by Todd May
(Let me note in passing—and I suspect I’m not the only one—that I have here and there talked with folks who ask me how I know that plants and trees don’t suffer. They claim that plants often bend away from danger, for instance. I try to point out that the evidence is that suffering requires certain pain nerves that plants don’t possess, but that is usually met with the response that perhaps there are other ways of suffering I don’t know about. Here I find myself stumped in that way one feels stumped when you explain to someone that all the evidence in the world points to a certain conclusion and the reply is, “But how can you be sure?”)
It is, then, the intersection of having a life to live with suffering that gives moral individualism its particular character, and perhaps that is an insight that we can prise apart from the doctrine and find a way to weave into our daily moral lives. Just as we can recognize that there are other people distant from us on the planet that we might take into account without becoming extreme altruists in our behavior toward them, we might also recognize that many nonhuman animals have lives to live and are capable of suffering in those lives without following the course that moral individualism commends to us.
But how might we do that? I believe the first step involves the recognition of that insight itself. This involves slightly more than what would be required in the case of people distant from us. I suspect that this recognition is more ready-to-hand than it was when I was young. With the influence of environmentalism over the past forty years and the rise of the animal rights movement, it is more difficult to avoid the recognition that animals are more than just beasts of burden or sources of taste and nourishment. This is all to the good. But what is ready to hand in our general social context should, in the formation of a morally decent relationship with nonhuman animals, become a personal recognition.
The next time you’re in a grocery store you might wander over to the meat section. Take a look at each of the meats wrapped in plastic and sitting on a Styrofoam plate. Think about where it came from. That hamburger meat is part of a ground-up cow. That cow was probably fed with corn rather than the grass it would normally eat because corn is cheaper. And because it was not eating its natural nutrition, it received injections of hormones, vitamins, and other nutrients. When it died it was probably hoisted along an assembly line where it could see its death coming and watch the deaths of the animals in front of it.
Or check out that pork loin. Pigs are intelligent animals and yet in factory-farming conditions are kept packed in together in ways that drain them both physically and emotionally. They often resort to aggressive behavior, lashing out and biting the tails of other pigs. They display every evidence of suffering throughout their lives.
One could perform the same exercise with chickens. And I probably don’t need to remind you what happens to calves to produce veal. In fact, veal may be the best place to take an initial behavioral stand, to convert recognition into action. Does anyone really need to eat the flesh of a young animal that has been restricted from practically all movement during its short life to make sure its meat has that particular tenderness we associate with veal? To abjure the eating of veal is a small step, one that is perhaps not so difficult, in reminding oneself that animals really can suffer.
This is only one exercise of recognition. There are others. I am told that many indigenous groups in North America and elsewhere personalize the animals they kill for food, thanking them, often through rituals, for providing the sustenance of their meat. They are not the only ones. Religious Muslims and Jews have rituals that accompany the killing of animals, which allow them to recognize the lives of the animals that will nourish them. This is another form of acknowledgment, an appreciation of the animal and of the fact that it too has (or has had) a life. For those of us who aren’t members of such groups, there need not be a ritual associated with this gratitude, although there is also no reason not to have one. That gratitude can be expressed in one’s own internal monologue, something one does before buying or serving meat or even dairy.
Neither of these exercises, nor others like this, must end in people’s refusing to buy or consume meat. They might well lead toward certain restrictions, asking at moments whether those chicken nuggets or that packaged ham is really necessary for the current meal. They might move one to investigate a vegetarian dish or two to be added to the family’s dining repertoire. Or they might just here and there move one from the meat counter to the fish display. (In saying this I note that overfishing is a deep ecological problem. As an acquaintance of mine once said regarding food choices, it sometimes feels as though there’s no port in this particular storm. As applied to fish the image seems apt.) There is no formula for decency here. There are instead insights that one might make a part of one’s life and daily routine, insights that are likely to lead different people toward different behavior or routines, but point them all in the same general direction.
I have a friend who is careful in his food choices. He does not eat meat that is factory farmed. He buys free-range eggs. He tries to eat healthy food (which is more than I can claim). He also eats duck, which he very much likes. When confronted about his eating duck he explains that ducks reproduce through males raping the females. Apparently it is a violent business. Male ducks gang up on a female, sometimes starting to drown her, to make her compliant to male entry. My friend’s reasoning is that in the case of ducks capital punishment in response to gang rape is a matter of just deserts. I once asked him, though, how he knew he was eating a male duck as opposed to a female duck. After all, if one kills a female duck, one that is already susceptible to rape, wouldn’t that be adding death to injury? He had clearly heard this question before and had a ready response. In regard to the female duck, he said, what kind of life is that?
Would I accept this as a justification for my eating ducks, male or female? I wouldn’t. But I have no particular justification for my eating fish in restaurants or dairy at home. Both my friend and I are trying to construct a decent moral relationship with nonhuman animals that we know falls short of what such a relationship ideally should be. We do, if not our best, something better than we might do.
One important consideration here is that the elimination of meat or fish from a diet can be expensive. Unfortunately, healthful eating generally costs more than unhealthful eating, at least in the US. It would be too much to ask of those among us whose budgets are strained to go very far down the nonmeat road—or, for that matter, the meat road that involves free-range animals. But even here, there are decent ways to approach meat eating. One could, for instance, avoid veal and goose-liver pate. Goose-liver pate involves a cruel force-feeding of geese. Alternatively, free-range eggs are becoming increasingly affordable, so one could buy them as an alternative—or a periodic alternative—to those from factory farms.
Turning away from our eating practices, there are other ways to show respect for the nonhuman animals among us. We have neighbors who capture feral cats and have them spayed to limit the population of unowned starving cats. Then, although they don’t let them in their house, they make sure they leave food out for them. I also know some folks who volunteer at animal shelters, and others who contribute money to them. And we all know people who adopt animals from these shelters to give them better lives. Most of these people are probably not vegetarians, but they are engaged in projects of decency toward individual animals.
On another front, Temple Grandin, in addition to her discussions of her own autism, has written perceptive pieces on animal welfare, particularly during their transportation and the period where they are being led to slaughter. She claims that her own experience of being on the spectrum contributes to an understanding of animals’ stress and anxiety and allows her to see ways to reduce it. Her work has been controversial among some animal rights activists who criticize her for making animal slaughter more humane rather than ending it altogether. However, for those who are not committed to vegetarianism her work provides a model for thinking about our relati
onships to nonhuman animals.11
Finally, we can look to the environment and its impact on other animals. We have already seen that addressing climate change is imperative for the sake of future generations of humans. And we are noticing that it is already having an impact, an increasingly dire one, on our current ecosystem. From droughts to heat waves to more intense hurricanes to rising sea levels, the effects of the warming of the planet are available for all to see. To the extent that we address climate change we are addressing an issue that also has effects on nonhuman animals whose environments are at risk as the planet warms. One example would be the preservation of forest land. Trees “breathe in” carbon dioxide and “breathe out” oxygen. Preserving forests, especially rain forests, both helps combat global warming and helps sustain the lives of animals who live in them.
How might this be done? People can plant trees or give money to an organization that is dedicated to conserving forest environments or one that struggles against climate change denial or one that is oriented to preserving a particular endangered species. As with our moral relationship with individual animals, there is no single road to decency. It is a matter of reflecting on the situation you find yourself in and asking what you might reasonably do to improve it.
Combining the two approaches—toward individual animals and toward the environment—opens a number of pathways to constructing different moral relationships with nonhuman animals. Some people might find it easier to maintain their focus on individual animals, trying to eat with more awareness of the effects of their diet on the animal world. Others, perhaps more politically oriented, might instead find that contributing to environmental sustainability would be more in keeping with their passions. Still others would perhaps want to draw from both approaches in forming a balance that they can live with. And, of course, there is always the question of balancing decency toward nonhuman animals with the kinds of benevolence and environmental awareness discussed in the previous chapter. (A friend of mine eats meat—he’s a bit of a foodie—but then again spends much of his time seeking to make the world a better place through charitable giving and political organizing. Who am I to condemn him?) In all of this, the starting point would be a reflection on the insight offered us by moral individualism: that many nonhuman animals have lives to live and are capable of suffering when those lives are frustrated or damaged.
At the close of the previous chapter, I suggested that in a decent life we might see ourselves as citizens of the world. We might close this chapter similarly. Not only are we citizens of the world—the human world—we are also citizens of the planet. We share that planet with animals whose lives are very different from ours but nonetheless worthy of our moral concern. In living decently, it is worth our asking ourselves how that moral concern should manifest itself. There will be different answers for each of us, of course, in accordance with our personal orientations and the structures of the other projects in our lives. But if we reflect on our citizenship on the planet we might see our way to a relationship, or set of relationships, with our fellow creatures that while not altruistic at least does not give us reason to be embarrassed with ourselves.
Which brings me back to Sammy. He is getting older now and moves a bit more slowly, although when it comes to feeding time he shows surprising alacrity. I have been getting up early in recent months—perhaps as a result of my own aging—and so have often been the person who opens the door and lets him in for breakfast. When I’ve had to do this in the past it has been a silent ritual. I open the door, Sammy walks in and eats, I open the door, Sammy leaves. That has been the mode of our relationship for the past ten or twelve years that Sammy has been with us. (If I were more caring I would know how long he’s been with us.) Over the past several months I have found myself a bit more sympathetic with him. Is it because he is getting older? Is it because after all these years I have finally come around to the fact that there is another creature living with us? Is it because we’re both getting older? I really don’t know. But on these early mornings when, bleary-eyed, I stumble to the kitchen door, open it, and let him in, I have found myself saying good morning to him.
I suppose it’s about time.
[ 5 ]
Politics and Decency
This is a book of morality, seeking to grapple with the question of how to be morally decent, so why include a chapter on politics? In much traditional philosophy, moral and political philosophy are treated as distinct areas. Moral philosophy discusses how we should act toward one another or how we should live, whereas political philosophy is interested in what kind of society we should live in. But, of course, these two areas are related. Political philosophy makes use of moral principles, while moral philosophy recognizes that we are all members of one or another polity.
The question I’m after here is a simple one. Because we are all members of polities, because we all inhabit what is more or less accurately called a public space—or several public spaces—we need to ask what it is to act decently within them. We have considered ways of acting decently toward individual others, both near and distant, both human and nonhuman. But each of us is also a member of a number of larger collectives—local, national, and international. What might decency involve within these memberships? How might we engage in our common spaces in ways that might roughly be called proper; that is, neither neglecting them nor making them the center of our existence?
We cannot ask this question in the abstract. That is to say, we cannot abstract from our current political situation in order to ask what political decency in some very general way might involve. In the previous chapters we were able to say some more or less general things about moral decency, about how to exhibit common decency, how to take account of others who live far away, or how to relate to nonhuman animals. Of course, all these things are, to an extent, contextual as well. Common decency, as we saw, runs along distinct pathways in different cultures. The fact of climate change imposes certain moral tasks on us regarding future generations and nonhuman animals that its absence would not. If there were no poverty in other parts of the world then our moral relationship to those distant from us would change. In no part of our moral life, then, can we abstract completely away from particular circumstances in order to ask how to be morally decent.
However, when it comes to politics we need to remain even closer to the ground. Politics concerns the structure of our common situation—its economic structure, its race and gender relationships, its form of governance, the ethos of political discourse, and so on. We cannot ask how to act decently without taking the structure of our situation into account.
There is a further problem here, one that you have probably already recognized in the previous paragraph. There is no such thing as “our common situation.” Different countries, and even different social groupings within those societies, have different political situations. In the United States, for instance, we cannot think about our political situation without taking into account the history of racial oppression. To attempt to ask the question of acting in a politically decent manner without reflecting on race would be to miss a central defining aspect of that situation. That would not be true, for instance, in the Philippines or in Sweden. Those countries have their own histories with their own difficulties, but there is no role for race equivalent to the one it plays in the US.
This raises the challenge of how to approach a reflection on political decency, since the lessons we might draw from thinking about one situation will likely have limited relevance for other situations. This challenge is a real one, but I believe we can meet it more or less successfully. While I will focus mostly on the current political situation in the United States, there are two ways in which what I say here might find resonance for those inhabiting other political spaces. First, some of the central concepts we will make use of here—civility and nonviolence, especially—can be applied in many different contexts, although those applications will have their own nuances.
Second, there are some problem
s that are similar or have equivalents in other countries. Although Denmark, for instance, does not have a history of racial difficulties—until recently it was a homogeneous society—it is now in the midst of dealing with an immigrant population that does not share its particular cultural assumptions. A reflection on US race relations can offer insights for Danish attempts to develop or maintain political decency regarding its newer population. Those insights won’t be direct; they will have to be filtered through the specific Danish context. But their relevance is readily apparent.
One caveat, though, before we delve in. Political situations will often look different depending on the perspective from which they are seen. I am a white male from a fairly privileged background and, although I have spent a good bit of time organizing alongside African Americans, Palestinians, LGBTQ folks, and others, I cannot help seeing things from a certain vantage point. In fact, it is because I have spent that time organizing that I have learned this. This is not to say that I cannot learn anything about the experience of others. Of course I can. We all can. However, in what follows there will necessarily emerge a certain perspective, one that might look different if it were written by, say, an African American woman.
Our Current Political Context
So where are we now? I am writing these lines in the summer of 2017. Our president is Donald Trump. One characteristic many have associated with him—and I am sympathetic with this—is his indecency toward others: women, African Americans, Muslims, and just about anyone who disagrees with him. It would be easy to lay all political indecency at his doorstep, but it would be a mistake. Indecency is part of our larger political context, one that cries out for our understanding.