Being the sort of person who reads – and comments – at blogs, I’ve found myself in discussions from time to time regarding the morality of animal use. Lately, the context has been the Canadian seal hunt and efforts by Native advocates to justify one form of seal hunt (traditional), but condemn another form (capitalist). Notably, the major American animal welfare organizations also make this distinction between traditional use and commercial exploitation. I am in the minority, it seems, as I am opposed to animals being slaughtered by Mr. Money-bags just as much as I am opposed to animals being slaughtered by Noble Savage.
Advocates of the “traditional” hunt will routinely make reference to using much more of the seal’s carcass than what is found in the “capitalist” hunt. (Although the reason why Mr. Money-bags doesn’t use the entirety of the carcass is likely because there is limited potential for commercial exploitation (e.g., meat, oils, by-products) and, if there were, seals would be rounded up and placed in factory conditions.) Of course, the advocates of “tradition” usually forgot that a commodity, the base unit in capitalist economies, is any good produced for sale. The seal is, indeed, largely slaughtered for sale – the “traditional” hunt is as capitalist as the “capitalist” hunt.
But, from the theoretical standpoint, that isn’t the most interesting thing – fetishizing cultures isn’t really an academic interest in mine (although one has to wonder if the fetishization of Noble Savage as engaged in an authentic lifestyle outside of capitalism has something to do with a feeling of inauthenticity experienced by many living in large cities where no outside of capitalism can be seen; it is the urban advocates of the “traditional” seal hunt that are interesting). What is interesting is the recourse ostensibly “progressive” people have to defenses of “tradition.”
Why do self-named “progressives” find security in tradition? What is so “progressive” about tradition? The question I put to them is quite obvious: how do you justify one form of “tradition” for the very reason that you perceive it to be “tradition” but condemn another form of “tradition” because you just don’t like it? How can the seal hunt be defended because it is “tradition” but anti-semitism, homophobia, racism, sexism, and the like cannot? How can you say Noble Savage is a being who finds his moral core in the traditional hunt while at the same time condemning marital rape or genital mutilation? How do you distinguish between “good” traditions and “bad” traditions? Can that even be done? Once you’ve defended one thing “because it is tradition,” it seems that only logical position one can adopt is to defend all practices deemed traditional.
The only response I ever get is that I am being shrill.
6 Comments
I can’t speak for everyone who invokes ‘tradition,’ and am not really speaking for myself, but I imagine something like the following is the argument:
***
(1) In these communities the seal hunt structures social relations beyond some utilitarian provision of resources – i.e. people learn skills beyond hunting itself, people are socialized into gender/age roles, formal and informal social networks develop, and so on – things which happen in many forms of labour (albeit with different contents).
(2) To cease the seal hunt and replace it with practices which do not use animals will also transform those social relations. To suggest practice X (seal hunt) can be replaced by practice Y without any other consequence is itself a fetishization of those practices.
(3) Those specific social relations currently correlated with the seal hunt are in themselves worth preserving, and it is not currently clear how to maintain them in the absence of the seal hunt.
(4) Furthermore, criticism of ‘traditional’ seal hunting may be latent or disguised prejudice – the call from some quarters to end the seal hunt is a disingenuous attack on the social relations, the community, which has a seal hunt, and really isn’t concerned with animal welfare.
***
I imagine the argument condensed by ‘tradition’ is something like that. I am not sure that it is convincing, but you asked for it. It is also possible to go around in circles, and to fight over point (3) – you might say in response (as you do), what about the social relations sustained by any jobs which are otherwise destructive in their consequences? Should we simply preserve the status quo because changes in production will also transform otherwise benign or desirable social relations?
I think that sort of debate will occur when people try to calculate or balance the relative moral worth of using animals vs. other actions. If one’s principle is that we should not use animals in any respect, and asserts that we need not do so, then I don’t see how such a debate would occur.
I can’t say I understand the distinction between the four points you make, Greg. My answer is that culture is dynamic, always changing, and new social relations are always being formed. What justifies this one over any other? Slavery of humans could be justified for all the same reasons you give. I come from a small town in Texas… I can tell you that the general sentiment was, “We hate this place, but we never want to leave because our friends and family are here!” People don’t want to change, even if it would be better for everyone involved.
Great post, Craig. I have to say I love my Anthropology professor, but most of the books I read in that class involved animal exploitation of some sort (mostly farming), and even though they evoked my sympathy, I was kind of bothered by the silence on the plight of animals juxtaposed by intense sympathy for traditional ways of life (not to mention the fact that my professor always deliberately looked at me when discussing how she eats meat… or mentioned my vegan campaign while joking that 20 years of vegetarianism meant she had “paid [her] dues”). There are things worth preserving, but not when they inherently include the unnecessary exploitation of sentient beings.
The points aren’t completely distinct, I numbered them for clarity but they are sequential.
Furthermore, I wasn’t trying to convince Craig of the tradition-based argument but was simply elaborating on what I figure many people mean when they use the rhetoric of ‘tradition’. I figured this is what Craig was curious about or frustrated by.
“Slavery of humans could be justified for all the same reasons you give.”
I recognized this in my comment. It doesn’t, however, automatically justify slavery (or anything else). Since it’s a utilitarian argument, of the form “X is worth more than Y” (or “X is worth keeping in spite of Y” and so on) then this problem would apply to many utilitarian arguments: you can replace X and Y with whatever you wish, and then attempt to convince people that it is so. Again, like I said, if you are not utilitarian, then this line of reasoning doesn’t go anywhere, from what I can see.
Yes, that is what I was wondering, Greg. I doubt many readers would seriously defend many – if any – traditions on the basis of their being traditional. An article in the The Star on the weekend reported on the GTA Portugese community putting on “bull-runs” and “Portugese style bullfights” (with velcro darts) on farms outside the GTA. According to the Portugese in the GTA, this was their community’s tradition and they didn’t expect anyone else to understand it. Apparently there is some cultural ritual whereby men prove their masculinity by staring down a bull and a bull proves is bullishness by charging. Not being part of the community and its traditions, I didn’t understand it. As usual, with newspapers, the comments were not particularly interesting, literate, intelligent or illuminating and they rapidly took a turn: if the “Portugese style bullfights” are objectionable, then the Calgary Stampede must also be objectionable. This is correct. It was further pointed out that at the Calgary Stampede, unlike the Portugese style bullfights, animals regularly die, are regularly killed and are regularly put in highly stressful situations. People eventually seemed to agree that they didn’t want to lose the Stampede and, so, they shouldn’t oppose the Portugese. (This is comparable to the argument whereby the Spainish have no right telling Canadians how to treat seals because of their bullfights.) Surely a triumph of a public sphere! One comment stood out in its simplicity: “Tradition means not having a good reason.” A lot of people clicked on “I disagree with this comment” or however the comment voting system works.
Anyway, most opponents of the seal hunt aren’t addressing (1)-(3), but only (4). Defenders of the seal hunt ignore (4) and point to (1)-(3). Having said that, there is a long history of animal welfare as a cover for bourgeois sensibility. The case of the London dog carts is a paradigm example. Dogs pulling carts offending the well-to-do Victorians. They made a law banning them. The dogs were then slaughtered by their owners who could not afford to keep them as pets. Few – if any – of these dogs found their way into the homes of well-to-do Victorians. We see the same with most fighting dogs, who are killed rather than retrained. The Vick’s case stands out as one of the few major investigations where the dogs were retrained and rehomed. The Animal Planet series “Dogtown” had a couple episodes on the Vicks dogs.
(Was it you, Greg, who asked me at Congress about robots and ethics?)
Yes, Craig, I was the one who asked about robots and ethics.
The argument goes something like the following:
If robots (or machines, or programs, or anything non-organic) existed which were structurally equivalent to vertebrates in terms of pain mechanisms (nociception, c-fibers, and so forth) would it be morally objectionable to activate those mechanisms?
Or more loosely, if I had a robot which demonstrated preferences and avoidance behaviors, e.g. the more I tried to turn it off the more it used whatever resources it could to stop me, would we be justified in asking whether turning off the robot was a moral problem or not?
On one hand, this is kind of silly, because such robots don’t exist* and aren’t a pressing ethical issue. On the other hand, like I also said at Congress, the best test of ethical frameworks is often the limit-case or the extreme case.
I can’t remember where I came across this argument, but it was probably somewhere in the philosophy of mind literature; I would be surprised if it were a new argument. What -would- be new would be actual political action on behalf of non-organic material things (like ‘computer rights’) or people actually concerned about turning off their AI program, rather than hypothetically.
*One might argue they do: it’s easy to make a little robot that avoids a particular stimulus. The difference is that the little robot won’t yelp or cry when presented with that stimulus, nor would it exhibit the other things that garner our sympathy or present it as worthy of moral consideration. One could imagine an art object along those lines – a machine that resists being turned off through vocalizations, movements, etc. I don’t yet have the technical know-how to make it myself, so if it’s made I can only take partial credit.
With animals, the usually given criteria is sentience, and that is usually demonstrated through experiencing pain. As you indicate above. The idea being, pain and suffering is detrimental to the life of the animal and the animal has an interest in the fullest possible life. The (intentional) infliction of pain by humans on animals is, therefore, morally wrong. The reply, then, is that it is permissible to use and kill animals so long as they don’t experience any “unnecessary” pain and suffering. The reply to this ends up being something to the effect that the life of the animal is inherently valuable to that animal. Consequently, humans have no right to take the animal’s life and the animal has the right to not have its life taken. The reply to this is usually something rather dumb like, “So, what you’re saying is that a wolf doesn’t have the right to eat a mouse?”
What seems likely to me is that machines or software will be developed that approximate if not reach states of consciousness, if not self-consciousness, sooner rather than later. The problem with robots will no doubt be whether or not data about harm (for instance, someone pushed the robot down the stairs and it broke some bone-like thing that is a part of its structure) to the robot is pain or not. (This parallels early responses to moral consideration for animals: they don’t experience pain.) Pain in animals seems to accompany an affective state – do machines have (or can they have) affective states? Having said that, it is likely the case that a machine will be developed that is autonomous and (self) conscious without emotional or affective states before a machine is developed that is autonomous and (self) conscious with emotional or affective states. The relevant criterion would seem to be whether the machine has an interest in its own existence. Science fiction seems to think that machines can have an interest in their own existence without being able to experience pain: for instance, terminators don’t seem to experience pain or have emotions but they seem interested in survival, the obsolete programs in the second “Matrix” movie who went underground rather than being deleted seem interested in survival, the centurions and raiders in “Battlestar Galactica” seem interested in survival.
However, so long as it is called “artificial intelligence,” I think pro-robotic advocates will have a hard time getting their message across. But, in general, I think animal arguments easily translate into general arguments about sentience, whether they be computers or the mentally retarded.
Post a Comment