and internalizing them” (Chudek et  al. 2013, 443) is invoked to help explain the evolution of distinctively human forms of prosociality and large-​scale cooperation. These mechanisms also help explain behavioral, cognitive, and cultural differences between groups, as well as diversity in the different kinds of normative standards that apply to occupants of different social roles within groups. This account of human norm psychology connects the individual capacity for learning and internalizing social information to regularities in the social environment concerning interactions between different types of people. A psychological mechanism for norm acquisition is posited to be present in the minds of individuals, but it monitors and extracts information from other people, about the roles they play, about appropriate ways to interact with each other in different settings and situations, and particularly about the ways they cooperate with each other—​and punish those who fail to cooperate. The account holds that humans share a universal set of cognitive mechanisms that not only support acquisition of local social norms, but underpin the performance of norms, producing the motivation to comply with those norms that they have internalized as applying to themselves, and to punish others who violate norms that apply to them and the roles they occupy. The appeals to both innate structure and social learning allow the account to accommodate the fact that norms are a ubiquitous and crucial part of human social life in all cultures. However, the content of social norms varies greatly, both from one culture to the next and between different members of a single culture, especially with respect to the social roles different members occupy. The account is also well equipped (was motivated) to capture and explain the fact that social norms change and evolve over time. Sripada and Stich (2007) emphasize other psychologically interesting features of the norm system, especially about the way it processes information; it is fast, intuitive, automatic, and thus difficult to intentionally stop, and its operation is implicit and not easily

I Eat, Therefore I Am    643 accessible to introspection.5 They argue that there is a distinctive motivational signature associated with social norms, marshaling evidence that in internalizing a norm, a person thereby acquires intrinsic motivation to both behave in ways that conform with the norm, as well as intrinsic motivation to punish, or at least direct punitive attitudes toward, those who violate it. Calling these paired motivations intrinsic means that they are not instrumental: one does not comply with a social norm merely as an intermediate step toward satisfying some more basic urge nor does one punish merely as a means to attain some further, more primary end. Rather, it is simply a feature of a person’s norm psychology that when it recognizes she is in a situation to which one of its proprietary rules applies, the system produces motivation to comply, and when she detects another person violating one of those rules, the system produces motivation to punish. The character of this motivation can vary from one norm to the next, however, and not just in intensity and objective. More interestingly and importantly, different norms can draw on different emotions (anger, jealousy, disgust, admiration), with details of the behaviors and attitudes associated with the norm being colored by the character of the emotion to which it is linked (more on this later, but see Shweder et al. 1997; Rozin et al. 1999; see also Haidt and Joseph 2007; Graham et al. 2009). In virtue of this kind of emotionally valenced intrinsic motivation, social norms can influence intuitions, choices, behaviors, and social interactions independently of any formalized institution, codified set of laws, or explicit, material system of incentives and disincentives. And in virtue of much of this psychological processing happening without effort or attention, and below the level of conscious awareness, the influence of social norms can be immediate and thus potentially mysterious from a first person perspective. As mentioned, social norms can also be enshrined in law and enforced with institutionalized mechanisms of punishment and reward—​a rule X can be widely distributed in psychological norm systems of the individual members of a culture, and rule X can also be explicitly articulated and officially recognized by that culture’s legal system—​but they need not be to shape the social life or have a deep psychological grip on the members of the culture. Social norms are often the proverbial “unwritten rules” that organize and regulate many spheres of action, define social roles, and shape people’s identities, and can do so, and can remain motivationally powerful, even when they remain covert.6 5 

In cognitive scientific terms, many of these features are characteristic of modular or System 1 processing. Dual process theories of mental architecture distinguish these from central or System 2 psychological mechanisms and processes, whose operation is by contrast slow, explicit, requiring effort and attention, and conscious and easily accessible to verbal report. The locus classicus is Fodor 1983; for more recent discussion, see Carruthers 2006; Kahneman 2011; and for a particular application to moral psychology, Greene 2014. 6  See Mallon (2016) for an illuminating discussion of overt and covert social roles, and what he calls the “revelatory aims” many social constructivist theorists have with respect to covert social roles. Categories like race, gender, and mental disorder are covert, claims the social constructivist, because it is not obvious that they denote social roles, or because the intuitive, received view is that they are natural, biological, or otherwise non-​socially constructed categories. The aim is to reveal that they are, in fact, socially constructed, and to show how, despite initial appearances, the intuitive, received view is mistaken.

644    Daniel Kelly and Nicolae Morar Details about the internalization of norms are also important, since they can explain why the social norm a person has internalized can shape feelings about identification and the right thing to do. Even though one may have never reflected upon, explicitly articulated, let alone consciously endorsed, many of the unwritten rules that she has internalized, she might experience the influence of those norms as something like the urgings and motivations of a conscience or a true inner self. Once a social norm has been picked up and internalized by a person’s norm psychological cognitive architecture, it can subjectively seem natural, compelling, normatively authoritative, and thus contribute to her sense of what kind of a person she is and should be, how she should interact with others, and where she fits into the larger social scheme.7 Even though a person may not be able to easily verbalize many social norms she has internalized, those unwritten rules can shape thoughts, emotions, and behavior, and delineate the social roles that become a core part of her identity.8 The cultural and moral ecology—​the marketplace of ideas, perhaps—​in which social norms are acquired and transmitted is far from monolithic or static, of course. In addition to characterizing the special capacity for recognizing and internalizing social norms, defenders of this account also make a convincing case that the capacity is subject to several kinds of learning biases (e.g., Richerson and Boyd 2005). For example, and perhaps least surprisingly, when faced with more than one potential norm to follow, a conformity bias makes people more likely to adopt the norm most common among their perceived peers.9 Another important type of bias is sensitive to prestige and makes

7 

See Hacking’s classic “Making Up People” (1986) for a complementary discussion. This psychological story dovetails nicely with Charlotte Witt’s view about what makes an individual subject to the normative force of any particular social norm or social role. She convincingly rejects the perhaps better known voluntarist view associated with Kantians like Korsgaard (1996) that (roughly) the authority a norm holds over an individual rests in the individual’s conscious endorsement and acceptance of it. Against this, Witt defends a limited ascriptivism, the idea that in many important cases, norms are ascribed to an individual by others, and so that the individual is responsive to and evaluable under those norms, even if the ascription is made without the individual’s consent or even explicit knowledge. As Witt points out, individuals do not voluntarily choose what culture they are born into or many of the social roles they occupy within it. Thus, they do not choose which social norms will apply to them, or even which norms they will internalize as applying to themselves. Hence, voluntary acceptance or endorsement does not determine which norms others will evaluate their actions by, which norms they will be socially pressured to comply with, and even which norms they may feel intrinsically motivated to conform to themselves. She goes on: “ascriptivism adds to the richness of our understanding of the grip of oppressive social norms by explaining why an individual might feel drawn under the normative umbrella of a social role which she is also at the same time critical” (47). And, given the account of norms and norm internalization we have described, we can also explain why an individual might feel drawn under and psychologically influenced by a norm that she has not fully articulated to herself or even become explicitly aware of. 9  There are complications, of course, perhaps most interesting of which is that norms and other units of cultural transmission are not discrete, and social learning is not a particularly high fidelity process. An upshot of this is that a social learner can blend together information from several cultural parents to arrive at a new norm, one that bears more resemblance to an “average” of those found amongst her peer group than to any particular instance antecedently found in that peer group (see Henrich and Boyd 2002; Henrich et al. 2008). 8 

I Eat, Therefore I Am    645 social learners more likely to acquire norms demonstrated by those held in high regard or seen to have the greatest success and status. These biases affect how norms are transmitted and thus how they change over time.10

Dining and Disgust Charlotte Witt, whose discussion of the connections between social norms, social roles, and identities informs much of our discussion here, and whose ascriptivism about social normativity we take to be supported by the empirical picture developed in the last section, nicely articulates the distinction between feeding and dining: Consider the natural phenomenon of feeding. Feeding is an animal function, and it is realized in and by animal bodies. In human societies, feeding (which requires bodies with specific organs—​mouths, tongues, stomachs, intestines along with other material conditions) is elaborated into the social function of dining by an array of social norms. Dining is a socially mediated form of feeding . . . connected intimately to biology and to bodies and their organs. (Witt 2012, 37)

The “many, elaborate social norms that govern dining” (37) are a subset of the category we will call food norms, which can include norms about what types of plants, animals, and other substances are appropriate to be consumed, how different types of food should be acquired and prepared, what types of person are fit or unfit to prepare and eat certain types of food, and the package of norms that assigns roles to individuals and choreographs the many smaller individual and joint behaviors that need to mesh during the complex dance of a collective meal. As Witt points out, even dining norms are not merely about edibility, nutrition, the pragmatics of eating, or the coordination of meal-​ related behaviors. They also structure the social practices surrounding food and eating in ways that give them and their component parts meaning and cultural significance. Two more points from recent empirical work on social norms can help flesh out Witt’s picture. The first is that of all of the emotions, disgust tends to play a predominant role in dining and is the emotion most prevalent in food norms more generally.11 This is

10 

Theorists of our status psychology also draw a distinction between prestige, which they take to be a uniquely human form of status rooted in cultural information and success, and dominance, which, while still present in humans, is much more widespread in nature, and rooted in coercion and the potential to inflict physical harm (Henrich and Gil-​White 2001; Henrich 2015, ch. 8). We think it likely that dominance plays an interesting and important role in food practices and norms, and potentially in the development of food preferences. As far as we know, this role has not yet been well explored, though. Thanks to Patrick Hoburg for discussion on this point. 11  Indeed, many food norms fall under the broader category of purity norms, which are typically associated with and follow the logic of disgust (Shweder et al. 1997; Horberg et al. 2009; Rottman and Keleman 2012).

646    Daniel Kelly and Nicolae Morar understandable, given that the primary evolutionary functions of disgust are, on the one hand, to monitor potential foods and protect against eating what might be toxic, poisonous, or otherwise cause insult to the delicate human gastrointestinal system, and, on the other, to act as the first line of defense of the human immune system, monitoring the environment, particularly other people, for evidence of potential sources of infection, and producing aversion toward and avoidance of anything that presents such a threat. As norms sprung up around the most pragmatic aspects of the gathering and preparation of food, disgust would have been a natural candidate to provide the intrinsic motivation associated with them. Moreover, due to the intrinsic salience of food to disgust, together with its sensitivity to other people as sources of social information about what is disgusting, as eating became culturally elaborated into dining, disgust would have once again been the emotion most suited to plug into the norms governing dining. It would thus exert its subtle but potentially important proprietary influence on the associated clusters or practices and social roles.12 The second point is that eating and food norms are likely to play an important part in people’s identities; and via this route, so is disgust. It follows that the empirical research on norms, disgust, and the interaction between the two can shed light on how those identities are likely to be formed and maintained, how they are liable to change and resist being changed, and thus how people’s food-​related habits may or may not be susceptible to being nudged in various ways. There are more general connections between norms and identities (i.e., clusters of norms help constitute particular social roles, and the set of social roles a person occupies makes up a core part of her identity). The empirical perspective on norms can add detail to this. For instance, the emphasis on the variability of social norms from one culture to the next, from one social role to the next, even from one person to the next, points to the importance of ethnic boundary markers: easily detectable cues displayed by a person that signal information about who she is. These serve as visible proxies for more abstract psychological properties that may not be directly perceivable or easily manifest, such as what groups a person belongs to and values she embraces, which social roles she occupies, which norms shape her judgments and actions, and thus what others should expect of her, and how they should interact with her and evaluate what she does. Indeed, there is reason to think that the psychological capacities for social norms evolved in tandem with similarly universal and emotion-​involving psychological capacities that make us sensitive to social role occupancy, group membership, and ethnic boundary markers, as part of a larger package of uniquely human cooperative abilities that have been called our “tribal social instincts” (see Richerson and Boyd 2001, 2005, ch. 6; Richerson and Henrich 2011; Kelly 2013, 2011, ch. 4). 12 

For more extensive discussion and citations on the empirical side, see Rozin et al. 2008; Kelly 2011; Chapman and Anderson 2013; and Strohminger 2104; and for empirically informed debate about the normative questions concerning the putative moral authority of disgust and the different roles it should or should not play in social contexts, Plakias 2013; Clark and Fessler 2015; Kelly and Morar 2014; Fischer 2015; and Kumar 2017.

I Eat, Therefore I Am    647 Eating is a universal, biologically inescapable activity that is necessary for survival, it is typically a social experience, and it is heavily monitored and regulated.13 It thus provides a rich arena of information salient to these tribal instincts and their various concerns—​and thus for the performance of identity: following the proper sequence in which to serve food, and appropriately portioning out the choicest morsels to the most prestigious people at the meal; knowing which utensil to use, how, and for what; or choosing to observe or flout persnickety etiquette rules about which one is fully aware. As many have noted, even specific cuisines are bound up with identity and can serve as ethnic boundary markers, especially types of food celebrated and relished by members of one group, but found disgusting by members of others. Paul Rozin and Michael Siegal (2003) present some experimental evidence along these lines concerning Vegemite and its unique place in Australian identity, but other examples include pairings like escargot and France, sushi and Japan, and jellied moose nose and indigenous populations of Canada and Alaska. In today’s global village, food preferences may vary in this way more dramatically along socioeconomic lines than traditional cultural lines, thus marking the boundaries between class more often and effectively than between nationalities. In general, the signaling function remains the same, though: you are what you eat, but you aren’t what you won’t eat, too. The larger class of food norms, including those having to do with the more ethical dimensions of what we eat and the moral reasons for eating or not eating it, are likely to have deep psychological connections with people’s identities and their sense of disgust, and thus who they are and what kind of person they take themselves to be—​and what kind of person they aspire to be. This dimension of psychological complication suggests one reason that mere appeal to utilitarian calculations or deontological obligations may fall on deaf ears, or at least fail to be persuasive or motivating, namely because such appeals might fail to effectively speak to the identity component of eating and dining. However, the empirical research might be leveraged; proposals for how to best communicate arguments about more ethical food practices, promulgate new food norms, or effectively change eating habits can take into account the empirical psychological research, both on tribal instincts and the way disgust is likely to inform the domain of food norms and cuisine-​based identity displays.

13  Sterelny (2012) develops an extensive and convincing case that some of the most ancient, persistent, and multifaceted collective action problems faced over the course of human evolutionary history were food-​related: the production of hunting and cooking equipment, the division of labor in the gathering and preparation of edible plants, the organization and assignment of roles for coordinated hunting strategies, the fair distribution of food once it has been acquired, particularly in the case of a single large calorie haul that can result from a successful hunting effort, and so on. This picture implies that the connections between our cooperative psychological capacities, on the one hand, and the norms and practices surrounding food, on the other, are far from recent or superficial. Our concern for food is primal and runs deeply through our tribal social instincts.

648    Daniel Kelly and Nicolae Morar

Disgust, Identity, and the Ethics of Improving Eating Habits Thus far, we have attempted to develop a concise account of the construction and maintenance of identities in terms of social roles that brings to bear the burgeoning empirical literature on social norms, and via this, highlights the centrality of disgust in the cognition of dining norms. Our account complements the work of anthropologists and sociologists who focus on culture (Douglas 1966; Goody 1982; Bourdieu 1987), but we emphasize that eating and the norms that govern it cannot be fully captured in social and cultural terms because dining is equally shaped by stable features of human psychology. Whether one is interested in the development of food preferences, the rise of specific food practices (e.g., locavorism—​Oxford dictionary word of the year 2007), or the significance of networks of representation and meaning associated with certain cuisines (e.g., veganism vs. pescatarianism), it is obvious that such phenomena cannot be captured with biological or psychological resources alone. We hold that they cannot be fully explained by cultural and social factors alone, either. The interrelations between dining, identity, and emotions like disgust are multifaceted, and an epistemological and methodological pluralism is needed to understand them in their full messy complexity. Here we briefly sketch two types of ethical implications that can be drawn from our own pluralist account. The first concerns how use of disgust makes it too easy to dehumanize those people whose eating habits are targeted. The second is that, given the connection between dining and identity, attempts to modify eating habits could raise interesting and distinctive problems, both practically and ethically. We end by reflecting on these and setting out some questions suggested by the view we have presented.

Dehumanization There is an important distinction between two kinds of claims ethicists might be making in the normative debates that have recently swirled around disgust. One kind concerns whether and when feelings of disgust, in and of themselves, should be taken to justify the judgments that they accompany. For example, should the putatively widespread (see May 2016) reaction of disgust toward emerging practices like human cloning or the replacement of natural foods with GMOs be taken as a reason in favor of the view that such developments are morally wrong—​and should widespread disgust inform how different institutions react to such practices and emerging biotechnological possibilities? The other kind of claim concerns whether and when it would be acceptable to cultivate widespread feelings of disgust toward different kinds of objects, broadly speaking, and thus which ethical and political uses of disgust are morally appropriate. Is, in other words, disgust an admissible social tool, one that might be harnessed by activists and policymakers to bring about morally and socially desirable ends (directing disgust

I Eat, Therefore I Am    649 at wildly unhealthy foods or barbaric factory farming conditions to discourage certain eating habits), or is there something about the emotion itself that renders it ethically ill-​suited for such purposes? While we have defended skeptical positions with respect to each of these (Kelly and Morar 2014), it is this second kind of issue that concerns us here. Consider the West Australian Live Lighter Campaign.14 The ad opens with a man reaching into the fridge for a slice of pizza. While sizing up the slice, he reaches down and squeezes his belly. At that moment, the camera moves inside the man’s body, revealing slabs of thick, viscous yellow fat covering his organs. As a voiceover calls obesity toxic and describes how it increases risk for disease, the viewer experiences embarrassment at the man’s lack of control over his eating, and the visual spectacle triggers a visceral sense of disgust. Obviously, this ad aspires to more than merely informing viewers of nutritional facts (e.g., about how diets high in carbohydrates lead to unhealthy levels of fat storage). It also employs disgust-​inducing imagery in an attempt to alter people’s behavior and combat eating habits that might be engrained in many people’s daily routines. What harm in giving into the temptation to enjoy a last slice of pizza, eat one—​ just one!—​more potato chip, indulge in another bit of instantly gratifying, nutrition be damned, tasty at any cost foodertainment? On the other hand, who wants to be gross, bloated with nasty yellow goop? That’s disgusting. It is not the effectiveness of disgust in getting across this kind of message that we doubt (Marks 2006), but rather the moral defensibility of using it in such ways. Emotional appeals of all sorts probably make public health messages, like most other kinds of messages, more likely to be understood, remembered, and perhaps even acted on.15 But features of the particular emotion of disgust make its use in these kinds of messages, directed at people, in this case those with unhealthy eating habits, unacceptable. Perhaps most worrisome for such tactics is how disgust dehumanizes those toward whom it is directed. Many writers have documented the long history of this particular emotion’s role in stigmatization, prejudice, and oppression (especially Nussbaum 2004, 2010). We think this appalling history is no accident. The recent empirical research on disgust shows that the relation between disgust and dehumanization is not that of a good (or even neutral) tool that has an unfortunate record of abhorrent uses, but rather that the dehumanizing propensity is intrinsic to the tool itself. The activation of disgust disrupts or reduces the disgusted person’s ability to fully “see” the object of disgust as an agent. If, say, you are disgusted by a group of people, or the occupants of a certain kind of social role, you become less sensitive to their intentions and the cues that signal their intentions (Russell and Giner-​Sorolla 2011; Young and Saxe 2011; for complementary neurocognitive evidence gathered using fMRIs, see also Harris and Fiske 2006, 2007). Not only is disgust intrinsically dehumanizing in this way, but it appears to be uniquely so; most of these empirical results are comparative and show that other related emotions like anger and contempt do not have similarly disruptive effects on social cognition. 14  See Rebecca Kukla’s contribution to this volume for more discussion of this example, as well as the more general philosophical issues we discuss in this section. 15  For empirical evidence about disgust along these lines, see Heath et al. 2001 and Nichols 2002.

650    Daniel Kelly and Nicolae Morar This is perhaps due to disgust’s distinctive evolutionary roots in dealing with poisons and parasites rather than navigating the subtleties of interpersonal interactions and the social world. Whatever the ultimate explanation, it remains that making an individual, or group of people, into an object of disgust makes it difficult to think of them as fully human and deserving of full moral status. Once they are seen as disgusting, they become easier to dismiss, to demonize, and to treat hideously; that which is gross is disposable. There are other components of the disgust response that we think also make it unsuitable for these kinds of social uses. To be disgusted by something is to conceptualize it as aversive and to be avoided. But it is also to conceptualize it as tainted and contaminating, able to pollute with its disgustingness other things that it comes into close proximity with, physically or figuratively. This property of the emotion is understandable and adaptive when it is functioning to protect against communicable diseases and track the cues that accompany them, but it contributes to the sticky stigmatizing power of disgust when the emotion operates in the social arena. Since the different elements of disgust tend to cluster together as a psychological package, the dehumanizing propensity can be transmitted via this same mechanism of contamination sensitivity. Disgustingness is likely to bleed beyond its intended boundaries, encompassing not just the sin but also the sinner, bringing its dehumanizing stigma with it. Returning to food and eating habits, the idea of harnessing this emotion to advance some well-​intentioned program or even just help get a public health message across seems misguided to us. Disgust may be a powerful tool to change individual and collective behavior, but we hold that there is good moral reason to refrain from using it, even in the service of advocating for morally laudable ends like more compassionate food production practices, healthier eating habits, or more just food norms. The advantages it would bring to the cause are far outweighed by, but also psychologically inseparable from, its attendant risks. Indeed, the unintended or unanticipated effects of such uses could be morally disastrous, especially when social disgust is normalized, and modern technological, advertising, and media sophistication is used to make a category of people into the target of the collective disgust of an entire population.16

Nudges and Identity Tampering Our second concern centers on the view we have developed about dining and identity and its relevance for the use of nudges in food policy.17 Here we aim to raise questions rather than fully articulate and defend a position. Ethicists and social theorists have long recognized the trade-​offs between individuals’ right to a sphere of unencumbered 16 

For an interesting discussion about the potential of disgust to stir up moral panics and drive the creation and stabilization unjust laws, see Douard 2007. 17  Earlier drafts introduced the terminology of “identity-​based harms,” but we decided we did not want to contribute to the “concept creep” of the notion of harm in psychology and philosophy (Haslam 2016).

I Eat, Therefore I Am    651 autonomy, on the one hand, and the right of others’, including the state and other institutions, to place limits on that sphere (see Sarah Conly’s contribution to this volume). In the case of public policy attempts to improve eating habits and install more healthy and humane food norms, the tension can be understood as a worry about approaches that are overly paternalistic. Even when they are well-​intentioned and the ends to which they aspire are morally laudable, policies that would limit individual choice in the name of public health and well-​being risk crossing the line, illegitimately interfering with people’s capacity for self-​determination, even if that capacity is often exercised to make unhealthy or morally questionable but perfectly legal food choices. We will frame our two points about this tension in terms of the viability of the tactics now commonly described as nudges. Debates rage about where the line should be drawn between acceptable measures and those that are unacceptably coercive or manipulative, and on what grounds that line should be established and justified (e.g., Hausman and Welch 2010; Saghai 2013; Sunstein 2014). Some have explored reasonable boundaries on paternalistic public health policies that limit consumers’ freedom in the name of healthier eating practices, including those that appear to directly impinge on consumer choice by delimiting the range of food options among which they can choose available (e.g., the SNAP sugary drink ban or the New York big soda ban). Many appeal to economic and the medical arguments for justification (Basu et  al. 2014). Others comment on the idea that less restrictive message-​based programs are more likely to be effective when they also draw an emotional response. Critics have raised legitimate worries about the potential side effects of such policies, pointing out how they are liable to reinforce the stigmatization of obesity or incite unwarranted blame toward lower income segments of the population for their dietary choices and poor health (Barnhill and King 2013). The notion of a nudge and the development of an accompanying vocabulary centered on it have been welcome recent advances. Measures that were once perceived as stark limitations on personal autonomy (Resnik 2010) are now easier to see as elements of larger, previously unappreciated “choice architectures.” These, proponents of nudges argue, have always been present, have usually been shaped by some interested party or other, and are practically inescapable, even if they are only now becoming the objects of scientific study (and of systematic ethical debate as such). The libertarian paternalist deployment of nudges and choice architectures seeks to act primarily on the set of available alternatives among which agents can choose, or to appeal to non-​rational ways of influencing an agent’s choice by, say, arranging food options in cafeterias in a way that promotes the best nutritional choices without hindering one’s personal preferences (see the example of Carolyn the director of food services in the introduction of Thaler and Sunstein 2009, 3–​5). The framework is controversial but intriguing and certainly advances a sophisticated conception of human agency that both properly appreciates the influence of situational and ecological factors on human behavior (cf. Doris 2002; Clark 2007) and seeks to countenance, anticipate, and often preemptively compensate for the litany of imperfections that riddle human decision-​making, for example, overconfidence, motivated cognition, status quo and

652    Daniel Kelly and Nicolae Morar confirmation biases, cognitive inertia, the multitude of fallible heuristics (anchoring, availability, representativeness) on which we constantly rely, seemingly, ad infinitum (Ariely 2010; Kahneman 2011). In other places, debates specifically about food can feel caricatured and could benefit from more nuance.18 One way to achieve this is by taking into account a wider range of factors, like for instance the fact that certain food experiences can have value for individuals independently of their relationship to deliberate and informed choices (Barnhill et al. 2014). Our concern can perhaps be located among this wider range of factors that deserve more attention. Not every act of eating is equally representative of a deep self, but people’s identities are often inscribed in their diets and food practices; there are distinctively Italian ways to cook and eat pasta that many would consider central to being a “true” Italian, or particularly French ways to taste and appreciate pungent cheeses that many French people would consider an important part of their self-​conception (de Solier 2013). We have argued that these types of relations between dining and identity are robust and have deep psychological roots. We further hold that these relations and the relevant aspects of identity should be taken into account when assessing the viability and acceptability of nudges designed to improve eating habits and modify food norms. In short, attempts to alter some eating habits will also be attempts to alter something significant in people’s identities. One set of problems this could raise has to do with the practical effectiveness of eating habit nudges. People may be more willing and able to change shallower aspects of themselves, behaviors or tendencies that they take to be more peripheral to their identities, but less willing and able to change those that are more central, or that they take to be expressive of who they really are. Or in the terms we introduced earlier, nudges could bump up against a food norm that is resistant to change because complying with it is an important way to signal commitment to a larger group, or because it is woven into an especially stable social role that many people strongly identify with and do not wish to abandon. Asking (or subtly prodding) people to change such eating habits and the norms that govern them is asking (or subtly prodding) them to change who they are. Changes could be practically harder to achieve because the identity-​based psychology of some dining practices runs “deeper” than that associated with run of the mill cases of behavior, even habitual behavior. This seems to us an open and interesting empirical question. The prominence of disgust in food norms may add an additional psychological wrinkle to this question about the likely effectiveness of eating habit nudges. It could also inform one of the factors that Thaler and Sunstein appeal to in justifying the use of nudges, namely that nudged choosers often approve of nudges because they see themselves as making better choices (i.e., better by their own standards of evaluation), whatever those may be. However, people may be less likely to so favorably assess a nudge that turned them into an object of public disgust (or an object of self-​disgust, for that matter).

18 

Not too much, though (Healy, 2017).

I Eat, Therefore I Am    653 A related set of problems is about not practical viability but justification and moral acceptability. Again, there will be a line between acceptable and overly coercive or manipulative nudging strategies, and different factors should be taken into consideration when deciding where it should be drawn. Our questions here center on whether and when moral appraisal should take account of identity. Is asking someone to change who they are and take themselves to be asking too much, or does subtly prodding them into altering certain behaviors amount to tampering with their identity? What are the conditions under which it is permissible to challenge a person’s identity? When, if ever, is it permissible to tamper with it in less overt ways? Where do these factors sit with respect to those more common to discussions of paternalism and nudging, and how should they be weighed? For example, there is a family of views on which autonomy and agency are deeply bound up with a person’s ability to express her identity through her actions, or act out his deepest self in his deeds (Benson 1990; Lindemann 2014, esp. ch. 3; cf. Sripada 2016). Critics could use such views to build a case that tampering with people’s identities is tampering with their agency and constitutes a kind of infringement on their autonomy. These infringements, like other infringing factors, need to be taken into consideration when assessing the moral acceptability of different nudging strategies. Moreover, given the overlap of food and dining with identity, these kinds of factors are likely to loom large when thinking about eating habit nudges. Certainly this line of thought needs to be spelled out in much more detail, but we hold that it is intriguing and worth pursuing, and hope to have laid some of the necessary groundwork for exploring it more carefully in the future.

Conclusion If you are what you eat, then attempts to change what and how you eat are, in effect, attempts to alter your identity, who you are. Given the connection between food practices, dining norms, and identities, we have argued that there is another dimension along which arguments and attempts to change food practices and dining norms need to be evaluated, namely the dimension that considers if and when it is permissible to change a person’s identity. Moreover, we have developed an account of identities in terms of social roles and social norms, which allows a wealth of work in empirical moral psychology on the acquisition and performance of social norms to be brought to bear on questions of how identities are psychological housed and how they might be effectively altered. It also illuminates the role that disgust is likely to play in food practices and dining norms, and the kinds of benefits and drawbacks this is likely to bring with it. We have argued that the nature of disgust restricts the uses to which it might justifiably be put in the service of creating more ethical eating habits.19 19 

Thanks to Lacey Davidson, Patrick Hoburg and the editors of this volume for useful feedback on earlier drafts.

654    Daniel Kelly and Nicolae Morar

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656    Daniel Kelly and Nicolae Morar Korsgaard, C. 1996. The Sources of Normativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Korsgaard, C. 2009. Self-​Constitution:  Agency, Identity, and Integrity. Oxford, UK:  Oxford University Press. Kumar, V. 2017. “Foul Behavior.” Philosopher’s Imprint 17(15): 1–​17. Lindemann, H. 2014. Holding and Letting Go:  The Social Practice of Personal Identities. New York: Oxford University Press. Mallon, R. 2003. “Social Construction, Social Roles and Stability.” In Socializing Metaphysics, edited by F. Schmitt, 327–​353. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Mallon, R. 2014. “Naturalistic Approaches to Social Construction.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2014 ed.), edited by Edward N. Zalta. http://​plato.stanford.edu/​archives/​win2014/​entries/​social-​construction-​naturalistic/​. Mallon, R. 2016. The Construction of Human Kinds. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Mallon, R., and D. Kelly. 2012. “Making Race out of Nothing:  Psychologically Constrained Social Roles.” In The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Social Sciences, edited by H. Kincaid, 507–​532. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Marks, J. 2006. “The Power of Emotion.” Atrium 3:6. May, J. 2016. “Emotional Reactions to Human Reproductive Cloning.” Journal of Medical Ethics 42:26–​30. McKeith, G. 2005. You Are What You Eat: The Plan That Will Change Your Life. New York: Penguin. Nemeroff, C., and P. Rozin. 2000. “The Makings of the Magical Mind: The Nature and Function of Sympathetic Magical Thinking.” In Imagining the Impossible: Magical, Scientific, and Religious Thinking in Children, edited by K. S. Rosengren, C. N. Johnson, and P. L. Harris, 1–​34. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nichols, S. 2002. “On the Genealogy of Norms: A Case for the Role of Emotion in Cultural Evolution.” Philosophy of Science 69:234–​255. —​—​—​. 2004. Sentimental Rules: On the Natural Foundations of Moral Judgment. New York: Oxford University Press. Nussbaum, M. 2004. Hiding from Humanity:  Disgust, Shame, and the Law. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Nussbaum, M. 2010. From Disgust to Humanity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pitte, J.-​R. 1991. Gastronomie française: Histoire et géographie d’une passion. Paris: Fayard. Plakias, A. 2013. “The Good and the Gross.” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 16(2): 261–​278. Pollan, M. 2008. In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. New York: Penguin. Resnik, D. 2010. “Trans Fat Bans and Human Freedom.” American Journal of Bioethics 10(3): 27–​32. Richerson, P., and R. Boyd. 2001. “The Evolution of Subjective Commitment to Groups: A Tribal Instincts Hypothesis.” In The Evolution and the Capacity for Commitment, edited by R. Nesse, 186–​220. New York: Russell Sage. Richerson, P., and R. Boyd. 2005. Not by Genes Alone. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Richerson, P., and J. Henrich. 2011. “Tribal Social Instincts and the Cultural Evolution of Institutions to Solve Collective Action Problems.” Cliodynamics: The Journal of Theoretical and Mathematical History 3(1): 38–​80. Rottman, J., and D. Kelemen. 2012. “Aliens Behaving Badly: Children’s Acquisition of Novel Purity-​Based Morals.” Cognition 124(3): 356–​360. Rozin, P., L. Lowery, S. Imada, and J. Haidt. 1999. “The CAD Triad Hypothesis: A Mapping Between Three Moral Emotions (Contempt, Anger, Disgust) and Three Moral Codes

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chapter 29

Moralit y a nd A esthetics of Fo od Shen-​y i Liao and Aaron Meskin

On The Smiths’s song “Meat is Murder” (1985), Morrissey indignantly sings: And the flesh you so fancifully fry Is not succulent, tasty or kind It’s death for no reason And death for no reason is murder

and Kitchen aromas aren’t very homely It’s not comforting, cheery, or kind It’s sizzling blood and the unholy stench Of murder

It is obvious that Morrissey is making a statement about the moral status of meat: as the song’s title says, it is murder. Even though it is less obvious, Morrissey also seems to be making a statement about the aesthetic status of meat: it is not succulent, tasty, homely, or comforting.1 Plausibly, by making these two statements together, Morrissey is thereby making a third, philosophically provocative statement about the interaction between moral and aesthetic values of food: the moral defect of meat makes for an aesthetic defect.

1 

Some readers might resist the thought that succulence and tastiness are aesthetic attributes. See the section “The Aesthetic Value of Food” for discussions of different senses of aesthetic value that might be relevant to this debate.

Morality and Aesthetics of Food    659 In recent times, the humor-​ oriented and hipster-​ approved T-​ shirt company Threadless has responded to Morrissey. One of their most popular shirts is emblazed with the slogan: Meat is murder. Tasty, tasty murder.

Threadless thus agrees with Morrissey on the moral status of meat:  it is murder. However, even while acknowledging the moral status of meat, Threadless disagrees with Morrissey on the aesthetic status of meat: it is, in fact, tasty. Plausibly, by making these two statements together, Threadless is also thereby making a third, philosophically provocative statement about the interaction between moral and aesthetic values of food: the moral defect of meat is aesthetically irrelevant. Our chapter is more or less about this exchange between Morrissey and Threadless. We will explore the interaction between moral and aesthetic values of food, in part by connecting it to existing discussions of the interaction between moral and aesthetic values of art. Along the way, we will consider the artistic status of food, the aesthetic value of food, and the role of expertise in uncovering aesthetic value. Ultimately, we will argue that the interaction between moral and aesthetic values of food is more complicated than the disagreement between Morrissey and Threadless suggests. Indeed, we will suggest a position concerning this interaction that differs from Morrissey’s and Threadless’s. We will conclude by drawing out broader implications of this position for discussions on the ethics of food and discussions on the interaction between the moral and aesthetic values of art.

Interaction between Morality and Aesthetics of Art Philosophical discussions on the interaction between morality and aesthetics have been primarily focused on art. Specifically, philosophers have been centrally concerned with the morality-​to-​aesthetics connection in the ethical criticism of art debate.2 Here is one taxonomy of that debate centered on this question: What is the connection between the moral value and the aesthetic value of an artwork?3 2 

Harold (2006) and Stecker (2005) are exceptions that discuss the aesthetics-​to-​morality connection. As Harold says, “the literature on this subject is now rich with variants of moralism and autonomism, making it difficult to give a general characterization of either view that all of those associated with that view would accept” (2008: 45‒46). As such, with the following taxonomy, we only aim to provide one reasonable way to bring out different views’ central tenets and draw out their respective differences. For alternative taxonomies of the ethical criticism of art debate, see Eaton 2016; Giovanelli 2007; McGregor 2014; and Stecker 2005. 3 

660    Shen-Yi Liao and Aaron Meskin Art autonomists say that an artwork’s moral value is unconnected to its aesthetic value.4 That is, both moral defects and moral virtues are aesthetically irrelevant. Although one can certainly criticize an artwork on moral grounds, such moral criticism is never relevant to aesthetic criticism of the artwork. Art moralists say an artwork’s moral value is directly connected to its aesthetic value.5 On a stronger formulation, exemplified by Berys Gaut’s ethicism, a work’s manifestation of a morally defective attitude always makes for an aesthetic defect and, correspondingly, manifestation of a morally virtuous attitude always makes for an aesthetic virtue. On a weaker formulation, arguably exemplified by Noël Carroll’s moderate moralism, some moral defects make for aesthetic defects and some moral virtues make for aesthetic virtues, even if there are also moral defects and moral virtues that are aesthetically neutral. All variants of art moralism endorse the valence constraint (Harold 2008): the claim that a feature’s effect on the work’s moral value must have the same valence as its effect on the work’s aesthetic value, regardless of the magnitude of the effect. The valence constraint accommodates both ethicism and moderate moralism; moderate moralists simply include some effects with zero magnitude. Given their adherence to the valence constraint, all art moralists say that a moral defect can never make for an aesthetic virtue and a moral virtue can never make for an aesthetic defect. Art immoralists say artworks exhibit different connections between moral value and aesthetic value.6 Specifically, they deny the valence constraint; they say that sometimes an artwork’s moral value is inversely connected to its aesthetic value. However, despite their misleading name, they do not say that an artwork’s moral value is always inversely connected to its aesthetic value; sometimes an artwork’s moral value is directly connected to its aesthetic value, and other times an artwork’s moral value is unconnected to its aesthetic value. (Indeed, sometimes this position is called “contextualism” instead to avoid false implications.) When art immoralists reject the valence constraint, they focus specifically on cases in which the connection between an artwork’s moral defect and its aesthetic virtue is no accident. However, different art immoralists spell out this non-​ accidental connection in different ways.

4 

Defenders of art autonomism include Anderson and Dean 1998; Cooke 2014; Harold 2011; Lamarque and Olsen 1994; and Posner 1997, 1998. In our experience, art autonomism is also a common default view among people who are not professional philosophers. 5  In our experience, art moralism is the dominant view among philosophers of art. Defenders of art moralism include Booth 1998; Carroll 1996, 1998; Clifton 2013; Eaton 2001; Gaut 1998; Gilmore 2011; Hanson 1998; Harold 2008; Kieran 2001; Mullin 2004; Nussbaum 1998; and Stecker 2008. Hume (1757) is sometimes cited as a historical predecessor of contemporary art moralism, but this interpretation of Hume is highly contested (cf. Mason 2001; Dadlez and Bicknell 2013). 6  Defenders of art immoralism—​though sometimes under other names, such as “art contextualism”—​ include Eaton 2012; Jacobson 1997, 2005; John 2005; and Kieran 2003, 2006. Even though Jacobson, in his pioneering “In Praise of Immoral Art” (1997), identifies immoralism with anti-​theory, this conception is not widely shared by others. Stecker (2008) argues that anti-​theorists need not (and should not) be immoralists, and other immoralists tend to not position themselves as anti-​theorists.

Morality and Aesthetics of Food    661 Indeed, within the ethical criticism of art debate, one can find various characterizations of the relevant connection between moral and aesthetic value.7 Some theorists suggest that the relevant connection is “internal” or conceptual. For example, Matthew Kieran (2006, 130–​131) frames the debate in terms of whether there are internal relations between the moral and the aesthetic or, instead, they are conceptually distinct. Some theorists suggest that the relevant connection is quasi-​causal or explanatory. For example, A. W. Eaton argues for the claim that “an immoral feature of an artwork can make a significant positive aesthetic contribution precisely in virtue of its immorality” (2012, 283). Some theorists suggest that the relevant connection is counterfactual dependence. For example, Daniel Jacobson argues for the claim that “the very features of an artwork that render it morally dubious can contribute essentially to its aesthetic value” (2005, 342). That is, if one took away the moral defect by taking away the underlying features, then one would also thereby take away the aesthetic virtue that involves the same underlying features. Obviously, our taxonomy is complicated by these different characterizations of the relevant connection between moral and aesthetic value. Given these different characterizations, it would be unsurprising to find in this literature, say, a self-​professed variant of art moralism that turns out to be compatible with a self-​professed variant of art immoralism.8 So, to be clear, our philosophical interests do not lie with whether some particular position is best labeled as “autonomism,” “moralism,” or “immoralism.” Instead, our philosophical interests lie with the substantive questions about the connection—​or, more likely, connections—​between moral and aesthetic value. Thinking about the central tenets associated with these labels and potential points of disagreement is simply a convenient way to gesture toward the substantive questions. It should also be emphasized that this debate is concerned with pro tanto, rather than all-​things-​considered, connection between moral and aesthetic value. For example, in describing his view, Gaut explicitly states that “the ethicist principle is a pro tanto one: it holds that a work is aesthetically meritorious (or defective) insofar as it manifests ethically admirable (or reprehensible) attitudes” (1998, 182). Hence, even according to 7 

In fact, the relevant connection between moral and aesthetic value is sometimes unspecified or underspecified. For related complaints about the vague terminology in this debate, see McGregor 2014. Although McGregor’s complaints primarily concern the vagueness of “moral defect” and “aesthetic defect,” such vagueness has the downstream effect of making the relevant connection between moral defect and aesthetic defect unclear as well. 8  For one example, John (2005) is classified as an immoralist on our taxonomy even though she calls her view “opportunistic moralism” because she allows that, even though it is not standard, a moral defect can make for an aesthetic merit. For another example, Jacobson (2005) maintains that the slogan of Carroll’s moderate moralism (1996, 1998) is compatible with Jacobson’s variant of immoralism. And, indeed, Carroll (2000, 2013) officially maintains that moderate moralism is logically compatible with immoralism. However, Jacobson also argues that, when one looks beyond the simplistic slogan, other aspects of Carroll’s theory in fact commit him to a minimally moralist position that is incompatible with immoralism. And Eaton (2013) echoes Jacobson’s observation of the disconnect between the official statement of moderate moralism and other claims that Carroll makes about the connection between moral and aesthetic values of artworks.

662    Shen-Yi Liao and Aaron Meskin the ethicist, there can be an artwork that contains a moral defect that is still all-​things-​ considered aesthetically meritorious. The debate between art autonomists, art moralists, and art immoralists has centered on works that are traditionally considered to be art, such as novels and films. As such, before we can consider applying or extending this debate to food, we will have to start by saying more about the artistic status of food and the aesthetic value of food.

The Artistic Status of Food Is food art?9 There is no univocal answer to this question because food and art are both highly heterogeneous categories. In this section, we consider three ways of answering this question and their relevance, if any, for applying or extending the ethical criticism of art debate to food.

Food-​Based Art One way we can answer the question “Is food art?” is to consider works that are recognizably art and centrally involve food. To start, consider artworks that use materials that would normally be recognized as food. Kara Walker’s A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, an Homage to the Unpaid and Overworked Artisans Who Have Refined Our Sweet Tastes from the Cane Fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the Demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant (2014) involves a massive sculpture made of sugar. Daniel Spoerri makes tableaux pièges (or “snare-​pictures”) that involve affixing various items, often the leftovers of meals, to various surfaces. Viviane Le Courtois’s 2012 exhibition at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Edible?, contained melted candy sculptures, video installations of eating and food preparation, and an interactive installation involving an indoor garden and the chance to make tea from herbs grown there. One might worry that a number of the previous examples are not really cases of food-​ based art; after all, they are not designed to be experienced through eating. That is, they do not function as food even if—​in the case of the works by Spoerri and Le Courtois—​ they were made with materials that were food at one time. It is instructive here to consider Marcel Duchamp’s ready-​mades. His In Advance of a Broken Arm (1915) involved the selection and display of an ordinary snow shovel, but although there is a sense in which this shows that a snow shovel can be a work of art, it does not show that something can function as both a snow shovel and a work of art at the same time. (Similarly, 9  Meskin (2013) gives an accessible overview of the contemporary responses to this question. In addition to contemporary responses that this section highlights, earlier responses to this question can be found in Harris (1979), Quinet (1981), and Winterbourne (1981).

Morality and Aesthetics of Food    663 the possibility of a collage made of cuttings from pornographic magazines does not establish that something can function as both art and pornography.10) So although the fact that these items were made with food is relevant to their appreciation, they do not seem like the most interesting cases of food-​based art. True food-​based art would thus have to centrally involve food functioning as food. Such works exist. For example, Hermann Nitsch’s Das Orgien Mysterien Theater (1957) is performed on some occasions with the experience of eating food being a component. Rupe (1999) describes one such performance as follows: an invading tank (yes, an actual war-​sized tank) trampled onto the castle grounds to be doused with both animal blood and roses. The deaths of the three bulls during the play were offered as life for the participants. There was no hiding the fact that the meat came from the death of an animal: This is not a hamburger, this is a dead bull, and you’re eating it.

For a less disturbing example, Rirkrit Tiravanija’s Untitled (Free) (1992) involves converting the gallery into a kitchen space where the artist served Thai curry and rice to the audience. Despite their notable differences, both artworks centrally involve food that functions as food, and therefore count as true food-​based art. The ethical criticism of art debate applies straightforwardly to food-​based art. For example, with Nitsch’s Das Orgien Mysterien Theater, an autonomist would say that the moral defect involved in the live animal slaughtering—​assuming there is such a defect—​ does not make for an aesthetic defect but a moralist would say that it does. An immoralist might even say that it makes for an aesthetic virtue—​without it, the work would be far less transgressive and aesthetically interesting, at least on its initial performance. So, there are artworks that centrally involve food that is experienced as such, and the ethical criticism of art debate is directly relevant to these artworks. Yet, these cases seem to not be fully relevant to discussing morality and aesthetics of food because they seem quite distant from what we typically think of when we think of food. Let us consider two other ways of answering the question “Is food art?” to see if even more relevant cases can be found.

Artified Food Another way we can answer the question “Is food art?” is to consider food that is “artified”—​the kind of high-​brow food that might be recognized as art. Arguably, the best contemporary examples are from the so-​called molecular gastronomy movement, such as the dishes and meals that were once found at Ferran Adrià’s El Bulli. For example, El Bulli’s reverse spherical olive (2005) is an elaborate reconstruction of olive oil and olive 10 

For discussions about the relationship between art and pornography, especially whether the two are mutually exclusive categories, see the essays collected in Maes and Levinson 2012.

664    Shen-Yi Liao and Aaron Meskin juice in the shape of an olive, using a technique that is new to gastronomy. This kind of food might to be thought to be a hybrid art form that combines haute cuisine, sculpture, various technologies, and performance art or theater. If this kind of food is art, then the ethical criticism of art debate is also directly relevant, in just the same way that this debate is relevant for Nitsch’s Das Orgien Mysterien Theater. However, while these cases are more recognizable as food than food-​based artworks, they still seem fairly distant from our ordinary culinary experiences. A robust understanding of the interaction between the morality and aesthetics of food requires a consideration of what we will call “food of everyday life.”

The Food of Everyday Life The food of everyday life is the food we consume on a day-​to-​day basis, such as pizza, ramen, tacos, and spinach salads. Many will intuitively deny that all food of everyday life counts as art. Microwaveable French fries, sausage rolls, and tofu hot dogs do not seem to be art. However, that leaves open the possibility that some of the food of everyday life counts as art, even if much of it does not—​in the same way that some films are plausibly art even if others are not. Whether some food of everyday life can count as art is a question that has been taken up by a number of contemporary philosophers. Many of them allow that such food can count as art but that it does not rise to the level of the “major” or “fine” arts. So, for example, Elizabeth Telfer argues that food can count as art in its own right and that cookery is an art form, since some dishes are “intended or used wholly or largely for aesthetic consideration” (Telfer 1996, 46). But Telfer characterizes food as both “simple” and “minor”—​simple because taste allows for less formal complexity and minor because it is alleged to be “necessarily transient, it cannot have meaning and it cannot move us” (58). Carolyn Korsmeyer responds to Telfer’s claim that food cannot have meaning by arguing that food often exhibits the form of symbolization that Nelson Goodman called “exemplification” where an object both refers to a property and possesses it (Korsmeyer 1999, 128–​131). According to Korsmeyer, an item of food may similarly do more than simply possess a property (such as freshness, smokiness, spiciness); it may call our attention to that property and, in so doing, exemplify it and, hence, possess a form of meaning. (Consider a very spicy curry that calls attention to that spiciness; perhaps by the use of a huge number of brightly colored chilies.) Despite this, and a number of other symbolic functions that she argues food may possess, she concludes with a position that is not so different from Telfer’s. Food is not art “in the full sense of the term” (Korsmeyer 1999, 141); that is, it is not a fine art because it lacks the requisite history, but it may nevertheless count as a minor, decorative, functional, or applied art (Korsmeyer 1999, 144). Even more skeptically, Tim Crane (2007) has argued that although wines are aesthetic objects, they do not count as works of art.11 11 

For skeptical views of food as art in the popular press, see Deresiewicz 2012; Poole 2012.

Morality and Aesthetics of Food    665 If Telfer is right, at least some of the food of everyday life is art in the full sense of that term, and the debate about the ethical criticism of art applies in just those cases. If Korsmeyer is right, things might be a bit less clear—​the standard debate focuses on fine art and its near relations, not the decorative, functional, or applied arts. (But it is hard to see why that debate could not be extended to concern the decorative or functional arts.) On the other hand, if the food and drink of everyday life is not art, then the ethical criticism of art debate, as such, is not directly relevant to it. However, even if this is the case, there remains the possibility that something analogous to that debate is relevant to our appreciation of everyday food. Remember, the core of the ethical criticism of art debate is a question concerning the connection between moral and aesthetic value. And it is widely accepted that moral and aesthetic value can be found outside the sphere of art. For example, food shares with art the potential for ethical significance due to its entwinement with human intentions, activity, and impact. So, even for those who do not count food of everyday life as art, there remains the possibility of extending the ethical criticism of art debate to this domain, as long as the food of everyday life possesses aesthetic value. We have already seen that Crane holds that this is the case for wine. In the next section, we explore whether there is good reason for thinking this is the case for food.

The Aesthetic Value of Food Does the food of everyday life possess aesthetic value? Since everyday food may be visually appealing and even beautiful (consider an attractively decorated cake or a piece of nigiri sushi), the answer is obviously yes. A trickier issue has to do with whether the food of everyday life may possess aesthetic value in virtue of its flavors and odors, and it is this question that we will focus on. Answering this question requires disambiguating various senses of aesthetic value and considering nearby concepts. In this section, we consider three ways of answering this question. The upshot is that, no matter how one characterizes aesthetic value, the debate about ethical criticism remains relevant to appreciating food, including the food of everyday life.

Wide Aesthetic Value In his Critique of Judgment, Immanuel Kant initially characterizes the idea of an aesthetic judgment as one that is distinct from a cognitive or “logical” judgment in that it is grounded in something subjective and non-​conceptual; namely, pleasure or displeasure (Kant [1790] 1987, 44). This conception of the aesthetic includes not only judgments of beauty and the sublime but also judgments of what Kant calls “the agreeable,” which express sensuous pleasure and mere liking. Judgments of agreeability make no claim to universality and lack the disinterestedness (i.e., disconnection from the faculty of

666    Shen-Yi Liao and Aaron Meskin desire) that Kant associates with judgments of beauty and the sublime (47–​48, 55–​56). Nevertheless, insofar as sensuous pleasure has value (qua pleasure), it is legitimate to treat such judgments as ascribing a sort of value—​we shall call that value wide aesthetic value. Some philosophers hold that judgments of tastiness and succulence are not full-​ fledged aesthetic judgments because they are merely judgments of agreeability. But this is because they do not have the notion of wide aesthetic value in mind. Clearly, food of everyday life can possess wide aesthetic value: Kant’s own discussion of agreeability refers to judgments about canary wine (55). To call something tasty or succulent, then, is arguably to ascribe to it wide aesthetic value.

Narrow Aesthetic Value However, those who question whether food possesses aesthetic value typically are not thinking of wide aesthetic value.12 Instead, they are thinking of narrow aesthetic value, which roughly corresponds to Kant’s “judgment of taste” (i.e., judgments of beauty and the sublime) and excludes Kant’s judgments of the agreeable. Unlike judgments of agreeability, judgments of taste do, according to Kant, make claim to universality, and they are disinterested (Kant [1790] 1987, 45–​46, 55–​56). These features have often been seen as characteristic of judgments of narrow aesthetic value.13 On Kant’s account, judgments of beauty are disinterested insofar as they are neither based on nor the source of desire. But, then it seems that food cannot possess narrow aesthetic value because nothing seems more connected to desire than the pleasures we take in tasting and smelling delicious food. One response to this worry is to argue that, in certain cases, we may in fact take disinterested pleasure in the tastes and smells of food (Monroe 2007, 142). For example, in trying to “do justice” to the food, we might try to taste it and appreciate it with a focus beyond satisfying our mere desires.14 Another response to this worry is to deny that the aesthetic is essentially linked to disinterestedness, as Kant thought. Contemporary philosophers have offered alternative conceptions of narrow aesthetic value. So, for example, Kendall Walton argues that something possesses aesthetic value when it is appropriate to take aesthetic pleasure in it, where aesthetic pleasure is understood, at least to a first approximation, as “pleasure which has as a component pleasure taken in one’s admiration of something” (2008, 14). Robert Stecker develops an account of aesthetic value rooted in his “minimal conception” of aesthetic experience: “The experience of attending in a discriminating manner to forms, qualities or meaningful features of things, attending to these for their own sake

12  For example, Thomas Aquinas questions specifically whether there can be judgments of beauty with tastes and smells. He would thus be skeptical of the possibility that food, with respect to those modes of perceptual engagement, can possess narrow aesthetic value. For discussion, see McQueen 1993. 13  Roger Scruton is, perhaps, the best-​known contemporary defender of the idea that judgments of beauty and aesthetic value are essentially disinterested. See, e.g., Scruton 2009. 14  We thank Eileen John for this suggestion.

Morality and Aesthetics of Food    667 or for the sake of this very experience” (2006, 4). On these alternative conceptions of narrow aesthetic value, it is difficult to see what could preclude ordinary food from possessing it. Since we may admire the flavors of an everyday meal and take pleasure in our admiration, it is clear that, according to Walton, the food of everyday life can possess narrow aesthetic value. And Stecker holds that “any object that can be attended to in the way picked out by the minimal conception can be . . . a potential source of positive aesthetic value” (2006, 5). Since we can attend to qualities of everyday food items for their own sake or the sake of that experience, nothing keeps the food of everyday life from having aesthetic value.

Aesthetic-​ish Values Even for the strict Kantian who insists that food cannot possess narrow aesthetic value, there is a way in which the core of the ethical criticism of art debate remains relevant to appreciating food. The fallback option is to appeal to values that we might think of as “aesthetic-​ish,” such as culinary or gustatory values, and then use the ethical criticism of art debate as a model. For example, we might develop analogous positions on which the debate between moralists, autonomists, and immoralists becomes a debate about the relationship between moral and gustatory value. However, since we believe that food of everyday life can possess narrow aesthetic value, we believe that this fallback option is not needed.

Aesthetic Value, Normativity, and Expertise There are two related core features of narrow aesthetic value that are worth remarking on. First, narrow aesthetic value possesses normativity: when we say that a painting is beautiful (i.e., aesthetically good), we are doing more than expressing our “mere” individual preferences; we are also inviting our interlocutors to share our judgment. Second, there can be expertise in aesthetic value of a particular domain, which consists in tracking what aesthetically matters to people who are psychologically similar. In this section, we expand on these two core features of narrow aesthetic value (hereinafter simply “aesthetic value”) as it applies to food. The normativity of aesthetic value associated with food is evident in how we talk about food in our daily lives. First, when we talk about a new restaurant we have tried and we say, “the food there is delicious,” we are often not just describing our own experience but also making a recommendation. That is, we are often not just reporting our own preference but also suggesting that our interlocutors ought to share our judgment. Second, our typical explanations go from value to preference, and not the other way

668    Shen-Yi Liao and Aaron Meskin around. It is much more natural to say “I liked this dish because it was delicious” than to say “this dish was delicious because I liked it.” The fact that we tend to try to explain our preferences in terms of aesthetic evaluations suggests that aesthetic value cannot be a matter of individual preferences, but instead something independent that we take to be a constraint on our preferences. Perhaps the apparent normativity exhibited in common discourse is only illusory, though. Skepticism about the reality of value has always lurked in the background of any discussion on aesthetic value, and maybe it is even more salient for food than for art. Although we will not try to conclusively answer the skeptic in this chapter, the literature on meta-​aesthetics (cf. Zangwill 2014) and meta-​ethics offers many possible answers. We will only sketch one such answer here: a naturalist realist account of narrow aesthetic value based on Peter Railton’s (1998) interpretation of Hume ([1757] 1985). We are especially attracted to this account because it emphasizes the role of human psychological commonalities in grounding narrow aesthetic value’s normativity, and it helps to explicate what aesthetic expertise with respect to food might consist in. As Railton summarizes the project: [Hume] is giving an account of the features of human sensibility and the world we inhabit in virtue of which aesthetic value can exist and afford a domain of objective judgment, a domain in which expert opinion is possible. The “joint verdict” of expert opinion is offered by Hume as a solution to the problem of finding a standard of taste, not as a way of saying what constitutes aesthetic value. Delicacy of sentiment, freedom from prejudice, extensive practice, comparative knowledge, and so on are important so that the expert critic can discern matches, that is, can “discer[n]‌ that very degree and kind of approbation or displeasure which each part is naturally fitted to produce.” (1998, 68)

On this account, although individual aesthetic experiences do not constitute aesthetic value, when sufficiently reconstructed, they can offer a standard for aesthetic evaluation.15 The reconstruction is far from trivial, though, since it requires us to have “delicacy of sentiment, freedom from prejudice, extensive practice, comparative knowledge, and so on.” Experts will be better at making the correct aesthetic discernments than ordinary folk, in virtue of possessing these features to a higher degree, but we can also gain some of these features as a community by pooling together individual aesthetic experiences across cultures and times. There is a sense in which aesthetic value is “subjective”: its standards are dependent on subjects like us—​creatures who share perceptual, sentimental, and cognitive infrastructures of human psychology. Collectively speaking, individual preferences matter—​insofar as they together reflect the infrastructures of human psychology. 15  The distinction is subtle, so let us borrow Railton’s (1998, 69) example to clarify it. Suppose there is a watch that is perfectly precise. The time as told by the watch still would not constitute real time. However, the watch does serve as a true standard of time: there is a regularity between the watch’s time and real time that we can identify a posteriori.

Morality and Aesthetics of Food    669 However, in a much more important sense, this form of value is not “subjective”: it cannot be identified with any particular individual’s preference. Instead, its standards are determined from the impartial aggregation of all aesthetic experiences across cultures and times, such that the “noise” from prejudice and other distorting factors cancels out, and the “signal” reflecting our perceptual, sentimental, and cognitive psychology remains.16 On this account, expertise in aesthetic value consists in a capacity to respond in ways that track regularities in our shared responses. Features like “delicacy of sentiment, freedom from prejudice, extensive practice, comparative knowledge, and so on” are all useful for tracking what aesthetically matters to us. As Railton says: True judges can exist because there is a subject matter with respect to which they can develop expertise, authority, and objectivity. This subject matter is afforded by the underlying sensory and cognitive structures that we share with other humans and, in particular, with such judges. If refinement on their part led to a fundamental alteration in their underlying sensory and cognitive structures, they might be subtle judges, but their “joint verdict” would no longer represent expertise about our taste, or human taste. We differ from the experts not so much in what matches best and most durably the potentials of our underlying structures as in how well we can detect these matches. As a result, we accord greater authority to those with genuinely acute and experienced palates, and greater authority to ourselves as our palates become more acute and experienced. (1998, 70)

In other words, expertise in aesthetic value is not something that one is born with, but something that one can acquire through attention and experience. In fact, on this account, we structure our social practices in order to acquire expertise: that is why we have so many ways of exchanging aesthetic evaluations. Railton gives a prescient summary of contemporary foodie culture, even though he did not obviously have food in mind: We seek not only to have good taste, but to be taken as having good taste and to identify other possessors of good taste. We are relentless producers and consumers of opinions, advice, and guides. Our conversation often turns to the exchange of judgments, and we are eager to share our enthusiasms and to find confirmation of our judgments in the opinions or experiences of others. (1998, 71)

Nowadays, services such as TripAdvisor, Yelp, and Foursquare all have users who relentlessly review dining spots and vote on each other’s reviews, as well as other users who use those reviews to decide on their next meal. We produce and consume these reviews to be taken as having good taste and to identify other possessors of good taste. Indeed, even those 16  Hume would have liked the social scientific work on wisdom of crowds, which show that under the right conditions, crowds can guide us to the truth much better than any individual, including individual experts. For an accessible introduction to the wisdom of crowds, see Surowiecki 2004.

670    Shen-Yi Liao and Aaron Meskin foodies who have not read Hume appear to have taken in his insight: we typically do not rely on any single review, but the “joint verdicts” of different reviews. At the theoretical level, Railton’s naturalist realist account makes sense of why aesthetic experiences collectively matter to aesthetic value, and also why aesthetic value is more than just individual preference. At the practical level, this account also makes sense of our various social practices regarding aesthetic value of food, and what expertise in this domain consists in. Nevertheless, it is only fair for us to remind readers of a key assumption in this account: the existence of psychological similarities in the relevant population. Whether we all largely share the same perceptual, sentimental, and cognitive psychology when it comes to aesthetic evaluations of food is an open question, and an empirical one. Only further research into the psychology of taste can answer that.17

Interaction between Morality and Aesthetics of Food We are finally ready to return to the interaction between morality and aesthetics of food. Our reference point in this section will be Korsmeyer (2012), which is the only other philosophical discussion of this interaction that we know of. We will build on some of the frameworks that Korsmeyer provides. But we will also argue against the food moralist position that Korsmeyer endorses. Immediately, discussing the interaction between morality and aesthetics of food faces a difficult question: Where is the morality in food? With artworks, philosophers typically appeal to the moral perspective that the artwork endorses or the moral perspective that the artwork engenders in making their moral assessments about the works. For example, an art moralist might say that The Birth of a Nation (1915), a film that glorifies White Supremacy, is aesthetically worse for its endorsement of racist ideology or for its effects on viewers’ racial attitudes. However, on the face of it, food—​and certainly food of everyday life—​does not typically endorse any moral perspective or engender any moral attitudes.18 Korsmeyer proposes locating the moral value of food in its causal history—​explicitly borrowing from a strand of art moralism that is called “means moralism,” which says that the fact that a work is produced in a morally dubious manner can count as a moral defect, and 17  Examples of such research into the psychology of taste can be found in Monell Chemical Senses Center and in psychologist Charles Spence’s Crossmodal Perception Laboratory at Oxford. 18  Morrissey might disagree. As the slogan “animals are friends not food” demonstrates, calling something food is arguably a moral act in itself. That is, arguably the presentation of something as food constitutes an endorsement of a moral perspective and engenders moral attitudes. For example, the presentation of animals as food seems to constitute an endorsement of a moral perspective that permits killing animals for human consumption and seems to engender moral attitudes about the permissibility of such killings. For a discussion on the moral implications of calling something food, see Haslanger 2011, 192; Plakias 2016.

Morality and Aesthetics of Food    671 therefore also an aesthetic defect, of the work.19 Korsmeyer (2012, 96) thinks linking a work’s causal history with its moral status in this way is especially appropriate: “means moralism seems especially apt for the assessment of foods and their enjoyments because cultivating tastes frequently requires noticing flavors that are the result of the way they were produced.” That is, a work’s causal history can become part of a work proper when it affects our perception or perceptual experience of the work. In discussing the interaction between morality and aesthetics of food, Korsmeyer mainly focuses on causal history that is directly accessible via narrow sensory perception.20 (We will say more about the idea of directly perceiving causal history when we discuss her notion of trace.) However, she also briefly considers causal history that enters into our broad perceptual experience, which can contain cognitive and affective components in addition to sense data.21 We will consider cases of both types. According to Korsmeyer, a trace is a causal historical quality that is directly perceptible via our senses. Importantly, not all causal histories are manifested via traces, but only some are. Korsmeyer (2012, 95–​96) gives the following contrasting examples: on the one hand, “one cannot cultivate a taste for foie gras without cultivating a taste for fatty liver of a force-​fed goose”; on the other hand, “tuna caught in nets that also kill dolphins are harvested in ways that use unfortunate means, but this is not evident in the flavor of the tuna.” According to Korsmeyer, while there is moral defect in the causal history in both cases, that causal history is only perceptible in the foie gras case. In other words, while the force-​feeding left a trace in the foie gras, the drift netting and trawling did not leave a trace in the tuna. So, it is only the moral defectiveness of foie gras production that can directly affect our narrow sensory perception.22 19  We can distinguish three aspects of a work in which moral qualities may be located: causal history, content, and causal influence (for a discussion on the three corresponding kinds of moral criticisms of pornography, see Liao and Protasi 2013). In this section, we are following Korsmeyer in focusing on the causal history of food and arguing against her version of food moralism on her own terms. However, this focus on the causal history of food does generate a disanalogy between the ethical criticism of food debate, as we have characterized it in this chapter, and the ethical criticism of art debate, as it is standardly characterized. In the art debate, philosophers typically focus more on moral qualities of a work’s content, such as the moral perspective it endorses, and on moral qualities of a work’s causal influence, such as the moral perspective it engenders. In note 18, we outline possible ways of locating moral qualities in the content and causal influence of food, and we believe it is possible that analogous positions can be developed in the ethical criticism of food debate that focuses on those kinds of moral qualities, using similar examples. However, we do not investigate this possibility further in this chapter. 20  Korsmeyer acknowledges that “traces of means in flavors are by no means the only indication of moral aspects of eating” but also says that it is with traces that “the case for ethical gourmandism is most strongly rooted” (2012, 96). 21  As Korsmeyer wonders in the coda of her essay, “Suppose human flesh tastes delectable. Is it okay to cultivate a taste for faux human being? Isn’t there something enduringly terrible about having a taste for human flesh, even if that taste is to be satisfied by means of a substitute?” (100). 22  Foie gras may not have been the best example. According to Barber (2014), there is now a farmer in Spain, Eduardo Sousa, who produces foie gras without force-​feeding, and that this foie gras tastes—​ allegedly—​as good as, if not better than, foie gras produced with force-​feeding. (It is not so clear from Barber’s account that this foie gras does taste as fatty, however.) Regardless, Korsmeyer can make the same point with a number of other real-​world cases. For example, it is well known that stress prior to and during slaughter of animals negatively affects perceived meat quality (Grandin 1980). In other words, a violent slaughter of an animal can leave a trace in the resulting meat.

672    Shen-Yi Liao and Aaron Meskin The exact relationship between a trace and its morality and aesthetics is unclear.23 Sometimes, Korsmeyer (2012, 97) speaks as if the trace itself is at once perceptual, moral, and aesthetic: “we can take cruelty of means of production as a fairly clear example of how aesthetic taste properties merge with moral taste properties.” Or perhaps, by saying so, she means that a trace is a perceptual quality on which aesthetic and moral qualities simultaneously depend on. Other times, it seems that a trace is a perceptual and aesthetic quality that in some sense contains a distinct moral quality: “we have moral properties infused in the taste properties of food” (2012, 96). For our aim of arguing against Korsmeyer, this lack of clarity with the notion is not especially problematic, given the variety of characterizations available—​from the ethical criticism of art literature—​for the relevant connection between moral and aesthetic value. Nevertheless, we want to flag this lack of clarity because it can complicate how we think about the parallels between the interaction of morality and aesthetics of food and of art. Setting those details aside, it is clear that the notion of trace plays an important role in Korsmeyer’s argument for (moderate) food moralism—​which says that a food’s moral value is directly connected to its aesthetic value—​and against food autonomism—​which says that a food’s moral value is unconnected to its aesthetic value. Food autonomism is false, Korsmeyer argues, because there can be qualities of food—​namely, the traces—​ that make for both moral and aesthetic qualities. So, depending on the exact nature of a trace, the moral and aesthetic qualities are either connected because they are one and the same, or connected via the perceptual quality they simultaneously depend on. She summarizes her conclusion as follows: “if certain kinds of meal preparation are morally dubious, and if the object and its preparation impart a trace on flavor, then this quality is simultaneously aesthetic and moral” (Korsmeyer 2012: 97). We entirely agree with Korsmeyer on this conditional conclusion. However, we disagree with Korsmeyer that food moralism is the only alternative to food autonomism. To see that acceptance of the consequent of Korsmeyer’s conditional conclusion does not imply the acceptance of food moralism, we must return to the defining thesis of moralism—​the valence constraint. Remember that the valence constraint says a feature’s effect on the work’s moral value must have the same valence as its effect on the work’s aesthetic value. In contrast, the consequent in Korsmeyer’s conditional conclusion only says that there can be qualities of food that make for both moral and aesthetic qualities; it does not say that the moral and aesthetic qualities must have the same valence. We think the most plausible view with respect to the interaction between morality and aesthetics of food is one that Korsmeyer overlooks. We endorse food immoralism, which denies the valence constraint. Since different art immoralists spell out the non-​accidental connection between moral value and aesthetic value differently, we will consider two cases in the food domain that plausibly demonstrate different connections between moral and 23  We thank Anne Barnhill, Mark Budolfson, Tyler Doggett, Andy Egan, Simon Fokt, and Eileen John for pressing us to clarify what Korsmeyer means by “trace.” Indeed, the two authors of this chapter disagree about the best interpretation of Korsmeyer’s notion.

Morality and Aesthetics of Food    673 aesthetic value. The first case, which constitutes our primary response to Korsmeyer, specifically shows that a trace can be morally defective but aesthetically virtuous. In this case, if one took away the moral defect by eliminating the trace, then one would thereby take away the aesthetic virtue too (compare: Jacobson’s variant of art immoralism). The second case shows a different kind of connection that can take place in broader perceptual experience, where it is precisely in virtue of the immorality that the food is aesthetically better (compare: Eaton’s variant of art immoralism). Our first case for food immoralism concerns the practice of ikizukuri, where a skilled chef cuts off parts of a live fish and re-​plates them as sashimi slices on the fish and serves them to the customer immediately, sometimes with the fish still showing some lingering signs of life. By cutting up fish that is still alive, the chef causes even more pain to the sentient creature than typical seafood preparation practices. As such, we think ikizukuri sashimi is morally defective. Nevertheless, by cutting up fish that is still alive, the chef is also able to serve sashimi that is as fresh as possible. As such, we think ikizukuri sashimi is aesthetically virtuous because freshness is a highly valued aesthetic feature of sashimi in general. The connection between the moral defect and aesthetic virtue of ikizukuri sashimi is non-​accidental; one could not have one without having the other. The same causal historical quality associated with ikizukuri, cutting up fish that is still alive, give rise to a trace in the sashimi that makes for both a moral defect and an aesthetic virtue. No doubt some readers are already recoiling at the thought of this practice and having a hard time imagining tasting the result as delicious. We have three comments in response. First, we want to urge these readers to recall the discussion of experts and normative values in the previous section. In aesthetics, as is the case with other normative domains, there should be a prima facie deferral to experts, where expert opinions are available.24 Many real world gourmands seek out and enjoy experiences of eating ikizukuri sashimi and its kin.25 Remember that one feature that is conducive to expertise is freedom from prejudice. Perhaps the fact that many Western gourmands seek out and enjoy experiences of eating ikizukuri sashimi and its kin is a sign that they are better able to overcome cultural prejudices in their aesthetic evaluation than are ordinary folk. At least, one should question whether one’s initial repulsion is a product of the kind of prejudice that Hume warned us against. 24 

We do want to also acknowledge that it is notoriously tricky to appeal to expertise in the context of the interaction between morality and aesthetics. It is difficult to say anything definitive and substantive without begging the very central question of the debate. For example, one cannot require aesthetic expertise to include moral sensitivity without presupposing the falsity of autonomism. Indeed, Jacobson (2005) has argued that Carroll (2000) begs the question in exactly this way when he invokes an idealized audience in arguing for art moralism. We make no assumptions about the moral sensitivity of real-​world gourmands. 25  Similar practices can be found in other East Asian cuisines. For example, Korean cuisine has sannakji, which is the practice of serving live octopus, and Chinese cuisine has yin–​yang shrimp, where only the body is flash fried and the head remains uncooked.

674    Shen-Yi Liao and Aaron Meskin Second, most people actually already acknowledge the central aesthetic virtue of ikizukuri sashimi: freshness.26 Specifically, for sashimi, freshness is perhaps the most salient quality in taste besides the fish source. So, in a way, it is not at all surprising that serving sashimi as freshly as possible—​by cutting it off from a live fish—​should result in an aesthetically virtuous product. The preference for freshness, especially in such a highly perishable food category, seems exactly the kind of thing that would be basic in human psychological infrastructures. The gourmands who recommend ikizukuri sashimi, then, can be said to be Humean experts who are able to track what aesthetically matters to us, given our psychological infrastructures. Finally, it is worth emphasizing that saying ikizukuri sashimi is delicious is absolutely not the same as saying eating it or selling it is ethically or legally permissible. Indeed, the whole point of this case being a data point in favor of food immoralism is that the practice of ikizukuri is, in fact, morally defective. Whether a morally defective practice should be outlawed is a separate and difficult question. Answering the question requires judging how moral value ought to be weighed against other human values, such as aesthetic value, in structuring our social practices. It is perfectly reasonable, and perfectly consistent with food immoralism, for someone who thinks moral value is the sole value relevant to law to believe that, no matter how delicious the sashimi is, ikizukuri should be outlawed. Our second case for food immoralism concerns the practice of zoophagy, where gourmands seek out exotic animals—​sometimes, that means animals that belong to endangered species—​to consume as food. It is easily imaginable that such gourmands would still seek out endangered species to eat even if there were non-​endangered species that can provide the same exact narrow sensory perception. Presumably, they would do so because it is the knowledge that the meat comes from an animal that belongs to an endangered species that heightens aesthetically their broad perceptual experience. The novelty of the experience is inextricably bound to the knowledge of the animal’s endangered status. So, according to such gourmands, it is precisely in virtue of the known immoral causal history that the food is aesthetically better. Of course, the food may still be aesthetically not good, all things considered, because connections between moral and aesthetic value are only pro tanto and because there can be many different pro tanto connections between moral and aesthetic value with respect to the same food.27 26 

We are thinking of freshness as an aesthetic quality in itself. However, our argument is compatible with thinking of freshness as shorthand for a cluster of more basic aesthetic qualities. We thank Eileen John for raising this worry and suggesting this response. 27  This clarification is especially salient with the case of zoophagy. Although we focus on the moral qualities located in the causal history of food and their pro tanto connections to aesthetic qualities, we acknowledge (in note 18) that there can also be moral qualities located in the content and causal influence of food. And these moral qualities may have distinct pro tanto connections with aesthetic qualities. Hence, in the case of zoophagy, the expressive moral value in presenting and eating endangered species as food may also make it aesthetically worse through distinct pro tanto connections between moral and aesthetic value.

Morality and Aesthetics of Food    675 With these two cases as our paradigms, it is not difficult to find other data points in favor of food immoralism. Indeed, we believe that Korsmeyer inadvertently gives another case when she quotes the renowned gourmand (and occasional novelist) Alexandre Dumas:28 In Toulouse they have a special way of fattening ortolans which is better than anywhere else; when they want to eat them, they asphyxiate them by immersing their heads in a very strong vinegar, a violent death which has a beneficial effect on the flesh. (2012, 98)

Dumas is acknowledging that this way of eating ortolans is morally defective—​the asphyxiation results in an unnecessarily violent death. (Nowadays, ortolans are also considered endangered in France.) Indeed, it is so morally defective that diners are said to cover themselves up while eating the ortolans in order to shield themselves from the eyes of God. Yet, on our reading, Dumas is also saying that the same causal historical quality—​the violent asphyxiation—​leaves a trace in such ortolans (“beneficial effect on the flesh”) that makes them aesthetically more virtuous (“better than anywhere else”) than ortolans prepared without the violent asphyxiation.29 We think cases like ikizukuri, zoophagy, and ortolans suggest that the valence constraint is false in the food domain. As such, we should be food immoralists, who say that food can exhibit different types of connections between moral value and aesthetic value, including ones that invert the valence. We leave the application of this conclusion to the case of meat as an exercise to our readers.

Further Philosophical Implications In this chapter, we have outlined the shape of a debate on the interaction between morality and aesthetics of food, and argued for an overlooked position in this debate—​food immoralism. We close by briefly suggesting two further philosophical implications of our discussion. First, for many people, food autonomism is likely to be the default position. Many other chapters in this handbook discuss in detail various moral considerations that are relevant to food. If we (and Korsmeyer) are correct in our rejection of food autonomism, then one surprising consequence is that the various moral considerations discussed in this handbook can also turn out to be highly relevant to aesthetic considerations. So 28  We believe that further examples can be found in Korsmeyer (2002), which discusses how cuisine can sometimes transform the disgusting into the delicious. 29  However, given what we now know about the effect of violent slaughter on meat quality (see note 22), it is also plausible that the ortolan case is—​contrary to Dumas’s own characterization—​more like the zoophagy case than the ikizukuri case. That is, it is plausible that it is really the knowledge of the immoral causal history that heightened aesthetically Dumas’s broader perceptual experience.

676    Shen-Yi Liao and Aaron Meskin we need to think further about how each of those moral considerations interacts with aesthetic value. Second, considerations about the interaction between morality and aesthetics of food can guide us to new considerations regarding the interaction between morality and aesthetics of art. As we have argued, the food debate is either an extension of or analogous to the art debate. As such, the position that one accepts in the food debate at least provides a pro tanto reason in favor of the analogous position in the art debate.30 This pro tanto reason can be overridden or undercut, of course, but doing so requires further philosophical discussion on, say, why the art domain is distinct from the food domain in terms of basic interactions between human values.31

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chapter 30

Fo od Ch oi c e s and Moral C ha rac t e r Kate Nolfi

Introduction Ordinary moral practice is rife with evaluations of individuals’ moral worth. We judge some people to be morally good, praiseworthy, admirable, or virtuous. Others we judge to be morally bankrupt, wicked, or vicious. Sometimes our evaluations are local (e.g., Beatrice might be courageous and committed in her support of efforts to stop fracking in her state, but not in her support of efforts to enact and sustain anti-​racist and anti-​ sexist policies at her office). Other times our evaluations are more global (e.g., Cadence is a generous person who is always willing to lend a helping hand, but Denise is out for herself). Regardless, such evaluations measure an individual’s moral worth qua moral agent. And to evaluate an individual’s moral worth qua moral agent is just to evaluate the quality of what ordinary moral practice terms the individual’s moral character. We make assessments of an agent’s moral character at least in part by examining the moral worth of the agent’s particular actions and choices. And we treat what and how an agent chooses or acts as exposing her moral worth by illuminating her moral character. This is why we find reasoning from the fact that Agnes volunteers at a soup kitchen once a week to the conclusion that she is compassionate, or from the fact that she speaks out when she discovers that her boss is skimming to the conclusion that she is courageous and principled, both natural and intuitively compelling, even if defeasible. Ordinary moral practice, then, treats an agent’s actions as (at least typically) revelatory: an agent’s actions ordinarily put her moral character on display. Of course, ordinary moral practice recognizes that an agent’s actions and choices can be, and sometimes are, divorced from her moral character. The compassionate agent, for example, may fail to act compassionately when she is severely sleep-​deprived or extremely anxious. And in such cases, we think that the moral quality of the agent’s action is of little use in helping us to uncover the agent’s true moral worth. But we treat

Food Choices and Moral Character    681 these sorts of cases as exceptions to the rule, as departures from the paradigm. These are cases where the paradigmatic connection linking an agent’s actions to her character is compromised or completely severed. In paradigmatic cases, where an agent’s actions manifest her moral character, the agent’s actions thereby expose the moral quality of the agent’s character (and so her moral worth qua moral agent). Insofar as we take ordinary moral practice as a guide to theorizing, all this suggests we have prima facie reason to accept that there is an important link between an agent’s individual actions and choices, on the one hand, and her moral character, on the other. And, if this is right, then evaluating the quality of an agent’s moral character (and so evaluating her moral worth) requires understanding the nature of the complex connection between individual actions and choices and moral character. Accordingly, we should expect a complete account of moral character to make clear (i) which of an agent’s actions and choices are importantly linked to her moral character, and (ii) how these actions and choices manifest or help to determine the moral quality of her moral character. Developing an account of our ordinary notion of moral character is a significant philosophical project, and one that I cannot hope to complete here.1 My ambition is far more conservative: I aim to take a small step in the direction of developing such an account. More precisely, I aim to show here that fully understanding the nature of our moral characters requires recognizing and understanding the connection between a particular class of actions and choices, on the one hand, and moral character, on the other—​a connection that is often ignored or underemphasized. My contention is that routine actions and choices that are largely dissociated from—​and are performed or settled without appeal to—​moral reflection and deliberation manifest an important, even if often overlooked, dimension of an agent’s moral character. Many of the choices that we make and the actions that we perform in the course of eating (i.e., our food-​and diet-​related choices and actions) are paradigmatic exemplars of the kinds of choices and actions that I argue are tied to this dimension of our moral characters. Thus, I suggest that our food-​and diet-​related choices and actions constitute especially fruitful ground for philosophers interested in understanding the nature of our moral characters to explore, and I begin to explore this ground. I investigate how understanding the way in which morally unreflective food choices and eating behaviors manifest this segment of our moral characters helps us get a better grip on what a person’s food-​and diet-​related choices and actions tell us about whether and to what extent the person is praiseworthy or admirable, qua moral agent.

1 

I follow here the dominant line in contemporary virtue ethics by accepting that one’s moral character is constituted, at least in part, by multi-​track dispositions to respond (through choice, action, emotion, thought, deliberation, etc.) to certain features of one’s circumstances or situation in certain ways (see, e.g., Swanton 2003). For ease of expression, I sometimes speak here as if presupposing an account of moral character according to which character traits are relatively global (e.g., Annas 2011; Hursthouse 1999; Swanton 2003). However, I believe that the main points I make can be reformulated so as to fit with an account of moral character according to which character traits are local (e.g., Doris 2002).

682   Kate Nolfi

Moral Virtues and Our Food Practice The idea that our food-​and diet-​related choices reflect our values, as well as the closely related thought that what, when, where, and how we (as individuals but also as a society) eat reveals our moral virtue or vice, figures prominently in philosophical literature and in popular discourse. And, of course, the notion that our food practices are tied to the moral quality of our characters (i.e., to our moral worth) also finds voice in different ways in many of the canonical texts of the world’s major religions.2 As it happens, however, most philosophical discussions taking up the question of what, if anything, our food-​and diet-​ related choices and actions might reveal about our moral characters have focused on the relationship between those choices and specific moral virtues. Accordingly, the questions that dominate these discussions are questions about what is involved in eating compassionately, open-​mindedly, temperately, and so on. Nathan Nobis, for example, argues that cultivating the virtues of compassion and a commitment to combating injustice requires adopting a vegetarian diet.3 Elizabeth Telfer makes the case that hospitality constitutes an important moral virtue, one that, at least paradigmatically, involves appropriately taking responsibility for satisfying another’s need for food and drink.4 And Matthew Brown argues that picky eating is incompatible with two less-​discussed moral virtues: an important kind of open-​mindedness and an appropriate sensitivity to one’s own fallibility.5 Inspired by Wendell Berry’s writing, Paul Thompson argues that agrarian virtues (e.g., self-​reliance and stewardship) are important moral virtues, and that a distinctively agrarian cluster of traits constitute the kind of moral ideal to which we all ought to aspire.6 Work on the relationship between an individual’s food practice and the virtue of temperance has particularly deep historical roots. According to Aristotle, the temperate agent is one who desires, acts, and feels appropriately within the sphere of the tactile pleasures (paradigmatic of which are the pleasures of food and drink). Manifesting temperance with respect to the pleasures of food involves both desiring and enjoying the right foods on the right occasions and to the right degree, where what foods, occasions, and degrees are right is determined by what foods, occasions for consumption, and degrees of desire and enjoyment in consumption are not unhealthy, deconditioning, unaffordable, or ignoble.7 The influence of Aristotle’s account of temperance on subsequent discussions of the virtue is palpable. Working within a broadly Aristotelian framework, Aquinas suggests a slightly different account of the virtue of temperance. For Aquinas, temperance is a habit or disposition that perfects what he terms our 2 

Think, for example, of the laws of kashrut (i.e., of Kosher food practice) in the Torah or of the role of fasting and abstinence during Lent in the Roman Catholic tradition. 3 Nobis 2002. 4 Telfer 1996. 5 Brown 2007. 6  Thompson 2010. See also Berry 2001. 7  See, e.g., Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics III. 10‒11. For discussion, see Young 1988 or Curzer 1997.

Food Choices and Moral Character    683 concupiscible appetite—​the appetite associated with eating, drinking, and sex—​by bringing it under reason’s control. So, the temperate agent’s desires for foods are not merely in line with, but determined by, her reasoned judgments regarding what foods are good.8 More recently, Elizabeth Telfer defends a Neo-​Aristotelian account of temperance according to which temperance is a virtue of moderation concerning the pleasures of eating and drinking. Telfer argues that an agent falls short of temperance if her desires for the pleasures of food and drink cause her to act in ways that conflict with her own standards for appropriate behavior, or if her standards for appropriate behavior attach too much or too little importance to these pleasures.9

Moral Deliberation, Moral Reflection, and Character I want to take up a slightly different set of questions about what, if anything, our food-​ and diet-​related choices and actions reveal about our moral characters. What follows is not an inquiry into the relationship between food-​and diet-​related choices and actions and any particular moral virtue, but rather an attempt to dissolve an apparent tension between the idea that our food-​and diet-​related choices manifest (some part of) our moral virtue or vice and a dominant picture of the relationship between an agent’s choices or actions and her moral character. My suggestion is that focusing on the nature of many of our food-​and diet-​related choices and actions, while taking seriously the idea that these choices and actions can, and often do, manifest our moral characters, illuminates an alternative, and especially attractive, picture of the relationship between action, choice, and character. The Aristotelian framework against the backdrop of which a great deal of the philosophical work on the relationship between food-​and diet-​related choices and actions and specific moral virtues is situated suggests an initially attractive and historically popular picture of the relationship between action, choice, and moral character. On this picture (call it an intellectualist picture), moral deliberation and moral reflection—​ paradigmatically:  explicit, conscious reflection and deliberation that is dominated by a kind of attentiveness to moral considerations—​constitute the mechanisms via which our moral characters are directly efficacious in shaping our actions and choices.10 Accordingly, the intellectualist maintains that the actions and choices that best illuminate or expose our moral characters are those of our actions and choices that are the product 8 

See Aquinas 1948. For discussion, see Butera 2006 or Floyd 2011. See Telfer 1990, 1996. 10  Julia Driver (2001) supplies an admirably careful reconstruction of the intellectualist’s way of thinking. In addition to the Neo-​Aristotelian tradition in virtue ethics, elements of this intellectualist picture run through, for example, Christine Korsgaard’s work (see Korsgaard 1996). Michael Smith (1994) also seems, at least at certain moments, to be committed to a version of the intellectualist picture. 9 

684   Kate Nolfi of conscious and careful moral reflection and deliberation. The good case (i.e., the case where an agent’s action or choice is most fully attributable to, and so most revelatory of, her moral character) is the case in which the agent in relatively ideal conditions (e.g., she is not sleep-​deprived, drunk, subject to cohesive pressures, etc.) deliberates in an endeavor to discover what morality requires of her in her present circumstances, reaches a conclusion, and then, as a result of her deliberation, acts in the way that she concludes she ought, morally speaking, to act. These are the cases in which the efficacy of the agent’s moral character with respect to action and choice is unobstructed and without impediment. And for this reason, looking at the way in which an agent acts or chooses in such cases gives us the clearest, most transparent picture of the quality of an agent’s character. Of course, one may engage in moral deliberation, arrive at the conclusion that one is morally obligated to Φ, and yet fail to Φ (e.g., because one is psychologically paralyzed by the perceived difficulty or unpleasantness of Φ-​ing). We are sometimes weak-​willed, incontinent, or overcome. But, if we adopt this intellectualist picture, then these are not the only kinds of cases in which it seems that the relationship between our actions and choices and our characters is somehow less-​than-​ideal; where it seems that our characters are not wholly responsible for how we act and choose, and so that our actions and choices fail to directly and straightforwardly manifest our moral characters. In particular, there are cases where external pressures (e.g., coercion, social pressures, time constraints, cognitive or emotional load induced by stress, sleep deprivation, etc.) can impede the manifestation of our moral characters by inducing a kind of blindness or inattention to the moral dimensions of a particular action and choice. External pressures can make it difficult for us to (i) notice or focus on the morally significant features of our circumstances or (ii) recognize or fully appreciate the moral import of these features in deliberation. And, when this occurs, then the intellectualist maintains that our actions less-​than-​perfectly manifest our moral characters. If I am late for a job interview, running from the subway in the rain without an umbrella, and anxious that I may appear disorganized and disheveled when I arrive for the interview, then I might simply fail to notice an intern struggling to maneuver a large package up the steps and through the building’s front door or I might fail to register the intern’s need for assistance and my ability to help. Plausibly, this explains why I let the door slam behind me just as the intern approaches the threshold with her unwieldy package. Of course, had I been in less of a hurry and had my thoughts not been so thoroughly consumed by my own situationally-​induced anxiety, I would certainly have offered to hold the door for the few extra seconds it would have taken the intern to pass through. But my present circumstances effectively render invisible (to me) the intern’s need for assistance.11 In one way or another, I fail to recognize the moral import of my behavior here, and I am oblivious to the fact that the question of how I ought to act now, as I make my way into the building, has this moral dimension. 11  I might fail to register the intern’s presence at all. Or I might register the intern’s presence and fail to recognize the difficulty of her circumstances and so her need for assistance. Or I might recognize the intern’s need, but fail to appreciate that I am in a position to help the intern at virtually no personal cost.

Food Choices and Moral Character    685 Crucially, for the intellectualist, my action here is not, or at least not fully, the product of moral reflection and deliberation. And the reason is that external pressures have effectively severed the connection between my moral deliberation and my action. My reasoning about how to proceed in the circumstances I face (to the extent that I reason at all or to the extent that my reasoning is efficacious) will be characteristically non-​ moral: it will not appeal to moral principles, it will not be framed in moral terms, and it will not be dominated by my concern (either tacit and de re or explicit and de dicto) to do the morally right thing.12 Thus, the intellectualist takes the lesson of such cases to be that external pressures can impede the manifestation of moral character in action and choice by causing us to dismiss, fail to notice, or fail to recognize our actions and choices as having moral dimensions. Put differently, external pressures can diminish or dissolve our inclination to treat questions about how to act and what to choose in the circumstances with which we are faced as substantively morally loaded. The intellectualist concludes that the agent’s action or choice in these sorts of cases tells us a great deal more about the way in which external pressures operate on the agent than about the moral quality of the agent’s moral character. At best, then, the intellectualist maintains that an action or choice in this sort of case will reveal a partially obscured, incomplete, or distorted view of the agent’s moral character. At worst, the action or choice reveals nothing at all about the agent’s moral character. The intellectualist will say that my failure to hold the door open for the intern with the unwieldy package is attributable to the particulars of my circumstances (e.g., that I am running late for a job interview, that it is raining, that I need to “look the part” if I am to secure the position), and so not—​or at least not sufficiently—​to my moral character. And for this reason, my action here offers little, no, or misleading evidence regarding the nature of my moral character. It is a poor source of information regarding my moral worth. Rather, my present behavior is a kind of fluke—​an aberration—​that can and should be explained by the peculiarity of my circumstances and so does not bear significantly on the question of whether I am a morally admirable or praiseworthy agent.

Morally Unreflective Character If the intellectualist picture is right, then our moral characters must be most transparently on display when action and choice are the products of moral deliberation. Our actions and choices most clearly illuminate the nature of our moral characters

12  This idea can be helpfully articulated by appeal to distinction between picking-​situations and choosing-​situations as described by Sidney Morgenbesser and Edna Ullmann-​Margalit (1977). In the relevant sorts of cases, the agent (perhaps without realizing it) treats her situation as a moral-​picking situation, rather than a moral-​choosing situation. The agent comes to act under the (perhaps wholly unconscious, tacit, or implicit) assumption that there is no significant moral difference between the live options for choice or action open to her in the circumstances with which she is faced.

686   Kate Nolfi when the moral dimensions of how we act are at the center of our consciousness and figure prominently in our thinking about what to do or choose. Those of our actions and choices that are the direct products of conscious, explicit, moral reasoning most clearly reveal our true moral characters. At least sometimes, however, our ordinary moral practice stands in tension with this line of thought. Often, we do not hesitate to regard actions that are not the product of moral reflection and deliberation as manifesting an agent’s moral character. And we evaluate that agent’s moral worth accordingly.13 Imagine Shonna shovels snow off the sidewalk in front of her home in order to maintain a clear path for pedestrians through the winter. Shonna certainly need not, and, we can imagine, does not, treat the question of whether to shovel the sidewalk in front of her home as particularly morally significant. Her deliberation or reasoning about whether and when to shovel, to the extent that she deliberates at all about such matters, does not take on an explicitly moral cast. In fact, we can imagine that, to the extent that Shonna’s decision and her subsequent actions to keep the sidewalk shoveled are products of a genuinely reflective or deliberative process, the considerations that figure prominently in the Shonna’s deliberation are straightforwardly non-​moral in character (Do I have time now to do the job? Is there enough snow accumulation to make shoveling necessary?). Perhaps Shonna’s shoveling is, in large part, simply a matter of habit. And perhaps this habit is one that Shonna made no conscious effort to cultivate, but rather acquired passively (via a kind of cultural osmosis, as it were) from the social and cultural context in which she finds herself embedded. Alternatively, perhaps Shonna deliberated about whether to adopt a policy of shoveling whenever it snows some years ago. But in the time since, Shonna has not bothered to reflect on the moral merits of having such a policy. In fact, if she were to turn her attention to the question now, she would likely be unable to remember precisely why she decided to adopt the policy in the first place. If pressed now to say why she makes such an effort to keep the sidewalk clear through the winter, and so to both explain and justify her habitual, largely morally unreflective behavior here, Shonna might respond by citing the fact that everyone in her neighborhood shovels. We can imagine her saying “Well, that’s just how we do things around here.” Alternatively, she might suggest that shoveling is simply one of the chores associated with homeownership—​it is like mowing the lawn or repainting the house when the old paint starts to chip. Or perhaps she would just say that she likes the way her home looks in the winter when the sidewalk out front has been shoveled. The fact that having the sidewalk cleared makes it far less treacherous for pedestrians to make their way along the street simply does not enter into Shonna’s explicit thinking about 13 

Julia Driver (2001) and Nomy Arpaly (2003) have both done a great deal to expose ways in which our ordinary moral practice stands in tension with the intellectualist picture. My strategy here—​to plead that moral psychology ought to pay attention to heretofore ignored or under-​discussed kinds of cases—​is especially inspired by and indebted to Arpaly’s work. Arpaly’s focus, however, is not on the particular sorts of cases that occupy my attention.

Food Choices and Moral Character    687 the matter.14 Shonna does not treat this moral consideration as a reason on the basis of which she decides to keep the sidewalk cleared through the winter, and it does not figure in Shonna’s own understanding of why she heads out with a shovel after each new snowfall.15 So described, Shonna’s shoveling in the present moment constitutes a paradigmatic a case of what I will term morally unreflective and non-​deliberative action. It is a case of action performed on moral auto-​pilot; a case in which the agent does not actively deploy her moral faculties in reflection or deliberation in the course of determining how to proceed now, given her present circumstances.16 In spite of the morally unreflective and non-​deliberative nature of Shonna’s behavior, we do, at least in certain moods, find it natural to think that Shonna’s shoveling reveals 14  And neither does the related fact that this makes keeping the sidewalk clear a considerate—​even caring—​thing to do, that it would maximize well-​being, or that it constitutes a way of treating passersby as ends in themselves. 15  Of course, it is plausible that Shonna is (or would be, if she thought about the matter) confident that it is at least morally permissible for her to keep the sidewalk in front of her home shoveled. If prompted, Shonna would certainly profess such confidence. Moreover, it might well be that if Shonna were to believe that, for some reason, she were morally obliged to refrain from shoveling—​if, that is, she were to believe that acting to keep the sidewalk clear of snow through the winter constituted a moral wrong—​ then she would not shovel. So perhaps Shonna’s (potentially tacit or implicit) confidence that her actions are morally permissible—​or, at least not gravely wrong—​helps to explain why Shonna works hard to keep the sidewalk clear. It seems that Shonna’s confidence that she is not committing a grave moral wrong in shoveling plausibly enables her shoveling. Perhaps having such confidence is, given Shonna’s psychological constitution, a prerequisite for her treating shoveling as a live option, as a course of action she considers genuinely open to her. But the fact that shoveling does not constitute a grave moral wrong does not count positively, in favor of shoveling. After all, I commit no grave moral wrong when I tie my right shoe before my left. But, of course, it is clear that this fact does not count substantively in favor of beginning with my right shoe. Accordingly, the role that Shonna’s moral confidence may play in explaining her shoveling is markedly different from the way in which moral conviction operates in paradigmatic cases in which explicitly moralized reflection and deliberation produces action. And so we should deny that Shonna’s (perhaps merely tacit or implicit) moral confidence that shoveling does not constitute a grave moral wrong is a reason for which Shonna shovels (or, at the very least, it is not among the primary or central reasons for which she so acts). 16  For ease of expression, I will sometimes speak as if there is a true dichotomy, with morally reflective and deliberative actions and choices, on one side, and morally unreflective and non-​deliberative actions and choices, on the other. In point of fact, however, I am inclined to think that there is a kind of spectrum here. Actions and choices that are the direct products of explicit moral reflection and deliberation—​the kinds of actions and choices which the intellectualist takes to most straightforwardly manifest our moral characters—​fall at one extreme. At the other extreme are actions and choices that appear to be wholly morally unreflective and non-​deliberative: the psychological mechanisms which immediately give rise to these actions and choices are thoroughly insensitive to the moral features (or to the moral import of these features) of the agent’s circumstances (although, as I suggest, this need not entail that the agent is thoroughly insensitive to moral considerations). And then there are actions and choice that fall somewhere in the middle: the psychological mechanisms which give rise to these actions and choices are somewhat, and perhaps significantly, insensitive to (certain of) the moral features of the agent’s circumstances or to the moral import these features have. When I say that many of our food-​and diet-​related actions and choices are morally unreflective and non-​deliberative, I mean that the psychological mechanisms which give rise to many of our actions and choices in the domain of food and eating are largely or significantly insensitive to (certain of) the central moral features of our circumstances or to the moral import that these features have.

688   Kate Nolfi something about her moral worth. We think Shonna is a better person, morally speaking, than she would be were she to give up on keeping the sidewalk clear and instead let the snow pile up through the winter. At least as compared to her hypothetical counterpart who is disposed to let the snow pile up, we think Shonna is more praiseworthy qua moral agent; she more closely approximates the ideal moral agent, at least in this respect. And this shows that, although Shonna does not regard her shoveling in moral terms, we are, nevertheless, inclined to think that Shonna’s behavior manifests a morally admirable element of her character. We might even go so far as to say that Shonna’s shoveling reveals a morally virtuous dimension of her character. We might, for example, say that Shonna’s shoveling manifests her considerate, diligent, or attentive (at least in this limited domain) nature. Of course, we need not think that Shonna exhibits perfect virtue here. Perhaps Shonna would be a better moral agent, at least in this one respect, if she were motivated to shovel (at least in part) by an explicit, perhaps consciously articulated recognition of the fact that her shoveling helps others pass safely along the sidewalk. Still—​and this is the crucial point—​we think that Shonna’s shoveling says something positive about the kind of person (i.e., the kind of moral agent) that she is. That is, we treat Shonna’s shoveling as evidence of the moral quality of (a part of) her moral character. These observations about Shonna’s case generalize. When we are engaged in ordinary moral practice, we often treat information about what people choose and how people behave in cases where they do not engage in the kind of explicitly moralized reasoning that characterizes moral reflection and deliberation as revelatory. We view such information as relevant to the question of whether or not an individual is a morally admirable person; we regard such information as a guide to the moral quality of the individual’s character and so to her moral worth, qua moral agent. Thus, our moral assessments of an agent’s character often track moral evaluations of what I am calling the agent’s morally unreflective and non-​deliberative actions and choices. But, to be clear, our moral practice is not univocal on this point: sometimes our moral assessments of character do seem to place particular weight on actions and choices that are the products of explicitly moral reasoning, and discount the significance of morally unreflective actions and choices—​but not always, and perhaps not even very often. Ordinary moral practice, then, recognizes and treats as significant (at least when it comes to evaluating an agent’s moral worth) a dimension of moral character that is manifested in our unreflective, habitual actions and choices and whose influence is not mediated by moral deliberation. This dimension of moral character—​call it the agent’s morally unreflective character—​is not the product of the agent’s conscious and deliberate cultivation and need not ever be subject to the agent’s reflective scrutiny. And, paradigmatically, at least, it is operative in shaping a choice or action in cases where the agent does not regard the choice or action as one that calls for moral deliberation because the agent does not recognize the choice or action as having significant moral import (the agent need not think that her choice or action lacks moral import; she may, having never considered the question, simply have no settled view on the matter beyond a kind of tacit or implicit confidence that her choice or action is not morally deplorable).

Food Choices and Moral Character    689

Food Choices and Morally Unreflective Character I make the case here that our everyday lives are filled with cases where we do not approach food-​and diet-​related decisions through moral deliberation; where we do not frame our food-​and diet-​related choices in moral terms. In such cases, we do not make choices regarding what, when, where, and with whom to eat by consciously taking up and deliberating on the question of what, when, where, and with whom we are morally required, morally permitted, or morally forbidden from eating. But if this is right, then the way in which we routinely treat the moral status of actions and choices that the agent does not regard as calling for moral deliberation or reflection and does not think to justify (to herself or others) in moral terms as revelatory of the quality of the agent’s moral character is particularly vivid in our food practice. And, accordingly, I suggest that attending to, and accounting for, what our ordinary, morally unreflective and non-​deliberative food practice reveals about our moral worth will help to illuminate a way forward as we move beyond the intellectualist picture of the relationship between actions and choices and moral character. Often, and perhaps more often than we realize, it seems entirely disingenuous to characterize food-​and diet-​related choices as the products of deliberation or conscious reflection (moral or otherwise) on the relative merits of our various options. Think of my impulsive reach for one of the individually wrapped chocolate truffles that sit temptingly by the cash register at my favorite coffee shop just as I hand my credit card to the barista (“Oh, and one of these!”).17 Or think of the mechanical way in which the practiced home cook adds olive oil to the skillet before beginning to sauté onions, the automaticity with which a shopper might reach for bananas on a weekly grocery shopping trip, the experience of plumping for one of two equally enticing entrées at the very last minute as the server stands impatiently, pencil poised, ready to take one’s order, or the mindlessness with which one sometimes continues to eat until one’s bowl or plate is clean.18 These are paradigmatic examples of substantially unreflective and non-​ deliberative behavior.19 17 

And, of course, there is the inevitable twinge of guilt and the attempted rationalization which follow. Brian Wansink (2006) provides an overwhelmingly long list of similar examples of what he terms “mindless eating.” 19  In some of these cases it is plausible that standing policies—​policies that we might have adopted intentionally and perhaps, in part, as a direct result of moral reflection and deliberation—​both can and do shape the food-​and diet-​related choices we make and actions we perform. I say that most of these food-​and diet-​related choices and actions are, nevertheless, unreflective and non-​deliberative full stop because the agent here need not and does not refer back to and then apply her standing policy (as she might a rule) in determining how to proceed. It seems highly disingenuous to say that the practiced cook, for example, consults her standing policy regarding how to begin sautéing onions and then picks up the olive oil and pours approximately a tablespoon into the pan. And we over-​intellectualize the shopper’s psychology if we say that she must be consciously consulting and applying her policy of buying bananas each week when she reaches for a bunch as she passes the relevant display. These actions are 18 

690   Kate Nolfi Our thoroughly unreflective and non-​deliberative food-​and diet-​related behaviors form a rather motley collection. Some of these behaviors seem most aptly characterized as the result of succumbing to temptation, some as guided directly by impulse or appetite, some as the product of habit (consciously and deliberately cultivated or otherwise), and some as cases of mere plumping. Moreover, the fact that we enthusiastically and quite skillfully engage in post hoc rationalization makes it easy to mistakenly read reflection and deliberation back into the genesis of our actions and choices. Needless to say, this is complicated terrain.20 Nevertheless, I suggest that this much is clear: some, although by no means all, of our food-​and diet-​related choices and actions—​choices and actions comprising a familiar portion of what we might call our food practice—​are not only significantly morally unreflective and non-​deliberative, but significantly unreflective and non-​deliberative full stop. They are like the choice to tie your right shoe before your left, to pull the front door shut behind you as you leave the house, or to press the “lock” button on the car’s key remote as you walk away from your parked car. But, of course, we do, on other occasions, reflect on and deliberate about what, when, where, and how to eat. In fact, it is very easy to think of situations in which our food-​and diet-​related choices receive a great deal of our conscious attention. Recall the familiar experience of looking at a restaurant menu and trying to figure out what to order, of standing in front of a beverage case or cooler and deciding which drink to choose, of planning what to serve when guests are coming over for dinner, or of surveying the shelves at the grocery store and deciding which brand and flavor of ice cream to purchase. Still, in many of these cases in which our food-​and diet-​related choices and actions are properly characterized as the products of our conscious reflection and deliberation, the kinds of considerations that figure prominently in our reasoning are paradigmatically pragmatic, aesthetic, economic, and so on. They are not—​and this is the crucial point—​moral in character. When choosing between two items on a restaurant menu, we often think about which entrée we are likely to enjoy more, about how much they each cost, about which is healthier, about how easily we could cook each dish at home, about how hungry we are, about which entrée is likely to be more filling, and so on. But, at least for most of us and most of the time, the question of whether we are morally required to choose one entrée over the other is rather far from our minds as we endeavor to make our selection. Our conscious, reflective, deliberative efforts to settle for ourselves what, when, where, and how to eat are rarely dominated by the question of what we ought, morally speaking, to choose or do. And, more than this, our deliberation about food-​and diet-​related choices and actions often treats the question more automatic and less intellectual—​the way in which the agent’s action is shaped by a standing policy here is more like the way in which a five-​year-​old’s inference might be shaped by modus ponens than like the way in which I complete and submit my expense report for a recent conference is shaped by the relevant school policy (which I must look up before I begin and then consciously and deliberately apply to the task at hand in order to avoid making a mess of things). Richard Holton (2009, ch. 3) makes a similar point, and provides an especially helpful discussion of related issues that I do not have time to explore here. 20 

For a discussion of some of these complications, see Morgenbesser and Ullmann-​Margalit 1977.

Food Choices and Moral Character    691 of what we ought, morally speaking, to choose or do as straightforwardly unhelpful. The way in which we approach deliberation about, for example, which entrée to order, of which beverage to select, of what to serve at a dinner party, or of which brand and flavor of ice cream to purchase, suggests that we think we cannot or should not look to moral considerations to help us weigh the various options among which we are choosing. Rather, the kinds of considerations that we treat as weighty with respect to certain sorts of questions regarding what, when, where, why, and how to eat and to which we respond in deliberating about such questions are paradigmatically, if not exclusively, non-​moral.21 Whether deliberative and reflective, or otherwise, then, much of our ordinary food practice does not take the questions of what, when, where, and with whom to eat to be questions the answers to which have significant moral import. Instead, we regard these as question that require us to look beyond the moral domain. In this respect, they are like the questions of where to hang a particular piece of art in one’s office, of which color to paint the living room walls, or of whether to tie one’s right shoe or one’s left shoe first. When I settle for myself where to hang a particular piece of art or which color to paint the living room walls, my deliberation proceeds under the assumption that the question of how to proceed outstrips the question of what my moral obligations and duties require of me here. And when I reach down for the shoelaces on my right sneaker first, I betray my (perhaps wholly tacit or implicit) presumption that morality is silent on the question of whether I ought to begin with my right sneaker or my left. Similarly, the ways in which we sometimes settle for ourselves questions about what, when, where, or how to eat encode our (typically unreflective and perhaps even subconscious) presumption that moral reasons run out here: our moral obligations and duties cannot tell us what to choose or decide between (some substantial set of) the presently available options. We might regard certain food-​related choices as thoroughly amoral. Alternatively, however, we might simply proceed under the tacit assumption that the live options among which we must choose are each morally acceptable or on a par, morally speaking. Either way, we do not expect moral considerations to tip the scales in favor of one food-​related option over the others. Accordingly, we do not attend to or rely on moral considerations in our approach to settling the relevant question about what, when, where, and how to eat. And, after the fact, we are inclined to justify our choices and actions by appeal (predominately, if not exclusively) to non-​moral considerations. This is the sense in which many ordinary food-​and diet-​related choices and actions are morally unreflective and non-​deliberative. I have tried to show that our morally unreflective and non-​deliberative actions and choices reveal something about our moral worth as agents. But if this is right, then our morally unreflective and non-​deliberative food-​and diet-​related choices expose or illuminate the quality of a segment of our moral characters. These choices and actions are attributable to our moral characters and so have bearing on the question of whether we

21 

Piazza et al. (2015) supplies some empirical confirmation for this thesis.

692   Kate Nolfi are morally virtuous or vicious people. Even more strongly, I suggest that the segment of our moral characters on display in our morally unreflective and non-​deliberative food-​ and diet-​related actions and choices is a segment of our moral characters the quality of which is particularly significant with respect to evaluating an agent’s moral worth qua moral agent. Here is why. In evaluating individuals’ moral worth, it makes sense that we should be interested (although perhaps not exclusively) in an individual’s dispositions to act and choose in the sorts of circumstances we expect her to face routinely and repeatedly. Put differently, it makes sense that we should be particularly concerned with the way in which an agent is disposed to act and choose in the sorts of circumstances that we expect her to face recurrently, and in the endeavor to resolve questions about how to proceed that we expect her to find both persistent and pressing. An important kind of evaluation of an individual’s moral virtue—​much like the kinds of evaluations of skill, capacity, or ability that we care about more generally—​is evaluation calibrated to the range of circumstances that we expect the individual to face with a high degree of regularity in the normal course of events.22 So, if our actions and choices routinely and ubiquitously manifest our morally unreflective characters in such circumstances, then evaluations of our moral worth as agents that are so calibrated must take account of the quality of our morally unreflective characters. We regularly face and must resolve questions about what, when, where, with whom, and how to eat. As a result, we make morally unreflective and non-​deliberative food-​ and diet-​related choices routinely, and as a matter of course, in our daily lives. Our lives are replete with food-​and diet-​related actions and choices that flow from our morally unreflective characters, and it is entirely predictable that this is so. In fact, food-​and diet-​related choices and actions are exemplars of our morally unreflective 22  More generally, Ernest Sosa has argued persuasively that having a competency always involves being disposed to perform in certain ways in certain sorts of circumstances. Sosa explains that “the sort of assessment[s]‌made constantly as we judge character, and more broadly reliability . . . tend to keep track of who would perform well in situations wherein good performance is of interest. In assessing people’s character, talents, and abilities, we are interested in how they would perform in relevant situations” (2010). In this way, a competence is constitutively indexed to a bounded set of situations in which successful performance in the relevant domain matters to us. So, if we think of the morally admirable or praiseworthy agent as the agent who is morally competent, and of moral virtues as competences to respond in the morally appropriate way to the morally relevant features of one’s circumstances, then moral virtues will be indexed to (and, indeed, partially constituted by) a set of situations in which the appropriate kind of sensitivity to moral concerns matters to us. I suggest here that any class of situations that we expect to encounter routinely in our daily lives is a class of situations in which it ought to matter to us whether an agent is disposed to respond appropriately to the moral features of her circumstances. And the class of situations in which we are faced with food-​and diet-​ related decisions—​situations involving eating and purchasing food—​supply a paradigmatic exemplar here. These situations, then, are relevant when it comes to evaluating the quality of an agent’s moral character simply because of the predictable frequency with which we encounter them (although these may not be the only situations with respect to which we care to evaluate an agent’s moral competence—​ our evaluative practice may perfectly reasonably incorporate additional modes of evaluation which index moral virtues to different classes of situations).

Food Choices and Moral Character    693 and non-​deliberative agency in action. And so, the dimension of an agent’s character often on display in her ordinary food practice—​a dimension of her moral character which is manifested in those of her food-​and diet-​related actions and choices that are not the products of explicitly moral reflection and deliberation—​holds particular significance for at least one important form of evaluation of an agent’s overall moral worth.

Evaluating Morally Unreflective Character in  the Context of Food Choices I have tried to characterize a dimension of our moral characters that I have argued is most clearly exposed or illuminated by our morally unreflective and non-​deliberative actions and choices. Moreover, I have suggested that this dimension of an agent’s moral character is specifically relevant when it comes to determining the agent’s overall moral worth. If I  am right, then evaluating an agent’s moral worth involves evaluating the moral quality of the agent’s morally unreflective character. And since our ordinary food-​ and diet-​related choices and actions are paradigmatic examples of the kinds of actions and choices which manifest our morally unreflective characters, there is good reason to expect that focusing first on the domain of food-​and diet-​related choice and action may help us develop a generalizable framework for the moral evaluation of morally unreflective character. By way of taking the first steps in beginning this project, I will try to sketch what I take to be the two most intuitively attractive approaches to accounting for the moral quality of the segment of our unreflective moral characters on display in our ordinary food-​and diet-​related choices and actions. I will not try to adjudicate between these two approaches here. Rather, my aim will be simply to construct a menu of possible responses to the demand for an account of the moral quality of the segment of our unreflective moral characters on display in our ordinary food-​and diet-​related choices and actions. The first approach adopts a kind of hardline view of matters, according to which the morally unreflective and non-​deliberative nature of our ordinary food-​and diet-​related choices necessarily betrays a lack of moral sensitivity. As such, the segments of our unreflective moral characters on display in our ordinary food-​and diet-​related choices and actions—​and, in fact, our morally unreflective characters, in general—​fall short of the moral ideal. We would be better people, morally speaking, if we were disposed to explicitly recognize and respond to the moral dimensions of our circumstances in deciding what, when, where, and with whom to eat through conscious moral reflection and deliberation. Carried to the extreme, the hardline approach suggests that our routine failure to regard our food-​and diet-​related actions and choices as morally significant in this sense exposes a necessarily vicious character flaw: a lack of moral understanding—​a

694   Kate Nolfi kind of moral blindness—​in the domain of food that counts against our moral worth.23 The fact that I do not, at the moment of choice, recognize and treat the decision between brands of ice cream at the grocery store as morally loaded, or that I do not, as I pour myself a cup, treat the act of drinking my morning coffee as one that merits careful explicitly moral reflection, reveals an element of my moral character that is criticizable. The proponent of a hardline approach might concede that my failures here are understandable, forgivable, or even blameless. After all, I am a limited moral agent, and so perhaps it is unreasonable or even impossible for me to realize perfect moral virtue. But they are failures nonetheless. A virtuous moral agent would be constituted so as to treat these kinds of choices and actions as morally weighty: she would be moved to deliberate about how to proceed in these sorts of circumstances in moral terms and to justify her choices and actions to herself and to others by citing moral considerations. Put differently, the hardline approach maintains that the perfectly virtuous moral agent is always disposed to treat those choices and actions that have moral significance as the kinds of choices and actions that merit serious moral deliberation and reflection.24 And any failure to be so moved manifests vice. If this is right, then the segment of our moral characters on display in our everyday food-​and diet-​related choices—​our unreflective moral character—​necessarily falls short of the moral ideal and ought to be regarded as vicious.25 23  In fact, a less extreme version of the hardline approach may be compatible with the thesis that we are not morally criticizable for falling short of the moral ideal here. Although we fail to achieve perfect virtue, the proponent of this less extreme version of the hardline approach might say that perhaps we nevertheless avoid viciousness, and that that is enough to inoculate us against moral criticism. On this sort of view, moral perfection constitutes a kind of ideal that we are morally obligated to pursue (perhaps with a certain degree of success), but not achieve in full. 24  The question of what is involved in treating a choice or action as morally weighty, or as one that merits serious moral deliberation and reflection (alternatively put, in being moved to deliberate about how to proceed in these sorts of circumstances in moral terms and to justify one’s choices and actions to oneself and to others by citing moral considerations) is far from trivial. Without pretending to offer an answer to this difficult question, let me simply suggest that it seems plausible that an agent may count as treating a choice as morally weighty without engaging in conscious moral reflection and deliberation at the moment of choice. She might, instead, engage in the relevant sort of careful and deliberate moral reflection in advance of the moment of choice and form a standing plan or policy on the basis of which she later chooses or acts. Accordingly, perhaps the proponent of the hardline approach can allow that certain unreflective and non-​deliberative actions and choices can and do reveal or expose an agent’s virtuous character in the event that they flow from a standing policy that the agent consciously adopted as a result of serious and careful moral reflection and deliberation (see note 19). If this line of thought is correct, then the categories of what I refer to here (perhaps less-​than-​ideally) as the morally unreflective and non-​deliberative, on the one hand, and as unreflective and non-​deliberative full stop, on the other, actually cross-​cut: some actions and choices are unreflective and non-​deliberative full stop, but morally reflective and deliberative by virtue of flowing from standing policies that the agent adopts on the basis of moral reflection and deliberation. 25  Of course, there are interesting questions about the extent to which we ought to aspire to perfect virtue and so strive to be ideal, perfectly virtuous moral agents. A proponent of the hardline approach might accept that an agent’s morally unreflective and non-​deliberative food choices necessarily manifest a kind of moral shortcoming or moral failure on the part of the agent, but go on to suggest that this moral failure does not constitute a genuine, all-​things-​considered shortcoming or failure on the part

Food Choices and Moral Character    695 This kind of hardline approach can have a kind of intuitive appeal. It seems to give the right verdict regarding an agent’s moral worth when we focus on cases like my failure to hold the door for the intern with the unwieldy package. But adopting the hardline approach comes with a cost, one that focusing on our everyday food-​and diet-​related choices makes vivid. If the hardline approach is right, then most of us most of the time fall short of manifesting anything that even approximates perfect moral virtue in some of the actions and choices that we make routinely, as a matter of course, as we go about our everyday lives. Even if our everyday food choices are themselves morally permissible, or even praiseworthy, the way in which we arrive at these choices or come to perform these actions exposes a facet of our moral agency that is morally non-​ideal. We fail to manifest perfect moral virtue here. If we act and choose in ways that are morally permissible in these sorts of routine food-​related cases, it is merely a happy accident that we do: we fail do to so for or in response to the right reasons. Of course, that the hardline approach impugns the morally unreflective and non-​ deliberative dimension of moral characters does not entail that the hardline approach is mistaken. It does, however, entail that Shonna, our morally unreflective and non-​ deliberative snow-​shoveler, is a defective moral agent (at least in this domain). It entails that our morally unreflective and non-​deliberative food-​and diet-​related choices and actions often expose our (perhaps merely local) viciousness. And one might worry that this kind of result misconstrues the nature of morality rather profoundly: it can seem that the hardline approach makes morality much more demanding than our ordinary moral practice suggests that it is. The second approach one might adopt in developing an account of the moral quality of the segment of our unreflective moral characters on display in our ordinary food-​and diet-​related choices and actions is more moderate. It suggests that the morally unreflective and non-​deliberative nature of, for example, our ordinary food-​and diet-​related choices, does not automatically or necessarily count against or detract from our moral worth. Thus, the moderate approach leaves open the possibility that certain kinds of morally unreflective characters might be morally virtuous. On this approach, it is possible that Shonna’s morally unreflective and non-​deliberative shoveling manifests a kind of virtue. Were Shonna to approach questions about shoveling as morally loaded—​were her deliberations about when and why to shovel to be dominated by moral considerations—​she would certainly be a different sort of moral agent, but she might not be a better moral agent. And similarly, the moderate approach suggests that if we were to approach questions about what, when, where, and with whom to eat as morally loaded—​if we were directly responsive to moral considerations in the course of deliberating about how to act and what to choose in the domain of food—​then of the agent. In fact, it may be that this kind of moral failure makes the agent all-​things-​considered more admirable than she would be were she to be perfectly morally virtuous. This way of developing the hardline approach will be especially appealing to those who are sympathetic to the idea, made particularly compelling by, for example, Susan Wolf (2015), that the kinds of agents that we most admire or strive to be (and reasonably so) are not morally ideal.

696   Kate Nolfi we would certainly be different sorts of moral agents. Crucially, however, the moderate approach has it that there is no reason to think we would thereby be better moral agents. The fact that our food-​and diet-​related choices manifest a morally unreflective and non-​deliberative segment of our characters does not impugn our moral worth; this fact does not expose our moral characters as less-​than-​ideal, flawed, or vicious (in this domain). Instead, the moderate approach allows that the segment of our morally unreflective character manifested in our ordinary food-​and diet-​related choices and actions might well be morally ideal, at least for moral agents like us.26 Certain kinds of cases in the domain of food can make the moderate approach seem attractive. In particular, think of cases in which individuals have internalized certain social and cultural norms—​norms which, themselves, seem to be rooted in a kind of cultural sensitivity to moral concerns—​governing food-​and diet-​related actions and choices. Social and cultural norms that construct excessive or unnecessary food waste as taboo, unacceptable, or distasteful, for example, are plausibly grounded in a kind of social recognition of the needs of others and/​or for the kind of respect that others deserve as agents with equal moral standing. Perhaps, then, it makes sense to say that an individual who has internalized these norms (not intentionally or even consciously, but rather as a result of a kind of cultural osmosis) manifests a kind of indirect sensitivity to moral considerations when her actions and choices flow from the relevant segment of her morally unreflective character. The agent’s sensitivity to moral considerations here operates via her enculturation and in a way that is unmediated by moral reflection and deliberation. In effect, she has offloaded to society and culture the work of determining the weight and import of the various moral considerations that bear on those choices that she and her peers face routinely in the course of everyday life. Crucially, this kind of indirect sensitivity to moral considerations does not require that the individual herself take her action or choice to have any significant moral import at all. From her perspective, the opportunity for action or choice before her might appear to be just as morally insignificant as the choice between tying her left shoe before her right or her right before her left. The moderate approach suggests that what matters, morally speaking, is that agents be such that their actions are somehow both sensitive to and shaped by moral concerns. But this kind of responsiveness need not be mediated by moral reflection and deliberation. If this kind of thinking is right, then the proponent of the moderate approach might reason that, at least for moral agents who are cognitively limited (i.e., for moral agents like us), it makes perfect sense—​and, in fact, it is for the best, morally speaking—​that some of the work of registering the moral significance of situations we face routinely and predictably is offloaded, so to speak, onto social and cultural norms. And so the moderate approach can tell an initially compelling story about the psychological requirements for moral virtue according to which we can inoculate ourselves against moral criticism by internalizing social and cultural norms that code 26  As such, the moderate approach will be appealing to those sympathetic to the idea that the perfect moral virtue must be compatible with living well—​that is, living a good, broadly appealing, and attractive, human life (see, e.g., Scheffler 1992).

Food Choices and Moral Character    697 a kind of social moral sensitivity. For moral agents like us, internalizing social and cultural norms which code this kind of social moral sensitivity obviates any sort of moral demand that we be psychologically disposed to recognize and respond to routine situations as calling for or meriting explicitly moral deliberation and reflection.27 More generally, then, the moderate approach maintains that the psychological life of the perfectly morally virtuous agent need not be—​and perhaps more strongly, simply is not always—​ dominated by moral concerns, recognized as such.28 In certain sorts of cases, sensitivity to moral considerations enters into the explanation of how and why the perfectly virtuous moral agent acts or chooses as she does only via a kind of psychologically buffered, indirect route. As a result, the perfectly morally virtuous agent’s moral sensitivity may go entirely unrecognized by the agent herself. From her perspective, what she does or chooses in the situation at hand lacks significant moral import (perhaps, e.g., she takes all the live options here to be on a par, morally speaking, or to all meet some minimal level of moral acceptability). And thus, moral considerations do not figure prominently, and may not figure at all, in the psychological explanation of her action or choice.

Conclusion I have argued that a certain class of routine actions and choices—​actions and choices which are dissociated from moral reflection and deliberation—​manifest an important, even if often overlooked, dimension of an agent’s moral character. Moreover, I have suggested that many of the choices that we make and the actions that we perform in the course of eating constitute paradigmatic exemplars of this class of actions and choices. Thus, our morally unreflective and non-​deliberative food-​and diet-​related actions and choices reveal something about our moral worth. These choices and actions expose or put on display a segment of our moral characters and, as such, help to determine whether we are morally praiseworthy or criticizable agents. I have sketched two different approaches to making sense of what, exactly, one’s morally unreflective food choices and eating behaviors tell us about the extent to which one is praiseworthy or admirable, qua moral agent. According to the hardline approach, the segment of our characters 27  Perhaps it is worth mentioning that a parallel story—​one according to which a human believer can manifest perfect epistemic rationality without taking oneself to be following an epistemic rule (e.g., modus ponens), without recognizing one’s reasoning as being guided by epistemic norms, and without recognizing one’s own reasoning as manifesting an epistemically appropriate sensitivity to, for example, evidential relations—​can seem particularly attractive in the epistemic domain. For an admirably clear articulation of why this sort of story is attractive, see, e.g., Boghossian 2008. 28  On the moderate approach, moral theory is indirect (see Stocker 1976) in the sense that the perfectly morally virtuous agent will not navigate (some) decisions about what to choose and how to act by applying the correct moral theory to her situation in an effort to determine how she ought to proceed. And for this reason, the moderate approach is a way of both embracing and extending a point about the indirect role that a concern to act rightly plays in the perfectly virtuous agent’s reasoning that Smith (1994, 1996) makes in the course of arguing against externalism about reasons.

698   Kate Nolfi manifest in our morally unreflective and non-​deliberative food choices necessarily falls short of the moral ideal. And, as a result, many of our food-​and diet-​related choices and actions manifest a kind of moral shortcoming or imperfection in our characters. In contrast, a more moderate approach allows that, in certain sorts of cases, manifesting perfect moral virtue does not require (and, in fact, may be incompatible with) engaging in substantive moral reflection or moral deliberation. And this opens up the possibility that some of our morally unreflective and non-​deliberative food-​and diet-​related choices and actions may well manifest a segment of our characters that is morally ideal. I have not tried to adjudicate between these two approaches here—​I leave that project for another time. My aim has been simply to canvas our options. More generally, I have tried to show that moral philosophers have good reason to attend to our morally unreflective and non-​deliberative food-​and diet-​related choices and actions as manifestations of a segment of our characters, and so as revelatory of our moral worth. In particular, theorists whose thinking is informed by these paradigmatic exemplars of morally unreflective and non-​deliberative action and choice will be better positioned to understand the role that moral reflection and deliberation play in the psychology of the morally virtuous agent.29

Bibliography Annas, Julia. 2011. Intelligent Virtue. New York: Oxford University Press. Aquinas, Thomas. 1948. Summa theologica. Translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province. New York: Benziger Bros. Aristotle. 1999. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by Terence Irwin. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Arpaly, Nomy. 2003. Unprincipled Virtue: An Inquiry into Moral Agency. New York: Oxford University Press. Berry, Wendell. 2001. “How We Grow Food Reflects Our Virtues and Vices.” In The Ethics of Food: A Reader for the Twenty-​First Century, edited by Gregory Pence, 5‒24. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Boghossian, Paul. 2008. “Epistemic Rules.” Journal of Philosophy 105(9): 472–​500. Brown, Matthew J. 2007. “Picky Eating Is a Moral Failing.” In Food & Philosophy: Eat, Think, and Be Merry, edited by Dave Monroe and Fritz Allhoff, 192‒207. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Butera, Giuseppe. 2006. “On Reason’s Control of the Passions in Aquinas’s Theory of Temperance.” Mediaeval Studies 68(1): 133–​160. Curzer, Howard J. 1997. “Aristotle’s Account of the Virtue of Temperance in Nicomachean Ethics III.10‒11.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 35(1): 5–​25. Doris, John M. 2002. Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Floyd, Shawn. 2011. “Aquinas on Temperance.” Modern Schoolman 77(1): 35–​48. Hursthouse, Rosalind. 1999. On Virtue Ethics. New York: Oxford University Press. 29  I am very grateful to two of the editors of this volume, Anne Barnhill and Tyler Doggett, as well as to Michael Ashooh, Sin yee Chan, Randall Harp, and Vida Yao for providing extensive and invaluable feedback on earlier drafts of this piece.

Food Choices and Moral Character    699 Holton, Richard. 2009. Willing, Wanting, Waiting. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Korsgaard, Christine M. 1996. The Sources of Normativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Morgenbesser, Sidney, and Ullmann-​Margalit, Edna. 1977. “Picking and Choosing.” Social Research 44(4): 757–​785. Nobis, Nathan. 2002. “Vegetarianism and Virtue:  Does Consequentialism Demand Too Little?” Social Theory and Practice 28(1): 135–​156. Piazza, Jared, Matthew Ruby, Steve Loughnan, Mischel Luong, Juliana Kulik, Hanne Watkins, and Mirra Seigerman. 2015. “Rationalizing Meat Consumption: The 4Ns.” Appetite 91:114–​128. Scheffler, Samuel. 1992. Human Morality. New York: Oxford University Press. Smith, Michael. 1994. The Moral Problem. Malden, MA: Blackwell. —​—​—​. 1996. “The Argument for Internalism: Reply to Miller.” Analysis 56(3): 175–​184. Sosa, Ernest. 2010. “How Competence Matters in Epistemology.” Philosophical Perspectives 24(1): 465–​475. Stocker, Michael. 1976. “The Schizophrenia of Modern Ethical Theories.” Journal of Philosophy 73(14): 453–​466. Swanton, Christine. 2003. Virtue Ethics: A Pluralistic View. New York: Oxford University Press. Telfer, Elizabeth. 1990. “Temperance.” Journal of Medical Ethics 16(3): 157–​159. —​—​—​. 1996. Food for Thought: Philosophy and Food. New York: Routledge. Thompson, Paul B. 2010. The Agrarian Vision:  Sustainability and Environmental Ethics. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Wansink, Brian. 2006. Mindless Eating:  Why We Eat More Than We Think. New  York: Bantam Books. Wolf, Susan. 2015. The Variety of Values: Essays on Morality, Meaning, and Love. New York: Oxford University Press. Young, Charles M. 1988. “Aristotle on Temperance.” Philosophical Review 97(4): 521–​542.

chapter 31

The Etiquet t e of E at i ng Karen Stohr

It was quite a nice dinner, Babette. —​Martine in “Babette’s Feast”1

Isak Dineson’s short story, “Babette’s Feast,” culminates in an extraordinary dinner party. The party is extraordinary both because of what is served and also because it brings about powerful moral transformation in the participants. Moreover, those two features that make the dinner party extraordinary are related to each other; the shared aesthetic experience transforms the participants by expanding their moral sensibilities and enabling them to relate to each other in a wholly new way. Most meals do not, of course, produce dramatic moral conversions. And yet, even a very humble or informal dinner gathering can contribute in important ways to our shared moral life. Conducted properly, dinner parties have the power to improve the participants as individuals and as members of a moral community. In this essay, I will explore what it means for a dinner party to be conducted properly in the way described. Any dinner party, regardless of the level of formality, is governed by an array of etiquette conventions. Those conventions, I will argue, create a structure in which the participants can collectively participate in these potentially morally transformative activities. The structure consists of rules, practices, and norms for behavior that bind the participants to behave in certain ways. Etiquette conventions thus set the terms on which the guests will interact with each other over the course of the meal and surrounding experiences. Although dinner parties vary widely in their specifics, I will focus on two defining features of any dinner party—​the communal experience of eating and the conversation among the guests. The experience of eating good food is both

1  Isak Dinesen, Babette’s Feast and Other Anecdotes of Destiny (New York: Vintage Books, 1988). My references are primarily to the short story, but some of my inferences about it have undoubtedly been influenced by the beautiful film version, directed by Gabriel Axel.

The Etiquette of Eating    701 physically satisfying and aesthetically pleasing. This is valuable in itself, but the shared nature of the experience at a dinner party facilitates engagements and interactions that bring new moral dimensions to the gathering. In order to see these moral dimensions more clearly, let us take a closer look at “Babette’s Feast.”

A Transformative Feast The story is set in a remote Norwegian village in the late nineteenth century.2 The protagonists are two sisters who are dedicated to living out the stern, religiously motivated asceticism that they inherited from their minister father. Martine and Philippa agree to take in a French refugee whose life in Paris has been shattered by violent political conflict. The refugee, named Babette, spends a dozen years quietly working as a cook for the sisters. Unexpectedly, she wins a large sum of money in a lottery and she asks the sisters for permission to prepare a special dinner for them. What the sisters do not know is that Babette had been the chef at one of the finest restaurants in Paris, and her dinner will prove to be a culinary masterpiece. The self-​ denying Martine and Philippa are horrified by the extravagant preparations and fear for the effects of its sinfulness on their souls. They are, however, too kindhearted to interfere with Babette’s plans, and their sympathetic guests agree among themselves that they will refrain from saying anything about the food and drink at the meal. But one guest, a visitor to the village named General Loewenhielm, realizes what he is eating and cannot contain his astonishment. Although the other guests deliberately refuse to engage with his wonder over the food, they are nevertheless drawn into conversation and eventually into a shared transformative experience: Of what happened later in the evening nothing definite can here be stated. None of the guests later on had any clear remembrance of it. They only knew that the rooms had been filled with a heavenly light, as if a number of small halos had blended into one glorious radiance. Taciturn old people received the gift of tongues; ears that for years had been almost deaf were opened to it. Time itself had merged into eternity. Long after midnight the windows of the house shone like gold, and golden song flowed out into the winter air.3

The transformation is portrayed in the story as primarily religious, but it is evident that their religious transformation has moral dimensions as well. Long-​simmering quarrels are forgotten, lost loves are acknowledged, and human sympathies are restored and deepened. Babette’s artistic genius (with the help of some exceptional wine) generates space in which moral renewal and expansion can take place. Although the story 2 

Although Dinesen’s original story is set in Norway, the film is set in Denmark.

3 Dineson, Babette’s Feast, 41.

702   Karen Stohr of “Babette’s Feast” focuses on the aesthetic dimensions of the food, the transformative effects of the meal travel primarily through the conversations that occur over the course of the feast.

Philosophers around the Table Dinner parties have a long philosophical history, with Plato’s Symposium as perhaps the most notable example. Although it is unlikely that Plato himself would have found much of moral significance in the material aspects of dinner gatherings, the philosophical discourse of the Symposium is obviously facilitated by its setting around a table, and, of course, by the wine consumed at that table. Confucius and his follower Xunzi paid far greater attention to the rituals surrounding meals themselves, granting those rituals foundational importance in the cultivation of virtue. Within the Western tradition, one of the more robust defenders of well-​conducted dinner parties was Immanuel Kant. This may come as a surprise to readers who picture Kant locked up in an ivory tower writing obscure treatises, but Kant’s Anthropology contains a quite specific and subtle commentary on the proper way to hold a dinner party. As we will see, both the Confucians and Kant believed that shared meals are a crucial setting for the moral cultivation of individuals and their communities. The idea that philosophers have been (and I will argue, should still be) concerned with dinner parties is less startling when we consider that in just about every culture, shared meals have tremendous social, political, and often religious significance. State dinners are among the most important diplomatic occasions for any government that hosts them. Feast days, both secular and religious, populate every calendar. Thanksgiving dinner in the United States is widely (although not always uncontroversially) celebrated. Muslims mark the end of Ramadan by feasting during Eid al-​Fitr, while Passover Seders and Sukkot gatherings are central celebrations in Judaism. Christian denominations often center their worship rituals around a Eucharistic liturgy modeled after the Last Supper. Less formally, shared meals are very much the axis around which human social life revolves. After all, everyone has to eat, and when we can, we often deliberately choose to eat with others.4 We might wonder why this clearly necessary activity of consuming sufficient calories for survival carries so much more weight than other, equally necessary activities. We all breathe, but we do not think of breathing alongside others as a shared pursuit in any sense. Of course, there are aesthetic dimensions to eating that are not present in other 4  Kant was especially troubled by the idea of philosophers dining alone: “Eating alone. . . . is unhealthy for a philosophizing man of learning; it does not restore his power, but exhausts him . . . it turn[s]‌into exhausting work, and not into the refreshing play of thought.” Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. Victor Lyle Dowdell (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978), 189.

The Etiquette of Eating    703 cases, and moreover, the work of bringing delicious food to the table certainly requires significant human effort. But there is more to our practices of sharing meals than this. Through eating with other people, we create, sustain, reinforce, and occasionally demolish social bonds and connections. As Aristotle put it in the Nicomachean Ethics, potential friends “cannot know each other before they have shared their salt.”5 Those who would become friends must live together, and a crucial part of living together is sharing meals.

The Moral Point of Etiquette Rules The claim that sharing meals is an important human activity is not likely to spur controversy or debate. But my further claim, that etiquette conventions form the essential structure of that activity, may seem more dubious. Why should the form or rituals of those shared meals be important? If we want to have dinner with our friends, does it really make any difference whether we are sitting on the couch with a box of delivery pizza or dining around an inlaid mahogany table, attended by footmen in livery? Even if we grant that shared meals have moral value, it hardly follows that the etiquette practices around those meals are contributing to that value. Indeed, one of the more compelling arguments in favor of pizza on the couch is precisely that it is relaxed and intimate, requiring little skill or etiquette know-​how. There is a reason why formal dining rooms and footmen are now relegated to Jane Austen novels and episodes of Downton Abbey. It is not simply that few people have the means to field a staff of trained footmen (not to mention the supporting cooks, scullery maids, and other workers). It is also that the elaborate etiquette rituals of formal dining no longer seem to have any kind of point or purpose in the modern world. I do not plan to argue in favor of formal dinners per se, but I do plan to argue that the etiquette rules and rituals that are so evident in those settings are important. Their importance does not arise from the mere fact that they are complicated and formal. Informal meals are governed by etiquette rules as well, even when it is pizza on the couch (e.g., be careful with long cheese strands, try not to get pizza stains on the pillows, don’t take the last piece without checking with the others). The etiquette rules governing a meal, whether a fancy dinner or a casual pizza party, are important because they give an occasion its shape. By that I mean that when the participants in the party abide by the relevant etiquette norms, they thereby constitute the party as a particular kind of occasion with specific aims and goods to be achieved. The etiquette conventions attached to dinner parties enable us to do morally valuable things together.

5 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 2d ed., trans. Terence Irwin (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1999),

1156b28.

704   Karen Stohr Elsewhere I have argued for the general moral significance of etiquette conventions.6 Abiding by the etiquette conventions operating in one’s environment is a way of communicating important moral attitudes, such as respect and consideration, to others in one’s surroundings. These conventions enable us to accomplish morally important tasks by providing us with tools we can employ to carry them out. It would be a mistake to relegate etiquette to the sidelines as unimportant or irrelevant to morality because etiquette just is part of morality. This is not, of course, how people standardly think of etiquette. If asked to define morality, most people would say that it is about how we treat other people. If asked to define etiquette, those same people are likely to mention forks. The looming specter of a table full of mysterious forks contributes to a widespread tendency to be at once anxious about and dismissive of etiquette. How is anyone supposed to tell a fruit fork from a fish fork? Why do oysters get their own special fork, and why does that fork live with the soup spoon on the right side of the plate? Now few people encounter this many forks on a routine basis, and probably those people already know the difference between a fruit and a fish fork.7 If fork placement were the only or even main concern of etiquette, then it would certainly not be something worth much time. But this is a mistaken assumption, and perhaps also a dangerous one, given Judith Martin’s exasperation with what she calls “The Great Fork Problem”: If Miss Manners hears any more contemptuous descriptions of etiquette as being a matter of “knowing which fork to use,” she will run amok with a sharp weapon and the people she attacks will all be left with four tiny holes in their throats as if they had been the victims of twin vampires.8

Once the prospect of stabbing people with forks looms, it becomes clear that we are talking about both etiquette rules and moral rules. (There is no fork designated by etiquette as the correct one to employ for stabbing a guest.) Martin’s point, though, is that the focus on forks takes away from the much more fundamental part of etiquette which, like morality, is about how we treat people. It is a mistake to think that etiquette concerns itself solely with table settings. It is also concerned with what happens at the table. For many people, fork angst is a result of feeling inadequate or ignorant in social environments. Certainly it is true that etiquette conventions have long been used as a way of enforcing class boundaries and distinctions. This, though, is not so much a problem about the conventions themselves as it is a problem about the purposes for which they 6  Karen Stohr, On Manners (New York: Routledge, 2012). See also Sarah Buss, “Appearing Respectful: The Moral Significance of Manners,” Ethics 109 (1999): 795‒826; Cheshire Calhoun, “The Virtue of Civility,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 29 (2000): 251‒275; Nancy Sherman, “Manners and Morals,” in Stoic Warriors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Peter Johnson, The Philosophy of Manners (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1999); Amy Olberding, “Etiquette: A Confucian Contribution to Moral Philosophy,” Ethics 126, no. 2 (January 2016): 442‒446. 7  As a public service to any readers who experience fork trepidation, I would like to emphasize that the fork rule is really quite simple. Pick up the outside fork and work your way in, continuing to use the outermost one as each new course is brought to the table. 8  Judith Martin, Miss Manners’ Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior (New York: Norton, 2005), 154.

The Etiquette of Eating    705 are being employed. Attempting to shame or humiliate people via excessively complicated table settings is disrespectful and hence, rude.9 Earlier I  described social conventions as tools with which we accomplish various moral aims, such as communicating attitudes of respect and consideration to other people. To take a straightforward example, when I go to the end of the line at my local Starbucks, rather than pushing my way closer to the counter, I exhibit my regard for my fellow coffee-​drinkers as moral and social equals. By contrast, if I were to cut in line, I would be expressing the attitude that I am superior to them, that my own caffeine-​ related needs are more important than theirs, and that I need not attend to them as fellow members of my moral community.10 (Of course, this is true only in cultures where queuing is standard practice and widely followed.) Cutting in line is hardly a major moral offense, although I would argue that it is not exactly trivial either. But the moral implications of line-​jumping are relatively straightforward. We can readily see that it matters whether someone jumps in line and also how it matters. Line-​jumping directly insults and inconveniences other people. And as we start to get into this territory, we start getting close to what nearly everyone recognizes as moral concerns. We owe people respect as a matter of moral obligation. Insofar as our actions and behaviors communicate disrespect, they seem to be wrong. This is what makes it wrong to use etiquette rules as a way of enforcing objectionable social hierarchies. And insofar as etiquette rules enable us to convey and communicate our respect for those same others, we have good reason to follow them. None of this, however, provides much basis for thinking that forks can be conducive to anything of moral significance. How does one convey respect or disrespect by using a particular utensil during the salad course? Even if it is true (which it is) that etiquette is concerned with a much wider array of social interactions than what takes place at dinner parties, there is no denying that it also has rules about forks. My suggestion is that forks matters insofar as they form part of a broader setting. The point of using an elaborate table setting is to create a certain kind of occasion. It is the occasion, and what is achievable in that occasion, that matters from a moral standpoint.

Proper Dining: Emily Post and Classical Confucianism The 1942 edition of Emily Post’s famous etiquette manual (sometimes simply called the “blue book”) includes a chapter on formal dinners that is over fifty pages long.11 There are separate chapters for less formal dinners, luncheons, breakfasts, and teas; these 9  This is Martin’s view. See her Miss Manners’ A Citizen’s Guide to Civility (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1996), 366. 10  For more on this, see Stohr, On Manners, ch. 1. 11  Emily Post, Etiquette: The Blue Book of Social Usage (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1942), ch. 16.

706   Karen Stohr fifty pages are entirely about a very specific kind of social gathering. Although Post does include diagrams showing the proper procedure for guests to walk into the dining room, much of the chapter focuses on the duties of the hostess, host, and guests. Hosts and hostesses are required to attend equally to each guest and take pains to make everyone feel comfortable. Introductions to fellow guests are to be informative without being excessively personal or overly focused on social status. Guests seated at the table are strictly forbidden from talking only to the person on one side. Indeed, refusing to “turn the table” and talk to one’s other table neighbor is grounds for social banishment. Post cites an anecdote about a woman who, when seated next to a man she despised, took turns reciting multiplication tables with him.12 Behaving properly at a formal dinner requires far more knowledge than can be acquired by memorizing pictures of forks. It might be easy to dismiss Emily Post and her etiquette manuals as important only for a small set of people inhabiting a rarefied social sphere. That would be a mistake, both about Post herself and about the advice she gives in those manuals. Post’s influence over the social culture of twentieth-​century United States was considerable. She was in fact setting etiquette standards for a much larger group of people than her own social set. Moreover, Post herself was an exceptionally intelligent and interesting thinker—​much more than she is often giving credit for being.13 In her emphasis on the etiquette of shared meals, however, Post is in excellent company. Few figures in the history of philosophy took mealtime rituals as seriously as Confucius seems to have taken them.14 In the Analects, he is described as placing tremendous emphasis on the minute details of self-​presentation and social behavior, from the way he walked through a doorway to the colors he chose for the trim on his clothing.15 He was moderate in his appetites but fastidious about the freshness of his foods, refusing musty grain, spoiled meat, and improperly cooked food. He is said to have refused to “drink wine bought from a shop or fried meat purchases from the market.”16 Perhaps most famously, he even refused to eat unless his mat was straight.17 We might just take all this to indicate that Confucius was an exceedingly difficult dinner guest, as he probably was. But this should not be regarded as an annoying personality quirk or an obsession with rules motivated by snobbishness. Confucius’s concern with these details was motivated by the value he placed on ritual purity and the importance of carrying out role-​specific actions in the prescribed way. His choice of colors for his robes 12  Ibid., 273. It is unclear whether Post is actually endorsing this practice, but it is clear that she believes it to be less rude than simply refusing to talk to him. 13  For more about Post’s life, see Laura Claridge, Emily Post: Daughter of the Gilded Age, Mistress of American Manners (New York: Random House, 2008). I discuss Post, including her sophisticated theory of taste, in chs. 3, 5, and 8 of On Manners. 14  It is common among scholars of Chinese philosophy to call Confucius by his more traditional name of Kongzi. Here, however, I will follow conventions in Western philosophy and call him Confucius. Although Confucius was concerned with behavior across a variety of settings, it is evident that mealtime rituals were of particular concern for him and for his later followers. 15 Confucius, Analects, trans. Edward Slingerland (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Press, 2003), esp. Book 10. 16  Ibid., Book 10, section 8. 17  Ibid., Book 10, section 12

The Etiquette of Eating    707 was determined not by his own preferences, but by the significance of those colors on the particular occasion and the role he played in that occasion. Confucius was admired for his ability to adapt to his circumstances in a seemingly effortless fashion: “At court, when speaking with officers of lower rank, he was pleasant and affable; when speaking with officers of upper rank, he was formal and proper. When his lord was present, he combined an attitude of cautious respect with graceful ease.”18 A mark of Confucius’s virtue is the fact that he not only knows what is required in each situation, but that his behavior seems to flow effortlessly and seamlessly. The unexpected never seems unexpected to him; he is prepared to speak properly with whomever enters the room. It is worth pausing here to compare Post’s description of the skilled hostess at a formal society dinner: although engrossed in the person she is talking to, she must be able to notice anything amiss that may occur. . . . No matter what happens, if all the china in the pantry falls with a crash, she must not appear to have heard any of it. No matter what goes wrong she must cover it as best she may, and at the same time cover the fact that she is covering it. To give hectic directions, merely accentuates the awkwardness.19

In both cases, the desired serenity of the occasion is achieved through complete mastery of the relevant social forms and the ability to maintain them in the face of unanticipated alteration. For Confucius, performing rituals correctly, particularly those required by one’s social position or role, is not slavish conformity to arbitrary rules or conventions. Rather, it is a matter of the highest spiritual importance. To get the rituals right is to respect one’s place in the order of things and contribute to a common social and spiritual good. It is, quite simply, a spiritual duty to conform to ritual with as much precision as one can manage. In classical Confucianism, adherence to rituals is also an essential aspect of character formation. This is more evident in the work of Xunzi, a third century b.c. follower of Confucius, and the author of philosophically rich texts on ritual (li) and its relationship to character development. According to Xunzi, human beings start out badly in need of assistance when it comes to moral cultivation. As he puts it, “crooked wood must await steaming and straightening on the shaping frame, and only then does it become straight.”20 We are the crooked wood and ritual is the shaping frame that straightens us and leads us on the path, or the Way. It does this by creating habits of correct behavior that eventually become part of who we are, much as Aristotelian virtues do. Practicing the rituals well, as Confucius did, inculcates moderation, self-​constraint, and consideration for others. By adhering to ritual, we shape ourselves into the proper embodiment of the Confucian ideal.21 18 

Ibid., Book 10, section 2.

19 Post, Etiquette, 270.

20 Xunzi, Xunzi: The Complete Text, trans. Eric Hutton (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 248. 21  See Eric Hutton, “Xunzi and Virtue Ethics,” in The Routledge Companion to Virtue Ethics, ed. Lorraine Besser and Michael Slote (New York: Routledge, 2015).

708   Karen Stohr For Xunzi, ritual instantiates the judgments of the practically wise person familiar to Western readers of Aristotle. Ritual directs us to act as the practically wise person knows to act: Ritual cuts off what is too long and extends what is too short. It subtracts from what is excessive and adds to what is insufficient. It achieves proper form for love and respect. . . . Thus, fine ornaments and coarse materials, music and weeping, happiness and sorrow—​these things are opposites, but ritual makes use of all of them, employing them and alternating them at the proper times.22

This remark occurs in the context of an extended discussion of funeral rites and mourning, the proper performance of which was clearly very important to Xunzi and his audience.23 But the various rituals and rites concerning sacrifices and meals would have been important in just the same way. They make us better by shaping our behavior in light of an ideal. By the time we have achieved that ideal (if we ever do), the behaviors have become part of our nature. It may seem implausible to modern readers that the elaborate rituals of formal dinner parties could improve our characters in any way. Perhaps waiting for hours until the dessert course arrives helps with self-​control, and we may see a certain beauty in the precision with which a formal dinner is executed. But I have claimed that the etiquette conventions about dinner parties do more than this, that they create a structure of norms and expectations of participants that make possible moral pursuits that could not be pursued in the absence of such a structure. In order to make a case for that claim, I will turn to Kant and his discussion of dinner parties in the Anthropology.24 As we will see, Kant’s view has some interesting similarities with his Confucian predecessors, but for him, the primary value of dinner parties lies in the ways in which well-​conducted ones promote the important moral goods of sociability, fellowship, and the cultivation of knowledge.

What a Kantian Dinner Party Can Do Like Xunzi, Kant believes that human nature is in need of correction and rehabilitation—​ warped wood that requires straightening.25 Although Kant did not place the same kind of emphasis on ritual as the Confucians did, we do see some parallels in his exhortations on behalf of the social graces. In the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant argues that it is a duty to 22 Xunzi, Xunzi, 209. 23 

See Erin Cline, “The Boundaries of Manners,” Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 15, no. 2 (June 2016): 241–​255. 24  For a thorough exposition of Kant on this topic, see Alix Cohen, “The Ultimate Kantian Experience: Kant on Dinner Parties,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 25, no. 4 (October 2008): 315‒336. As will become clear, I am indebted to Cohen’s exposition of Kant on this subject. 25  For more on this comparison between Xunzi and Kant and on self-​cultivation more generally, see P. J. Ivanhoe, Confucian Moral Self-​Cultivation (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2000).

The Etiquette of Eating    709 cultivate social graces on the grounds that they make virtue more appealing and hence, promote its cultivation: Affability, sociability, courtesy, hospitality, and gentleness (in disagreeing without quarreling) are, indeed, only tokens, yet they promote the feeling for virtue itself by a striving to bring this illusion as near as possible to the truth. By all of these, which are merely the manners one is obliged to show in social intercourse, one binds others too; and so they still promote a virtuous disposition by at least making virtue fashionable.26

We find a rather stronger statement of the moral importance of etiquette in both the Lectures on Ethics and the Anthropology. In the Lectures on Ethics, he suggests that etiquette helps us hide and eventually overcome our mistrust and dislike of others: “We try to conceal our mistrust by affecting a courteous demeanor and so accustom ourselves to a courtesy that at last it becomes a reality and we set a good example by it. . . . Accordingly the endeavour to appear good ultimately makes us really good.”27 Kant does not explain how the endeavor to appear good improves our character, but it is evident that he thinks it does. The theme reappears in the Anthropology, where he makes the following claim: Collectively, the more civilized men are, the more they are actors. They assume the appearance of attachment, of esteem for others, of modesty, and of disinterestedness, without ever deceiving anyone, because everyone understands that nothing sincere is meant. Persons are familiar with this, and it is even a good thing that this is so in this world, for when men play these roles, virtues are gradually established, whose appearance had up until now only been affected. These virtues ultimately will become part of the actor’s disposition.28

The first sentence or two of this paragraph might be read cynically, as if Kant is calling us out on our hypocritical pretense of politeness. It might also be read as a criticism of someone like Confucius, who could be seen as merely acting a role insincerely, albeit skillfully. The last part, however, makes it clear that Kant has something else in mind. The playing of the social roles is the method by which virtues are established. We start out as imitators, but if things go well, we end up as the real deal. We can see this in Confucius, who is represented as a moral ideal insofar as he has internalized the rituals and made their practice part of his own character. He is modest, self-​restrained, considerate, respectful, adaptable, and generally virtuous. Moreover, he has become that way through his careful performance of social roles. This concept of etiquette as connected to playing a social role is, I  think, quite important to understanding what is happening in dinner parties, particularly formal 26 

Immanuel Kant, The Doctrine of Virtue, in The Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 474. This reference and all further references to this text employ the Prussian Academy page numbers. 27  Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Ethics, trans. Louis Infield (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1963), 225. 28 Kant, Anthropology, 37.

710   Karen Stohr ones. A successful dinner party requires that people take up a role, usually as either a guest or a host. One’s job as a dinner party guest is to be a good guest in those particular circumstances. This means knowing what the occasion demands of me and acting accordingly. For example, I should show up at an appropriate time, dressed as I am expected to dress. I should talk pleasantly to the people next to me at dinner, and I should exit at an appropriate time. Hosts have different obligations, but the role is similarly structured. In this sense, dinner is a staged production, but the staging of it is essential to achieving the moral value at which the production aims. Kant recognized this, which is why he took the specific form of a dinner party to be so important to its success. The title of the section of the Anthropology in which Kant discusses dinner parties is “On the Highest Ethicophysical Good.”29 The title matters because it reflects Kant’s constant concern with reconciling our moral and physical natures. He begins the section by reminding us that “the inclination to pleasurable living and inclination to virtue are in conflict with each other” and suggests that one of the tasks of morality is to help us navigate this conflict successfully in our daily lives. Clearly, food is part of pleasurable living, and elsewhere in the Anthropology, the Doctrine of Virtue, and the Lectures on Ethics, he reminds us of the moral dangers of giving in to our desires for pleasurable bodily experiences, whether they are pleasures of food and wine, mind-​altering drugs, or sexual activity. He recognizes, of course, that we must satisfy a moderate version of some of these desires simply in order to survive. The trouble, of course, comes in when those desires get out of hand, as they so often do. This is the standpoint that Martine, Philippa, and their friends have when they are faced with Babette’s feast. They are ascetics, partly from necessity but mostly from choice. They eat only unassuming foods, refrain from drinking alcohol, and generally push all forms of aesthetic pleasure and enjoyment out of their lives, believing this to be the path to holiness and moral rectitude. When Babette arrives in their village, they instruct her to prepare their food in the simplest possible way. Although they are genuinely welcoming to her, the mere fact that she is French creates some anxiety for them. France, to them, carries an aura of decadence and unrestraint. They fear it because they are well aware of the power of aesthetic experience. Martine had been, and still is, extraordinarily beautiful. Years before, her beauty had captivated a young officer named Lorens Loewenhielm, who returns to the village by happenstance on the evening of the feast. His love for her is described in quasi-​religious terms, and she seemed to return his affection. Alas, the young man was unable to communicate his feelings to her and left the village in despair. Philippa’s gift is an exceptional singing voice, which caught the attention of a visiting French opera star. Achille Pepin, who was not only French but Catholic (doubly dangerous!), trained Philippa with the hope of convincing her to return with him to France to sing on stage. Although Philippa turned him down, he was responsible for sending Babette to them years later.

29 

Ibid., 185‒191.

The Etiquette of Eating    711 These back stories matter because Martine and Philippa are acutely aware of the genuine attractions of aesthetic value. They understand beauty all too well, which is why they are frightened of Babette’s preparations and indeed, of Babette herself: “By this time Babette, like the bottled demon of the fairy tale, had swelled and grown to such dimensions that her mistresses felt small before her. They now saw the French dinner coming upon them, a thing of incalculable nature and range.”30 Martine and Philippa have never had a French dinner, and certainly don’t know what Babette is capable of creating. It is enough that she is French; they know where that might lead. Kant is not arguing on behalf of asceticism. Quite the contrary, he is fully aware of the transformative power of aesthetic appreciation. Like Martine and Philippa, he knows both its appeal and its dangers. The highest ethico-​physical good is what we achieve when we navigate this channel successfully. As he puts it, “the good living which still seems to harmonize best with virtue is a good meal in good company.”31 Neither a bad meal in good company, nor a good meal in bad company, will do. In order to unite these two dimensions of ordinary human life, we must have both. But getting them to harmonize is a challenge.32

Dinner with Kant Kant’s response to this challenge is to spell out an explicit set of requirements for a successful dinner party. He follows Chesterfield in claiming that the number of guests must be no fewer than the Graces, but no more than the Muses (that would be between three and ten, not counting the host). Too few people and the conversation falters; too many, and the guests tend to break off into small groups and there is no unified conversation. The food and drink must be pleasant and plentiful enough to induce physical satisfaction, but not so pleasant and plentiful that guests are tempted to overindulge and render themselves unfit for conversation. (This, of course, requires self-​restraint on the part of the guests.) Music, he thinks, is both unnecessary and distracting, and competitive games after dinner put guests at odds with each other by placing self-​interest too much at the forefront. What is needed is excellent conversation, supported and maintained by all the participants. For Kant, a good dinner conversation has a very specific narrative arc. His account of that arc and the rationale for it is fascinating and worth quoting at length: At a full dinner, where the multitude of courses is only intended to keep the guests together for a long time. . . . the conversation usually goes through the three stages of 1) narration, 2) reasoning, and 3) jesting. A. The first stage concerns the news of the day, first domestic, then foreign, received from personal letters and newspapers. 30 Dineson, Babette’s Feast, 25. 31 Kant, Anthropology, 186. 32 

My understanding of Kant on this point is especially indebted to Cohen’s article.

712   Karen Stohr B. During the second stage, when this first appetite has been satisfied, the company gets livelier, because, in arguing back and forth, it is hard to avoid a variety of judgment about one and the same object under discussion. Since no one has a low regard for his own judgment, a dispute arises which continues to whet the appetite for food and drink; and in proportion to the liveliness of the dispute and the participation in it, the food is felt to be beneficial. C. In the third stage, because reasoning is always a kind of work and exertion of energy, this finally becomes difficult after eating too copiously during the dinner. Consequently the conversation turns naturally to the mere play of wit, partly also to please the lady in the company who is encouraged by the minor, intentional, but not insulting attacks on her sex to shine in her own display of wit. Thus the meal ends with laughter.33

Kant goes on to explain how hearty laughter aids in digestion and so improves one’s physical well-​being. But it is not simply the digestive and lady-​pleasing effects of laughter that matter to Kant. Laughter also creates a sense of playful comradery. Consider how things might go if the conversation ended at stage B instead. Guests might find themselves in heated arguments, exacerbated by wine, each convinced that he or she is correct and the others badly mistaken. Or supposing that the dinner makes it through stage C without incident, if the guests take up competitive games, like gambling, self-​interest inevitably begins to edge in. Guests who were best of friends after dessert can quickly slide into becoming belligerent rivals. When it comes to the conversation itself, Kant spells out five specific rules: (1) choose topics that interest everyone and make sure that everyone is included; (2) do not allow long silences; (3) do not change subjects suddenly or repeatedly; (4) squelch any form of dogmatism, ideally with “a jest deftly introduced”; (5) in the event of serious conflict, remain controlled “so that mutual respect and good faith always prevail.”34 These five rules, along with his account of the narrative arc of the dinner, help us see what moral aims Kant thinks can be achieved by well-​conducted dinner parties. Although there may be multiple aims, I will consider two—​the improvement of one’s understanding of important topics through rational conversation and the creation of bonds of fellowship and community. Both were important to Kant; a good dinner could not be good without both of them. Let’s start with the first aim. Kant believed that we have a duty to ourselves to cultivate our own perfection. He distinguishes between natural and moral perfection, although that distinction is not important for present purposes. What does matter is that the way we cultivate our perfection is through enhancing our rational capacities and our general understanding of the world and the people in it. Conversation is essential to this task. We are limited in our ability to acquire knowledge about the world, and so we are dependent on the testimony of others to increase our own understanding. (This is, incidentally, a crucial

33 Kant, Anthropology, 189. 34 Ibid., 190.

The Etiquette of Eating    713 reason why Kant was so opposed to lying. Deliberately presenting someone with a false view of the world violates not just a duty to that person, but a duty that we owe to the moral community.) Within Kant’s narrative arc for a conversation, it is primarily stages A and B where this aim is accomplished. At the beginning of stage A, guests are still hungry. Although Kant does not say as much, we all know that hungry people can be cantankerous. The conversation of stage A suits the physical state of the guests. They are distracted from their hunger by hearing or giving reports of the news, but they are not called upon to undertake challenging arguments or control their emotions. As the food and wine begin to flow, the conversation moves to stage B, where debate and discussion take place. Here guests can hone their argumentative skills while still listening respectfully to others. Because the topics are of interest to all, everyone can contribute their own observations, enhancing the range of opinions and perspectives available. Wine has loosened tongues without yet producing intoxication. The physical state of the guests is one of pleasant satiety, with the expectation of more pleasant food and drink to come. By the time that the wine has taken its full effects, the conversation has moved to stage C, where no one is expected to make much sense. Because Kant strictly forbids destructive gossip as a dinner topic, nothing is said at which someone might take offense or feel the need to contradict as a matter of loyalty. The mood is light and people are satisfied with their physical and mental states. The first three of Kant’s five rules also conduce to rationality-​enhancing dinner conversations. As we have said, the introduction of topics interesting to everyone broadens the number of ideas and perspectives in play. The second limits awkwardness and prevents the unnecessary introduction of new, disjointed topics. Kant’s third rule makes clear that a good conversation must have some sort of thematic unity, apparent on reflection. As he says, “if the mind cannot find a connecting thread, it feels confused and realizes with displeasure that it has not progressed in matters of culture, but rather regressed.”35 The right sort of dinner party should leave everyone with the feeling that they have both learned something and contributed to the enlightenment of others. An evening of mutual enlightenment, bolstered by the pleasant physical sensations of a good dinner, might very well seem to deserve the title of the “highest ethicophysical good.” The second aim of dinner parties, the creation of fellowship and community, is enhanced when the first aim is successful. When the conversation feels like a shared project, conducted in a spirit of seriousness that is yet not too serious, we find ourselves drawn together in a cohesive whole, bound by a feeling of mutual respect and affection. This is what Kant thinks we must take special care not to disrupt or disturb with overly contentious arguments, too much wine, or high stakes gambling. The final two rules are aimed at preserving the right spirit of community. As Kant says, “what counts more is the tone (which must be neither ranting nor arrogant), not the content of the

35 Ibid.

714   Karen Stohr conversation, so that none of the guests should go home from the company at variance with each other.”36 In “Babette’s Feast,” Dineson says little about what is discussed over dinner, or whether the conversation flowed in accordance with Kant’s directives. But we do know that the second of Kant’s two aims was achieved with extraordinary success. People came to the dinner at variance with each other; they leave as a community brought together by their shared aesthetic experience. The nearly miraculous, entirely unexpected exquisiteness of the meal does more than simply satisfy their physical hunger; it transforms their hearts. Although the feast undoubtedly involves more wine and decadent food than Kant would have deemed prudent, it certainly seems worthy of being called the highest ethico-​physical good. Kant’s account of dinner parties illuminates the ways in which the specific rules and practices of a dinner can facilitate moral aims and achieve morally important goods. Crucially, it will only succeed if all the participants come prepared to fulfill their particular roles in the gathering. Although Kant does not draw sharp distinctions among the various roles at a dinner party, he clearly thinks that all participants are duty-​bound to live up to the moral demands of the participant role. Each person must do his or her part to sustain both the rationality-​enhancing conversation and the feeling of pleasant fellowship that the dinner aims to produce. Hosts and guests alike have a duty to remain in control of their emotions and their rational capacities. They must contribute to the conversation without dominating it or misdirecting it, and they must be prepared to step in with a well-​timed joke or conversational redirection. This last element of the dinner participant role requires a considerable degree of skill. We often refer to the person with this skill as having tact. Tact, while not on most standard lists of virtues, is indisputably helpful in social settings. Indeed, Emily Post remarked that “at least half the rules of etiquette are maxims in tact.”37 Tactfulness requires imaginative awareness of what other people are thinking, feeling, and experiencing, as well as the ability to create or alter circumstances that will produce a desired effect. Consider Kant’s recommendation that dogmatism be disarmed by jesting. This is challenging, even among dinner participants who know each other well. The jest has to be significant enough to produce a change in conversational tone or direction, but cannot tilt too far into the territory of insulting or humiliating the person being dogmatic. It requires just the right remark, in just the right tone, at just the right moment.

Dinner Disasters Given how few of us can really exhibit this skill consistently, it is a helpful feature of etiquette that it often sets strict rules about what does and does not count as appropriate dinner conversation material. In one of Jane Austen’s many marvelously awkward 36 Ibid.

37 Post, Etiquette, 624.

The Etiquette of Eating    715 dinner scenes, one guest starts launching excessively intrusive questions at another. In a desperate effort to keep her dinner from turning into a social disaster, the hostess interrupts with a remark about rain. Another guest picks up her cue and continues the topic, with the result that “much was said on the subject of rain by both of them.”38 This maneuver is effective because the subject of rain, however boring, is an exceptionally safe one. Everyone can discuss the rain, and no one can reasonably take offense or be mortified by anyone else’s commentary on rain. In this context, the deliberate change of topic to the weather is a way for participants to reclaim the occasion and force everyone to revert to their appropriate social roles as dinner participants. Although the rain discussion has the effect of diminishing everyone’s interest in further conversation, the dinner does at least end properly, with everyone back on good behavior. Contrast this with another formal dinner that does end in disaster, this time at Downton Abbey. The trigger for the disaster is a guest who is not at all inclined to play the social role expected of her as a participant in this kind of dinner. The dinner is hosted by the Earl and Countess of Grantham at their estate. Most of the guests are friends and family members, and the disruptive guest, Miss Sarah Bunting, has been invited as a friend of one of the Grantham family members. Miss Bunting, who is neither a member of the Grantham’s social class nor a particular fan of the aristocracy, is given to expressing her strong political opinions whenever she sees fit. At this particular dinner, her frankness borders on the insulting, and gets the better of Lord Grantham. He storms out of the room, but not before telling Miss Bunting that she is no longer welcome at Downton Abbey. The scene takes place in the 1920s, and the upending of established social roles is one of the primary themes of the series. Those roles have changed enough that it seems perfectly reasonable to invite a schoolteacher to dinner, but not enough to change the basic social expectations of dinner guests. Those expectations, it should be noted, have nothing to do with forks. Although Downton Abbey has its share of snobbish dinner guests, the Granthams do not seem particularly concerned with whether their guests are able to use silver properly. The cause of Miss Bunting’s banishment is her unwillingness to stay in the conversational role assigned to guests at such a dinner. Nor can she be talked down or redirected by others into safer topics; she plows ahead with her efforts to unsettle Lord Grantham, efforts that succeed. This is no small feat; Lord Grantham’s own designated social role would have militated quite strongly against storming out of his own dining room in response to a guest. He had already used all the defenses socially available to him; politeness had not succeeded. We might say that Miss Bunting rendered him unable to be Lord Grantham at that moment. Formal dinners do not have a monopoly on awkwardness, of course, and they need not be the miserable affairs that they often are at Downton Abbey. But let me suggest that one of the functions of the elaborate rituals and practices of formal dinners is to make it possible for potentially volatile groups of participants to come together in a joint activity without that activity imploding. The highly structured roles of the participants give each

38 

Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1923), 62.

716   Karen Stohr person a well-​defined part to play, with little room for improvisation or modification. No doubt this makes formal dinners less conducive to fellowship than a group of friends roasting marshmallows over a fire, but that is not the point of such a dinner.

The Point of Formal Dinners The clearest example of this is a state dinner. Such a dinner is hosted by the head of state of a country for some honored guest, usually the head of state of another country or an equally important person. State dinners, which are generally held at the residence of the home country’s head of state, are about as formal as a dinner can get. They are elaborate affairs, requiring protocol experts from both countries to participate in the plans, procedures, and expectations. Everything is planned out in advance, everyone is briefed on what to wear and do. Violations of protocol, even minor ones, can turn into international incidents if not properly managed. The symbolic significance of each handshake or toast is enormous—​the wrong dress designer or a mistimed entrance can throw off the entire evening. The entire event is scripted and undoubtedly extremely stressful. It is hard to imagine how anyone has fun. Of course, having fun is not the point. The point is the symbolism of bringing together two countries under a single roof to share a meal. It is the extension of hospitality on one side and the acceptance of it on another. When the countries already have common interests and a strong relationship, a state dinner will carry much less symbolic burden than when the relationship between the countries is marked by unease and distrust. (To take a recent example, if President Obama must accidentally talk over the national anthem of another country, it is fortunate when the country in question is the United Kingdom.) But if the two sides can get through a meal together with the appearance of good will and mutual enjoyment (of sorts), we might be more hopeful that they can get through the next round of diplomatic negotiations over climate change or nuclear testing. The strict rules of protocol make it far more likely that the dinner will proceed without incident because there is so little room for improvisation. The point of scripting everything is to ensure that no one wanders off that script. Her unwillingness to follow a script is why Sarah Bunting will never get invited to a state dinner. Miss Bunting’s tirade was focused on what she believed to be Lord Grantham’s lack of concern for his servants. And yet the butler, Mr. Carson, considered her remarks as outrageous and insulting as Lord Grantham himself. Carson does not see his servant role as demeaning or degrading. Quite the contrary, he prides himself on the skill with which he performs his job.39 That job is to make the house, and certainly the formal dinners 39  Of course, it helps Mr. Carson’s sense of his dignity that he is the lord of the downstairs version of the manor. The scullery maids may (and indeed, often do) see it differently. In his novel The Remains of the Day (New York: Vintage, 1988), Kashuo Ishiguro draws a far more nuanced and poignant picture of a butler’s self-​conception in relation to his employer and the social system in which their roles are located.

The Etiquette of Eating    717 served in the house, run as smoothly and seamlessly as possible. The hallmark of excellent service for him is the invisibility of it to those who are being served. Of course, the invisibility of the servants is precisely what troubles Miss Bunting. But the invisibility, however much we may share Miss Bunting’s concerns, has a function. In formal dinners, whether at Downton Abbey or high-​end restaurants, the dinner is intended to seem effortless. Obviously, it is not effortless, but the experience of the guest is supposed to be seamless. A good footman or waiter serves and removes dishes in a barely perceptible fashion. Plates appear and disappear as if by magic. Those bringing in dishes walk noiselessly into rooms and blend into the background once there. Sometimes even the very doors they use are disguised from the view of the occupants. It is as if they are not there. What is the point of such invisibility? One answer is that it makes it possible for the participants in the dinner to give their full attention to other things, such as each other or the conversation they are having. Emily Post’s dinner hostess is able to maintain her calm demeanor because she has a staff of highly skilled servants working in the background. If she were jumping up every few minutes to attend to some aspect of the dinner, the dinner itself could not proceed, or at least not on those terms.40 Sarah Bunting was, of course, justified in her criticisms of the social hierarchy at Downton Abbey, although she was rude in her expression of them. But that has more to do with the social status of servants in that system than with the practice of invisible service itself. The point of some etiquette rules is to make possible certain things by making other things recede into the background. The fact that this has often been done by morally dubious methods does not mean that there is something morally dubious about the entire practice.

Creating Community at the Table To see this, let us return to Babette and her dinner. Babette is a servant in the sisters’ household, but she is hardly their social inferior. The sisters do not regard her that way and she certainly does not regard herself that way. Babette carries herself with a dignity and self-​assurance to which the villagers respond. She quickly takes control not just of the kitchen, but of the household budget and indeed, of the well-​being of many of her neighbors. Regardless of her actual job title, Babette is clearly a force to be reckoned with. 40 

This is evident in Post’s description of a remarkable fictional woman named Mrs. Three-​in-​One. As Post’s popularity grew, it became evident that her how-​to chapter on hosting a formal dinner with the help of a bevy of servants had limited usefulness to much of her audience. She thus invented Mrs. Three-​ in-​One, who simultaneously fulfills the roles of cook, waitress, and hostess. Although Post has some practical tips for those of us who manage without servants, some of her breezy advice for Mrs. Three-​in-​ One borders on the absurd. Still, Post’s message is clear—​scale back your entertaining ambitions to what you can actually manage to do.

718   Karen Stohr Over the course of the entire feast, Babette herself never enters the dining room. Instead, she employs a boy to be a waiter. Had she appeared in the dining room, she would have disrupted the very thing she was working so hard to create—​a near-​mystical aesthetic experience. Babette describes herself as an artist. Her art is the dinner, and to enter the dining room would have been to ruin her own work by distracting from it. She chooses to be invisible to the dinner participants, and her choice to be invisible is an exercise of her creative authority. Martine and Philippa do not ask Babette to come into the room; probably, they realize that she would not and moreover, that she could not without destroying her work. But it is not simply Babette herself who is absent from the dining room. Crucially, the food itself has been declared a taboo subject at the dinner, at least for all but one guest. It is, I think, an essential part of the success of the dinner in “Babette’s Feast” that the guests are deliberately not talking about the food. As we have seen, they think their indulgence in the meal is sinful, and they neither wish to exacerbate their own state of sin nor mortify their beloved Martine and Philippa by calling attention to it. So they remain silent, except for the visiting General Loewenhielm, who is understandably mystified by the appearance of such food at such a gathering. The general, who has led a cultured life in France, is the nineteenth-​century version of a modern foodie. He knows exactly what he is eating and he cannot refrain from remarking on it. His remarks, however, are left hanging in mid-​air by his dining companions. They are deliberately ignoring him, of course, but even if they were not, they would not know what to say in response. They have no idea what they are eating and drinking. The general knows this as well; his remarks are really for himself. Strikingly, he never once seeks to find out how such a dinner came to be taking place. He simply enjoys it. And this is crucial to the experience of that dinner, both for him and for the others. The experience of eating an extraordinary meal in this company is sufficient. Each participant is transformed and renewed in a way that is both specific to that individual and importantly communal. The general’s speech at the end of dinner falls on different ears, but it manages to unify the listeners anyway. Not every dinner can or should be Babette’s feast. The guests at the feast cannot talk about the food, because talking about the food would interfere with that particular shared aesthetic experience. But there are many different types of aesthetic experience possible at a dinner party. Many people enjoy talking about what they are eating and drinking, and indeed, dine with friends for the sheer purpose of discussing culinary matters with friends. It may enhance their sense of community rather than detract from it. (We can, perhaps, imagine Babette at dinner with friends who are also highly skilled chefs.) The relevant governing rules will depend on what the participants seek from the experience. Depending on the aim, pizza on the couch may be more effective at achieving it than the fanciest restaurant meal. But we should not mistake the informality of a delivery pizza meal for the absence of etiquette. As I mentioned earlier, there are rules about eating pizza, just as there are rules about eating oysters. And if I am invited for pizza, my job is to follow those rules and occupy the social role of a guest at that kind of party.

The Etiquette of Eating    719 This is important because as I have said, my willingness to occupy that role and follow its associated conventions and rules help define a particular occasion as an instance of a kind.41 What makes a meal a picnic is that it is eaten outdoors under highly informal circumstances. Food is spread on a blanket and eaten with the fingers or hands by people dressed in casual clothes and sitting or lying on the ground.42 By contrast, formal dinners are partly constituted by the guest’s adherence to certain standards of dress and behavior. Suppose I show up to a formal dinner wearing jeans and a T-​shirt. I have, by that small act of rebellion, made the dinner less formal. Of course, a dinner is not perceptibly less formal if the oyster fork is placed next to the soup spoon, rather than being nestled in it. But if the hosts decide to forgo the china and silver in favor of takeout containers served on the patio, they are no longer having a formal dinner at all. The alteration of the rituals has altered the nature of what they and their guests are doing. It is, of course, not always a problem for a planned formal dinner to turn into something else entirely. Sometimes the power goes out on Thanksgiving, leaving guests with a choice between a half-​cooked turkey and peanut butter sandwiches. And certainly hosts can invite people to gatherings of any form they want. Still, accepting an invitation comes with responsibilities, and the responsibilities are important. It is a role with normative implications. If I agree to be a dinner guest, I must be a good one. If I am invited to a picnic, I do not show up in heels and expect to be served delicate fish. That would be as much of a mistake as showing up for a formal dinner in jeans. I can interfere with an occasion by adding to the formality just as much as I can by diminishing it. And both would be rude. This applies not just to attire, but to participation in the relevant activities. A guest who sat silently through one of Kant’s dinner parties would be a lousy guest, since the point of such a dinner is to engage in conversation. Once the occasion has been named and its aims established, participants have an obligation to come prepared to participate in the relevant rituals and practices (learning about them if necessary) and moreover, participate in them with the right state of mind. If one accepts an invitation to a Super Bowl party, one had better be ready to eat junk food and watch football. Feigning interest in football at a Super Bowl party is permissible, but starting a loud rant about corruption in the sport during a key play is not. A person who finds football too objectionable to watch should probably decline the party invitation entirely. The fact that the success of the dinner depends in part on whether guests successfully execute their social roles at that dinner undeniably places a burden on guests (although it alleviates burdens on hosts). That may be seen as a reason to reject being a guest at dinners that require such a performance. I have claimed that all dinners require a performance of some kind of role. Even a come-​as-​you-​are party invitation makes demands on guests. Although it is possible to eat dinner in a fork-​free zone, there is no such thing as an etiquette-​free zone. 41 

Cline, “The Boundaries of Manners.” This is why the “picnics” of aristocrats, involving as they do tables, linens, and servants in livery, are no such thing. I thank Tyler Doggett for this reminder. 42 

720   Karen Stohr

Conclusion My claim has been that the etiquette conventions of dinner parties get their point and purpose from the moral aims of the occasion to which they apply. In the case of a dinner party, the aims involve both a shared aesthetic experience of food and fellowship generated through conversation. In “Babette’s Feast,” we see an especially transcendent aesthetic experience, one that extends the imaginations and conversational powers of the participants in unexpected ways. Although they have pledged not to speak of the food, the meal gives them an opportunity to communicate and converse about matters deeply important to them and to leave with a sense of expanded moral understanding. For Kant, that sense of fellowship and expanded understanding is of tremendous moral significance. On his view, it can take place only when certain constraints about that conversation are in operation. Etiquette is what provides those constraints, preventing us from behaving in ways that would undermine the community we are trying to build. It is rude to pick a fight at dinner or ignore others at the table, both because it is disrespectful and because it prevents all the participants from achieving what everyone came to experience. We might see a successful Kantian formal dinner as a kind of symphony—​beautiful when each instrument fulfills its own designated role well. Informal dinners allow for more improvisation, but even that improvisation has to abide by some constraints. The ultimate aims of aesthetic enjoyment, conversation, and fellowship must continue to be possible for all participants. I have argued that the etiquette conventions of dinner parties form the essential structure of the occasion, and hence that abiding by them is a requirement for being a good guest. I have also argued that there is moral value in participating in such activities insofar as they make possible moral goods that we could not achieve alone. The conversation at a good Kantian dinner party, improves my understanding of the world, which is itself a way of fulfilling a moral duty to myself. But it also produces warm feelings of love and appreciation for my fellow human beings, something that Kant thought difficult for human beings. In this way, my efforts to constrain my behavior by the norms of etiquette can help improve my character. Insofar as etiquette norms constrain me to treat people well around the dinner table and everywhere else, they draw me into a better form of moral community than I might otherwise be inclined to inhabit.43 Dinner parties are occasions where we can join with other people in some kind of communal aesthetic and social experience. Decent food is an essential element, but far from the entire point. If it were, it would not matter whether philosophers dined alone. Kant, however, knew better. It is a good meal in good company that we seek, and when we find it, we are better for it.44 43 

I argue for this thesis in more depth in “Keeping the Shutters Closed: The Moral Value of Reserve,” Philosophers’ Imprint 14, no. 23 (July 2014): 1‒25. 44  Many people have contributed to my thinking about dinner parties, especially Erin Cline, Andy Blitzer, and Amy Olberding. In addition, I am grateful to Anne Barnhill and Tyler Doggett for their extremely helpful comments on this essay.

The Etiquette of Eating    721

Bibliography Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. 2d ed. Translated by Terence Irwin. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1999. Austen, Jane. Sense and Sensibility. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1923. Buss, Sarah. “Appearing Respectful: The Moral Significance of Manners.” Ethics 109 (1999): 795–​826. Calhoun, Cheshire. “The Virtue of Civility.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 29 (2000): 251–​275. Claridge, Laura. Emily Post:  Daughter of the Gilded Age, Mistress of American Manners. New York: Random House, 2008. Cline, Erin. “The Boundaries of Manners.” Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 15, no. 2 (June 2016): 241–​255. Cohen, Alix. “The Ultimate Kantian Experience: Kant on Dinner Parties.” History of Philosophy Quarterly 25, no. 4 (October 2008): 315–​336. Confucius. Analects. Translated by Edward Slingerland. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Press, 2003. Dineson, Isak. Babette’s Feast and Other Anecdotes of Destiny. New York: Vintage Books, 1988. Hutton, Eric. “Xunzi and Virtue Ethics.” In The Routledge Companion to Virtue Ethics, edited by Lorraine Besser and Michael Slote, 113‒125. New York: Routledge, 2015. Ishiguro, Kashuo. The Remains of the Day. New York: Vintage, 1988. Ivanhoe, P. J. Confucian Moral Self-​Cultivation. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 2000. Johnson, Peter. The Philosophy of Manners. Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1999. Kant, Immanuel. Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Translated by Victor Lyle Dowdell. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978. —​—​—​. The Doctrine of Virtue. In The Metaphysics of Morals, translated by Mary Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. —​—​—​. Lectures on Ethics. Translated by Louis Infield. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1963. Martin, Judith. Miss Manners’ A Citizen’s Guide to Civility. New York: Three Rivers Press, 1996. —​—​—​. Miss Manners’ Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior. New York: Norton, 2005. Olberding, Amy. “Etiquette: A Confucian Contribution to Moral Philosophy.” Ethics 126, no. 2 (January 2016): 442–​446. Post, Emily. Etiquette: The Blue Book of Social Usage. New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1942. Sherman, Nancy. “Manners and Morals.” In Stoic Warriors, by Nancy Sherman, 43‒64. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Stohr, Karen. “Keeping the Shutters Closed: The Moral Value of Reserve.” Philosophers’ Imprint 14, no. 23 (July 2014): 1–​25. —​—​—​. “Manners, Morals, and Practical Wisdom.” In Values and Virtues:  Aristotelianism in Contemporary Ethics, edited by Timothy Chappell, 189‒211. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. —​—​—​. On Manners. New York: Routledge, 2012. —​—​—​. “Viewing Manners through a Wider Lens.” Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 15, no. 2 (June 2016): 273–​290. Xunzi. Xunzi: The Complete Text. Translated by Eric Hutton. Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 2014.

chapter 32

T he Ethics of Be i ng a Fo odi e Susan Wolf

The interest in our ethical relation to food, barely noticeable to observers of Western culture a decade or two ago, seems to have burst into prominence in recent years, thanks to philosophers like Peter Singer and journalists like Michael Pollan. There has been an explosion of books on “food ethics”—​clearly, this book is one—​not to mention documentary films, college courses, conferences, and workshops that testify first to the growing realization that there are moral issues at stake in our attitudes to food and our behavior with respect to it, and second to the remarkable and commendable interest and willingness to confront these issues in the academy, in policymaking institutions, and in the public at large. Among the topics that fall under the general heading of Food Ethics, our obligations to animals loom large. Is it permissible to raise animals for food? To hunt them if it is not necessary for one’s survival? What practices for raising, not to mention slaughtering, food-​producing animals, if any, are humane enough to meet minimal moral standards? As our treatment of animals has come under moral scrutiny, so has the treatment of farmworkers and others in the food industry. There are grave environmental issues, too, that arise in connection with our techniques for harvesting fish, for fertilizing our fields, for feeding our cattle. Further, the distribution of food, at both the global and the local levels, has significant consequences for the health and flourishing of whole regions and communities. Relative to these weighty issues, this essay’s topic is undeniably frivolous.1 For those seeking moral edification, this may come as bad news—​there is not likely to be much in these pages that will lead to moral improvement or to making the world a better place. But there is good news, too, in the fact that one is not likely to come away from this essay

1 

Indeed, one might argue that the qualification of relative frivolity is unnecessary—​that if ever there were a topic that were absolutely frivolous, this would be one.

The Ethics of Being a Foodie    723 with new reasons for shame and guilt. And, anyway, it does us good to take a break from moral edification once in a while. Although the topic of this essay is announced in its title, its central term—​foodie—​is new enough and contested enough to call for more explicit definition. The word did not exist before 1980,2 and it has been variously embraced, excoriated, and debated in recent years as use of it has proliferated. It is not, I think, a pretty word and I have some sympathy with those who wish it had never been coined, but, in my dialect at least, it identifies the category of people about whom I wish to speak better than “food lover,” on the one hand, or “gourmet,” on the other, and so I will employ it. What does it mean (or how at any rate shall I be using it)? Let me characterize a foodie, roughly and briefly, as someone who is an enthusiast about food for aesthetic reasons; someone, more particularly, who loves food—​or more precisely, who loves tasting food, and is interested enough in it to be willing to spend a considerable portion of his or her expendable income and time to exploring, studying, and sampling food, with special interest in the pleasures of the tastes. So understood, the term is narrower than that of “food lover” insofar as one might describe oneself, or be described by another, as a food lover for having a hearty appetite and taking great joy in eating, without having any interest in or tendency to develop the kind of refinement of gustatory sensibility and discrimination that the term “foodie” invokes. On the other hand, the term is meant to be broader than “gourmet” in not being restricted in its application to people with an interest in haute cuisine or in rare or exotic ingredients and dishes. Although the traditional gourmet is one kind of foodie, so is the person who chooses to spend her vacations in search of the best chili, the best barbecue, the best ice cream in the world.3 Importantly, my use of the term is evaluatively neutral. It is not part of its meaning that there is anything objectionable about being a foodie (nor obviously is it part of its meaning that there is anything admirable about it). It is not, in other words, a slur. In light of that, however, one might wonder why the ethics of being a foodie is a topic at all. For while there are roles, professions, and activities that raise ethical questions distinctive enough to make “the ethics of being an X” a reasonable subject for a lecture or even a course, not just any “X” will do. It would be mystifying for someone to announce an 2  Roberto A. Ferdman, “I will never use the word ‘foodie.’ I will never use the word ‘foodie.’ I will never . . .” https://​www.washingtonpost.com/​news/​wonk/​wp/​2016/​03/​01/​why-​the-​word-​foodie-​ is-​terrible-​and-​needs-​to-​go-​away/​?tid=sm_​tw. I am told that the philosopher Gerald Dworkin is responsible for suggesting the word to journalist Paul Levy, who, with Ann Barr, coauthored The Official Foodie Handbook, which brought the word to public attention. 3  The first book by a foodie I ever read (and which I enthusiastically recommend) was Calvin Trillin’s American Fried (New York: Penguin Books, 1975), whom it would be very misleading to call a gourmet. Thus in one memorable passage (22), Trillin asks some locals in Muskogee, Oklahoma, if they knew where he could get some good barbecue: “One barbecue place was mentioned, but something about the way it was mentioned made me suspicious. ‘They have plates there?’ I asked. . . . ‘Of course they have plates,’ [the local man] said. ‘You have any other barbecue restaurants around here?’ I asked. I have eaten fine barbecue on plates . . . but I would hesitate to eat barbecue in a place that has plates ‘of course’ or ‘naturally’ or ‘certainly.’ ”

724   Susan Wolf interest in the ethics of being a basketball player or a pianist. Why, then, think that there is such a thing as an ethics of being a foodie distinct from the ethics of being an ordinary human being? Why indeed. It is, in fact, this very question that this essay will explore. For it is my impression that although it is rarely made explicit, there is a common sentiment of at least quasi-​moral disapproval toward foodies—​a feeling or an attitude that there is something morally dubious about a passionate interest in the aesthetics of food, that having such an interest is somehow a sign of bad character.4 And it is this sentiment and the possible reasons behind it that I want to unearth and assess. In the interest of full disclosure, I should confess that my interest in this topic is at least partly personal. I consider myself a foodie—​it is a status and an interest I share with many of my relatives and friends. But I also have friends and relatives—​including some good friends and close relatives—​whom I sense are unhappy with this aspect of my character. Although they would not criticize me directly—​at least not to my face—​ or judge that it is strictly speaking immoral to be a foodie, I pick up cues suggesting some sort of vaguely moral disapproval. If you’ll pardon the ironic choice of metaphor, I would say that they find something unsavory about a foodie’s sort of interest in food. And, as I have already mentioned, it is my impression that they are not unusual. There are a lot of foodies in the middle classes of twenty-​first-​century America, but there are also a lot of anti-​foodies, where the disdain or dislike is at least roughly moral in character. Confirming my sense of this split in popular culture, is the fact that when I browsed the Internet for a definition of “foodie,” the first one I came across—​in urbandictionary. com—​defined foodie as “a douchebag who likes food.” Now what I have already said should make clear that, however amusing, this definition of “foodie” is unacceptable. One reason why is that it is easy to imagine a douchebag who likes food who is not a foodie. Consider, for example, the sort of person who enters pie-​eating contests, or hot-​dog-​eating contests, or, in my home state, the person who enters the Krispy Kreme Challenge. (This is a remarkably popular race in which the participants run two miles, eat a dozen Krispy Kreme doughnuts, and run back.) Although not all the people who enter such competitions would qualify as douchebags, it is probable that some of them would, and that the kind of love of food they have does not necessarily qualify them as foodies. But my interest in this essay is with the flipside of the suggested definition: the question is not whether every douchebag who likes food is a foodie, but whether every foodie is a douchebag. Since I have already announced that I think of myself as a foodie, you will not be surprised that my answer shall be “no” and you might reasonably expect my remarks to be somewhat defensive. But I hope at least not to be blindly defensive. I want to be as open as possible to understanding what lies behind the negative attitudes so many people have to foodies, to make more explicit the bases for such attitudes, to distinguish the prejudices from the reasons.

4 

No doubt this attitude is more prevalent in some cultures than in others.

The Ethics of Being a Foodie    725 Why, then, do so many people find foodieism morally questionable? Perhaps the most obvious reasons relate to its associations with being at once bourgeois and elitist. There is no question that foodieism is typically an interest for the privileged. Foodies are apt to enjoy going out to fancy and expensive restaurants, to stock their cupboards with extra virgin olive oil and Celtic sea salt rather than the cheaper generic versions of the same categories of foods. They may also take the time to shop at four different grocery stores because one has the best meat, another the best produce, and so on. They will drive to the next county for its famed breakfast pastries, or make their own mayonnaise from scratch. These things are all reflective of some degree of luxury. One cause of discomfort, then, comes from an awareness that the foodie is choosing to spend so much time and especially money pursuing self-​interested culinary pleasures while others are struggling to survive. Mixed up with this concern is the impression that foodies are snobbish—​that they look down on people who cannot tell the difference between heirloom tomatoes and the ordinary ones at the supermarket, or at people who have not heard of shishito peppers or who think maple bacon cupcakes are just weird. To a considerable extent, analogous concerns can be raised about any activity or interest that members of the privileged classes tend especially to have. There are legitimate issues to be discussed about how much one ought morally to allow oneself to spend on one’s own interests and pleasures (and on the interests and pleasures of one’s loved ones) in the face of the disparities of wealth in one’s society and the world. And snobbishness, insofar as it involves judging people to be less worthy of one’s care or respect—​judging them, if you will, to be inferior people—​because they lack either the capacity or the interest in cultivating the values and discrimination of a domain like this, is rightly subject to criticism. Yet it seems to me that many people have moral reservations or other negative responses to foodieism that they do not have to other activities or interests that are at least as exclusionary. Why is this? It is curious that, even though the cost of a ticket to the opera or to a rock concert or a Broadway play is considerably more than a dinner at most upscale restaurants, the attitudes toward concert-​going music lovers are rarely as disapproving as those toward foodies. Indeed, many people who feel morally uncomfortable spending $50 or $100 for a meal buy such tickets themselves; they drive Volvos rather than Subarus or Hondas; they own large flat-​screen TVs. There is no reason to think that the amount of money the typical foodie spends in the service of her foodieism, then, is especially large, relative to other middle-​and upper-​class indulgences. That it should be more likely to arouse moral criticism needs to be explained in other ways. Part of the explanation, I suspect, has to do with the fact that food is a universal. We all need food. We all buy groceries. And so the comparison between what you eat and what I eat, what you spend and what I spend, comes readily to mind. When considering whether to spend $15.00 for a Wagu Beefburger, one cannot help but notice the disparity between that and the Big Mac you can get for $3.99. And the Feeding America site tells me that every dollar I donate will provide the organization enough to secure and distribute ten meals to people facing hunger. One might hope that it would give a person pause

726   Susan Wolf to spend an amount on a dinner for himself that could provide meals to 500 or even a 1,000 starving people. And yet, we do not expect people to stop and think about all the good they could be doing with their expendable income before buying concert tickets or going to an amusement park or a sporting event, nor do we blame them for buying a house with a study rather than making do with a smaller one and donating the difference in cost to Habitat for Humanity.5 Of course, I  am all for donating money to Habitat, and to Feeding America and Oxfam, and I agree that if a person did not think twice before spending a hundred dollars or more on a meal, it would show a troubling kind of callousness or obliviousness to the world we live in. But thinking twice is one thing, having a moral obligation to refrain is another. If one does not object to people spending a portion of their resources pursuing their interests in the arts or buying occasional luxury items, or traveling to other countries for a holiday, one should not object to their spending it on food and restaurants without an argument for why this interest should be singled out from all the others. Similarly, the accusation that foodies are smug or snobbish has something in common with issues about snobbery in other areas. For those (like me) who want to defend and even rejoice in people’s ability to develop their powers of discrimination, and who believe that there are, to use Hume’s phrase, standards of taste that allow us to distinguish better and worse movies, paintings, works of philosophy, as well as blueberry pies, it is an interesting question how one can be discriminating—​even judgmental—​about such things without being a snob. But again this challenge is not peculiar to the culinary domain. If the tendency to think of foodies as snobbish or smug is more common than the tendency to think of movie or opera lovers this way, then, this too needs to be explained. Again, I suspect that the universality of our relation to food is behind it. A part of the explanation for the charge that foodies are snobs may have to do with defensiveness on the part of the non-​foodie. Knowing that one’s dining companion is a foodie might make one uncomfortable when it is time to order, or when she asks you how you like your dinner. Is there a right answer? What if one gets it wrong? One will be humiliated if one shows one’s ignorance or lack of sophistication. One may be reluctant to invite one’s foodie friends over for dinner, fearing that they will sneer when one passes around the store-​brought bread or tosses the salad with Kraft dressing. (Writing this essay, I wonder whether this is why so few people invite me to dinner.) Such worries are less likely to come up in connection with other domains—​first, because, one is less likely to go to the opera or the cinema if one is not an opera or a movie lover, and second, because, there is no shame in being a novice in these fields. But one cannot say to one’s dinner companion “I’ve just taken up eating.”

5 

Strictly speaking, most of us do not expect such things, but there are people—​for example, members of the effective altruism movement—​with more demanding standards.

The Ethics of Being a Foodie    727 These same facts, however, may also make foodies more prone to snobbery than enthusiasts of other domains. It is common knowledge that not everyone likes opera, or movies, or football, and it is rare to find someone who thinks that your interest or lack of it in one of these realms is a reflection of your merit as a person. But we all not only eat, we have preferences about what we eat, and so a foodie might think that these preferences ought to be formed a certain way, or based on a certain kind of consideration. She might think that a person who does not notice or care what his food tastes like, or even one who does not care very much, shows an objectionable kind of blindness to his surroundings or detachment from his body. This seems to me to be as moralistic as the anti-​foodie stance that I am trying to argue against, however. Related to this, foodies may be especially susceptible to allowing or encouraging conversations about food to go on, say, around a table, in a way that is insensitive to the interests of the other participants. Like a childless or a single person in a group that is exchanging stories about their toddlers or their weddings, or the spouse of a philosophy professor stuck in a group of his wife’s colleagues, a non-​foodie can find herself bored, annoyed, and alienated from a group passionately arguing about where to get the best saag paneer, or what to do with zucchini blossoms. The fact that, in some sense, everyone is interested in food may lead a foodie wrongly to assume that everyone is interested in food in this sort of way. Note to Self and other foodies: Don’t let this happen! So far I have been suggesting some reasons that foodies may be subject to criticism that on reflection I believe are issues for many bourgeois interests. An interest in the aesthetics of food, however, also raises a distinctive set of concerns because, unlike the other interests with which I have been comparing it, such as music, movies, and sports, what we eat is necessarily and obviously subject to evaluations along non-​aesthetic dimensions as well as aesthetic ones. Since food nourishes us, we need to be concerned with the healthiness of food; since food is a massive industry, which, among other things, involves the raising and slaughtering of animals, we need to be concerned with the moral consequences of the food-​related decisions we make. It is arguably urgently important that we be alert to the atrocities connected to factory farms, the environmental consequences of fertilizers and pesticides, the dehumanizing conditions to which many farmworkers are subjected, and to the ongoing obesity epidemic. There is a stereotype of foodies as food aesthetes—​that is, as people who give priority to their personal quest for interesting and delicious tastes over moral and health concerns. And there is no doubt that some foodies fit the stereotype,6 looking away from or scoffing at those who protest the treatment of veal calves, dairy cows, and so on. But it is a stereotype, and one that seems to me increasingly obsolete. To be sure, foodies need to beware of the motives for self-​deception. Just as SUV drivers (and manufacturers) may tend to underrate the evidence of how much gas guzzlers contribute to climate change, and parents who want to send their children to private 6  At an event during Aspen’s annual food and wine festival a few years ago, the group attending a reception hosted by the chefs of a Los Angeles restaurant was said to burst into applause when one of the chefs expressed gratitude that in Colorado, foie gras was still legal.

728   Susan Wolf school brush off considerations about the effects of their decisions on the quality of public education, foodies may irrationally belittle moral (or for that matter health-​related) arguments that would tell them that they ought to forego dishes they especially enjoy. Avoiding the books and documentaries that would make the case against eating meat or fish or dairy or foie gras in the strongest terms is no excuse for not knowing that there is anything morally problematic concerning them. So here is another note to self and other foodies: face the facts as objectively as possible; weigh the evidence; consider the arguments; and, when called for, change your habits. But, of course, this is advice to everyone, dealing, as everyone must, with the questions of when and how much and at what personal cost moral and political values should lead us to give up or constrain or reshape our interests, our habits, and our ways of life. Happily for foodies, it is easier than it has ever been before to make some of the changes that might be at issue. The increasing interest, among chefs, foodies, and the public at large, about the moral, political, nutritional, and health consequences of our eating and food-​raising practices do not stand apart from much less compete with shifts in culinary values. To the contrary, concerns about health and environment, about the treatment of animals and the loss of biodiversity, among other things, have informed the movements in haute cuisine over the past several decades. Fine dining has shifted away from heavy rich sauces, large slabs of meat, and dishes that are insensitive to regional and seasonal ingredients; now good restaurants commonly celebrate sustainably raised produce, foraged mushrooms and herbs, served in moderately sized portions. The variety of ingredients and recipes that is easily available (at least among the middle and upper classes) is greater than ever before. Where once it was a challenge for many a host to figure out what to serve a vegetarian, much less a vegan, houseguest or where one might take him to dinner, coming up with a recipe for a tasty vegan meal, made from ingredients to be found at one’s local supermarket, is now only one or two clicks on the Internet away. So far the reasons I have offered in explanation of the antipathy toward foodies have fallen into two overlapping classes: one set, having to do with privilege and elitism, is not restricted or distinctive in its objections to foodies per se; the other applies to a stereotype to which foodies need not and should not conform. If all these reasons were to be cleared away, would the antipathy toward foodieism vanish? An anti-​foodie might employ a thought experiment to answer this question, by focusing on a foodie who met the anti-​foodie’s standards of moral conscientiousness—​he might consider, for example, a vegan foodie who gives a suitable portion of her money and time to soup kitchens and relevant political activism. Would he still find anything morally unsavory about the foodie’s attitude and approach to food? Of course, I can only speculate, but I suspect that a significant range of negative attitudes toward foodies and foodieism would remain. For there seems to me something about people’s attitudes to food in particular that makes foodies especially open to censure, and indeed open to censure from multiple directions. Some people, who are leery of aesthetic pursuits generally (as opposed, say, to the quest for truth or social justice), see an aesthetic interest in food as one example among others of a frivolous and

The Ethics of Being a Foodie    729 unworthy pastime. While others, who might love art or dance or music, and who are therefore sympathetic to aesthetic interests of other kinds, nonetheless regard food as too lowly or otherwise unfit to be a proper object of aesthetic passion. What is it about food that makes it especially apt to arouse moral suspicion? I think that it is the fact that food is so clearly an aspect of our corporeal and animal nature. Since ancient times, the idea of humans as rational animals has been associated with a status placing us between beasts and gods. Insofar as we are capable of reasoning and valuing and governing ourselves according to rationally chosen ends, we are thought to rise above other animals, to possess a special dignity and worth. According to this line of thought,7 our bodily natures weigh us down, burdening us with needs and appetites, which threaten to override the more admirable parts of ourselves. If we could but shed our bodily nature and its associated needs entirely, we would be better off.8 Is there anything to be said in favor of this way of thinking about ourselves and our bodily appetites? It is true that our appetites can be strong and excessive and can lead us astray in ways that can be harmful to ourselves and to others. This is why gluttony is listed in Aristotle’s catalogue of vices, and why, along with lust, it is included as one of the seven deadly sins. But it is one thing to want to be able to control one’s appetites, another to want to be free of them. Furthermore, it is important to recognize the difference between the desires for food that mark one out as a glutton and those that characterize the foodie. If gluttony is a sin, it is a sin of excess—​that is, of desiring too much food, and allowing oneself to satisfy that desire in the face of good reasons not to. It is a kind of substance abuse. But what makes one a foodie is a desire for (aesthetic) quality not quantity. Although some foodies also, and perhaps not coincidentally, struggle against gluttonous tendencies, many do not. And for those of us who do, and whose desires for quantity are a consequence of their delight in quality,9 the interest and joy of culinary experience is well worth the periodic need for dieting and restraint. In any case, the idea that we should regret our bodily natures and regard our bodily appetites in purely instrumental terms has little to recommend it. Philosophically, it is not obviously coherent to imagine oneself as potentially free of one’s body, and psychologically such an alienated view of one’s physical self is in tension with full mental health. Although there are people10 who simply do not get significant pleasure from food, people who would be happy with a diet of Soylent11 that would minimize the time,

7 

This view has its roots in Plato and the Stoics and is present in a branch of Christianity. See also the essays in this volume by Katja Vogt, Henrik Lagerlund, and Aaron Garrett and John Grey. 9  In contrast to the sentiment of the women Woody Allen describes in the opening of Annie Hall: First woman: “Boy, the food at this place is really terrible.” Second woman: “Yeah, I know; and such small portions.” 10  Including impressive and wonderful people, such as Oliver Sacks, Derek Parfit, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, to name just a few who have come to my attention. 11  Soylent is a drink or a powder that can be mixed with water, meant to serve as a replacement for meals. It is claimed by its creators to be a nutritionally complete food source. As recommended by its manufacturer Rosa Labs, “Soylent frees up your already burdened schedule and budget by saving you the 8 

730   Susan Wolf effort, and attention required to meet their nutritional needs, they do not typically regard their own indifference to taste as a norm toward which others should aspire. And the fact that most of us recoil at the prospect of getting our nourishment from a tasteless paste squeezed from a tube suggests not only that we get more than a little pleasure from eating but also that we value eating for its own sake and not just as a means to survival.12 Probably few people today hold so extreme an ascetic ideal as the one I have been discussing. But the traces of such views from our cultural histories may be affecting us nonetheless. It might explain, for example, why so many people refer to chocolate as one of their guilty pleasures, even though, speaking for myself, I can hardly think of a pleasure more innocent. More generally, it might account for the quasi-​moral disapproval many people have toward an enthusiastic interest in the aesthetics of food that I am trying to assess today. Thus, Tolstoy, in the course of defending his theory of art as the communication of human emotion, argues against those who think the point of art is beauty (understanding beauty to be a kind of pleasure) by comparing art to food. “To see the aim and purpose of art in the pleasure we get from it,” he writes, “is like assuming that the purpose and aim of food is the pleasure derived when consuming it,”13 remarking parenthetically that such an assumption is made only “by people of the lowest moral development, e.g., by savages).” Such people, he goes on to say, “cannot recognize the real meaning of eating,” which is “the nourishment of the body.”14 People whose development is more advanced, he says, understand that “the satisfaction of our taste cannot serve as a basis for our definition of the merits of food.” But, with respect both to art and to food, Tolstoy’s talk of “the real meaning” of the thing is uncalled for. Why think that an object or an activity, much less a whole category, like “food” or “art,” must have one and only one meaning and purpose? Such a view would presumably also claim that the point of sex is procreation, the point of clothing is warmth, the point of housing is shelter, and that the pleasure of the act or attractiveness of the object is irrelevant to its merit. But to imagine a world in which people held such attitudes and reflected them in the way they lived is to imagine a dreary and depressing world indeed. In fairness to Tolstoy (who happens to be one of my literary heroes), what he does think important is humanity and human community. He wanted art to aim at enhancing and promoting the brotherhood of man and thought that good and great art time and money spent shopping, cooking, and cleaning while making you healthier” (from http://​www. rosalabs.com/​about/​). See also https://​www.youtube.com/​watch?v=SGkLWjuiakQ. 12 

In the Omnivore’s Dilemma (New York: Penguin, 2006), Michael Pollan remarks, about the human desire to eat meat, that it “is not, as the animal rightists would have it, a trivial matter, a mere gastronomic preference. By the same token, we might call sex—​also now technically unnecessary for reproduction—​a mere recreational preference” (315). Even if one disagrees with Pollan about meat-​eating, the analogy between sex and eating as such seems apt. 13  Leo Tolstoy, What is Art? (Indianapolis, IN: Liberal Arts Press, 1960), 46. 14 Ibid., 46.

The Ethics of Being a Foodie    731 necessarily does so. Insofar as his comments on food are meant to remind us to keep our priorities straight (to value people and their flourishing above exquisitely prepared meals, for example) we can hardly be unsympathetic. But Tolstoy goes wrong first in suggesting that caring about the pleasures of food must be in tension with caring about its nutritional value, and second in failing to realize that one can promote the brotherhood and sisterhood of men and women through mutual engagement with the aesthetics of food—​through cooking and eating and enjoying food together—​and not just independently of it. In its most extreme version, the ascetic and Stoic ideal reflected in Tolstoy’s remarks judges pleasure to be at best irrelevant to the real value of food, at worst a distraction steering us away from a proper appreciation of what is truly valuable. A less extreme and more common version of the view accepts a preference for good-​tasting food over bad—​since one has to eat, after all, it might as well be a pleasant experience—​but insists that one see this as a minor consideration. To take great pains for the sake of deliciousness, to go out of one’s way to avoid food that is bitter or bland, or even to notice too insistently on whether food is tasty or not, would be evidence of bad character and a bad set of values. Connected to this perspective is a further view about the kinds of pleasure that food can provide—​namely, low pleasures, pleasures of a kind that lower animals (“beasts”) can enjoy, pleasures that do not exploit or express our distinctive and superior humanity. This view, perhaps even more than the view that food’s real or main value is instrumental, often underlies the feeling that food is unworthy of the kind of aesthetic enthusiasm constitutive of foodies. But this view is mistaken.15 Talk of high and low pleasures, which, in philosophy, is associated with an important passage by John Stuart Mill, is itself in bad repute, charged with being irremediably infected by elitist tendencies and values. Insofar as anti-​foodies who spurn the distinction are subconsciously applying it nonetheless, consistency calls for them to get over their negative appraisal. For if, as they think, one set of pleasures or passions is as good as another, then their disapproval of foodies in particular is indefensible. Other anti-​ foodies, however, are likely to think that foodies take themselves to be pursuing higher pleasures, and that that is part of the problem. Insofar as the idea of higher pleasures is inextricably identified with an objectionable elitism, I have already suggested that this is a stereotype that right-​minded foodies can avoid. I myself, however, am a fan of the distinction between higher and lower pleasures, and believe that, used cautiously, it can serve a good and useful purpose. Thus, I want to argue against the idea that the pleasures of foodies are low pleasures not by questioning the very category of low pleasures, but by suggesting that when the distinction between high and low pleasures is understood properly, the pleasures of foodies are not particularly low. 15  See also Frank Sibley, “Tastes, Smells, and Aesthetics,” in Sibley’s Approach to Aesthetics: Collected Papers on Philosophical Aesthetics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), for further discussion of this point.

732   Susan Wolf What is meant by the distinction between high and low pleasures? Mill introduced it in the context of defending utilitarian moral theory against the accusation that, by identifying the ultimate end of morality as the maximization of pleasure (and the minimization of pain), it represents human nature in a degrading light, making utilitarianism “a doctrine worthy only of swine.”16 In reply, Mill countered that the accusation itself “supposes human beings to be capable of no pleasures except those of which swine are capable.”17 But, Mill argued, observation and introspection shows the situation to be otherwise. For there are some pleasures that, despite the fact that they bring with them, discontent, vulnerability, stress and hardship, we would not give up for any amount of other pleasures that are easier to secure. Few human creatures would consent to be changed into any of the lower animals for a promise of the fullest allowance of a beast’s pleasures; no intelligent human being would consent to be a fool, no instructed person would be an ignoramus, no person of feeling and conscience would be selfish and base, even though they should be persuaded that the fool, the dunce, or the rascal is better satisfied with his lot than they are with theirs. . . . It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question.18

In explanation of these claims, Mill infers that pleasures can differ in quality as well as quantity. Those which we prefer despite the considerable costs that accompany them he considers to be “higher pleasures.” They ultimately contribute more to our happiness than the lower ones. They therefore rightly matter more to us and are of greater value. Although the passages I quoted may fuel the worry that Mill’s distinction is inextricably bound up with a kind of intellectual if not social snobbery, it should be noted, in Mill’s defense, that even in the passage just quoted he takes the distinction to separate not just the intelligent human being from the fool but also the man of conscience from the cad, and his extended discussion of the higher pleasures explicitly mentions not only those available to “a cultivated mind” such as “the imaginations of poetry” and “the incidents of history” but also those involving and motivated by “public and private affection.”19 The pleasures of friendship, family, and community are for Mill as distinctively human and as richly rewarding as those of science and art. Moreover, we need not interpret the pleasures of the intellect in a way that restricts them to domains associated with higher education. A distinctively human intelligence is involved in sport, in craft, in the development of skills and the exercise of tastes of all sorts. Intellectual curiosity is indeed, for Mill, a great source of happiness, but it need not be confined to the halls of the library. 16 

John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2001), 7.

18 

Ibid., 9–​10.

17 Ibid., 8.

19 Ibid., 14.

The Ethics of Being a Foodie    733 In fact, it seems to me in the spirit of Mill, when he is charitably interpreted, to draw back from the tendency to use the distinction between high and low pleasures to separate some areas of interest from others—​low art from high, or sport from study. His point is rather closer to what John Rawls has called the “Aristotelian principle”—​namely that “other things equal, human beings enjoy the exercise of their realized capacities . . . and this enjoyment increases the more the capacity is realized, or the greater its complexity. The intuitive idea here is that human beings take more pleasure in doing something as they become more proficient at it, and of two activities they do equally well, they prefer the one calling on a larger repertoire of more intricate and subtle discriminations.”20 The difference between high and low pleasure, in other words, has less to do with whether you prefer to watch television or go to art museums as it does with how you watch television or look at paintings, respectively. This brings me back to a discussion of food. There is no question but that our enjoyment of food can sometimes qualify as a low pleasure. The experience of eating a peanut butter sandwich or a candy bar when we are hungry, or of having a cold beer when we are thirsty, may be similar in character to the pleasure of the much maligned swine at feeding time. Nor are these pleasures to be underestimated or scoffed at. But the fact that some pleasure in food is like this does not make the thirst-​quenching potential of beer a good model for all culinary pleasure. There is no reason to think that the pleasures of eating are necessarily low pleasures, and as such unfit to be cultivated and sought out as foodies do. Although the idea of food as a low pleasure is less commonly voiced than it once was, it still seems to me to be implicit in much anti-​foodie sentiment, and so it is important to expose it and to point out its error. Two aspects of this idea are worth separating and bringing to light. One has to do with the thought that the pleasures of food are simple and cannot therefore be a domain in which one can exercise the higher faculties either as creator or appreciator. The other involves the thought that the pleasures of food are private and selfish, and therefore, when they occupy a significant place in one’s life, self-​ indulgent. But these ideas are not true to even the non-​foodie’s experience of cooking and eating. Anyone who has tried to make a pastry crust or a white sauce, who has had to judge when a roast or a fish is ready to come out of the oven, knows that it takes practice and skill. Anyone who has tried to get her marinara sauce just right or to do something special with the overabundance of zucchini in his garden knows that such tasks call for imagination, discernment, and creativity. And just as the preparer of food can exercise her higher faculties in making interesting and excellent dishes, so the consumer can develop her powers of discrimination and taste, allowing her to appreciate the chefs’ achievements. 20  John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 426. And Mill himself: “Now it is an unquestionable fact that those who are equally acquainted with and equally capable of appreciating and enjoying both do give a most marked preference to the manner of existence which employs their higher faculties” (Mill, Utilitarianism, 9).

734   Susan Wolf The idea that the pleasures of food are private and selfish is similarly insupportable:  since ancient times, “breaking bread together” has constituted a paradigm of warmth and sociability, while to make or serve food to others is commonly both intended and understood as an affirmation of love, friendship, or good will. Even if these last considerations show that a person can exercise her higher faculties in the service of the aesthetics of food, however, an anti-​foodie might still have reservations about whether one ought to do so. Two last considerations that might support the impression that food is an unworthy object of such effort and attention occur to me. Each are sometimes mentioned in the course of discussions about whether gastronomy can ever be elevated to an art form (and each, of course, is offered in support of a negative answer to that question).21 The first has to do with the fact that the products of gastronomy are transient and ephemeral. Paintings and sculptures, not to mention cathedrals, last for a very long time; and barring certain kinds of catastrophe, particularly in our world of computer backups and i-​cloud storage, poetry and literature, mathematical proofs and scientific knowledge can exist for as long as or longer than humans. Not so with a casserole, much less a soufflé. And so it can seem a frivolous waste of time and resources to put a lot of energy into making an exquisite meal. Insofar as this criticism relies on a utilitarian perspective that reduces the value of an aesthetic activity or of an event to some quantity of “appreciation hours” experienced by those who come into contact with it or its products, it should be questioned. Such a perspective would have difficulties justifying any aesthetic activities, even cathedral-​building, or indeed almost any endeavor that involves the pursuit of excellence for its own sake. Much contemporary art self-​consciously rejects that view, incorporating the very fact of the works’ transience into the character and quality of the experience, somewhat like Tibetan sand paintings, or improvisational jazz.22 Further, this criticism too closely identifies the pleasures of the foodie—​both the foodie cook and the foodie consumer—​with the pleasures respectively of making and eating individual dishes. It thus neglects both the fact that recipes are long-​lasting, thus vastly extending the permanence of a chef ’s creation and the considerable interest to be found in observing or creating variations on a theme (say, the theme of a beef stew) or transformations in taste. We need not enter into a debate about whether cooking is an art to recognize the aptness of an analogy between cooking and music: as performers (may) play from musical scores, so cooks (may) use recipes, and as music lovers may take pleasure in comparing different renditions of a Bach sonata, so may the foodie enjoy sampling several versions of a crème brûlée. 21 

For a complementary discussion of the aesthetics of food that argues that food is an art but a minor one, see Elizabeth Telfer, “Food as Art,” in Food for Thought, by Elizabeth Telfer (London: Routledge, 1996). 22  The movie Babette’s Feast—​maybe the best food movie of all time—​makes an eloquent case against this view of a kind that expository philosophical writing cannot capture.

The Ethics of Being a Foodie    735 The second consideration for continuing to judge food as an unworthy object on which to direct serious effort and expense is that food cannot carry the kind of cognitive content that paintings, literature, or even music, can. It cannot communicate human emotion; it cannot tell a story; it cannot offer insight into the human condition. This thought, perhaps more than any other, may explain the low esteem, if not outright skepticism, in which the aesthetics of food is often held, encouraging the idea that unlike the rewards one can get from an appreciation of fine arts such as poetry and drama, the pleasures of food are necessarily dumb. To an extent, the critic who cites this consideration has a point: a dish, or a meal, or a menu, cannot comment on man’s inhumanity to man, it cannot teach us about the stages of grief, or inspire us to adopt a more expansive and deeper commitment to justice.23 But, as many others have pointed out, neither can a Turkish rug or an Amish quilt, or a piece of Chinese ceramics. Not every art needs to be classified as a fine art. Not every aesthetic experience needs to be compared to War and Peace or the Sistine Chapel. What is less often noted, but I think equally important, is the fact that even if food cannot have representational much less propositional content, a wealth of information, both natural and cultural, can inform and affect both the preparation of food and the aesthetic experience of the attentive consumer, in ways that suggest that, if “meaning” and “emotion” are generously interpreted, food may be said to convey meaning and emotion after all.24 When a botanist walks through the woods, she sees something different from that of the unschooled nature lover. A child’s first exposure to opera is quite a different experience from that of a person who has heard and attended a lot of them. One’s reaction to a vase of flowers is apt to shift dramatically upon learning that the lilies that one took to be natural are actually made of silk. The information that the vivid colors of a sunset are a result of pollution may (for better or worse) affect its beauty. How things taste to us is similarly affected by a wide range of information and knowledge. It is common for a person who enjoys the first bite of meat on his plate to lose his appetite for it upon learning that it is horsemeat or tongue. A pie may taste better when one knows that one’s friend made it from scratch than it would have if one had assumed it was bought from a store. And the taste of foods may become more or less appealing as one becomes more keenly aware of their relation to health. (When a person complains that a dessert is “too rich”—​a complaint, I confess, I have never been tempted to make—​it is usually meant as an aesthetic description, but it is one that I suspect is often based subliminally on one’s beliefs about its effects on one’s physique or one’s circulatory system.) The associations a food or a dish has to cultural traditions, geography, and one’s own personal history, also affect the quality of one’s experience of it. The familiar category of 23 

Some might wonder whether, if a meal could do any of these things, anyone would want to eat it! Oenophiles make similar claims about their experience of wines. See also Caroline Korsmeyer, Making Sense of Taste (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), ch. 4; and Caroline Korsmeyer, “Delightful, Delicious, Disgusting,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 60 (2002): 3. 24 

736   Susan Wolf comfort food is an implicit acknowledgment of this, as is the importance many attach to having the same dishes on Christmas every year. The appearance of shad roe marks the first signs of spring—​and conversely, the first signs of spring mark the availability of shad roe! To many people collard greens implicitly allude to the American South; pavlovas “mean” Australia. The chef who is aware of these associations can exploit them, making dishes and serving meals to suit particular occasions, dishes that express personality and that celebrate seasons, locations, cultures, and more. And while almost all of us are affected by such associations involuntarily and subconsciously, foodies are apt to delight in these connections. By expanding their culinary knowledge as well as refining their powers of taste discrimination, their tasting and eating experiences are enriched. As I hope my examples have suggested, one need not be a foodie for the aesthetic quality and character of food to affect you. A family reunion, a religious ritual, a romantic picnic can be immeasurably enhanced by the inclusion of the right kind of food prepared in the (or in a) right kind of way, as it can be significantly marred by the opposite. Once one notices how much the aesthetic aspects of food affect people’s lives, it seems to me that the thought that food is a low pleasure, unworthy of strong interest or attention, should simply disappear. The fact that that thought and its subconscious effects on our values have survived for so long seems to me plausibly explained by a false ideology distorting our understanding of our own experience. But once we have banished that thought, no basis for moral or quasi-​moral disapproval of foodieism remains. A strong, even passionate interest in the aesthetics of food is no more morally questionable than a passionate interest in opera or basketball. Although one can be an ethically better or worse foodie (as one can be an ethically better or worse sports fan or opera lover), there is no cause to object to foodieism as such. As I mentioned near the beginning of this essay, there may be reasons, connected to the universal but non-​aesthetic role that food plays in our lives, that explain why foodies might be especially prone to certain sorts of obnoxious behaviors, and why non-​foodies might be especially sensitive to foodies’ real or imagined faults. But I want to conclude by bringing out a way that this same universality also provides a reason not just for defending foodieism as morally permissible but for positively supporting it, as an interest that, as hobbies and other extracurricular activities go, has an exceptional potential to be ethically good. The psychologist Jonathan Haidt, citing the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, describes the phenomenon of “vital engagement” which is characteristic of people who live exceptionally rewarding lives. Such people, Haidt writes, typically find in themselves some deep interest or activity to which they are drawn, “but then, gradually . . . [they weave] an ever more encompassing web of knowledge, action, identity, and relationships.” As an example, he mentions a student in his class who was passionate about horses. As a child, she had begged her parents for riding lessons, and over time, in addition to becoming an expert equestrian, she began to study the history of horses, to develop a community of friends through riding, and so on. Her relationship with horses

The Ethics of Being a Foodie    737 became an important part of her identity—​it gave meaning as well as happiness to her life.25 I expect that this phenomenon of vital engagement will be familiar to many of you. To a considerable extent, it explains how a deep interest in virtually any morally innocent topic or activity—​sports or the arts, horses or philosophy, stamp-​collecting, Star Trek or Dungeons and Dragons—​can be an opportunity to exercise one’s higher faculties, to develop expertise, to acquire knowledge, to expand one’s communities of friends. But food is, if you’ll pardon the pun, an especially fruitful interest with which to vitally engage. Because our need for food is universal and essential, its history is as long and its geography as wide as the history and geography of humanity itself. The activities of growing or procuring food, of preparing food, and of eating food are central to every culture. For people who are interested in the aesthetics of food—​in other words, for foodies—​ vital engagement is apt to connect one not just to high-​end restaurants and like-​minded people with similar levels of education and income. It will also connect one to communities and ways of life all around the world. An interest in food leads to an interest in Indian food, Guatemalan food, Ethiopian food, and so on, and from there to an interest in the attitudes and customs, the rituals and holidays, in which specific foods and dishes have their place.26 An interest and joy in the aesthetics of food can thus lead us to an expanded and strengthened appreciation and delight in human diversity and ingenuity. It can serve, much more than most interests, as a window to the world. In addition, the universal and basic need for food can take vital engagement with the aesthetics of food in explicitly political and ethical directions. For an interest in food that is grounded in aesthetic concerns can spark an interest in other aspects of food and our relation to it. It can make one attentive to articles and programs that inform one of objectionable farming practices or acquaint one with the environmental effects of the fishing industry. Foodies, wanting to share their delight in good-​tasting food, may be especially likely to get involved in campaigns to improve the quality of school lunches, to support urban farms, and to support ways of bringing high-​quality food products and restaurants to poor and struggling neighborhoods. In other words, the phenomenon of vital engagement may make it more likely rather than less that a person who is deeply interested in the aesthetics of food will develop an interest in the ethics of food. These interests and values, far from being in tension, can complement and enhance each other. I conclude therefore that foodies, as a self-​identified group, have nothing to be ashamed of. Not only is there nothing morally wrong with being a foodie, being a foodie has the potential to influence and contribute to one’s life in particularly rich and ethically rewarding ways. Like everyone else, foodies must take care to keep their interests in perspective; they should avoid moralizing and expecting everyone to care about food in the way and to the degree that they do; they should be willing to consider and 25  In Susan Wolf, Meaning in Life and Why It Matters (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 94–​95. 26  See also Lee McBride’s essay, in this volume.

738   Susan Wolf acknowledge facts that, in conjunction with moral principles, call for the sacrifice of certain culinary pleasures. Ideally, a foodie’s interest in the aesthetics of food will lead to an interest in promoting and supporting projects that are rightly advocated by those whose main focus is in food ethics. But, of course, if these projects are rightly advocated, we all ought to support them, foodies and non-​foodies alike.

Pa rt  V I I I

H I STORY OF P H I L O S OP H Y A N D F O OD  E T H IC S

chapter 33

W h o You Are I s W hat You  Eat Food in Ancient Thought Katja Maria Vogt

What to eat and when. How not to starve. How not to eat that which should not be eaten. How to learn something about others by eating their food. How not to forget one’s own culture by no longer eating one’s own food. How to think, feel, and act while hungry. What role to give food in one’s life. Historically, when does discussion of these matters begin? Surely not with philosophical or scientific theorizing, given how basic food is to human life. I will use the Odyssey as the starting-​point of this essay and as an extended example, illustrating the ideas under consideration. Plato, Aristotle, and skeptical-​relativistic philosophers explore a wide range of questions about eating. They are interested in the nature of hunger, the moldability of food-​ related desires, the role of custom in eating, and more. In their discussions, they refer to Homer as a predecessor. My essay takes its structure from these references, starting with Homer, then turning to Plato, Aristotle, and relativistic-​skeptic discussions. Plato, I argue, pursues the question of what hunger is—in which sense it is a bodily, natural, and necessary desire—and what hunger is for: for the eatable or for specific kinds of food. Aristotle has much to say about control and lack thereof, and the ideal set of attitudes an agent may have with respect to food. Relativistic and skeptical discussions, finally, address difference in eating habits and disagreements about what to eat. It should not come as a surprise that ancient ethics, which asks questions about a good life and is thus broader than standard approaches in modern moral philosophy, has much to say about eating. In everyday life, eating is conflicted, in ways that relate to scarcity, adversity, health, one’s attitudes to nature and other living beings, mastering one’s desires or failing to do so, encountering foreign cultures, and more. It makes sense for ethicists to address these conflicts. From this perspective, food ethics is not primarily or exclusively about what may be morally right or wrong. Some questions belong, according to today’s distinctions between fields, to the philosophy of mind, as when one asks what kind of

742   Katja Maria Vogt presence hunger has in the mind and how it motivates action. Others sit at the intersection of psychology and medicine, as when one asks how one should and should not mold one’s food-​related desires, to what extent they are moldable, and so on. Yet others are about identity and disagreement, as when one navigates different cultures by sharing or not sharing in their eating habits. Arguably, all of these questions are recognizable to us. The central proposal of this essay is that contemporary food ethics should include them, thus starting out, like ancient thought on eating, from ordinary experiences.

Food in the Odyssey The Odyssey is the most famous instance of a genre called nostoi, or home-​coming stories. This genre holds its own next to stories of war, as exemplified by the Iliad. Return from war, or so the balance between both poems suggests, is as challenging and complex as war itself. How is one to navigate what once was one’s own culture, to relate to those who once were closest? Is one even the same person? In the Odyssey, the clash between war-​on-​foreign-​shores and returning-​home is highlighted by the alienness of what is in between: territories of peoples who may or may not be human, monsters, divinities, the underworld, and more. In willfully anachronistic language, one might say that Odysseus suffers reverse culture shock when he finally arrives back home in Ithaca. He does not recognize the place, asking “who lives here?”: Ah me, what are the people whose land I have come to this time, and are they savage and violent, and without justice, or hospitable to strangers and with minds that are godly? (Odyssey 13.200‒202)

His inquiry is a refrain, recurring throughout the poem.1 The organization of a place can be lawful and just or savage and violent. In the Odyssey, it matters greatly how those who are unknown and from distant places are treated. Whether and what kind of food is offered to strangers is often a matter of life and death. Moreover, it expresses the cultural identity of a given group, their level of civilization, and their commitment to friendly interactions with others. The Cyclopes are, more than anything else, lawless (9.106‒115). They have no political institutions, no agriculture, or any other achievements of civilization.2 Their extreme lack of culture translates into the opposite of hospitality. Visitors are not invited for dinner: they are the meal. 1 

For example, cf. Odyssey 8.573‒576 and 9.175‒176. All citations from Lattimore 1999. The Cyclopes’ lack of culture is further reflected in their disinterest in ships (9.126‒129). Cf. Bakker 2002. Openness toward strangers is associated with travel and exploration. Life “with” the sea is also life with salt. Salt permits preservation of food and is associated with the sophisticated life of an agricultural society. The strangest way of life would be one that is far from the sea and without salt. Odysseus, 2 

Who You Are Is What You Eat    743 In response to Odysseus’s questions about (as of yet unrecognized) Ithaca, Athena says, before she even reveals the country as his homeland, that much grain for bread is grown (13.244). This is a sign for relief: Odysseus has arrived at a place with a human population. Human beings are as a species identified via their basic food, they are bread-​ eaters. Here food signals physical identity, indicating what kind of being one encounters. This does not mean that, in the Odyssey, human beings live on bread alone.3 On the contrary, they also eat meat and drink wine. But the expression “bread-​eaters” is used to refer to humans (1.349).4 Other foods may change one into another kind of creature.5 Thus, Lotus-​Eaters are nonhuman, or if they are, they are humans who are fundamentally shaped by their means of sustenance, in such a way that they differ from human beings who do not eat lotus. They embody a thought-​experiment of the most condensed form. Lotus-​Eaters are who they are and lotus-​eating is all they care about. What they want from newcomers is that the newcomers likewise eat what they eat, namely lotus. But lotus is a food and a drug at the same time. It illustrates a more general lesson about eating foreign food: the experience that it changes one’s state of mind, making one forgetful of one’s native culture or in other ways conflicted about one’s alliances.6 Divine beings like Calypso live on nectar and ambrosia. Calypso too aims to make Odysseus what she herself is by having him eat what she eats (10.509). In offering this kind of food to Odysseus, she offers a life of divinity to him. If Odysseus were to accept her invitation to eat divine food, he would not just change physically into a divine being. He would also become Calypso’s long-​term companion, opting for her way of life rather than life at home in Ithaca. The Cyclopes and Laistrygones, on the other hand, are cannibals. What they eat, namely humans, is one of their most conspicuous features. Here assimilation takes an even scarier form, that of being literally devoured, rather than incorporated into another form of life. Another option, with its own horror, is to be fed drugs that transform you into a different creature. Circe initially uses her potions not to make a divine companion out of Odysseus, but to transform his companions into pigs.

according to prophecy, shall go on yet another journey (11.121‒125): “then you must take up your well-​ shaped oar and go on a journey /​until you come where there are men living who know nothing /​of the sea, and who eat food that is not mixed with salt, who never /​have known ships whose cheeks are painted purple, who never /​have known well-​shaped oars, which act for ships as wings do.” 3 

Odysseus and his crew eat various kinds of meat; don’t drink milk (the Cyclopes do), though they eat cheese when it is available (9.232, cf. 17.224); seem never to drink pure water (though wine mixed with water); and eat no or almost no vegetables and no spices. 4  The Cyclops Polyphemus differs from human beings precisely insofar as man is “an eater of bread” (9.191). 5  To eat fish, and even to eat game or to live on milk products as the Cyclopes do, is seen as a kind of exploitation, a life that lacks the progress of a well-​regulated agricultural civilization. On the absence of fish-​eating in the Odyssey, cf. Berdowski 2008. Combellack (1953) argues that Homer’s fish are another group of cannibals; Davidson (1996) and Bakker (2013) argue that meat is crucial to ritual practices. 6  For Odysseus, the main danger is forgetting his purpose, namely his return home to Ithaca (9.100‒104). Cf. Circe’s spell for Odysseus’s companions: “malignant drugs, to make them forgetful of their own country” (10.236). This applies not only to human travelers. When Polyphemus, the dangerous Cyclops, drinks wine he is not accustomed to, he forgets his purpose and is outwitted by Odysseus (9.196‒205).

744   Katja Maria Vogt Throughout the Odyssey, desire and control over desire are explored. Food is one of the primary objects of desire. The plot is driven, again and again, by whether someone gives in to the desire to eat a given food. Moreover, the desire for food competes with other thoughts and desires in the minds of the poem’s protagonists, and it affects one’s cognitive powers. Eating, forgetting, and remembering stand in complicated relations. Hunger makes you forget other kinds of suffering as much as feasting does, and for those who suffer, forgetting itself is a temptation.7 Eating is desirable not just qua eating, or insofar as the food is desirable; it is desirable as a means of lessening the presence of pain in one’s mind. For Odysseus, it is a maddening feature of human experience that, no matter how bad things are—with companions devoured by monsters, and so on—the mind of a hungry person does not hold on to the gravity of events.8 Throughout the poem, Odysseus remonstrates with himself, finding it despicable how loudly and relentlessly hunger speaks to him, when his motivations and thoughts should be elsewhere.9 The mind seems to require a delicate balance in order to be able to recall things and adequately take in the seriousness of drastic events: it must be the mind of a body that has been fed, and fed in the right way.

Plato on Hunger Plato forefronts the motivational force of hunger /​thirst both in the Republic and in the Philebus, that is, in two extensive investigations into human psychology. The Republic’s famous account of a tripartite soul with three motivational faculties (appetites, spirit, and reason) starts with an extended analysis of hunger/​thirst. Hunger/​thirst are flagged as the clearest instances of desire (437d1‒3).10 The Philebus’s famous discussion of 7  Forgetting is in general associated with temptation. For example, the song of the Sirens is so sweet that it makes people stop in their tracks, and all they want is to listen (12.39‒43). 8  For example, Odysseus’s companions are able to grieve for their lost fellows, perished in the hands of Scylla, only after a first meal. “But when they had put away their desire for eating and drinking, /​they remembered and they cried for their beloved companions” (12.308‒309). 9  For example, right after his arrival at Alcinous’s palace, Odysseus asks the Phaeacians to leave him alone to eat. He says it is shameful that, in spite of all his troubles, there is always hunger asserting itself, telling him to eat and drink and forcing him to forget (7.215‒221). 10  Scholars used to read the passage as differentiating hunger/​thirst qua desires of appetite from the desires of reason. Only reason, they argued, aims at the good. Cf. Cornford 1941; Irwin 1977, 1995; Reeve 1988. Today, there is broad consensus that all desire aims at the good (cf. Vogt 2017a). This includes the desires of the appetites, spirit (which is unaccounted for in the traditional reading), and reason. Cf. Carone 2001; Bobonich 2002; Lorenz 2006; Moss 2008; for an in-​between position, see Cooper 1984. My views are in agreement with the current consensus and take it further. As I see it, Plato does not address any one particular part of the soul at this point. He is characterizing all motivational attitudes, introduced via a range of Greek terms (437b‒c, esp. 437b7‒8); he uses hunger/​thirst to make a general point about desiderative attitudes (Vogt 2017b). However, nothing in my argument here depends on this. A weaker version of my proposal is that hunger/​thirst are paradigmatic for a subclass of desires, which Plato calls appetites.

Who You Are Is What You Eat    745 pleasure begins with the example of hunger/​thirst as well. Socrates makes the suggestion to turn to hunger/​thirst because they are ordinary and conspicuous, and thereby presumably easier to analyze than other desires (31e). In other words, hunger/​thirst are considered paradigmatic examples of desire, well-​suited starting-​points for a general theory of desire. The Republic’s discussion of hunger/​thirst (437d‒439a) contains a hard-​to-​decipher claim: that hunger/​thirst aim at the eatable/​drinkable, not at that which is good-​to-​eat/​ drink (438a). And yet, as Plato holds in agreement with a long-​standing tradition, to desire something is to relate to it as good—as something that is seen as good and something that is, qua good, an object of pursuit. How, then, should one understand the claim that hunger/​thirst are, on the one hand, paradigmatic desires and aim, on the other hand, at the eatable/​drinkable, not at the good-​to-​eat/​drink? Plato emphasizes that he is making a larger point here. He argues for a distinction between F-​simpliciter and its simpliciter-​relatum, and F-​qualified and its qualified-​ relatum (438b). For example, knowledge is of the knowable, and knowledge of housebuilding is of how one builds a house (438c‒d). This is the structure of his proposal about hunger/​thirst. There are two relations: hunger/​thirst simpliciter is for the eatable/​drinkable; and qualified hunger/​thirst is for something specific to eat (439a).11 Good food is just one of several examples; similarly, hot food or cold food count as qualified relata (437d‒e). Why postulate these two relations? My suggestion would be that they are postulated in order to analyze the states of mind of being hungry and of being hungry-​for-​X. This suggestion may appear straightforward, merely stating the obvious. But interpreters do not commonly take seriously that Plato is here engaged in the philosophy of mind side of an analysis of desire. Thus, they do not commonly ask whether, rather than being far-​fetched, Plato’s twofold distinction actually captures two recognizable aspects of a complex state of mind. Readers of the Odyssey, attuned to the motivational phenomena relating to hunger, may share Plato’s view that these are worth keeping apart. Consider some relevant scenarios. (i) Upon registering that one is hungry, one may register just that: I’m hungry! Provided that one takes oneself to have choices, it may be a second step to figure out what it is that one is hungry for—what one wants to eat or should eat. (ii) In ordinary cases, there may be no experiential sequence of this sort. One may wake up hungry in the morning. One is acculturated to having breakfast in the morning, and thus one wakes up hungry-​for-​breakfast. One is accustomed to having porridge for breakfast, and thus one wakes up hungry-​for-​porridge. And so on. (iii) At times, one is out of porridge, or traveling, or sick, or subject to someone else’s preferences, and so on. If X is unavailable/​forbidden/​and so on, X may be substituted by Y. In settling on Y, one may come to see Y in a positive light, deciding that after all, Y is what one feels like eating. One may also have to substitute X with Z, which is eatable though not at all something one is able to see in a good light. One may make oneself eat Z (bark

11 

I speak of Plato’s proposals, setting aside questions of whether Socrates is, in every respect, Plato’s spokesperson at this point.

746   Katja Maria Vogt perhaps, or insects), without being hungry-​for-​Z. The motivation to eat Z may consist in seeing survival in a good light, and Z as eatable, and yet so inherently repellent that its status as means-​to-​survival does not suffice to make it the intentional object of hunger. If this is roughly why Plato postulates the two relations, then his proposal captures eating in adversity as seen in the Odyssey: eating like a pig from the ground; eating potentially dangerous things like lotus because nothing else is available; and so on. Given the pervasiveness of war, travel, scarcity, and other external constraints, these are familiar phenomena.12 What follows, then, for the question of whether hunger/​thirst are desires, assuming that desire is for the good? One thing to say is that the eatable, though falling short of what is by the lights of the agent good-​to-​eat, meets some norms, simply on account of qualifying as eatable. It is in this sense, I propose, that Plato calls the eatable/​drinkable the natural object of hunger/​thirst (437e). The eatable/​drinkable meets weaker norms than the good-​to-​eat and good-​to-​drink.13 But it differs from the uneatable/​undrinkable. The way it differs depends on the way in which eating/​drinking is a natural feature of human existence: it is a matter of our physiology and of the composition of various objects in the world that, say, stones are not eatable. For something to fall into the category of the eatable it must not only be such that a human being could ingest it, as one may chew and swallow paper. It must also contain some nutrients that sustain, even if only in suboptimal ways, a human organism. Another argument in favor of the two-​relations view of hunger/​thirst may appeal to the acquisition of desires. Republic VIII‒IX discuss how agents come to desire what they desire; how, for example, one gets hooked on a habit such as desiring a certain amount or quality of chocolate. It seems that for an agent to desire to eat/​drink X, the agent must have acquaintance with X and memory of it. Typically, say, someone who desires Tarte Tatin has previously eaten Tarte Tatin and she recalls this event as eating Tarte Tatin.14 Perhaps one can desire Tarte Tatin if one has tasted apple cake and other French fruit tartes and so on, allowing one to put together some idea of what a French upside-​down baked apple tarte might taste like. But even here, it is unclear whether one would desire Tarte Tatin, or whether the object of desire, as represented by the agent, would be some kind of taste and texture—sweet, apple-​like, tarte-​crust-​like, and so on—​that one puts together in one’s mind based on other earlier eating experiences. In this kind of case, it could happen that one mistakenly takes oneself to desire Tarte Tatin, while really one

12  For present purposes, there is no need to settle how this carries over to other desires. Perhaps desiring knowledge has the same twofold structure. One might be motivated to learn, study, and so on, without yet knowing what it is that one wants to study (arguably a widespread experience). More generally, it is conceivable that one feels like “doing something” (analogously to “I’m hungry!”) without yet having a specific motivation for doing this-​or-​that. 13  Moss (2008) aims to explain Plato’s proposal via a distinction between desire for good drink and desire for drink as a good. But the core distinction is between desire for an unqualified object, and some addition (τὰ προσγιγνόμενα; 437e8‒9) by virtue of which objects are qualified (τὰ ποιὰ; 438b2). Barney recognizes that Plato is here making a metaphysical point of some generality, related also to his discussions of knowledge/​belief/​ignorance in Book V of the Republic (Barney 2010, 45 and 76‒77). 14  Plato discusses, e.g., how one gets hooked on “foreign delicacies” (Republic 559b8).

Who You Are Is What You Eat    747 was desiring some other kind of apple cake. To properly desire Tarte Tatin, so the argument goes, one must have had a taste of it such that one relates to it as the object of desire.15 At this point, it may seem that for anything to be a desire, experience, memory, and so on, are necessary. And yet, hunger/​thirst prevent the desire theorist from going down that route in an unqualified way. Infants are hungry/​thirsty without yet having memory of this-​or-​that food/​drink. The Republic’s proposal, that hunger/​thirst are for the eatable/​drinkable, captures this phenomenon. In another formulation, hunger/​thirst are by nature for food/​drink. This proposal corrects a simpler and misguided notion of hunger/​thirst as “natural.” Hunger/​ thirst are not natural as opposed to culturally acquired; for surely, they also are the latter. They are natural insofar as they have natural objects, the eatable/​drinkable. Another way of putting this is in terms of limited plasticity: as much as one may shape hunger/​ thirst, their objects must fall into the domain of the eatable/​drinkable. And yet everyday occurrences of hunger/​thirst, which tend to be instances of being hungry-​for or thirsty-​ for X, are subject to acculturation, habit, and so on.16 Much of what an ordinary person experiences in being hungry/​thirsty is far from natural. This is significant for anyone who takes food ethics seriously. Instructions on what to eat and what not to eat may be more successful if it is possible, at least to some extent, to habituate oneself such as to be hungry for that which one approves as good-​to-​eat. At the same time, the fact that the natural object of hunger is the eatable sets limits to such instructions. In extremis, agents must negotiate their acculturated commitment to certain foods, on the one hand, and hunger simpliciter, on the other hand. Consider next the related question whether hunger/​thirst are “bodily” desires, or whether that term even makes sense. In the Philebus, Plato formulates a discovery that, once stated, sounds trivially true: for anything to be a desire, it must be “in the soul” (33c‒35b), or in other words, it must figure in an agent’s psychology. Qua desires and motivations, hunger and thirst cannot be bodily. Physiological goings-​on, if they are not psychologically recorded and represented (say, growth and decay of cells), have no motivational power. The expression “bodily desire” is a misnomer. Assuming that there is, nevertheless, a sense in which hunger/​thirst are bodily, a theory of hunger/​ thirst must be both physiological and psychological. The proposal Plato puts forward in the Philebus aims to adjudicate the sense in which hunger/​thirst is both.17 It conceives of hunger/​thirst as depletion and refilling. Much of the relevant physiology falls below 15 

These matters are discussed further in the Philebus, where Plato explores the role of cognitive faculties in desire, pleasure, and pain. 16  Hunger/​thirst are so much subject to these forces that it can seem to an agent that she is hungry-​ for-​X without being hungry. For example, she claims to be hungry-​for-​dessert without being hungry simpliciter. It is a difficult question whether this state should count as hunger. Moreover, in extreme cases the object in such problematic instances of being hungry-​for-​X may not even count as food, but, say, as a drug. 17  I am here following Frede (1997). The Philebus modifies the Republic’s claim that thirst is for the drinkable, namely by saying that it is for “filling caused by drink” (35a). I am setting aside the question of whether this is a revision or a specification.

748   Katja Maria Vogt the threshold of perception. For example, after you just drank a sufficient amount of water you are not thirsty, even though the process of dehydration restarts right away. Only once a certain threshold is met, depletion is perceptible as thirst. Hunger and thirst, on this account, are perceptions of physiological states. As perceptions of physiological states, hunger/​thirst are afflictions, pathê. They are passive in the sense that the agent records a state of hers, say, dehydration. These perceptions, however, are not as if one read off a level from a scale or some other measuring device. They are painful and thereby motivational. One registers a physiological state in a way that is inherently such as to motivate one to get rid of this state. Along the same lines, newborns are hungry/​ thirsty without memory of former instances of eating/​drinking because living beings strive for the opposite of such experiences as depletion (34e9‒35a9).18 Finally, hunger/​thirst may seem to be “necessary” desires. According to the Republic, there are necessary and non-​necessary desires (558d f.). Food is Plato’s primary example for necessary desires, defined as desires that are impossible to get rid of and useful. The claim that hunger/​thirst cannot be eradicated is not put forward on its own. People can succeed in quite radical schemes of silencing hunger. That hunger/​thirst are useful sets limits to the extent to which one should aim to mold hunger/​thirst. There are not only limits to their plasticity set by them having natural objects. There are, in addition, normative limits to their plasticity: constraints regarding the ways and extent to which one should mold them. Although Plato would not have thought of it in our terms, disorders like anorexia are by no means outside of the spectrum of desiderative conditions discussed in Republic VIII‒IX. The decline from bad to worse (and worse and worse) amounts to an urgent warning: the reach of our ability to form our desires, and the extent to which they can get out of hand if this effort is misguided, should not be underestimated. The difficulty of moderation is not simply one of cutting down or of doing without certain kinds of food. Desires that are valuable for human life, on this view, must not only be shaped but also be preserved.

Aristotle on Measure Turn now to Aristotle, and another prominent feature of the story with which I began. Odysseus and his companions display various attitudes with respect to eating. Odysseus stands out as someone who suffers from hunger, deplores its prominence in his mind, but is all things considered remarkably unaffected by drugs and ultimately able not to eat anything that should not be eaten, or at least, to stop eating foods that make him forgetful of his purpose. While he is not seen by philosophers as a model of virtue, the difference between him and his companions is stark.19 It is a starting-​point for asking which attitudes one should cultivate with respect to food and hunger. Aristotle’s account 18 

19 

Price (forthcoming) also argues for reading the Republic and Philebus conjointly on this question. Cf. Elster 1979.

Who You Are Is What You Eat    749 of the character virtues uses moderation and eating as a core example.20 It zooms in on the differences between control, lack of control, and moderation. The classic texts on these matters are Nicomachean Ethics II.1‒6, where Aristotle develops the framework for his view of character virtue, and the (presumably earlier) Nicomachean Ethics VII.1, where he sets up a scale of better and worse states to be in. The highest is a super-​human excellence. Then comes virtue, understood as human excellence; then control; then lack of control; then vice; and finally brutishness, which lies outside of the regular human spectrum as much as the quasi-​divine state that is better than human virtue. Aristotle’s conception of human virtue employs five basic ideas:21 PP [Pleasure/​Pain]: character virtue is situated in the domain of pleasure/​pain. RR [Right Reason]:  a philosophical reconstruction of the adage “do as right reason says.” M [Measure]: a philosophical reconstruction of the adage “everything in measure.” H [Habituation]: desires are moldable according to RR and M. A [Activity]: one acquires a firm motivational state by acting in the relevant way.

PP has two dimensions. First, character virtue is “about” actions and affections in the sense that the virtuous person not only performs the right actions but also has the right affections (pathê). Here actions and affections are on a par, namely insofar as both are reflective of a person’s virtue. Second, character virtue consists in having acquired the right affective states. Here the formation of one’s affective states is considered as prior to, and constitutive of, one’s virtuous or less than virtuous actions. The virtuous person takes pleasure in what she should take pleasure in and finds painful what she should find painful; and her actions are motivated accordingly. This means that virtue does not consist in restricting oneself or successfully implementing control-​mechanisms, say, a strategy of not buying gummy worms in order to not eat gummy worms.22 This is control, which, though better than lack of control, is not virtue. Virtue is to desire to eat X, and enjoy eating X, where X is what one should be eating. But who says what one should be eating? Perhaps gummy worms, say, are precisely right for me at a given moment. To this Aristotle would agree. There is no set of general principles on what to eat and when and to what amount (and so on) that one could adopt and thereby become a moderate person. Here RR comes in. One should eat what 20  Aristotle distinguishes between the virtues of character (such as moderation, courage, justice, and so on), on the one hand, and the virtues of thought, on the other hand. Practical wisdom (phronêsis) is a virtue of thought; it is a way of being an excellent reasoner. But it stands in a particularly close (and much-​debated) relation to the virtues of character. Contemporary virtue ethics tends to differ from ancient virtue ethics in focusing solely on character virtues as well as phronêsis, not attending to other ways of excellent thinking. 21  Each of these ideas is much-​debated and subject to different reconstructions. Leunissen (2012) explores a further angle of Aristotle’s theory, namely how environmental factors including diet affect character. Aristotle discusses these matters in his biological treatises. 22  The virtuous person, McDowell (1998) argues, does not want an n-​th doughnut, assuming that n−1 is the right number of doughnuts for her.

750   Katja Maria Vogt right reason says, and right reason, here, is ideally one’s own mind.23 One’s own mind— one’s motivations and reasoning—must be such as to guide oneself toward the right food, drink, and so on. This state of mind involves, ultimately, all of the virtues: the character virtues and the excellences of thinking. The relevant person has the right affective attitudes, is a good deliberator, and also an excellent thinker in various other ways.24 Put together RR and M and this person, often called the phronimos, is the measure. In this state of mind one is able to “measure” what one should be eating, drinking, and so on.25 Given that we tend to be far from such a state of mind, right reason is often represented externally. In Aristotle’s example, a trainer determines how much food a beginning athlete should eat. The beginner should not eat as much as Milo, a champion. The trainer has the expertise to determine the right amount and kind of food for everyone in his class, from beginner to accomplished athlete. This is the well-​known idea of a mean relative-​to-​us: right measure is relative to a given person at a given moment in time. In this case, what-​to-​eat takes the form of an instruction or prescription. But according to H, as one takes up exercise and related kinds of eating, one comes to desire the exertion of movement and the kinds of food that sustain one in that kind of life. This is how habituation works. Moderation (as well as any other virtue), or so premise A says, is acquired by performing the kinds of actions that the moderate person performs. Say, one comes to enjoy exercise by regularly exercising. This process is supported by the pleasure one takes in doing what one thinks one should be doing, say, feeling good about oneself as one is running in the park. Understood along these lines, Aristotle’s mean relative-​to-​us is a non-​relativist version of Protagoras’s “man is the measure” (to which I turn in the next section). The agent is the measure in the sense that, if one’s desires are well-​habituated, they guide one to take pleasure in what one should take pleasure in, and thereby they guide one to do what is right. Interpreters disagree about the extent to which a well-​habituated person still needs some on-​the-​spot reasoning or even long-​term deliberation; or whether she is fully guided by her desires. Although this is not the place to defend my views on this matter, I am assuming that even the moderate person needs to continue to learn and think about, say, what to eat, if only because new information, new foods, and so on, become available. But much of her ordinary life—​what to prepare for breakfast in a daily routine; whether to stop by the vending machine at the office several times a day; and so on—is guided by how her desires are habituated. Our desires are such that we can mold them. We can come to take pleasure in what we think we should take pleasure in. 23  On the translation of orthos logos, cf. Moss 2014. Aristotle’s first observation about the slogan is: it is true but not clear (as in: in need of elucidation). Roughly, the right reason formula is as if one said, “one should do what’s right.” Many different positions in ethics share the premise that one should do what is right, and yet differ in the substance of their proposals. 24  Different scholars spell out differently how this person acts. Classic contributions are Burnyeat (1980) and Cooper (1986). According to McDowell (2009), having the right affective attitudes is having the correct conception of a good life. My own sketch gives more room to excellent thinking of various kinds (rather than merely excellent deliberation) than is currently customary. 25  On the phronimos as measure, compare Segvic 2009.

Who You Are Is What You Eat    751 Moldability is a tool for someone who wants to live a certain way. It is, however, also a fact about desire that cannot be side-​stepped. One way or another, one’s desires will be shaped by what one does, what one tries out, what habits one picks up, and so on. If one fails to consciously direct this development, one’s desires are likely to get out of hand. Addiction is a cousin of habit, and the plasticity of desire provides ample room for both. Before one knows it, one is such as to desire, all the time, fried food or sugared beverages or heroin or whatever. Examples of this kind should suffice to highlight the relevance of these ideas to everyday life—indeed, from the point of view of ancient ethics, the urgency of thinking this through. These ideas involve empirical claims about which today one may want to know more. To what extent can agents mold their desires? Is it true that the structure of coming-​to-​desire something is such that repeated φ-​ing, combined with the pleasure of approving of one’s φ-​ ing (say, praising oneself for going running) typically leads one to come to enjoy φ-​ing? If the answer to both questions as far as they apply to food is “yes,” or at least a qualified “yes” with provisos about limits and exceptions, then contemplating food ethics may be more than an academic exercise. Figuring out what we should be eating can be a significant step toward actually eating accordingly, not just for a brief period of restraint or in a joyless manner, but such that one embraces it as an aspect of one’s way to live. Food ethics could be a genuinely Aristotelian kind of ethics, one that ultimately aims at becoming a better person, rather than merely at knowing what a better person would do. According to a prominent line of Aristotelian ethics, it is not even possible to come up with a set of principles or guidelines on what to eat and not to eat (at given occasions, in given quantities, and so on) from a point of view that is external to the sensibilities of the well-​habituated person. What one should and should not do only comes into view, as it were, through having acquired relevant sensibilities. It is through these very sensibilities that features of situations are salient to an agent that otherwise might go unnoticed.26 On a less extreme reading, ethical reasoning—​the kind of reasoning one may engage in when discussing questions of food ethics—continues to play a role in the Aristotelian framework. Indeed, there might be a reciprocal relation between reasoning and molding of one’s sensibilities. As one comes to learn more about some matter, both in terms of empirical information and of ethical arguments, one may habituate oneself further; and as one does, one may become more sensitive to information and arguments that come one’s way.

Relativism and Skepticism about Difference and Disagreement Finally, consider the third theme I highlighted in my sketch of the Odyssey, the ways in which eating figures in cultural difference and identity. Today and in antiquity, 26 McDowell 2009.

752   Katja Maria Vogt philosophers who analyze difference and disagreement often use examples that involve eating. In recent discussions, two phenomena tend to be explored separately: disagreement of taste, where A likes X and B dislikes X; and disagreements about the rightness or wrongness of eating X. Ancient philosophers take a different approach, but not because they fail to understand the distinction between “do you enjoy X?” and “do you think eating X is good/​right?.” Rather, they think that usually enjoying X goes along with being committed to the view that eating X is good. Today, as in antiquity, few people eat what they do not like, or only if they have to. And many would defend their eating habits as right, perhaps even aiming to persuade others to eat what they eat. Ancient philosophers devise a range of responses to these phenomena, some of them broadly speaking relativist, others broadly speaking skeptical. I address both in turn. One line of thought is associated with the sophists, traveling intellectuals some of whom are eminent philosophers. The sophists observe that typically people consider their customs as natural and right. Surveying this pattern, they ask whether everything is merely custom, and hence nothing right or wrong by nature.27 The presumption that one does what is natural or right crumbles in the face of the identical presumption by any number of other people who live differently.28 The resulting perspective is sometimes referred to as relativism. It is a perspective that asks whether there are true answers to questions on how one should live. One feature of these ancient discussions is especially pertinent to food ethics. While today’s debates about moral relativism tend to focus on questions at the core of morality, much of the evidence about ancient discussions is about cultural practices such as, for example, burial rites or customs of eating. With respect to such practices even committed moral realists may wonder whether there is a truth of the matter: whether, say, there is a right mode of burial or a set of correct eating habits. The sophists’ experience is more common now than in antiquity, when fewer people were “traveling intellectuals.” A semester of study abroad, say, may prompt these sorts of observations and reflections. The relevant lines of thought may induce some degree of distancing from one’s own convictions and practices. One may realize that one would likely hold different convictions and engage in different practices had one grown up elsewhere. One may “convert” to some extent to practices that one shared for a while, integrating some of them into one’s own life abroad or even at home. And one may entertain the thought that none of the relevant beliefs are true. Alternatively, one may argue that each set of practices is right and all relevant beliefs true. Protagoras, famous sophist and proponent of relativism, arguably makes this move. According to his work Truth, what seems to anyone is the case for them.29 This

27 

A formulation of this charge is contained in NE I.3; Aristotle sets out to refute it. Similar considerations are found in Herodotus’s Histories, an imaginative quasi-​record of the ways of life of peoples throughout the larger Mediterranean—the further away from Delphi, the stranger. 29  “Man is the measure of all things, of things which are, that they are, and of the things which are not, that they are not” (Plato, Theaetetus 152a2–​5; this is a quote from Protagoras’s book Truth); “[A]‌s each thing appears to me, so it is for me, and as it appears to you, so it is for you (152a7–​9); “What seems to each, he [Protagoras] says, that is also as it seems to him” (170a3−4). 28 

Who You Are Is What You Eat    753 is often reformulated as follows: what seems to anyone is true for them. On this reconstruction, Protagoras puts forward the view that all views, including different views about what should be done, are true. One of the views that are true, on this proposal, is this very proposal itself. Another view that is true, on this proposal, is its denial. Put this way, Protagoras’s relativism seems untenable, perhaps even so that one cannot coherently formulate or defend it.30 Another response to difference and disagreement is to hold on to the intuition that there are true answers to such questions as what to eat and not to eat.31 These answers may not be the same for everyone or at every point in time. But they may still be true. Witness Aristotle’s example of Milo the athlete: Milo needs more food than he would if he stopped exercising. Thus, what he should eat is relative to him. But the truth of such claims is not relative: it is true, not just true-​for-​Milo, that Milo needs more food than he would if he did not exercise. To take another example, Calypso should eat nectar and Odysseus should eat food suitable to humans. These claims are true (if they are), not true-​for-​Calypso or true-​for-​Odysseus. Arguably, many questions about eating are of this sort. In outline, the answers seem straightforward: athletes need lots of nutrients, human beings should live on food suitable for humans, and so on. And because such truths seem to be available, it seems that one can push further, aiming to make the answers more precise. This is a premise of food ethics: that it makes sense to ask ourselves what we should eat. And yet, making such answers more precise may be far from straightforward. Assuming there is a fact of the matter of what Milo should eat, how is one going to determine this fact? What, say, should athletes include in their diet so as to improve their chances to win championships? Think of substances that are harmful or illegal for competing athletes, or of scientists doing research on nutrients. More generally, which foods are suitable for humans? Think of the problems discussed in this volume. The ancient skeptics are committed to investigation, even though answers may not be readily forthcoming. They are committed, in Sextus Empiricus’s terms, to ongoing investigation (PH 1.1).32 The Pyrrhonian skeptics are well-​known for so-​called “modes” of argument, types of argument they bring to bear on any question, thereby leading themselves and others to suspension of judgment. By considering differences and disagreement, the skeptics come to suspend judgment. With respect to food, they put together examples 30 

Plato prominently explores Protagorean relativism in the Theaetetus, refuting it multiple times, each of which is difficult to reconstruct. For more detail on the relativist and skeptical construals of difference and disagreement, cf. Vogt 2012. 31  I refrain from saying “objectively true,” a go-​to phrase at this point for many authors. The subjective-​objective distinction is not part of ancient philosophy; to introduce it here would be anachronistic. 32  All quotes in this section from Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Skepticism (abbreviated as PH). The Greek terms for difference and disagreement are diaphônia and diaphora (PH 1.87). Sextus Empiricus’s writings as well as Diogenes Laertius’s report on Pyrrho and Timon in his Lives of Eminent Philosophers 9.61−116 are our main sources for reconstructing Pyrrhonian skepticism.

754   Katja Maria Vogt of the following sort. Sweet oil is agreeable to human beings but intolerable for beetles and bees (PH 1.55); human beings get sick from eating ants, not so bears (PH 1.57); some person drinks with impunity hemlock (PH 1.81); someone travels through arid Libya without drinking (DL 9.81); someone else gets a heart attack from eating pepper (PH 1.84); Ethiopians eat scorpions and snakes (PH 1.83). Why do the skeptics collect such examples? Suppose one suspends judgment on whether ants are good to eat, based on observing humans versus bears. Is this not a nonsensical move? If anything, it would seem surprising if bears lived on the same diet as human beings. Also, the story that someone traveled through Libya without drinking seems either incredible, or in need of some explanation that invokes highly unusual circumstances. If someone had a heart attack from eating pepper, it would seem that, at least in principle, a medical explanation regarding her particular condition can be found. That is, the skeptics seem to record phenomena as puzzling that are not particularly puzzling, or only insofar as one may seek explanations. Why should the consideration of such phenomena lead one to suspend judgment on what (how much, etc.) is good to eat or drink? The bear example comes from Sextus’s illustration of the First Mode of the so-​called Ten Modes. It argues from differences that occur between kinds of animals. Subsequent modes of argument zoom in, more and more narrowly, looking at differences between human beings, between different sense perceptions, different states and dispositions, and so on. These differences can be invoked when one tries to make sense of discrepant phenomena: say, one may assume that ants are good for bears and bad for people (if they are) because bears differ in relevant ways from human beings. These attempts at explanation lead one, or so the skeptics stipulate, to look at things ever more closely, along the lines of the progression of the Ten Modes. For example, the Fourth Mode invokes different circumstances: the same food seems agreeable when hungry and disagreeable when sated; actions that appear shameful when sober do not appear shameful when drunk; and so on (PH 1.109). Eventually, one is considering a particular agent under particular circumstances at a given time. One person in one given context/​time/​ circumstances/​state of mind/​and so on pursues X as good and another person, or the same person, in a given context/​time/​circumstances/​state of mind/​and so on pursues Y as good. Add now the premise mentioned earlier: people tend to be committed to viewing their actions as good or right. Accordingly, or so it is stipulated, people who act differently hold different evaluative beliefs. The manifold discrepancies that are observed thus imply that there are manifold different evaluative beliefs. The skeptics argue that, with respect to any two such beliefs, one can either attempt the impossible: to believe both, holding contradictories—​that, say, X is good, and that it is not the case that X is good— to be true. Or one suspends judgment on how things really are (PH 1.87‒88). In matters of value, this means one suspends belief on whether there is anything good or bad by nature, or in another formulation, on whether there is such a thing as expertise in matters of how one should live. Are the skeptics thereby unable to eat anything, as it were, paralyzed by not endorsing any particular view? This is a well-​known anti-​skeptical

Who You Are Is What You Eat    755 argument, the so-​called Apraxia Charge.33 Skeptics, by not holding views about what is right and wrong and good and bad and more generally, about the way the world is, are presumably reduced to inactivity. The skeptics, however, argue that this objection is misguided. Consider an example that is much debated today, whether one should live on a vegetarian diet. Suppose one considers this question as unresolved. This is compatible with being quite taken by one side of the argument, enough so in order to live accordingly. One’s tentative view may be good enough for oneself to go along with it, though one continues to think through the issues, fails to have responses to some objections raised by those who are more taken by another position (vegan, omnivore, etc.), and so on. This is how Academic skeptics, and that is, philosophers in Plato’s Academy who endorse the Socratic legacy, respond to the Apraxia Challenge.34 They argue that one can go along with what is persuasive (pithanon) or reasonable (eulogon), while at the same time suspending judgment on how matters really are. Their actions are based on their “best bet,” given their current thinking—and that includes an ongoing effort to investigate and figure things out. Future evidence, new arguments, and so on, may lead one to modify, correct, or refine one’s suppositions. But given a Socratic commitment to an examined life, it is preferable to act based on the best thinking currently available on a given matter, as compared to being either inactive or acting on unexamined, dogmatic notions. This is the stance that, arguably, many of us take with respect to questions in food ethics. Pyrrhonian skeptics are more radical. On their way of telling the story, investigation tends to leave one torn between arguments for different sides of an issue, acutely aware of problems within each of the competing views. Rather than leaning one way or another, one finds oneself genuinely in-​between positions. The skeptics call this an “equal” state of mind (isostheneia). What, then, guides one’s actions? In Sextus’s terms, the skeptics adhere to appearances. This includes being compelled by necessary affections like thirst/​hunger and going along with custom and convention (PH 1.21‒24).35 On the skeptics’ analysis, custom can be the custom of human beings, of one culture, of one family, one person, one person in a given context, and so on. Thus, a Pyrrhonian skeptic might eat what is eaten in her culture, or she might eat what her family eats, or what she habitually eats in a given season, and so on.36 This too is a highly recognizable approach today, compatible with taking questions of what we should eat to be deserving of ongoing investigation.

33  I am here sketching the moves leading up to suspension of judgment as they are envisaged in Pyrrhonian skepticism. A different story, albeit also leading to suspension of judgment, needs to be told for Academic skepticism. Both schools encounter the Apraxia Challenge. Cf. Vogt 2010. 34 Vogt 2010. 35  Note that this invokes the Platonic two-​relations view of hunger/​thirst discussed in the second section. 36  Sextus highlights the fact that skepticism should not be understood as conservative through the example of whether a skeptic might give in to pressure from a tyrant, performing unspeakable deeds because the tyrant threatens him. Here one might suspect that “convention” speaks for submission. But according to Sextus, it all depends. Someone could have grown up with rebel parents, or be part of a group of political activists, and convention pulls the other way.

756   Katja Maria Vogt

5. Conclusion Ancient ethics has much to say about eating and my discussion in this essay was by necessity selective. I addressed three topics that strike me as pertinent to the ways in which eating is conflicted in ordinary life. What is the nature of hunger, and how does the nature of hunger shape its motivational force? How and to what extent can one habituate one’s food-​related attitudes? How can one make sense of the differences between eating habits; and how should one respond to disagreements about what to eat? I assigned each of these topics to one ancient philosopher or group of philosophers—Plato, Aristotle, and the mixed group of relativists and skeptics, respectively. This is no doubt somewhat artificial. To some extent, they all engage with the full range of questions under consideration. But Plato, or so I argue, makes a unique proposal about the nature of hunger, namely, that hunger has two dimensions: being hungry, and being hungry-​for-​X. Aristotle, my argument continues, puts forward a premise about the moldability of desire. Repeated φ-​ing, combined with the pleasure of approving of one’s φ-​ing, typically leads one to come to enjoy φ-​ing. This premise may require empirical confirmation or refinement. Minimally, it signals that, if food ethics is to be more than an academic exercise, some connection between theorizing about eating and adjusted eating habits is needed. Finally, I take it that difference and disagreement are pervasive features of how people today experience eating. If one does not want to give up on the idea that there are answers to the questions that food ethics raises, the stance of the Academic skeptics seems promising. As they argue, one can investigate these questions, considering them as so far unresolved, and at the same time be guided in one’s eating habits by one’s best current thinking.37

Bibliography Annas, Julia, and Jonathan Barnes, eds. and trans. Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Scepticism. 2d ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Bakker, Egbert J. The Meaning of Meat and the Structure of the Odyssey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. —​—​—​. “Polyphemos.” Colby Quarterly 38 (2002): 135–​150. Barney, Rachel. “Plato on Desire for the Good.” In Desire, Good, and Practical Reason, edited by Sergio Tenenbaum, 34–​64. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Berdowski, Piotr. “Heroes and Fish in Homer.” Palamedes:  A Journal of Ancient History 3 (2008): 75–​92. Bobonich, Christopher. Plato’s Utopia Recast. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Broadie, Sarah, and Christopher Rowe, ed. and trans. Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

37 

I am grateful for feedback to Thimo Heisenberg, Sam McVane, Christiana Olfert, and Nandi Theunissen; and for extensive input and discussion of the material to Jens Haas.

Who You Are Is What You Eat    757 Burnyeat, Myles. “Aristotle on Learning to be Good.” In Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics, edited by Amélie Rorty, 73–​92. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980. Carone, Gabriela R. “Akrasia in the Republic: Does Plato Change His Mind?” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 20 (2001): 107–​148. Combellack, Frederick M. “Homer’s Savage Fish.” Classical Journal 48 (1953): 257–​261. Cooper, John M., ed. Plato Complete Works. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1997. —​—​—​. “Plato’s Theory of Human Motivation.” History of Philosophy Quarterly 1 (1984):3–​21. Reprinted in John M.  Cooper. Reason and Emotion, 118–​137. Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 1999. —​—​—​. Reason and Human Good in Aristotle. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1986. Cornford, Francis M. The Republic of Plato. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1941. Davidson, James. “On the Fish Missing from Homer.” In Food in European Literature, edited by John Wilkins, 57–​64. Exeter: Intellect Books, 1996. Elster, Jon. Ulysses and the Sirens. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Frede, Dorothea, ed. and trans. Platon: Philebos. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1997. Irwin, Terence, trans. Plato: Gorgias. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979. —​—​—​. Plato’s Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. —​—​—​. Plato’s Moral Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977. Lattimore, Richard, trans. The Odyssey of Homer. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1999. Leunissen, Mariska. “Aristotle on Natural Character and Its Implications for Moral Develop­ ment.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 50, no. 4 (2012): 507–​530. Lorenz, Hendrik. The Brute Within: Appetitive Desire in Plato and Aristotle. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. —​—​—​. “Desire and Reason in Plato’s Republic.” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 27 (2004): 83–​116. McDowell, John. “Eudaimonism and Realism in Aristotle’s Ethics.” In The Engaged Intellect: Philosophical Essays, by John McDowell, 23–​40. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. —​—​—​. “Some Issues in Aristotle’s Moral Psychology.” In Mind, Value, and Reality, by John McDowell, 23–​49. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. Moss, Jessica. “Appearances and Calculations: Plato’s Division of the Soul.” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 34 (2008): 35–​68. —​—​—​. “Pleasure and Illusion in Plato.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 72, no. 3 (2006): 503–​535. —​—​—​. “Right Reason in Plato and Aristotle: On the Meaning of Logos.” Phronesis 59 (2014): 181–​230. Price, Anthony. “Plato on the Object of Thirst:  A Response to James Warren, ‘Memory, Anticipation, Pleasure.’” Forthcoming in Moral Psychology in Ancient Thought: Proceedings of the 9th S.V. Keeling Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy, edited by Fiona Leigh. Reeve, C. D. C. Philosopher-​Kings: The Argument of Plato’s Republic. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988. Segvic, Heda. “Deliberation and Choice in Aristotle.” In From Protagoras to Aristotle: Essays in Ancient Moral Philosophy, edited by Myles Burnyeat, 144–​171. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009. Vogt, Katja M. “The Guise of the Good.” In Desiring the Good:  Ancient Proposals and Contemporary Theory, 115–​144. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017a. —​—​—​. “Plato on Hunger and Thirst.” Logical Analysis and History of Philosophy 20 (2017b): 103–​119.

758   Katja Maria Vogt —​—​—​. “The Nature of Disagreement: Ancient Relativism and Skepticism.” In Belief and Truth: A Skeptic Reading of Plato, 97–​118. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. —​—​—​, ed. and trans. Pyrrhonian Skepticism in Diogenes Laertius. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015. —​—​—​. “Scepticism and Action.” In The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Greek Scepticism, edited by Richard Bett, 165–​180. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

chapter 34

Fo od Eth i c s i n the Middle  Ag e s Henrik Lagerlund

Introduction There has been virtually nothing written about medieval food ethics. One might ask what food ethics in the Middle Ages would be. There were certainly not the same concerns that we have today in medieval times, but there was a discussion of animals and their moral status, which picks up from the ancient discussions, but which was heavily modified and influenced by the dominant religions of the time. There was also a discussion about food in general, what to eat, when, and how. These issues were also set out in relation to religion. There was, furthermore, a moral concern about eating and drinking. Food and drinking in relation to the natural desires of hunger and thirst are such important aspects of our lives that they have a tendency to run our lives. In today’s society, we know this all too well. We get overcome by the desire for food and drink that we naturally have inside of us and without which we could not continue to live. It is crucial in a culture like the medieval Western European one dominated by religion to find ways to moderate these desires and not let them take over and stand in the way of the moral good or, put differently, the final end of human nature, which for most medieval thinkers was God. Toward the end of his well-​known book Animal Minds and Human Morals, Richard Sorabji argues that the Christian tradition of the Middle Ages basically followed the Stoics in their view of animals, that is, they generally rejected the idea that they have intrinsic moral value or even that they enter into the spheres of moral concern, since they lack reason. He shows that this is Augustine’s view. As will be clear from my discussion, he is basically right in this interpretation, although it is important to remember that the Christian Middle Ages thought that all creation has been given to humans by God and on some interpretations—​medieval philosophers differ here—​this implies that we humans have a responsibility to take care of what has been given to us, that is,

760   Henrik Lagerlund an obligation to treat it with respect. This includes animals as well, but some philosophers and theologians deny this and argue that we have no obligation toward nature and can rule over it in whatever way we want. Even if one goes the first route, this does not, however, as we shall see, generally give animals an intrinsic moral value or imply a positive obligation for humans toward them, aside from making sure that they do not suffer needlessly; for example, Maimonides is very clear on this. The person that often comes to mind as someone with a different attitude to animals as well as the nonhuman natural world is, of course, St. Francis of Assisi (1182‒1226)—​ the founder of the Franciscan Order and the patron saint of Italy. By some scholars he is portrayed as an opponent of the destructive attitude to nature that can be found in mainstream medieval thought—​a view that some think modernity has inherited.1 There are many stories told of Francis and his interactions with animals in the Middle Ages,2 but one of the most important is the one about the wolf in the city of Gubbio in Italy. When Francis arrived in the city, the countryside just outside of it was being terrorized by a large hungry wolf that had killed both humans and animals in search of food. Francis is said to have gone out to search for the wolf and having found it, confronted it with these words: Brother Wolf you have done great harm in this region, and you have committed horrible crimes by destroying God’s creation without any mercy. You have been destroying not only irrational animals, but you even have the more detestable brazenness to kill and devour human beings made in the image of God. You therefore deserve to be put to death just like the worst robber and murderer. Consequently everyone is right in crying out against you and complaining, and this whole town is your enemy. But, Brother Wolf, I want to make peace between you and them, so that they will not be harmed by you any more, and after they have forgiven you all your past crimes, neither men nor dogs will pursue you any more.3

The wolf supposedly understood and accepted everything that Francis said. Francis then made a pact with the wolf so that it would never have to go hungry, if it left the town and its inhabitants alone. The wolf accepted and never again bothered the town of Gubbio. Francis has been hailed as someone seeing nature in a democratic and egalitarian way, where animals and humans are equal, unlike other medieval authors and thinkers. Particularly, of course, his attitude toward animals is exemplified by the wolf in the story. The power he was said to have had over animals was in the Middle Ages, particularly by his followers, seen as a sign of his remarkable sanctity. He was, they claimed, able to temporally restore the world after the Fall to its state before the Fall, that is, to the state in which Adam and Eve had complete dominion over animals. It is, however, highly 1 

For the canonical form of this view of the Middle Ages, see White 1967. For a more balanced view of Francis, see also Salter 2001. 2  There are many stories in general about holy men’s interactions with animals. See, e.g., Waddell 1934, which contains many stories particularly from the time of the Church Fathers. 3  Translation is from Salter 2001, 28.

Food Ethics in the Middle Ages    761 questionable that any egalitarianism can be attributed to Francis or draws from these stories. The focus in his work and in these stories is foremost on human nature and the animals are used to import important spiritual truths on human kind.4 The hierarchy that is so clear in Augustine, as Sorabji (1993) pointed out, is also present in Francis; perhaps less extreme, but nevertheless it is there. In this essay, I  will first look at what kind of foods medieval people ate and what impact on their habits religion had. I will then look closer at what they said about animals as food, but I will also look carefully at perhaps the most important aspect of medieval food ethics, namely, the moral aspect of eating itself. This is foremost governed by the virtue of fasting and the vice, or even deadly sin, of gluttony.

Food in Medieval Times What did people eat in the Middle Ages? There was a surprisingly large variety of food stuff available to people in the Middle Ages, but it was as nowadays unequally distributed and dependent on social class as well as geographic region. Many new, more exotic foods were brought to medieval Europe by Arab merchants. These included a variety of spices, fruits, and some grains like rice.5 The staples for most people in the Middle Ages were, however, bread (wheat in general for things like stuffings, potages, and soups), dairy products (milk, cheese, and butter), cheap cuts of meat, and preserved fish. When it comes to drinking, it also varied between social class and region. The poor drank mostly water. Water was often, especially in cities, not very clean, so if they could afford it they preferred ale or wine. Wine was most commonly drunk in France and Italy while ale was the drink of choice in England. The custom in the Middle Ages was to eat two meals a day; dinner around noon and a supper in the evening. The major meal was dinner in the middle of the day while supper was usually a simple meal of either a soup or what was called sops, that is, bread dipped in wine. Breakfast was not recommended, since it meant breaking the overnight fast too soon, but it was a necessity for most peasants and craftsmen. They found that it was too long to wait to eat nothing between supper in the evening and dinner at noon, since they had to be up early for work. In the fifteenth century, the nobility also started to have bread, meat, and ale for breakfast. For a long time, it was associated with shame to admit that one ate breakfast. The late night snack or small meal after supper became increasingly popular throughout the Middle Ages, but it was usually condemned by both the Church and the head of the household. It was mostly enjoyed by friends in private rooms behind closed doors and sometimes included heavy drinking. It was seen as frivolous and associated with vice, by moralists of the time.

4  5 

See Salter 2001, 25–​32. See Adamson 2004, 1–​50.

762   Henrik Lagerlund Food and religion have a very close connection throughout the Middle Ages. Food is essential for the Christian religion. Think about the important place of the Last Supper before Christ’s death or the Holy Communion, which involves wine and bread. There are many examples, and, in one particular respect, food distinguishes Christianity from Islam and Judaism, namely in the indiscriminate consumption of different kinds of meat. In the first five books of the Bible, the dietary requirements of Hebrews are set out. Adam and Eve were vegetarians in Paradise and not until after the flood were Noah as well as his followers allowed to eat meat. With Moses, the dietary requirements were changed again and the restriction of certain kinds of meats as unclean was added. Pork was and still is prohibited in Orthodox Judaism. As Maimonides puts it in Guide for the Perplexed: The principal reason why the Law forbids swine’s flesh is to be found in the circumstance that its habits and its food are very dirty and loathsome. It has already been pointed out how emphatically the Law enjoins the removal of the sight of loathsome objects. . . . But if it were allowed to eat swine’s flesh, the streets and houses would be more dirty than any cesspool, as may be seen at present in the country of the Franks. (Maimonides 1956, 370–​371)

The idea seems to be that, for example, pigs are a particularly dirty animal and even though he does not think that their unclean nature would transfer to us, if we were to eat them, but that, if they are eaten widely, they would be raised widely as well and the result would be filthy towns and camps. In light of this comment, it is true that pigs could be seen roaming around the streets of big cities like Paris. According to Maimonides, this is against the idea that cities should be ordered and clean to have an environment that fosters the kind of thoughts that lead to a law-​like life and holiness. He also compares pigs to excrements and their dirtiness to latrines (compare Maimonides 1956, 339–​340). There were other ideas about why certain animals were excluded from the diet. Clean animals were herbivores and had cloven hooves, which would exclude pigs, horses, camels, and rabbits, for example. Jews would then eat only herbivores and not carnivores, since the Garden of Eden did not allow killing and everybody living there were vegetarians.6 Islam also has strict laws about diet, which derive from the Qur’an or reports about the life of Mohammed. These laws are very similar to the laws of the Hebrew Bible. It is, for example, forbidden to eat meat from animals that die of themselves, blood, as well as the meat of swine. See the following quote from the Qur’an: 6 

See Adamson 2004, 198. To be kosher, fish must have fins and scales, which excludes many kinds of fish. Maimonides is quite subtle about this and notes that “signs marking a permitted animal,” for example, chewing the cud and divided hoofs “are in themselves neither the cause of the permission when they are present, nor of the prohibition when they are absent”; they are merely signs to distinguish the species. He does not say why some species are and not others are permitted, and indicate that it is a form of idolatry that the Law forbids (see Maimonides 1956, III.48). I am indebted to Josef Stern for comments on my note on Maimonides.

Food Ethics in the Middle Ages    763 Forbidden to you [for food] are: dead meat, blood, the flesh of swine, and that upon which a name other than Allah has been invoked; that which has been killed by strangling, or by a violent blow, or by a headlong fall, or by being gored to death; that which has been [partly] eaten by a wild animal, unless you are able to slaughter it [before it dies]; and that which is sacrificed on stone (altars). (Al’Ma’idah 5.3)

For most Muslims, it is enough that this law is stated by Allah, but the same reason for excluding pork is mentioned in the Islamic tradition, namely, that pork is unclean and also, some seem to think, unhealthy. The Qur’an also prohibits alcohol for similar reasons.7 Early Christianity, on the other hand, had a very liberal attitude to meat eating compared to the Hebrews. The dramatic break from the old Hebrew tradition comes in the New Testament with St. Peter’s vision in Act 10 of the Apostles as he is about to meet Cornelius for the first time. The passage reads: About noon the following day as they were on their journey and approaching the city, Peter went up on the roof to pray. He became hungry and wanted something to eat, and while the meal was being prepared, he fell into a trance. He saw heaven opened and something like a large sheet being let down to earth by its four corners. It contained all kinds of four-​footed animals, as well as reptiles and birds. Then a voice told him, “Get up, Peter. Kill and eat.” “Surely not, Lord!” Peter replied. “I have never eaten anything impure or unclean.” The voice spoke to him a second time, “Do not call anything impure that God has made clean.” (Acts 10:9‒15)

Through Peter, God is here giving Christians a license to eat any kind of meat. Even though there are no restrictions on what kind of meat Christians were allowed to eat, there were other rules. By the fifth century, more and more such rules were put into place. These were rules about fasting and abstinence, and they played similar roles as the laws against certain meats and alcohol in Judaism and Islam. One of the reasons for introducing these rules was that many Church Fathers came to associate too much food and indulgence with sin, and particularly with lust. This becomes an important theme in medieval food ethics.

Animals as Food As is set out in Genesis, God has given humans dominion over the earth and this includes animals. There was a long debate among medieval Christian philosophers as to what this meant. They agreed that it clearly meant that we could use animals for food, but they

7 

For more about food ethics and Islam, see Mathewson Denny 2014; and for more on food in Judaism, see Segal 2014.

764   Henrik Lagerlund disagreed on a lot of other things, as we shall see. There is, however, an even stronger tie to the eating of animals for a Christian than the one presented in the Bible. This argument to a great extent was provided by Augustine when he discussed whether killing an animal is breaking the commandment that one shall not kill. He writes in the City of God that: Must we therefore reckon it a breaking of this commandment, “Thou shalt not kill,” to pull a flower? Are we thus insanely to countenance the foolish error of the Manicheans? Putting aside, then, these ravings, if, when we say, Thou shalt not kill, we do not understand this of the plants, since they have no sensation, nor of the irrational animals that fly, swim, walk, or creep, since they are dissociated from us by their want of reason, and are therefore by the just appointment of the Creator subjected to us to kill or keep alive for our own uses; if so, then it remains that we understand that commandment simply of man. (Augustine 1957, 1:20)

First of all, he notes clearly that the commandment does not apply to animals, only to humans. They together with the rest of the earth were given to us humans by God to rule over. We are the appointed rulers, since we are the only creatures endowed with reason, according to Augustine. This is a standard argument that is present throughout the Middle Ages and ultimately derived from the Stoics, but what I was foremost thinking about in this quote is Augustine’s reference to the Manicheans. They were known for their asceticism and they advocated for vegetarianism. They saw not just some meat as unclean but all meat. In this passage, Augustine is, hence, not only saying that it is morally right to kill animals, but he is also associating a non-​meat diet, or vegetarianism, with the sin of Manicheanism. Thus, making vegetarianism not only not morally required but not even morally permissible. The killing of animals was, however, following Augustine, seen as a necessity. Consider, for example, this quote from Maimonides’s Guide for the Perplexed: The commandment concerning the killing of animals is necessary, because the natural food of man consists of vegetables and of the flesh of animals; the best meat is that of animals permitted to be used as food. . . . Since, therefore, the desire of procuring good food necessitates the slaying of animals, the Law enjoins that the death of the animal should be the easiest. . . . There is no difference in this case between the pain of man and the pain of other living beings, since love and tenderness of the mother for her young ones is not produced by reason, but by imagination, and this faculty exists not only in man but in most living beings. (Maimonides 1956, 371)

Someone might draw the conclusion from this quote there was a concern for the animal in question being killed as well, but this would be to go too far. Maimonides insists that this is not because of any concern for the animal in question. Instead it has to do with the development of human character. It is about educating humans not to be cruel, which means not being cruel to animals as well. Most thinkers after the twelfth century were influenced by Aristotle and, hence, many aspects of our human nature were conceived of as being shared with animals. The

Food Ethics in the Middle Ages    765 abilities to feel pain and to care for your offspring were among them. In general, philosophers of an Aristotelian bent saw animals and humans on a continuum of living beings stretching from trees and flowers through animals up to humans. A thinker like Thomas Aquinas, for example, sees human passions as similar, if not identical, to the passions of animals. We share our emotions or passions with animals. Humans are distinguished by their reason and ability for understanding and knowledge. It is this part that for someone like Aquinas makes us like or created in the image of God, and hence also more perfect. However, the Cartesian idea of animals as soulless machines did not exist in the Middle Ages. All living beings have a soul, argued Aristotle and with him most medieval thinkers, but this did not generally give animals a higher moral status, since having interests and rights comes with having reason. Turning now to Aquinas’s view of animals. His view has been somewhat discussed in the secondary literature and many have pointed out that his view of the moral status of animals is almost identical to Descartes’s, namely, that they have none.8 As we shall see, this is not quite right. I already noted that as far as the ontological status of animals is concerned Aquinas differs radically from Descartes, but he is very much an orthodox Christian philosopher when it comes to animals’ moral status. He generally agrees with the sentiments expressed in the Bible and the view attributed to the Stoics by Sorabji.9 He, for example, says the following as an answer to the question whether it is unlawful to kill animals: Now the most necessary use would seem to consist in the fact that animals use plants, and men use animals, for food, and this cannot be done unless these be deprived of life: wherefore it is lawful both to take life from plants for the use of animals, and from animals for the use of men. In fact this is in keeping with the commandment of God Himself. (Aquinas 1948‒50, ST II-​II, 64, 1, resp.)

He prefaces this by the following statement: “Now the order of things is such that the imperfect are for the perfect” (ST II-​II, 64, 1). Plants exist for animals and animals exist for humans, but we humans also exist for the sake of God. All living beings are in this way finally ordered to God. Humans are nevertheless different because we have an aspect of our nature, namely, our intellects or reason, that is divine and which make our souls part of a very special group of beings that are immortal and immaterial (that is, human intellective souls, angels, and God). Animals, on the other hand, are purely material beings and their souls perish when they die, Aquinas thinks.10 Aristotelianism and certainly Thomism assume a normativity embedded in nature. This is implicit in the teleology governing both philosophical systems. Hence, what is 8  For a careful discussion about Aquinas on animals, see Barad 1995. She presents a view of Aquinas’s attitude to animals as much more conflicted than the one I will present. My view is more traditional. 9  See Sorabji 1993, 20–​28. 10  As far as I know, no medieval philosopher or theologian entertained the idea that animals go to heaven, but there was some discussion of whether they are resurrected. In this sense, God would save all of his creation. See Salisbury 2014.

766   Henrik Lagerlund ontologically lower or less developed is also morally less valuable and exists for the use of the beings higher up. Humans are the highest being in nature and, hence, everything lower exists for the sake of, as well as for the use of, humans. For his disobedience to God, man was punished by the disobedience of those creatures which should be subject to him. Therefore in the state of innocence, before man had disobeyed, nothing disobeyed him that was naturally subject to him. Now all animals are naturally subject to man. . . . First, from the order observed by nature; for just as in the generation of things we perceive a certain order of procession of the perfect from the imperfect . . . so also is there order in the use of natural things; thus the imperfect are for the use of the perfect; as the plants make use of the earth for their nourishment, and animals make use of plants, and man makes use of both plants and animals. Therefore it is in keeping with the order of nature, that man should be master over animals. Hence the Philosopher says (Polit. i, 5) that the hunting of wild animals is just and natural, because man thereby exercises a natural right. (Aquinas 1948‒50, ST I, 96, 1 resp.)

This order was, hence, most perfect in Paradise, since animals then obeyed humans, but the order is nevertheless there after the Fall as well. It is fair to say that on Aquinas’s view animals have only instrumental value in relation to humans. They, on the other hand, do what they do and use plants and trees below them as instruments for their perfection. They do this by nature or because it is laid down by the divine law in creation. They do not do this by free will or by following a natural, moral, law like us humans. Animals hence have an instrumental value, which is different from Descartes’s view. Even though they have a mere instrumental value, it is nevertheless prudent to treat animals well and not cruelly, Aquinas thinks. The reason for this is not that we are doing something morally wrong, if we beat or torture an animal, it is because the way we treat animals is an indication of how we treat humans. Cruelty to animals reveals a bad moral character and a person likely to be vicious and bad to humans as well. Aquinas explains this in Summa Contra Gentiles: For animals are ordered to man’s use in the natural course of things, according to divine providence. Consequently, man uses them without any injustice, either by killing them or by employing them in any other way. . . . Indeed, if any statements are found in Sacred Scripture prohibiting the commission of an act of cruelty against brute animals . . . this is said either to turn the mind of man away from cruelty which might be used on other men, lest a person through practicing cruelty on brutes might go on to do the same to men; or because an injurious act committed on animals may lead to a temporal loss for some man, either for the agent or for another man. (Aquinas 1961, SCG III, 112)

Another example of this can be found in Summa theologiae: He that kills another’s ox, sins, not through killing the ox, but through injuring another man in his property. Wherefore this is not a species of the sin of murder but of the sin of theft or robbery. (Aquinas 1948‒50, ST II-​II, 64, 1, obj. 3)

Food Ethics in the Middle Ages    767 This is a clear statement of Aquinas’s view of animals. There is nothing in the medieval tradition like what we can find in Montaigne in the sixteenth century. In the Apology of Raymond Sebond, he famously argues for equality between humans and animals. We read there, for example, things like: “The inequality is due to us,” and “There are bigger differences between humans than between humans and animals.” Descartes vehemently objected to this in a letter addressed to the Marquis of Newcastle dated November 23, 1646, and instead he returns to the general medieval view of a clear difference between humans and animals in the Discourse on Method.11

Ethics of Eating As was mentioned, the early Christian tradition had no problem promoting the eating of any kind of meat—​it created a unity and distinguished it from other religions of the time—​but it also from the very beginning took a moral perspective on eating and food. It associated wasteful and indulgent eating with weak moral character and even with sin. The Church Fathers were keen to set moral standards and define the actions of the followers of the new religion. In an effort to do this, Evagrius in the fourth century set out what he called eight “thoughts” that he saw often affected the monks of his convent. These were later developed into what we now know as the seven deadly sins. For Evagrius, these were “thoughts” that lead away from the most important Christian “thought” of all, namely love and particularly, of course, the love of God. Gluttony is on Evagrius’s list and it is already then right next to lust. These two sins became associated with one another from the very start of Christianity, and they remained connected throughout the whole Middle Ages.12 In his little treatise On Fasting (­chapter 1), Tertullian (155‒240) gives an interesting and quite physical explanation of the connection of these two sins. He writes: I should wonder at the Psychics, if they were enthralled to voluptuousness alone, which leads them to repeated marriages, if they were not likewise bursting with gluttony, which leads them to hate fasts. Lust without voracity would certainly be considered a monstrous phenomenon; since these two are so united and concrete, that, had there been any possibility of disjoining them, the pudenda would not have been affixed to the belly itself rather than elsewhere. Look at the body: the region (of these members) is one and the same. In short, the order of the vices is proportionate to the arrangement of the members. First, the belly; and then immediately the materials of all other species of lasciviousness are laid subordinately to daintiness: through love of eating, love of impurity finds passage.13 11 

See Melehy 2006. For a detailed view of animals in early modern thought, see also Wild 2006. For an interesting and entertaining book on gluttony, see Prose 2003. For more on the role of fasting in the early Christian tradition, see Grimm 1996. 13  Tertullian, “On Fasting,” http://​www.newadvent.org/​fathers/​0408.htm. 12 

768   Henrik Lagerlund This treatise is aimed at Montamus (or the so-​called Montamists), which was an early Christian sect whose teachings eventually became heresy. Tertullian proposes fasting as a cure to the sins of the Montamists. He sees lust and gluttony as intimately linked and associated with our bodily anatomy and material constitution. He contrasts this with purity of spirit or mind. Fasting in his view is a way of literally starving the body and not allowing it to take over and lead us into sin. The excess of food as well as drinking, which is undoubtedly an important factor, is seen as directly leading to lust and a need to satisfy sexual desires. The overnight fasting and the rejection of evening meals as well as breakfast was a way of keeping the body and any unwanted desires under control. Fasting eventually also became a central part of the Church calendar year with set times for fasting. The most famous one being Lent, that is, the fasting before the feast of Easter. It is noteworthy that in Aquinas’s Summa theologiae the questions on fasting come right before the questions on gluttony. Also in Aquinas fasting has a moral character and for him it is a virtue. He remarks: An act is virtuous through being directed by reason to some virtuous good. Now this is consistent with fasting, because fasting is practiced for a threefold purpose. First, in order to bridle the lusts of the flesh. . . . Secondly, we have recourse to fasting in order that the mind may arise more freely to the contemplation of heavenly things. Thirdly, in order to satisfy for sins. . . . The same is declared by Augustine in a sermon: “Fasting cleanses the soul, raises the mind, subjects one’s flesh to the spirit, renders the heart contrite and humble, scatters the clouds of concupiscence, quenches the fire of lust, kindles the true light of chastity.” (Aquinas 1948‒50, ST II-​II, 147, 1, resp.)

Even though fasting is foremost about curbing bodily lust (passions are for Aquinas foremost related to the body), as expressed in the quote, it is nevertheless an act of abstinence from food. The thought is also to abstain from certain kinds of food in particular. He explains: As stated above, fasting was instituted by the Church in order to bridle the concupiscences of the flesh, which regard pleasures of touch in connection with food and sex. Wherefore the Church forbade those who fast to partake of those foods which both afford most pleasure to the palate, and besides are a very great incentive to lust. Such are the flesh of animals that take their rest on the earth, and of those that breathe the air and their products, such as milk from those that walk on the earth, and eggs from birds. For, since such like animals are more like man in body, they afford greater pleasure as food, and greater nourishment to the human body, so that from their consumption there results a greater surplus available for seminal matter, which when abundant becomes a great incentive to lust. Hence the Church has bidden those who fast to abstain especially from these foods. (Aquinas 1948‒50, ST II-​II, 147, 8, resp.)

Fasting is, hence, associated with avoiding certain animal meats. He does not mention drinking in any of these passages and it might seem counter-​intuitive, given what we

Food Ethics in the Middle Ages    769 know about abstaining from food today, that it would work as a remedy against lust and sexual desire in general, but it seems that eating and drinking are equal concerns and related to the sin of gluttony, which makes the moral dimensions of fasting and eating more understandable. As the mainstream medieval philosophical tradition, Aquinas also thinks that gluttony is on the list of deadly sins. On his view, gluttony is an inordinate desire for eating and drinking (ST II-​II, 148, 1). A desire is inordinate, if it is not in line with reason or equivalently with what is good and in line with moral virtue. Something is a sin, Aquinas thinks, if it is contrary to virtue, which gluttony hence is. The desire, or appetite more generally and perhaps more properly, that he has in mind here is a sensitive appetite. As such a sensitive appetite (or a passion simply put) is neither good nor bad, Aquinas thinks. It acquires moral status only in relation to reason. If they are in line with reason, they are good, and correspondingly, if they are out of order with reason, they are bad or evil. The passions are absolutely central to Aquinas’s moral psychology and ultimately ground the moral virtues when they are in line with these virtues, but when disordered they instead form the basis for sin and vice. The particular passion or desire for food and drink must also be distinguished from the natural appetites of hunger and thirst, since they are not under the control of reason. Hence, they can never be good or bad. Interestingly, Aquinas in relation to his discussion of gluttony as a sin also notes against the Jews and the Manicheans that it is not the food that we eat that makes us sinners, but the inordinate desire in us. As already mentioned, both the Jewish religion and the Manicheans thought it is unclean or a sin to eat certain meats, but this is not at all the case for Aquinas and with him the mainstream Christian tradition. It is the way we eat and whether we do so contrary to reason that makes it wrong. Gluttony is a sin, but it can also, obviously, be a deadly sin, argues Aquinas (ST II-​II, 148, 2). Reason can regulate a sensitive appetite in two ways. In one way, insofar as it regards things directed to the end, and in another way as regards the end in itself. In the first sense, the appetite (passion) is said to be inappropriate to or does not accord with the end, and in the second sense it turns us away from the end. It is only in the second sense that gluttony is a deadly sin, and it is only then that we are taking eating and drinking to be an end in itself. As he puts it, we are then in contempt of God (the final good) as our final end, since we for the sake of a pleasure are ready to disobey God’s command. If, on the other hand, someone has too great a desire for food or wine, say, but this does not distract her from God’s law, then gluttony is not a deadly sin—​it is merely a venial sin. Gluttonous behavior does surprisingly not only mean eating too much food or drinking too much wine or ale. It can, of course, mean that, but it also means (ST II-​II, 148, 4) eating food that is too luxurious, exotic, or costly. It might also mean eating food that is too elaborately prepared—​too fancy, but it also has to do with the time of the meal (e.g., in the late evening) and with the manner of eating, that is, eating too slow or too fast or eagerly. This is summarized in the Latin slogan: “Laute, nimis, studiose, praepropere, ardenter.” In true Aristotelian fashion, Aquinas advocates moderation in all aspects of eating and drinking. This, foremost, has to do with moral character and is not connected,

770   Henrik Lagerlund at least not explicitly, with any political or social agenda, that is, it is not for him connected to any of the contemporary problems like obesity, health, alcoholism, or waste of resources. Gluttony is also what Aquinas calls a capital vice, namely, it is a vice from which other vicious behavior follows. There are two capital vices, gluttony and lust. As we have seen earlier, these two are connected. He speaks about the “daughters” of gluttony, which are the vices that are “conceived” by gluttony. He writes the following about the four first: These may be accounted for either on the part of the soul or on the part of the body. On the part of the soul these results are of four kinds. First, as regards the reason, whose keenness is dulled by immoderate meat and drink, and in this respect we reckon as a daughter of gluttony, “dullness of sense in the understanding,” on account of the fumes of food disturbing the brain. . . . Secondly, as regards the appetite, which is disordered in many ways by immoderation in eating and drinking, as though reason were fast asleep at the helm, and in this respect “unseemly joy” is reckoned, because all the other inordinate passions are directed to joy or sorrow, as stated in Ethic. ii, 5. . . . Thirdly, as regards inordinate words, and thus we have “loquaciousness,” because as Gregory says (Pastor. iii, 19), “unless gluttons were carried away by immoderate speech, that rich man who is stated to have feasted sumptuously every day would not have been so tortured in his tongue.” Fourthly, as regards inordinate action, and in this way we have “scurrility,” i.e. a kind of levity resulting from lack of reason, which is unable not only to bridle the speech, but also to restrain outward behavior. (Aquinas 1948‒50, ST II-​II, 148, 6, resp.)

The four vices mentioned here as following from gluttony are (i)  dullness of mind, (ii) unseemly joy, (iii) loquaciousness, and (iv) scurrility. Even though the focus is on food, particularly meat, all four of these seem more appropriately associated with heavy drinking of alcoholic beverages. A lot of food tends to make us passive and tired and while it is true that eating fancy and well-​prepared food will often cause joy, it seems more appropriate to associate excessive joy with drinking wine or something similar. This seems even clearer when we add the fifth and sixth daughters of gluttony having to do with the body. He writes: On the part of the body, mention is made of “uncleanness,” which may refer either to the inordinate emission of any kind of superfluities, or especially to the emission of the semen. Hence a gloss on Eph. 5:3, “But fornication and all uncleanness,” says: “That is, any kind of incontinence that has reference to lust.”

The fifth seems to be (v) uncleanness, while it is a little bit unclear what the sixth is, nevertheless it is clearly related to (vi) lust, which I will claim to be the sixth daughter of gluttony. Again both of these are much more easily associated with the drinking of alcohol. Uncleanness might be a result of heavy eating, but it is here associated with emission of semen, which is a result of sexual desire or lust. The tie between drunkenness and food in relation to gluttony is obviously very close. The emphasis in Aquinas and other thinkers in the Middle Ages is on eating and food and the behaviors associated with it in

Food Ethics in the Middle Ages    771 relation to gluttony, but most of the consequences that they associate with it are clearly consequences of heavy drinking perhaps in combination with food.14 Aquinas’s view was very influential and widespread even in everyday thought as well as literature. Dante picks up many of the themes outlined by Aquinas in his descriptions of the gluttons in the Divine Comedy.15 The gluttons are in the third circle of Hell just after the circle of those that sinned through lust. He writes: Steadily through the shadowy air of Hell; The soil they drench gives off a putrid odor. Three-​headed Cerberus, monstrous and cruel, Barks doglike at the souls immersed here, louder For his triple throat. His eyes are red, his beard Grease-​black, he has the belly of a meat-​feeder And talons on his hands: he claws the horde Of spirits, he flays and quarters them in the rain. The wretches, howling like dogs where they are mired (Dante 1994, Canto VI)

The gluttons are guarded by Cerberus, the three-​headed dog that in Greek mythology guarded the entrance to Hades. Given his constant hunger, he is a fitting guard of the gluttons. He stands over them and claws and bites everything within his reach. The sinners crawl like pigs in the dirt. Their punishment is to have all they enjoyed in life turned around on them. Dante uses the idea present in Aquinas that the gluttons made food and drink an end in itself and hence put their desire above God. As a result, in Hell, they get to eat mud, and instead of fine establishments and warm fires of luxury, they crawl around in a constant rain and in the wet mud that they also are forced to eat.

Conclusions The main elements of food ethics in the Middle Ages are related to the eating of meat, the moral status of animals, and the ethics of eating and drinking governed by the morally good and bad (that is, virtue and vice) particularly under the heading of gluttony. It was quite a uniform tradition in the sense that most held on to the view that there is a clear hierarchy in nature with humans on top. There was little appetite for views that saw animals as equal in any sense, certainly morally, to humans, which is nothing like what can be found in Montaigne, for example. Also, limiting vice and sinful behavior was very important to moralists of the time and this especially involved behavior that was seen to follow from gluttony and lust. Fasting played a particularly important role as 14  15 

There is a debate about this. See, e.g., Yeager 1984. Dante’s thinking was greatly influenced by Aquinas. See Wetherbee 2015.

772   Henrik Lagerlund the main method for moderating sinful desires. Regardless of this, food was very central to the European medieval society, since it played such an important role in Christianity.

Bibliography Adamson, Melitta. 2004. Food in Medieval Times. London: Greenwood Press. Aquinas, Thomas. 1948‒50. Summa theologiae. Edited by P. Caramello. Turin: Marietti. —​—​—​. 1961. Summa contra Gentiles. Edited by P. Marc, C. Pera, and P. Carmello. Turin: Marietti. Augustine. 1957. City of God, Volume I:  Books 1–​3. Translated by George E. McCracken. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Barad, Judith A. Aquinas on the Nature and Treatment of Animals. San Francisco: International Scholars Publications, 1995. Dante. 1994. The Inferno. Translated by R. Pinsky. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Grimm, Veronika. 1996. From Feasting to Fasting, the Evolution of a Sin: Attitudes to Food in Late Antiquity. London: New York: Routledge. Maimonides, Moses. 1956. The Guide for the Perplexed. Translated by M Friedlander. New York: Dover. Mathewson Denny, Frederick. 2014. “Islam and Food and Agricultural Ethics.” In Encyclopedia of Food and Agricultural Ethics, edited by Paul Thomson and David Kaplan, 1–​ 6. Dordrecht: Springer. Melehy, Hassan. 2006. “Montaigne and Ethics: The Case of Animals.” L’Esprit Créateur 46(1): 96‒107. Passmore, John. 1975. “The Treatment of Animals.” Journal of the History of Ideas 36(2): 195–​218. Prose, Francine. 2003. Gluttony: The Seven Deadly Sins. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Salisbury, Joyce. 2011. The Beast Within: Animals in the Middle Ages. New York: Routledge. —​—​—​. 2014. “Do Animals Go to Heaven? Medieval Philosophers Contemplate Heavenly Human Exceptionalism.” Athens Journal of Humanities & Arts, 1(1): 79–86. Salter, David. 2001. Holy and Noble Beasts: Encounters with Animals in Medieval Literature. Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer. Segal, Eliezer. 2014. “Judaism and Food.” In Encyclopedia of Food and Agricultural Ethics, edited by Paul Thomson and David Kaplan, 1308–​1315. Dordrecht: Springer. Sorabji, Richard. 1993. Animal Minds and Human Morals: The Origins of the Western Debate. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Tertullian. “On Fasting.” http://​www.newadvent.org/​fathers/​0408.htm. Waddell, Helen. 1934. Beasts and Saints. London: Constable. Wetherbee, Winthrop. 2015. “Dante Alighieri.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2015 ed.), edited by Edward N. Zalta. http://​plato.stanford.edu/​archives/​win2015/​ entries/​dante/​. White, Lynn, Jr. 1967. “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis.” Science 155:1203–​1207. Wild, Markus. 2006. Die anthropologische Differenz: Der Geist der Tiere in der Fruhen Neuzeit bei Montaigne, Descartes und Hume. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Yeager, R. F. 1984. “Aspects of Gluttony in Chaucer and Gower.” Studies in Philology 81(1): 42–​55.

chapter 35

You Are W hat You Eat, Bu t Sh ou l d You Eat What You Are? Mode rn Phil osophical Di et et i c s John Grey and Aaron Garrett

Introduction Friedrich Nietzsche began the chapter “Why I Am So Clever” from Ecce Homo with a discussion of the importance of dietetics to philosophy: But German cuisine quite generally—​what doesn’t it have on its conscience! Soup before the meal  .  .  .  overcooked meats, vegetables cooked with fat and flour; the degeneration of pastries and puddings into paperweights! Add to this the virtually bestial prandial drinking habits of the ancients, and by no means only the ancient Germans, and you will understand the origin of the German spirit—​from distressed intestines. The German spirit is an indigestion; it does not finish with anything. (Nietzsche 1967, 238)

This is one of a number of passages that reflect Nietzsche’s philosophical interest in scientific physiology and philosophical dietetics.1 Not all philosophers gave diet the pride of place that Nietzsche did, but many viewed it as necessary for a good, philosophical life. It is the sort of philosophical interest that is easy to disregard on the way to topics

1 

For a discussion of the significance of Nietzsche’s philosophical dietetics, see Hallet 11.

774    John Grey and Aaron Garrett that seem more relevant to present-​day philosophers. But once one is attuned to the presence of these discussions, one sees they abound even in familiar works of ancient and modern philosophy.2 In this essay, we will present three different aspects of the moral relevance of diet. The overarching structure of the piece will begin with eating for virtue, turn to eating virtuously, and conclude with tasteful eating as a virtue in itself. In the second section, we will consider some discussions in the sixteenth and seventeenth century of how diet impacts philosophy—​either via its impact upon physical health or more directly via its impact upon spiritual well-​being. Specifically, we will consider two familiar foundational figures of early modern philosophy, Michel de Montaigne and René Descartes, and then turn to Anne Conway, who unifies elements of their views along with elements of traditional theology to present an account of the spiritual significance of diet. However, for each of these authors, the salience of diet to morality lies first and foremost in its impact on the person doing the eating, not on the animals or plants being eaten. In third section, we will discuss two ways3 in which these themes were built on and transformed. First, in the later seventeenth century and the eighteenth century, philosophical arguments for the expansion of moral consideration to animals led to worry about the eaten not only the eating. Second, in Bernard Mandeville, Montesquieu, and others the political consequences of luxury and diet came into focus and developed thinking about the body politic in novel directions. These two strands were united via Jean-​Jacques Rousseau and non-​Western influences in the French Revolutionary philosopher John Oswald’s arguments for the need for a vegetarian diet in a moral republic. Most of these authors contrasted a natural life, diet, and natural virtue, on the one side, with artifice, excess, and vice, on the other. This was a dietary analogue of the rejection of original sin insofar as the original state to which we ought to return was not irredeemably intestinally corrupt. In the final section, we will conclude by considering how the discussion shifted at the end of the eighteenth century due to Thomas Malthus’s arguments that natural population growth exceeds the natural growth of food supply. This posed a pressing problem to those like Oswald, William Godwin, and Nicolas de Condorcet who thought that an age of reason might be at hand if one just heeded the cry of nature. We will conclude with the response of Charles Fourier who argued that food might be transformed in tandem with population curbs so that in the future we might have seas of lemonade and new gustatory delights of “gastrosophy.”4 2 

E.g., Rousseau, Plato, and so on. Michel Foucault noted the obsession with diet in the ancient world, over even sex (Foucault 1985, Part 2). 3  We will also briefly mention how the rise of theories of taste also led to their application to literal taste, and smell, and the bringing of food into the aesthetic fold. 4  The second section was primarily written by John Grey, the remaining sections by Aaron Garrett. Our discussion is eclectic and includes both well-​known philosophers and the obscure. There is no attempt at exhaustive coverage, instead we attempt to draw out a few philosophically interesting themes in the modern period concentrating on France and Britain. We are aware of the breadth and depth of philosophical thinking about food outside of Europe (some of which impacted Oswald, as we will mention).

Modern Philosophical Dietetics    775

You Are What You Eat:  Diet and the Philosophical Life One kind of ethical concern about food that can be traced from contemporary discussions back through the modern period (and much farther) is about the connection between diet and the capacity to live a philosophically and morally good life. Dietetics refers to the study of diet and its relationship to health in general. In philosophical contexts, though, early modern authors writing about diet often explicitly justify their interest by pointing to the fact that our mental and moral health depend very strongly on what we eat. In this section, we will show that, in spite of the many other ways that moral philosophy changed between the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, interest in the relationship between diet and virtue remained a constant. Furthermore, because of the purportedly natural character of this relationship, many authors took it to be both possible and preferable to cure most human ailments by amending our diets instead of by pursuing medical remedies such as drugs.5 These concerns can be traced back to ancient Greek philosophy, and briefly doing so may help us to understand the way they manifest in the modern period. Hub Zwart has observed that many ancient Greek philosophers are concerned with diet and its relationship to well-​being, especially the Stoics, who hold that a fundamental ethical prescription is that we ought to live in accordance with nature (Zwart 2000, 115). Making rational, moderate choices about one’s diet is a crucial part of this way of life, for our choices here determine (at least partly) our capabilities in other areas of life. As Epictetus rhetorically asks in the Enchiridion, “You want to do the pentathlon, or to wrestle? Look at your arms, your thighs, inspect your loins. . . . Do you think that if you do [philosophy] you can eat as you now do, drink as you now do, have the same likes and dislikes?” (Epictetus 1983, 20). Moderation or temperance with respect to both what and how much one consumes is required in order to sustain the life of the Stoic sage.6 Given that ancient approaches to ethics, and particularly Stoicism, continued to exert influence throughout the modern period, it is no surprise that concern with philosophical dietetics can be found in many writers. Michel de Montaigne—​widely recognized as one of the authors who initiates the modern period—​discusses food and drink in several of his Essays and repeatedly connects these discussions to questions of character and virtue. Montaigne retains the Stoic thought that certain diets are naturally to be avoided because of their ruinous effect on our moral and intellectual character, while others are to be preferred because they have the opposite effect. However, he is

5 

E.g., “I commend rather some diet for certain seasons, than frequent use of physic, except it be grown into a custom. For those diets alter the body more, and trouble it less” (Bacon, “Of Regiment of Health,” in Vickers 1996, 404). 6  This theme can be found in Aristotle, Plato, and others as well. On this as an important issue for ancient philosophy, see Foucault 1988, Part 2.

776    John Grey and Aaron Garrett not an unabashed Stoic. Montaigne often emphasizes how our choices regarding food and drink are made in light of our knowledge of our customs and established habits. Hence, he might acknowledge, the diet that would suit Epictetus is unlikely to be good for Montaigne (Montaigne 1948, 152). Both the ethical significance of diet and the fact that it must be selected with an eye to society’s established customs are on display in Montaigne’s famous essay, “Of Cannibals.” In that essay, he sings the praises of a society of cannibals he has studied: “It seems to me that what we actually see in those nations surpasses not only all the pictures in which the poets have idealized the golden age and all their inventions in imagining a happy state of man, but also the conceptions and the very desire of philosophy” (Montaigne 1948, 153). Somewhat surprisingly—​given that they are cannibals!—​one of the facts that Montaigne notes as being responsible for their exalted state is their eating habits: their society has “no agriculture” and “no use of wine or wheat” (153).7 Yet Montaigne does not suggest that we ought simply to adopt the diet of these cannibals. He merely observes that, in the absence of the more refined food common in Western Europe at the time—​the products of agriculture, such as wine and corn—​the “savages” lead good lives. Their proximity to nature accounts for this: Those people are wild, just as we call wild the fruits that Nature has produced by herself and in her normal course; whereas really it is those that we have changed artificially and led astray from the common order, that we should rather call wild. The former retain alive and vigorous their genuine, their most useful and natural, virtues and properties, which we have debased in the latter in adapting them to gratify our corrupted taste. (Montaigne 1948, 152)

While their diet is not the only respect in which they follow nature’s “normal course,” Montaigne’s comparison of their habits with the “corrupted taste” of his contemporaries indicates the moral importance he places on diet. It is a mark of the immorality of his society that its customs about food deviate from what “Nature has produced by herself.” By contrast, René Descartes says little about diet in his published works. However, Descartes’s correspondence reveals that he is interested in the relationship between diet and health and the cultivation of virtue. More important, his letters also reveal a deep skepticism regarding modern drugs and medicines, and a preference for the “natural” approach of modifying one’s diet to cure illness. Nor is Descartes alone in the latter tendency; it is found in many authors in the modern period.8 7 

What about their cannibalism? Montaigne is convinced that they do not eat their enemies “for nourishment, as of old the Scythians used to do; it is to betoken an extreme revenge” (Montaigne 1948, 155). 8  Even trained physicians, like Anne Conway’s brother, default to this view (see Nicolson 1992, 63–​64), which we will discuss in more detail. This was also a central theme for the philosopher and doctor Bernard Mandeville. His A Treatise of the Hypochondriack and Hysterick Passions (1711) was an attack on what he took to be the quackery of many physicians and an argument that diet and exercise were often all that was needed for health.

Modern Philosophical Dietetics    777 One reason that diet is important to Descartes is that he is concerned about prolonging life. In a 1646 letter to Christiaan Huygens, he optimistically writes, “If only we guard ourselves against certain errors which we are in the habit of making in the way we live, we shall be able to reach without further inventions a much longer and happier old age than we otherwise would” (CSMK, 76; emphasis added).9 The optimism here is based on the thought that a more intricate study of the human body will allow us to fine-​tune our habits in such a way as to extend the human lifespan, even without relying upon the use of (say) drugs that improve longevity.10 Descartes’s interest in this topic is not an isolated or temporary one, and indeed he sometimes claims that he only undertook what we today take to be his most important philosophical works because of the practical benefits he thought they might have for extending life through the cultivation of good habits, including diet. In another late letter, Descartes goes so far as to write, “The preservation of health has always been the principal end of my studies” (CSMK, 275)—​a hyperbolic description, presumably, but one that reveals how seriously he took this topic. Descartes’s optimism about the possibilities afforded by empirically informed, rationally planned dieting is matched by his pessimism about other forms of early modern medicine, such as drugs and alchemical remedies. For example, in his correspondence with Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia, Descartes makes some suggestions about the best course for Elizabeth to follow to recover quickly from an illness she had suffered. He writes, “The remedies which Your Highness has chosen, diet and exercise, are in my opinion the best of all—​leaving aside those pertaining to the soul” (CSMK, 237). Although Descartes goes on to suggest some thoughts that, if meditated upon, might help the body to recover, he recognizes the importance of diet here as well. And in a 1647 letter (again in the context of discussing Elizabeth’s health) he expresses his dim view of other forms of early modern medicine: “As for drugs, either of apothecaries or of empirics, I have such a low opinion of them that I would never venture to advise anyone to use them” (CSMK, 314). Prolonging life and curing illness, then, are two reasons that motivate dietetics for Descartes—​but what about its philosophical significance? After all, the fact that a carefully planned diet is important for living a long life does not immediately entail that it is important for living a good life. Descartes typically prefers to emphasize the role that intentionally ordering our mental lives according to reason plays in cultivating virtue. Certainly this is the focus in the “provisional morality” that Descartes sketches in his Discourse on Method.11 But in the Passions of the Soul, he pursues the strategy of providing a physiological analysis of the passions in order to understand how we might 9 

Citations of Descartes’s correspondence (abbreviated CSMK) are to Descartes 1991. So, when Descartes refers to his planned work on “a compendium of medicine” in the letter to Huygens, he seems to have in mind the unfinished “Description of the Human Body and All of Its Functions,” which includes a relatively detailed description of the physical processes involved in bodily nutrition. See Descartes 1985 (henceforth abbreviated CSM I), 314–​324. 11  See CSM I, 122–​125. Roger Ariew (2014, 150) paraphrases the provisional code as the following set of maxims: “the decision to obey the laws and customs of his country and to hold on to his religion; to be firm and resolute in his actions; and to conquer himself rather than fortune.” 10 

778    John Grey and Aaron Garrett master them and live virtuously; this in turn gives diet an important place in his ethical thought, even if it is not center stage in the text itself. In the Passions of the Soul, Descartes defines passions as “those perceptions, sensations or emotions of the soul which we refer particularly to it, and which are caused, maintained and strengthened by some movement of the spirits” (CSM I, 338‒339). These “spirits” are constituted by an extremely rarefied extended substance, which permeates the brain and nerves, allowing the various parts of the body to interact with one another. “Disturbances” in the heart interfere with the blood and the spirits, so that the soul is prevented “from having full control over its passions” (CSM I, 345). Diet is one of the factors that can introduce or prevent such disturbances, though Descartes does not delve into the details in that text.12 Several prominent historians of philosophy take Descartes to have recognized that control over our physiological state is required for mastery of our passions, which is in turn the key to human flourishing. For example, John Cottingham writes: The traditional project of Greek ethics involved the goal of achieving the kind of rational mastery, or at least guidance, of the emotions and passions that would enable humans to lead a good and fulfilling life. And Descartes subscribes to this ancient aspiration . . .  . But because of our embodied nature we cannot, by the mere exercise of our will, generate the desired patterns of emotional response, since we cannot directly control the relevant physiological changes in our bodies. (Cottingham 2008, 244)

We agree, and add only that on the Cartesian picture, diet is one of the key ways to effect such physiological changes in our bodies. Our suggestion is that, although Descartes rarely discusses such matters directly, his approach to the project of rational mastery of the passions implies that food and diet would nevertheless play an important role in a completed Cartesian ethics. In the picture painted by Montaigne and Descartes, we care about diet because it is a source of happiness and a requirement for living a good life.13 Many subsequent authors in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries voiced similar reasons for philosophical or ethical concern about diet. In his Ethics, Spinoza claims that “it is the part of the wise man . . . to refresh and restore himself in moderation with pleasant food and drink, with scents, with the beauty of green plants, with decoration, music, sports, the theater, and other things of this kind,” a practice Spinoza takes

12 

He does touch on a related point (namely, that our personal history with food determines how our passions influence our appetite) in a 1646 letter to Elizabeth responding to her comments on an early draft of the Passions of the Soul. See CSMK, 286. 13  These reasons for caring about diet and its study ought not to be understood to arise out of a duty for self-​care, as they might for later authors such as Kant. It is not clear that authors so early in the modern period had anything like the notion of duty or obligation that would subsequently become central to moral philosophy. Instead, what makes these concerns moral is their (instrumental) relevance to the good or virtuous life.

Modern Philosophical Dietetics    779 to be required “so that the Mind also may be . . . capable of understanding many things” (Spinoza 1985, 572). Descartes and Spinoza would disagree about the particular means by which diet influences our mental faculties. However, they both agree that there is a strong ethical reason to pursue a diet aimed at allowing us to cultivate the understanding and control our passions. Other authors in the period make a similar point in a more negative way, highlighting the fact that poor diet leads to various sorts of vice. Rousseau exemplifies this approach, pointing to “the excessively exotic dishes of the rich, which fill them with inflammatory humors and wrack them with indigestions, [and] the bad food of the Poor, which most of the time they do not even have, and the want of which leads them greedily to overtax their stomachs when they get the chance” as evidence that “most of our ills are of our own making” (Rousseau 1997, 137‒138). Although Rousseau’s interest in diet tends to emphasize its broader social and political ramifications, which we will turn to in subsequent sections, it is clear that he agrees that certain types of diet are causally connected with moderation and virtue, others with excess and vice. For the authors considered so far, the value of a good diet is instrumental: it is a step on the road to virtue. Some philosophers in this period, however, hold that diet also has intrinsic moral significance. A nice example of this sort of view is found in Anne Conway’s Principles of Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy. It is worth mentioning that, although Conway’s account of the moral significance of diet diverges significantly from those discussed so far, she too had an interest in the instrumental connection between diet and well-​being. She suffered from a mysterious, lifelong illness that caused her to have painful and debilitating headaches, and her friends and correspondents frequently urged her to attempt to modify her diet in order to cure the illness.14 For instance, John Finch, her brother and a trained physician, wrote to her in 1652—​ Conway would have been twenty years old at the time—​with some suggestions about how to modify her diet: I am apt to thinke you drink too much small beere which the summer will also manifest unless you either increase your quantity of drink or cool your stomach by fruits. . . . Let the meat you eat be little and of easy digestion and rather of good nourishment than quelque chose, such as Mutton, in the first place, Veal, Lamb, and all sorts of White Fowl. . . . I professe I cannot think but that Diet without Physick will end your griefe. (Nicolson 1992, 63)

Later in the same letter, Finch makes the more direct claim that it is “better to work your cure without Physick than with it if it can be done” (64). However, over the course of the next several decades, Conway’s symptoms grew so dire that she (and her husband,

14  At least they made such recommendations to her in her youth. As the years went on, she and her friends came to recognize that no obvious modification to her diet would suffice to cure her. By 1652, Henry More has apparently begun to ask any reputable doctors he happens to meet about Conway’s case to see whether they have recommendations for treatment; see Nicolson 1992, 69.

780    John Grey and Aaron Garrett family, and friends) visited a wide variety of physicians in pursuit of medicines and surgical procedures that might cure her.15 Conway’s philosophy is characterized, in part, by a thoroughgoing vitalism, according to which “every spirit has its own body and every body its own spirit” (Conway 1996, 39),16 and “the distinction between spirit and body is only modal and incremental, not essential and substantial” (40).17 The central motivation that Conway has for adopting this view is religious in nature: since matter is the creation of God, matter must always bear some degree of similarity to God, a perfect spirit. In her view, this entails that all material beings are also spiritual beings, to some degree—​indeed, it is better simply to speak of created substances than of bodies and spirits, since Conway (unlike Descartes) declines to treat extended things and thinking things as fundamentally different kinds of substance.18 Rather, created things are characterized by the fact that they are subject to continual change throughout their existence. That is, every created thing, from a human being all the way down to a rock, is always “changing itself either for good or bad” (24), becoming more or less spiritual. Conway is not very specific in her descriptions of the way this continual change of substances takes place. However, it is clear that the continual change in perfection that created substances are supposed to undergo is not some abstract quantity. As Sarah Hutton rightly observes, By change Anne Conway means not just the capacity for perfectibility, but natural processes such as digestion and reproduction.  .  .  .  This kind of change is non-​destructive: it does not result in the annihilation of any species, but in its conservation and ultimate regeneration, if not evolution. The death of a creature is not its annihilation but a transmutation from one kind of life to another. (Hutton 2004, 151–​152)

This interpretation has a strong textual basis in Conway’s Principles. In particular, Conway writes: All motion wears away and divides a thing and thus makes it subtle and spiritual. In the human body, for example, food and drink are first changed into chyle and then into blood, and afterwards into spirits, which are nothing but blood brought to perfection. These spirits, whether good or bad, always advance to a greater subtlety 15 

For more detailed description of Conway’s symptoms and the various treatments she attempted, see Hutton 2004, 30–​31 and 116–​131. 16  On this topic, see Merchant 1979. 17  Conway goes on to offer a number of fascinating arguments for this claim; see her Principles, chs. 7‒8. 18  Indeed, some commentators read Conway as endorsing the much bolder view of monism with respect to created substance; see, e.g., Mercer 2012; White 2008, 52; and Hutton 1997, 227. On this interpretation, Conway takes all individual created bodies and spirits to be modes of a single underlying created substance. For an opposing interpretation, see Grey 2017.

Modern Philosophical Dietetics    781 or spirituality. Through those spirits which come from blood, we see, hear, smell, taste, touch, and feel, indeed, think, love, hate, and do everything we do. (Conway 1996, 61‒62)

The human body processes food and drink into chyle, chyle into blood, and blood into spirits. These spirits in turn account for the human’s various mental capacities (albeit in a manner Conway leaves unspecified). Moreover, the spirits that a human acquires by means of these processes of digestion may be either “good or bad.” What we eat thus has significant moral ramifications, and in two different dimensions. First, what we eat influences all of our physical and mental capacities; indeed, it impacts “everything we do.” Consuming food and drink that releases bad spirits will diminish our capacity for sensation, thought, and emotion. By contrast, appropriately chosen food and drink will release good spirits, enhancing those capacities. Again, Conway is not clear on the details, but her general reason for being interested in diet is clear enough. Insofar as our goal is to become more spiritual and less rooted in the corporeal—​to become more like angels and less like brutes—​our choice of food and drink appears to play an extremely significant role in helping or hindering us on our way. So, like Montaigne and Descartes, Conway sees great instrumental value in adhering to a diet that will improve our bodies and minds. However, Conway’s vitalism and her conception of created substance inspire her to award a deeper, spiritual significance to the way that our physical and mental lives depend upon our food. Second, the things that we eat are themselves supposed to be spiritually improved by that act. This is the hardest part of Conway’s view to swallow, but she takes it to follow from her ontology. She explains that “in all hard bodies, such as . . . herbs, trees, and animals . . . there exist many spirits which are as if imprisoned in gross bodies and united with them because they cannot flow out or fly away into other bodies until death or dissolution occurs” (Conway 1996, 61). The biological process of digestion that begins when a person eats (say) a piece of steak is thus recast in grandiose spiritual terms. The steak, like all material objects, has a spiritual aspect that is made more prominent as its material aspect is dissolved. This is just one of the ways in which “nature always works toward the greater perfection of subtlety and spirituality” in all things (61). One danger for Conway’s view is that it would seem to permit (and perhaps even prescribe?) that we kill and eat other humans for precisely the same reasons that we may kill and eat cows. Conway does not address this concern directly, but based on what she does say it is relatively easy to anticipate her response. God determines what kinds of food and drink are appropriate for human nature, which according to the picture developed so far is just to say that God determines how our spirits will be impacted—​either improved or harmed—​by what we eat or drink. Although doing something like killing and eating another human might not always be accompanied by what we would think of as physical harm, it would presumably be contrary to human nature, on Conway’s view, and so would result in spiritual harm; that is, it would degrade the spirit of the cannibal to be more like that of a brute. And, as she

782    John Grey and Aaron Garrett elsewhere observes, “it is far worse to be a brute in spirit than to be a brute in outward form and shape” (Conway 1996, 36). Intriguingly, because of the fact that Conway draws far more heavily than Descartes does upon the Judeo-​Christian theological tradition in her discussion19 of the relationship between humans and food, she has occasion to touch upon the ethical relationship between humans and their environment in a way that he does not. Whereas Montaigne’s and Descartes’s interest in diet seem only to motivate an instrumental concern for the environment, Conway’s more spiritual conception of food leads her to argue that humans have intrinsic moral obligations toward the animals and plants that form their food chain. Conway writes: God endowed man with the same instinct for justice towards beasts and the trees of the field. For any man who is just and good loves the brute creatures which serve him, and he takes care of them so that they have food and rest and the other things they need. He does not do this only for his own good but out of a principle of true justice; and if he is so cruel toward them that he requires work from them and nevertheless does not provide the necessary food, then he has surely broken the law which God inscribed in his heart. (Conway 1996, 35)

In this passage, Conway explicitly denies that we have only egoistic reasons for being good stewards of our environment and of other animals. Rather, human interactions with nonhuman animals and the environment are governed by natural principles of justice, principles that determine how we ought to treat the animals and plants that we rely upon for food. Conway thus awards significant moral status to nonhuman animals and the environment. Nevertheless, her view is still strikingly alien in comparison to contemporary defenses of animal rights or the intrinsic value of nature. Even setting aside the metaphysics of spiritual perfection that serves as the background of Conway’s view, she differs from most contemporary treatments of these issues in that she treats nonhuman animals and the environment not only as moral patients, but as moral agents, at least in a limited sense.20 Continuing her discussion of the natural principles of justice that govern our relationship with animals and the environment, Conway writes: Thus, a man who has a tree in his orchard that is fruitful and grows well fertilizes and prunes it so that it becomes better and better. But if it is barren and a burden to the earth, he fells it with an ax and burns it. Therefore, there is a certain justice in all

19 

Although the lack of concern for animals in many early modern authors was often rooted in a different Judeo-​Christian assumption, that animals were made for human consumption and human happiness and their suffering was inevitably offset by the utility of their suffering for humans (Garrett 2011). 20  Conway is not unique among early modern authors in holding this view. Another prominent instance of it occurs some half a century later in the work of Julien Offray de la Mettrie, who wishes to deny that moral agency can be used to draw a principled line between humans and other animals; see la Mettrie 1996, 18–​20.

Modern Philosophical Dietetics    783 these things, so that in the very transmutation from one species to another, either by ascending from a lower to a higher or by descending in the opposite way, the same justice appears. (Conway 1996, 35)

This is the other side of the “principle of true justice” described in the previous quotation. Justice demands that the man act as the steward of the tree but also that the tree acts to serve the man. If the tree is fulfilling its role by providing food, then the man is obligated to care for it by providing the conditions under which it can become a more perfect tree. However, if the tree fails to fulfill its duty to provide food to the man, justice instead demands that the man cut it down. God’s design, it seems, assigns roles to both humans and nonhumans (stewards and servants) that give them duties of justice to one another. On Conway’s view, this makes even nonhuman animals and plants out to be moral agents. To sum up: philosophical discussions of diet in early modern Europe often emphasized the relationship between a proper (and in some sense “natural”) diet and a morally and intellectually virtuous life. For some authors, like Montaigne and Descartes, the value of pursuing a natural diet is taken to be purely instrumental: it allows one to better control one’s passions. For others, like Conway, there is also intrinsic value in a proper diet: it satisfies certain principles of natural justice governing one’s relationship to animals and the environment. Either way, such early modern discussions of dietetics can be seen as further developments of, or modifications to, the ancient precept to live in accordance with nature.

The Diet of the Body Politic Many discussions of food between Conway and the French Revolution concerned the stability of the body politic in connection with its capacity to provide enough food to all of its constituents. The analogy between state stability and bodily health, familiar from Hobbes’s Leviathan and before it the medieval theory of the king’s two bodies, guided a further analogy. Although the need for food and the competition for food was a motivation to conflict, Hobbes excluded diet from his brief sketch of the constituent parts of the Leviathan in the Introduction. He did include an important chapter on the “Nutrition and Procreation of a Commonwealth” (II.24) that located nutrition in the agricultural and marine resources, and trade. Although Hobbes wished to stress the self-​subsistent character of the successful state he argued that “Commonwealths can endure no Diet: For seeing their expence is not limited by their own appetite, but by externall Accidents, and the appetites of their neighbours, the Publique Riches cannot be limited by other limits, than those which the emergent occasions shall require.” In modern Europe the effects of this cluster of issues was often discussed, as was political philosophy more generally, via the example of Rome (as well as of China, Venice, and other model states). The conflict over the Agrarian Laws and its contribution to the

784    John Grey and Aaron Garrett Civil Wars in Rome was seen as a main source of the slide from vigorous republic to decadent empire. As James Harrington noted, “take the bread out of the people’s mouths, as did the Roman patricians, and you are sure enough of a war” (Pocock 1977, 293). One lesson that could be drawn for the modern state was that relative equality of property is the anchor of a stable polity: inequality of property gives rise to hunger and envy, and hunger and envy to political strife. The theme persisted throughout the eighteenth century.21 The importance of a varied and international diet to insure the stability and well-​being of the Leviathan became a more central issue for eighteenth-​century political philosophers due to the far greater stress placed on international commerce as providing the wealth of the state and by extension its stability. This led to a new twist on the theme of the proper diet for virtue discussed in the previous section. Just as different bodies needed different diets for different needs in different contexts, so there were different diets for different bodies politic beyond the minimal subsistence of the state. The diet of the state included as part of commerce, food, which connected the literal individual diets of citizens to political well-​being. In conjunction with the sorts of considerations discussed in the previous section this reinforced the import of questions about the connection between politics, morals, and diet. Was a restricted and frugal diet of the sort practiced at the height of the Roman Republic a necessary condition of a thriving and virtuous citizenry and polity? Or was luxurious diet a motivation to the greatness of Imperial Rome and the stability of the Pax Romana? Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees brought the contrast to a head by claiming that a vigorous and virtuous republic was bound to wither and die whereas an expanding trade empire—​like Holland or Britain or Imperial Rome—​ grew in ways that led to greater and greater well-​being of both citizens and empire. Perhaps both were viable if care enough was paid to the many conditions influencing their subsistence and flourishing and in distinguishing well-​being from Republican virtue. Montesquieu’s discussions of the relation between diet—​and more broadly luxury—​and politics were the most influential framing of these issues. For example: As soon as the Romans were corrupted, their desires became immense. This can be judged by the price they put on things. A jug of Falernian wine sold for one hundred Roman deniers; a barrel of salt meat from the Black Sea cost four hundred deniers; a good cook, four talents; young boys were priceless. When everyone, by a common impulse, was carried by voluptuousness, what became of virtue? (1989, VII.2)

We can see Montesquieu drawing the inference that desires for food reflects (and presumably reinforces) the lack of republican virtue that led to Imperial despotism. We can also see the tacit claim that this sort of luxury gives rise to an inversion of natural desires, and therefore vicious, in keeping with the themes considered in the previous section.

21  More than a century later Thomas Paine argued that a different lesson to be learned was that it was not a matter of prudence, of finding an Agrarian Law, but a matter of Agrarian Justice (1797). If the state made some people’s lives worse in the state of civil society than it would have been in the state of nature, justice was owed independent of considerations of stability.

Modern Philosophical Dietetics    785 Classical republicans saw a frugal and natural diet as necessary for virtue, since the simple communal virtues of republicanism flourished in frugal societies before the rise of luxury and with the decay of diet came the decay of government. Montesquieu, though, was providing an empirical argument for more general laws connecting consumption and virtue in different types of regimes. Luxury was a problem for empires—​China was the model long-​lived empire and it fell due to the inability to control luxury (1989, VII.7). But, luxury is also the principle that keeps monarchies and large-​states thriving unlike republics (and to a lesser extent aristocracies). Republics, like the early Roman Republic, need strict diets in order to keep them vigorous and pure due to their reliance on a virtuous citizenry. Aristocracies, such as Venice, needed to make sure that the ruling class did not fall into despotism due to profligacy and so also needed extremely restrictive sumptuary laws (VII.3). This provided a response to Mandeville. Montesquieu accepted a restricted version of Mandeville’s thesis that private vices gave rise to public virtues where the latter is understood as prosperity. But, Montesquieu rejected the conclusion that this meant that virtue was at odds with greatness. Mandeville had failed to recognize the degree to which different diets were appropriate to the virtues of different regimes due to an inadequately empirical and comparative political science. The resultant problem for Montesquieu’s political science was how to take all of these different variables into account that contributed to the health or sickness of a particular regime and then how best to frame laws such that the state will be vigorous and thriving. One of Montesquieu’s laws educed from examples affirms “republics end in luxury; monarchies in poverty.” Monarchies need commerce, consumption, and moderated luxury.

Should You Eat What You Are? We have seen that in sixteenth-​and seventeenth-​ century Europe philosophical discussion of food and diet often turned on the fact that a proper diet is a prerequisite for, or constituent of, a virtuous life. In the early eighteenth century, some of these themes became reconceived via the new physiology in Holland and Britain. Bernard Mandeville’s A Treatise on Hypochondriacal Disorders (1711) argued, following Thomas Sydenham (1693) that many mental maladies such as green sickness (a mental illness affecting adolescent women; cf. King 2004) could be mitigated or cured by proper exercise and diet. Mandeville differed both from the prevailing physic associated with the Royal College that stressed physician intervention and prescriptions, and from non-​ medical accounts that focused less on physical well-​being and more on the cultivation. Regarding the former, Mandeville criticized the physicians for actively harming the vulnerable by pushing unnatural lives dependent on drugs and physicians on them. Regarding the latter, Mandeville qua trained Leiden physician viewed human well-​ being as in part a consequence of the human body understood physiologically.22 22 

Although he was extremely skeptical about how much we actually knew of the body.

786    John Grey and Aaron Garrett The physician George Cheyne argued similarly for moderation in diet in his widely read An Essay of Health and Long Life (1724). Unlike Mandeville, the religious and conventionally moral agenda was clear—​to prevent the destructive effect of the passions and the vices licensed through poor diet was “the Business, not of Physick, but of Virtue and Religion” (171; cf. Guerrini 2000, 2004). Like Mandeville, Cheyne also argued physic only comes after diet has had its destructive and unnatural effects, again drawing on the old tradition of diet in accordance with nature as the seedbed of virtue. In both, diet in accordance with nature became connected with the new scientific methodology—​ Sydenham’s and Newton’s, respectively—​and the new physiology. In his later The English Malady, Cheyne offered an extensive Newton-​inspired analysis of the passions in conjunction with an extended discussion of different dietary regimens via particular case studies (1733, section III) as a means to cure depression and other nervous complaints. Consequently, we can see in the rise of medical psychology a new way of treating these older themes in a medicalization of moral dietetics. But what about the moral standing of what we eat as distinct from the way in which what we eat contributes to our well-​being? Moral arguments for ethical vegetarianism were familiar through familiar ancient texts by Plutarch, Porphyry, and others.23 Voltaire, for example, associated Porphyry’s paganism with a pure enlightened paganism and opposed it to the Church’s barbaric dogmatism and acts of cruelty (Larue 2010). But, as discussed in the previous section, modern philosophers tended to have different interests than the ancient authors they drew on. Voltaire’s primary interest in praising Porphyry was not in the standing of animals but in undermining the standing of the clerics. Conway argued for the need for justice toward the animals of the field, as we have just seen. But her argument was brief and primarily theologically justified. In the first half of the eighteenth century, Francis Hutcheson in Scotland and Frederik Christian Eilschov in Denmark (Koch 1976; Haakonssen 2006, 278) argued for a similar moral community between men and animals with humans as stewards—​much like the passage from Conway just cited—​and as a consequence for moral restrictions of justice in how animals can be treated (Haakonssen 1990, 378‒379; Garrett 2007). Their arguments that mistreating animals that one eats is morally wrong were given natural law justifications in addition to religious justifications. This rested on recognizing that the differences between humans and animals were of degree not of kind. For Hutcheson, this view of animals was an outgrowth of his sentimentalism. If animals could feel pain and pleasure, which seemed obviously to be the case, then although their pleasures might be lesser, they were lesser only to a degree. This combined with the argument that rights were licensed by the fact that humans and domesticated animals formed mutually beneficial communities. For Eilschov, this view of animals was the consequence of the gapless metaphysical gradualism advanced by Gottfried Leibniz and Christian Wolff. Every

23 

In particular, Porphyry’s “On Abstinence from Eating Animal Products” gave a series of powerful moral arguments that have been taken up repeatedly in the history of philosophy. See Sorabji 1995.

Modern Philosophical Dietetics    787 degree of beings that was possible was actual and consequently all degrees of beings were united together in the best world, differing from one another only by degree. Both Hutcheson and Eilschov used the affinities between humans and animals to provide animals with moral standing with respect to natural law.24 For Hutcheson, this manifested in the provision to animals of a right to not be harmed pointlessly insofar as animals contribute to the domestic community. The right was defeasible: it was only acquired via the domestic community and so ceased to exist if the community ceased to exist. But it suggested that humans might have moral duties to animals in virtue of animals’ domestic standing, which included restrictions on the eating of animals and animal products. The argument from degree raised a further potential objection to meat eating. Since we only differ from animals by degree, one might conclude that eating animals is too similar to cannibalism to be morally acceptable. For Hutcheson, in particular, animals are more similar to humans than anything else in creation. And further this degree of similarity allowed both humans and animals to be capable of some degree of moral virtue. Hutcheson did not draw the conclusion that this made vegetarianism obligatory. However, another later Scottish philosopher, John Oswald, saw the eating of animals to be a kind of morally destructive eating of what we were. For Oswald, to eat animals was to deny the fundamental sentimental affinities of humans and animals in pursuit of vicious ends. His inspiration was perhaps the dominant philosophical presence of the second half of the eighteenth century: Jean-​Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau argued in Émile for the benefits of vegetarianism in a manner consistent with the natural dietetic tradition described from Plutarch onward (Oliver 2014). He stressed the physiognomic reasons for it and its contribution to virtue. But as with most everything else, Rousseau’s discussion of taste was complex as can be seen in this passage from Julie, or the New Heloise (1761): Milk products and sugar are one of the [fair] sex’s natural tastes and as it were the symbol of the innocence and sweetness that constitute its most endearing ornament. Men, on the contrary, usually seek strong flavors and spirits, foods more suited to the active and laborious life that nature requires of them; and when it happens that these diverse tastes are perverted and confounded, it is an almost infallible mark of a disorderly mingling of the sexes. Indeed I have observed that in France, where women live all the time in the company of men, they have completely lost the taste for dairy products, the men largely that for wine, and in England where the two sexes are less confounded, their specific tastes have survived better. In general, I think one could often find some index of people’s character in the choice of foods they prefer. The Italians who live largely on greenery are effeminate and flaccid. You Englishmen, great meat eaters, have something harsh that smacks of barbarity in your inflexible virtues. The

24 

Intriguingly, some earlier authors who agreed with the premise that animals differed from humans only as a matter of degree nevertheless explicitly disagreed with taking this fact to motivate vegetarianism. Spinoza, who certainly agrees with this premise, writes that “the law against killing animals is based more on empty superstition and unmanly compassion than sound reason” (Spinoza 1985, IVp37s1). See Grey 2013.

788    John Grey and Aaron Garrett Swiss, naturally cold, peaceful, and simple, but violent and extreme in anger, like both kinds of food and drink both milk and wine. The Frenchman, flexible and changeable, consumes all foods and adapts to all characters. (Cited in Wertz 2013, 26)

Rousseau goes on to praise Julie as “a true Pythagorean.” Here we see good taste as natural to the sexes and as preserving distinctions between the sexes. We also see that both natural and artificial restrictions—​what grows in a particular climate or the mixtures and sauces of chefs—​can result in vices. So far, though, this is not particularly novel, although clearly of a piece with other Rousseauian commitments about sex and the corrupt nature of artifice. The novelty was rather in connecting natural diet to a historical account of the development of society following from Montesquieu and the luxury debates. For Rousseau, as famously argued for in the Discourse on Inequality (1755), the growth of society involved the transition from pre-​social vegetarian ancestors to simple societies based on hunting and carnivore diets, to regimes of property with agriculture and mixed diets. The cultivation of diet, Rousseau suggested—​like Conway, Montaigne, et al.—​involves the cultivation of mores (Oliver 2014, 1625). But it is a primarily a historical story of how what man is reflects “how he eats: flesh eaters are cruel while flower eaters are gentle” (1628). For Rousseau, consequently, the history of what we have become is very much the genealogical history of our diet, a theme taken up by Nietzsche among others. We are omnivores and so like the French can encompass both gentle and cruel. Man is protean in diet as in everything else (except the distinctions between the sexes). On the positive side, we are no longer simple barbaric carnivores. On the negative side, our status as omnivores breeds expanding and varied desires which breed more and more needs that enslave us—​as in the quote from Montesquieu—​and removes us further from our simpler and happier pre-​social past. In addition, both Émile and Julie highlighted the importance of diet in the cultivation of self. The capacity to control oneself in relation to fundamental desires for food and in matters of taste decisively contributed to one’s choice of and capacity for self (Wertz 2013, 28).25 But dietary resolve was constantly challenged by our current omnivorous condition. Absent life in an ideal republic where virtue and self-​control were supported by citizens and laws, individual education and the way in which it helped guide one to make proper choices of and for one’s self became central to happiness. The importance of food in this regard was due to its omnipresence in human life and that it was, alongside sex, our most basic connection to our pre-​social past. The backdrop for Rousseau’s general position on diet was his familiar argument that our societies take as natural what is indeed the destructive consequence of a fallen history. We think it is natural to be omnivores, but our earliest forebears were vegetarians. Vegetarianism connects us to this prior and happier state. This theme was conjoined with 25  We have not discussed aesthetic taste in this chapter although taste in food was the model for many discussions of aesthetic taste. Montesquieu, Rousseau, Voltaire, and Hume were all major contributors to the international discussions about the nature of taste. We will turn briefly to this theme in the conclusion.

Modern Philosophical Dietetics    789 Rousseau’s familiar criticisms of the self-​estranged and alienating character of commercial society in John Oswald’s Cry of Nature (1791). As suggested previously, Oswald developed arguments similar to those found in Hutcheson to a striking conclusion although his most important influence other than Rousseau was not Western. Oswald served as an officer in India, where he was greatly influenced by Indian vegetarianism and the philosophical justifications for it. (He also picked up Arabic on the way back to Britain.) When returning to London, he became a member of the Jacobin Club and a radical advocate of the revolution in France, eventually leading a regiment (and dying) in the Vendée.26 The aptly titled Cry of Nature drew on a wide range of sources—​from Porphyry to the Koran to Hindu works—​to combine vegetarianism with a revolutionary Rousseauism. The core argument was that meat eating and animal experimentation led humans to be estranged from their own nature. Oswald held that eating flesh was corrosive, following Porphyry, Buddhist and Hindu philosophers, Rousseau, and many others that he cites. But his innovative idea was to focus on what we do to animals in order to satisfy our desire for their flesh. Pity draws us to naturally feel for animals suffering as they are being slaughtered. In order to eat more and more animals, we butcher them in abattoirs out of sight. This allows us to avoid feeling pity and so we butcher more and more and more and more ruthlessly. The avoidance of natural pity alienates human beings from their fundamental sentiments of fellowship and makes them dependent on the cruelty of animal products that enervate them as a consequence of the conditions that produce them. There was also a political argument. The ills of political society were in part due to the self-​destructive character of our suppression of the natural sentiments toward animals, sentiments that show us all to be of a piece. By embracing vegetarianism and embracing our natural pity and love, we eradicate the divisions that undermine political society through creating castes and dependences. Oswald imagined a society where the lion quite literally lay down with the lamb, drawing on the Christian images (although he was an atheist). Unlike Rousseau, he argued for a deliberative democracy, and unlike his cohort Thomas Paine, a direct democracy—​perhaps a reflection of his connection to the anarchist sans-​culotte elements of the French Revolution. In Oswald, one can see Rousseau informed by Indian philosophy, radical politics, and the central thought that by eating animals and by suppressing our responses to their suffering we undermine ourselves morally by doing something wrong to them. By eating animals we eat what we are and erode ourselves morally.

Conclusion:  Malthus and Seas of Lemonade Oswald was one of a number of liberal and radical philosophers during and after the French Revolution—​including William Godwin, Condorcet, and Richard Price—​who 26 

For Oswald and his milieu, see Erdmann 1986.

790    John Grey and Aaron Garrett imagined a millennial transformation of society as around the corner. Godwin and Condorcet both held that humanity was indefinitely perfectible and became more and more enlightened as it progressed through its historical stages. Godwin argued in Political Justice that private property and marriage caused hunger and overpopulation and the former would be replaced by collective administering of food according to individual and group well-​being (Godwin 1793, 2:791). Condorcet argued in his Sketch that as human faculties expanded due to the progress of enlightenment initiated by Descartes and Locke agricultural technologies would arise that would allow for the global maximizing of the productivity of land and labor (Condorcet 1976, 269‒270). Five years after these central works of the Enlightenment, Thomas Malthus drew a famous conclusion about the relation between food and population in An Essay on the Principle of Population that fundamentally challenged these utopian visions:  “an unchecked population would increase, beyond comparison, faster than the earth, by the best directed exertions of man, could produce food for its support” (1798, 340‒341). The target was made clear by the subtitle:  “As It Affects the Future Improvement of Society, with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and Other Writers.” Malthus calmly undermined the millennial visions of human transformation in Condorcet and particularly Godwin by suggesting that there was a natural impediment to the natural, virtuous, and democratic utopia: the comparative rapidity of the growth of population over the growth of food supply. It would be all the worse in the peaceful, property-​less, anarchist society with no marriage championed by Godwin and greater struggle, vice, and exploitation would follow than ordinary. The conclusion for utopian political thought was stark: What consequences then are we to expect from looking to such a point, as our guide and polar star, in the great sea of political discovery? Reason would teach us to expect no other, than winds perpetually adverse, constant but fruitless toil, shipwreck and certain misery. (Malthus 1798, 285)

Malthus’s argument focused on population so Godwin and many others who responded to Malthus primarily responded by disputing his conclusions about the necessity of population expansion.27 Some accepted Malthus’s conclusions about population, as John Stuart Mill and other reformers did, and argued for the importance of control of population through contraception. Some disputed Malthus’s premises or the basis for his conclusions as Marx and Engels did among many others. And some developed Condorcet’s arguments for the technological transformation of agricultural production and the indefinite perfectibility of man as against Malthus’s assumptions that there were material limits to this perfectibility. The French utopian socialist Charles Fourier argued in an even more thoroughgoing and speculative fashion than Godwin for a utopia built on women’s full emancipation 27 

The story of the relation between Malthus and Godwin, and Godwin, Condorcet, and Rousseau is complicated. See Winch 1996, ch. 10. On Malthus in general, see Winch 1987.

Modern Philosophical Dietetics    791 and on free love. Like Condorcet, he took this to reflect the historical progress of enlightenment on (Newtonian) scientific principles. Like many of his contemporaries, he responded to Malthus by accepting the need for strict controls of population (Hecht 1988, 65‒68) within his scheme. But unlike most anyone we have discussed other than Mandeville, Fourier rejected the idea that there was any nobility in a simpler and poorer state (although he also rejected the eradication of class). He saw a “green revolution” (67) as necessary to provide for the overflowing table that was in turn necessary for the moral and virtuous lives of the denizens of his utopia. This would both revolutionize agricultural production and protect resources and nature more generally. To live a life according to nature demanded a transformation of our fundamental relation to nature—​stewardship and cultivation of the globe were sides of the same coin. Animals would benefit as “the surplus food given to animals is at least as good as the produce which we admire at the table of kings” (Fourier 1996, 162) and even the poorest children “will find their tables loaded with . . . sugar plums” (165) as well as acidic drinks that offset their negative effects. The sea will gain the flavor of lemonade and be drinkable when desalinated (50n). For most of the utopian authors, food was primarily a means to furthering other moral ideals. One ate for virtue (à la Conway) or ate virtuously (à la Oswald) but eating with good taste was not a virtue in itself. Post-​revolutionary Paris saw the invention of modern ideas of gastronomy and particularly the idea that one might eat well in public but not be a glutton or a gourmand (Levi 2015, 44), where eating well is understood as eating in a manner that reflects refined taste. The eighteenth-​century focus on aesthetic taste turned toward the ability to exercise and minister to literal taste as something of value in Jean Anthelme Brillat Savarin’s Physiology of Taste (1825) and in other notable works. The proliferation of food was a good in itself, but it also led Fourier to imagine the realization of “gastrosophy”—​ “higher gastronomic wisdom, profound and sublime theory of social equilibrium” (as quoted in Levi 2015, 44). Unlike the simple diet of Plato’s Guardians, and far more Epicurean in the colloquial sense than Rousseau’s Julie, the elites in Fourier’s utopia would be brought together at dinner tables through mutual love of and the scientific operations of the art of food. Kant had thought of dinner party conversation (and in others the salon) as a kind of ideal of Enlightenment. Fourier agreed and presented the conditions for its realization that included the emancipation of women and a new relation to food. The preparation of food would be a central feature of education from childhood and would be used as examples bringing all citizens into a life in harmony with gastronomic pleasures and the social and amorous unity it afforded through a “publicly acceptable form of sensuality” (5228). Returning to Hobbes, Mandeville, Montesquieu, and the theme of the diet of the body politic, we can see in Fourier a surprising response. The most successful polity will be

28 

Unlike Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, there would be no Oompa Loompas. Just children.

792    John Grey and Aaron Garrett one where the diet in accordance with nature brings about the social unity making for a state that promotes well-​being and stability. But the pleasures of the diet are not just something instrumental to other moral goods such as stability and a flourishing natural environment—​although they are that—​but a basic component of real socially harmonious well-​being. In this sense, a life of eating with good taste and exercising good taste is morally valuable in itself, and the suppression of the importance of food for other virtues is part of what keeps the polar star so distant.

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Index

Note: References to figures are denoted by ‘f ’ in italics following the page number. Adams, Carol,  415 advertising,  470–​93. See also responsibility agrarianism,  6, 57–​58, 61, 333 contemporary,  61–​64 environmentalism and,  256–​59 agricultural sciences,  30. See also agriculture agriculture,  53–​65 alternatives in practices of,  4–​6, 44–​46, 85 animal-​friendly,  242 biomimicry in,  45–​46 biotechnology as sustainable,  46–​48 conservation, 86 contract,  383–​88 conventional,  4–​6, 33, 37, 79 in developing nations,  382–​83 factory farming in,  253, 276, 279 and food waste,  314–​18 global challenges for,  368–​70 history of, 61 industrial,  4–​14, 32, 53–​57, 69, 73, 84–​87, 108, 112–​15, 131, 149, 171, 274n13, 292–​93, 296, 383–​88, 429–​45 organic,  69–​79, 84–​87 philosophy of,  53–​58 politics of,  427–​46 sustainable,  29–​50 waste in,  11, 87 See also animal farming; food; organics; permaculture; technology agronomy, 30 Althusser, Louis,  603–​4 Anderson, Rohan,  182 animal farming,  7–​9, 44–​46, 142n12 and the environment,  243, 246, 296 humane, 8, 171 human consumption and,  241–​63

industrial,  7–​8, 87–​88, 170, 220–​21, 273, 276–​81, 296 See also animal welfare Animal Liberation, 3 Animal Machines,  2–​3 animal welfare,  7–​9, 139–​64, 248, 279–​81 animal cognition and,  163–​64 animal suffering and,  217–​21, 230–​31 human food and,  1, 190–​91 See also animal farming; hunting Ankeny, Rachel A.,  6 Aquinas,  765–​67 Arab Spring,  368 Argentina, 100 Aristotle,  6, 58, 61–​62, 322, 748–​51, 764–​65 Aschwanden, Christie,  176 Atleo, Marlene,  351, 357 Augustine, 764 Australia, 109 Barnhill, Anne,  609 Barry, Brian,  39 Baumrin, Bernard,  321 Beitz, Charles,  76 Bekoff, Marc,  161 Bentham, Jeremy,  55, 217 Berg, Paul,  99 Berry, Wendell,  55, 62, 64, 257 biodiversity,  1, 7, 32, 427. See also environment biofuels,  2, 72–​73 biotechnology, 30. See also technology Bloch, Ernst,  307 Bloomberg, Michael,  455 Boisvert, Raymond,  62–​63 Boorse, Christopher,  566 Bordo, Susan,  560, 563, 570, 574–​75

796   Index Borlaug, Norman,  76, 88, 98, 427, 431 Bourdieu, Pierre,  515 Bowe, John,  1 Bratman, Steven,  553, 555–​58, 564 Bray, Heather J.,  6 Brazil, 100 Broom, Donald,  160–​61 Brownsword, Roger,  453 Bruckner, Donald,  247 Brundtland, Gro Harlem,  38, 41 Budolfson, Mark,  274, 291, 294 Butz, Earl,  385 Callicott, J. Baird,  256–​57 Campbell, T. Colin,  213 Campbell, Thomas,  213 Campos, Paul,  602 Carens, Joseph,  531 Carruthers, Peter,  242, 252–​53 Carson, Rachel,  56 Casal, Paula,  21 cattle,  139–​64 desire and,  149–​56 pain and,  143–​49 self-​consciousness and,  156–​62 See also animal farming; animal welfare Cerulli, Tovar,  172–​73, 175, 177, 185–​86 Césaire, Aimé,  340 Chavez, Cesar,  56 Chignell, Andrew,  10–​11, 20, 23, 295 Choudry, Aziz,  420 Christianity,  763, 789. See also religion climate change,  72–​73, 85–​86 Cohen, Andrew Jason,  320–​21 Cohen, Carl,  251 colonialism,  347–​49, 354, 358–​62 community-​supported agriculture (CSA) farms, 30, 34, 49 Comstock, Gary,  9 confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs), 35, 54, 56 Conly, Sarah,  16 consequentialism,  6, 57. See also ethics consumer ethics,  9–​11, 267–​85, 404. See also advertising; ethics; responsibility consumption,  9–​11 ethics of,  50, 487

local,  48–​50 sustainable,  29–​31 See also consumer ethics Conway, Anne,  774, 779–​83 Conway, Gordon,  87 Cox, Christopher,  248 Crenshaw, Kimberlé,  401, 587 culture and food messaging,  593–​612 food traditions as products of,  338–​41 and identity,  462–​65 nature and,  31–​33 See also ideology; media Cuneo, Terence,  250–​51 Curtin, Deane,  3 Darwall, Stephen,  454 Davis, Steven,  246–​47, 259 Deaton, Angus,  77 deep ecology,  67–​68, 76. See also environment deforestation, 7. See also environment DeGrazia, David,  247 DeLind, Laura,  114–​16, 120–​21 democracy, 346 deontology,  6, 57, 292, 420. See also ethics Descartes, René,  776–​79 Deschampe, Norman,  346 Desmarais, Annette,  127 Diet for a Small Planet,  3–​4 disgust,  637–​53. See also food divine command theory,  288, 292. See also ethics Dixon, Beth,  18 Doggett, Tyler,  17, 297 Dombrowski, Daniel,  22 DuBois, W.E.B.,  337–​38 Dunsmuir, Pamela,  99 Dworkin, Gerald,  453 eating. See consumption economics, 2, 30 environmental, 81 of industrial agriculture,  4, 573 mainstream, 82 education,  82, 349, 546 Emsley, John,  76 energy,  30, 72, 316. See also fossil fuels

Index   797 environment agriculture and the,  1, 4, 31–​33, 67–​93, 111, 115 animal products and the,  243, 246 change in the,  354 ecosystems and the,  74 harm to the,  71–​72, 105, 253–​59, 267, 315–​18, 374, 427 problems for the,  7, 43 stewardship of the,  359 trade-​offs and the,  79–​84, 93 See also fossil fuels; natural resources Environmental Protection Agency (EPA),  128 Environmental Working Group (EWG),  45 Estabrook, Barry,  494–​95 ethics, 2 ancient,  741–​56 of eating,  648–​53, 767–​7 1 environmental, 31, 68 for fish,  189–​205 of a foodie,  722–​38 and food labor,  501–​9 of food policy,  16–​18 and GM foods,  103–​8 immigration, 510 international, 126 medieval,  759–​72 and moral character,  680–​98 normative, 2 optimality and,  79–​84 practical, 2 and religion, 288n3 See also consumer ethics; food ethics; philosophy Europe,  100–​1, 109 fairness, 371n30 and food,  367–​92 and market fundamentalism,  370–​76 See also food justice Fast Food Nation, 3 feminism and agriculture,  53 and body image,  18 and diet,  572–​84 fertilizers,  7, 69, 85, 315. See also agriculture Fischer, Bob,  10

fish,  128, 184, 189–​205 global catch of,  204 wild capture of,  195–​98 See also fishing; oceans fishing collective action and,  201–​4 communities of,  198–​201 sustainability of,  201–​2 See also fish; oceans Flora, Cornelia,  130 Floros, John,  296 food aesthetics of,  658–​76 alternative systems of,  113, 130 in ancient thought,  741–​56 choices of,  113, 116, 680–​98 and collective continuance,  355–​58 community control of,  113 and cultural practices,  19–​22, 113 and eating disorders,  580 and etiquette,  700–​20 global markets and,  367–​92 and identity,  637–​53 industrial systems of,  171–​72 insecurity and,  572–​92 in the Middle Ages,  761–​63 and moral character,  680–​98 morality of,  658–​76 and personal freedom,  449–​69 racial imperialism and traditions of,  336–​38 and social identities,  19–​22 sustainable systems of,  69, 112, 353–​55 transportation of,  48–​49, 116 waste of,  1–​2, 11, 313–​30, 314f See also agriculture; food ethics; food justice; local food movements; nutrition food activism,  30 multi-​issue,  399–​420 mutual understanding in,  415–​19 solidarity in,  410–​15 unity in,  407–​10 See also food Food and Drug Administration (FDA),  449, 478. See also governmental agencies food deserts,  13, 120–​21, 333. See also food food ethics,  54–​57, 333 contemporary, 54

798   Index food ethics (cont.) history of,  2–​3, 22 and hunting,  170–​87 and local food movements,  113 race and,  14, 333–​42 See also ethics; food; food justice food justice,  12–​15, 30, 127, 180 and food sovereignty,  345–​64 and indigenous peoples,  347–​50, 358–​64 See also food; food ethics; food sovereignty food justice movement,  12–​13. See also food justice food labor ethics and,  494–​515 temporary,  521–​50 See also agriculture; humanity; immigration food science,  6, 69. See also food; science foodshed,  70, 70n4, 77 food sovereignty,  14–​15, 77–​79, 127, 130–​31 and food justice,  345–​64 and food security,  584–​87 and indigenous peoples,  347–​50, 358–​64 See also food; food justice fossil fuels,  7, 43, 74, 314, 316, 326. See also environment Fourier, Charles,  790–​91 France, 316 Francione, Gary,  415 free trade,  77–​78. See also globalization; neoliberalism Freyfogle, Eric,  62 Gaarder, Emily,  415 Galvin, Richard,  244 Garrett, Aaron,  23 Garrett, Jeremy,  244 Garry, Ann,  587 Gaus, Gerald,  435–​36, 441–​43 gender,  18–​19, 401, 417 genetically modified organisms (GMOs),  4, 34, 36, 46–​48, 86, 95–​111 the broader food system and,  108–​9 ethical debates about,  103–​9 food policymaking and,  109–​10 history of,  96–​101 public attitudes to,  101–​2 technologies of,  106

See also technology geography, 2 geopolitical stability,  78, 78n28 George, Kathryn Paxton,  249–​50 Gilbert, Margaret,  225 Gilson, Erinn,  180 globalization,  78, 367–​92. See also free trade; neoliberalism governmental agencies,  113, 449–​469. See also food; health Grandin, Temple,  144 greenhouse gases (GHGs),  7–​8, 318, 328. See also environment Greenpeace, 100 Green Revolution,  5, 87–​88, 98, 107, 125 Grey, John,  23 Grotius, Hugo,  55 guerilla gardening campaigns,  127. See also local food movements Guptill, Amy E.,  20 Guthman, Julie,  614 Hagen, Kristin,  160–​61 Halteman, Matthew,  297 Hanson, Victor Davis,  58 Hare, R. M.,  245 harm footprint,  67 Harper, A. Breeze,  415–​16 Harrington, James,  59 Harris, John,  244 Harvest of Shame (documentary),  2–​3 Hatala Matthes, Erich,  1, 11 Hatala Matthes, Jaclyn,  1, 11 health animal,  103–​4 environmental, 105 human,  104–​5, 107, 241, 358, 449–​69 ideals of,  570 orthorexia and,  553–​7 1 See also obesity; public health Heldke, Lisa,  3, 62–​63 herbicides,  4, 34–​35 Hettinger, Ned,  256 Hobbes, Thomas,  433–​34, 783 Holmes, Seth,  17, 500, 513 Holt-​Giménez, Eric,  399 Howard, Sir Albert,  46

Index   799 Howarth, Richard,  39 Hsiao, Timothy,  242 humanity,  68, 74, 104 harm to,  105 suffering and,  173 See also culture; ethics; food labor Hume, David,  472 hunger,  3, 13. See also food hunting,  170–​87, 197 and the biotic good,  183–​87 conservation and,  180–​83 ethics of, 170n3, 180 humaneness and suffering in,  172–​73, 181 and local food,  171–​75 and the natural cycle of life and death,  177–​79 responsibility, killing, and emotion in,  175–​83 transparency and,  173–​75 See also animal welfare; food; local food movements Huxley, T.H.,  32 ideology,  33–​34 of conventional agriculture,  36–​37 dieting as,  572–​92 of sustainable agriculture,  34–​36 See also culture immigration,  521–​50. See also food labor India, 98 indigenous rights movements,  31, 64, 127–​28, 131. See also food justice; food sovereignty industrial agriculture. See agriculture integrated pest management (IPM),  35 International Monetary Fund (IMF),  367, 401 Isaacs, Tracy,  18 Islam, 763. See also religion Jackson, Wes,  55, 62 Jaworska, Agnieszka,  220 Jayaraman, Saru,  494–​95 Jefferson, Thomas,  6, 60, 337 Jensen, Derrick,  120, 131 Jensen, Jon,  176 Judaism, 763. See also religion justice distributive, 13, 76

global,  6, 73–​79 intergenerational,  13–​14 procedural, 13 See also ethics; food justice; social justice Kagan, Shelly,  272 Kahneman, Daniel,  459 Kant, Immanuel,  55, 299–​305, 307, 334, 337, 711–​14, 791 Karuk Tribe,  347–​63. See also food justice; indigenous rights movements Keith, Lierre,  32 Kelly, Daniel,  20 Kemmerer, Lisa,  290 Keys, Ancel,  578 Kim, Claire Jean,  419 Kingsolver, Barbara,  1, 112, 127n71 Kittay, Eva,  415 Kleinig, John,  453 Kneeland, Jessi,  576 Ko, Aph,  415, 418 Ko, Syl,  415 Kukla, Rebecca,  18, 565 Kutz, Christopher,  279 Lagerlund, Kent,  22 Lamey, Andy,  246–​47 LaMott, Anne,  570 Lehman, Hugh,  249–​50 Leopold, Aldo,  178, 256–​57 Liao, Shen-​yi,  21–​22 Lincoln, Abraham,  60–​61 Lipscolm, Benjamin,  257 List, Charles,  9 local food movements,  6, 112–​32, 170–​87 community-​focused sub-​movement of,  115, 119, 126–​31 and the environment,  112–​13 farm-​to-​table in,  117 and the food industry,  112 and food policy,  112 individual-​focused sub-​movement of,  115–​21 politics of,  124–​25, 129–​30 and radical social transformation,  113 and social justice,  112–​14 systems-​focused sub-​movement,  122–​26 See also food; food justice; hunting

800   Index Locke, Alain,  14, 335–​37, 339, 341–​42 Locke, John,  61, 321 Lowe, M. R.,  578 Lugones, Maria,  587 MacClellan, Joel,  243 Macpherson, C. B.,  59 Maimonides, 764 malnutrition,  1, 13, 213, 540. See also nutrition marginalization, 13, 401 Marris, Emma,  171, 176 Mason, Jim, 91n49, 126 Matheny, Gaverick,  246 McBride, Lee A.,  14–​15 McCaulou, Lily,  175, 181 McJetters, Christopher-​Sebastian,  417 McPherson, Tristram,  10 McWilliams, Carey,  56 meat,  73–​74 animal suffering and,  268–​69 factory farms for,  268, 279–​80 See also animal farming; animal welfare media,  573–​84. See also culture Mepham, Ben, 3 Merritt, Michele,  608–​9 Mertz, Janet,  99 Meskin, Aaron,  21–​22 Mexico, 98 Meyers, C. D.,  248 Michaelson, Elliot,  9, 292 Mill, James,  380 Mill, John Stuart,  59, 380, 454, 732–​33, 790 Mohanty, Chandra,  588 monoculture, 5 Monsanto, 100 Montaigne, Michel de,  775–​78 Montesquieu,  784–​85 moral vegans arguments for veganism and,  88–​93, 164, 243, 417 Black feminist,  415 on the eating of living things,  8 and the environment,  45 the ethical basis of,  10, 209–​36, 247, 250, 403, 559, 599 feminism and,  418

See also veganism Morar, Nicolae,  20 Moskal, L. Monika,  49 Mozi,  288–​89 multinational corporations,  77 Murrow, Edward R.,  56 natural capital,  80, 82 natural resources,  80, 82, 388–​92. See also environment; natural capital Navin, Mark,  126 Nefsky, Julia,  10–​11 neoliberalism,  15, 77, 114, 370, 401. See also globalization; ideology New Zealand,  109 Nietzsche, Friedrich,  773 Nolfi, Kate,  21 Noll, Samantha,  6, 9, 124 Norcross, Alastair,  272 Norton, Bryan,  39 nutrition, 90f, 353, 581, 783 footprint of,  88–​93 of staples,  89 See also food; malnutrition Obama, Michelle,  561 obesity,  18, 459, 614–​31. See also health oceans, 29. See also fish; fishing Omnivore’s Dilemma, 3 O’Neil, Catherine,  128 Orbach, Susie,  574 organics,  69–​79, 84–​86, 114, 469. See also agriculture; food Organista, Kurt,  500 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD),  367 Ortega y Gasset, José,  178 Parfit, Derek,  38 Patel, Raj,  589–​90 paternalism,  449–​69, 472, 482–​84. See also food; health Patterson, Charles,  415–​16 Pellegrini, Georgia,  173, 175, 177, 179 Peragine, Natalie,  418 permaculture,  70–​7 1. See also agriculture; environment

Index   801 pesticides,  4, 34–​35, 47, 69, 71, 86, 497–​98. See also agriculture; food labor Philippines, 98 philosophy, 2 agrarian,  54, 57–​58 industrial,  53–​54 of language, 474n12, 475–​82 and local food movements,  118–​19 political, 2, 428 See also ethics Plato,  744–​48 Pogge, Thomas,  76, 233 political economy,  59–​61 Pollan, Michael,  112, 117, 127n71, 175, 178, 222, 242 Portman, Anne,  182 poverty,  367, 548. See also food labor; humanity Powers, Madison,  15 Powys Whyte, Kyle,  14–​15, 21 progressivism, 113 public health,  116, 268n3, 354, 375, 399. See also health; obesity Rachels, Stuart,  221 Rauch, Doug,  329 Rawls, John,  118, 372, 434–​35, 437n54, 438–​39, 537n74 Regan, Tom,  141–​42, 249, 252, 415 Reisner, Andrew,  9 religion,  11, 140, 354 dietary practices and,  287–​309, 564–​67 and ethics, 288n3, 297–​99 and food,  287–​92, 762 freedom of,  439 Kantian,  299–​303 See also ethics; spirituality responsibility,  470–​93 and character,  595–​97 without fault,  475–​82 freedom of speech and,  485–​90 obesity and,  614–​31 See also ethics Ricardo, David,  59, 372, 380 Richardson, Jeffrey J.,  49 rights theory,  142, 149, 242 and animal rights,  249–​59

See also ethics Rinella, Steven,  182–​83 Rose, Nikolas,  602 Rougier, Louis,  371 Rousseau, Jean-​Jacques,  787–​89 rural life activism,  30 Sagoff, Mark,  320 Salatin, Joel,  242 Salt, Henry,  245 Sandler, Ronald,  20 Savulescu, Julian,  248 Schaefer, G. Owen,  248 Schanbacher, William,  125, 129, 405 science, 102 of DNA experiments,  99 of fish psychology and intelligence,  192–​95 See also food science; technology Scruton, Roger,  243 Sebo, Jeff,  15 Sen, Amartya,  39 Sengupta, Shuddhabrata,  591 Shahar, Dan C.,  16 Shattuck, Annie,  399 Shaw, Hank,  174, 186 Shepard, Paul,  176, 178 Shiffrin, Seana Valentine,  16 Shriver, Adam,  248 Sidgwick, Henry,  38 Silent Spring,  2–​3 Singer, Peter,  3, 91n49, 126, 140–​41, 222, 251–​52, 272, 295, 415 Skeptics,  751–​55 Smith, Adam,  372 Smith, Kimberley,  62 social justice,  12–​15, 417. See also justice social movements,  30, 115 sociology, 2, 30 soils,  29, 41–​42, 70, 79–​80, 82. See also environment Solow, Robert,  38, 41 Sorabji, Richard,  759 speciesism,  253–​56, 416 Spelman, Elisabeth,  570, 587 Spiegel, Marjorie,  415–​16 Spinoza, Baruch,  301, 304, 307, 778–​79 spirituality,  353, 357. See also religion

802   Index Steiner, Rudolph,  34 Stiglitz, Joseph,  77 Stohr, Karen,  21–​22 Stoics,  764, 775–​76 Stuart,Tristram, 22 Sunstein, Cass,  452 sustainability,  5, 79–​84, 170 of alternative agricultural practices,  44–​46 the concept of,  37–​44 economic, 42, 44 environmental health and,  6, 105 intensification and,  6, 69, 84–​88 myths of,  33–​37 as non-​depletionary use,  39–​41 as prevention of deprivation,  38–​39 the triple bottom line and,  43–​44 weak,  81–​84 See also agriculture Tannenbaum, Julie,  220 Taylor, Sunaura,  415 technology,  30, 36, 82, 85–​87, 102, 105, 381. See also agriculture; biotechnology; genetically modified organisms; science Telfer, Elizabeth,  3 Thaler, Richard,  452 Thompson, Michael J.,  320–​21 Thompson, Paul,  2–​3, 6, 31 triple bottom line (TBL),  40–​44. See also sustainability Trosper, Ronald,  350–​53, 355–​57 Tsuruda, Sabine,  17 Tuttle, Will,  415 Tversky, Amos,  459 United Kingdom,  101, 109, 316–​17 United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC),  72 United States,  76, 96, 100–​1, 109, 140, 315–​17, 324, 328–​29, 346–​49, 378, 385, 472, 513, 526 USAID, 383 US Department of Agriculture (USDA), 13, 478 utilitarianism,  38–​39, 142, 149 on consuming animal products,  242–​48

contrast of rights theory and,  249 See also ethics van Dyke, Christina,  19 Varga, Márta,  556 Varner, Gary,  145, 156 veganism,  3, 8, 10, 417 arguments for,  88–​93, 213–​35 ethical,  210–​12, 227 the ethical basis of,  209–​36 health benefits of,  241 objections to,  88–​93, 246 and orthorexia,  560 See also moral vegans; vegetarianism vegetarianism,  22, 269n5, 275 health benefits of,  241 refusal of meat in,  269, 283–​84 See also veganism Villarejo, Don,  500 virtue theory,  292. See also ethics Vogt, Katja Maria,  22 Walmart,  114, 116, 121, 125 water,  11, 79–​80, 82, 315. See also environment Welsh, Talia,  608 Werkheiser, Ian,  6, 9, 124 Wertheimer, Alan,  511 Whittman, Hannah,  125 Wilkerson, Abby,  590 Williamson, John,  371 Winne, Mark,  329 Wirzba, Norman,  62 Wolf, Clark,  5 Wolf, Susan,  22 World Bank,  367, 370, 383, 401 World Trade Organization (WTO),  77, 78n28, 367, 372, 377–​79, 401 Young, Iris,  400 Yuen, Edward,  555 Zack, Naomi,  334 Zagzebski, Linda,  184 Zeneca, 99