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Conor Cradden
Gex, France
Since I'm outside the US, I can stand up and admit that by very liberal I mean LEFT. I'm currently non-party-affiliated, but in the past I have been in the Labour Party in the UK, Rifondazione Comunista in Italy and the Parti Communiste Français in France. My main interest is in labour unions and economic democracy.
Recent Activity
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Conor commented on the article |Alex, sorry about the nonhuman animal thing -- you're right to use and defend that terminology of course.
Let me try and come at this from a different direction. We can presumably agree that we have the same right to inhabit the planet as other species. We have the right to live our lives and to behave in the way that we have evolved to behave. Now I don't want to get all state-of-nature essentialist here, but humans, like most of the other great apes, are naturally omnivorous. We can survive on a meat-free diet, but for most of history and in most cultures we have not done so. Eating meat is deeply embedded in almost every traditional culture.
It seems to me, then, that meat-eating is not an aberration in the way that sexism and racism are aberrations. Nonhuman animals have different sex roles, but we would never say that they are sexist because they have no choice about their behaviour. Male lions are not lazy and female lions are not oppressed. Animals also engage in attacks on members of the same or similar species, not for food but seeking to extend their territory or whatever. But we would never say that they are speciesist or subspeciesist. None of these categories make sense in the (nonhuman) animal context.
We, of course, have a choice about how we live. But the choice of meat or not-meat is a categorically different one to oppress or not-oppress.
I'll leave that with you while I go and look at the Singer piece. It may be a while before I get a chance to join in again as I'm going away for a few days, but I'm not ducking out. It's cool to be in this discussion. I've been a vegetarian for twenty years and I'm not going to change now, but I think I still need to work out exactly why and what it all means philosophically. -
Conor commented on the article |
Alex, I read the essay about speciesism that you linked to and I was deeply unimpressed. You can't treat people who believe that the life of an animal -- oh, alright, a nonhuman animal -- is of less value than the life of a human in the same way as racists and sexists. The palpable contempt in that essay for 'the speciesist' was really quite offensive. If you came across a farmer who didn't give a f**k about the fact that his livestock were raised and slaughtered in appalling conditions and was interested only in how much he could sell them for when they were dead then you would be entitled to that kind of outrage, but this was someone who is likely to be sympathetic to your arguments and is basically on the same side as you -- like me. I realise it may seem to you that I'm asking you to compromise on a principle that doesn't admit of any compromise, but you need to recognise that comparing what you call speciesism to racism and sexism is not comparing like with like. When women and people from ethnic minorities demand equality what they are saying is "we are suffering and we demand that it stop". What they are not saying is "we demand that you live like us because we cause less suffering to animals than you". The political message is different, and much more difficult to swallow.
We need to make it easier for people to eat less meat, not more difficult. -
Conor commented on the article |
whoops -- in paragraph 2 line 4 there shouldn't be that 'don't' at the end of the line.
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Conor commented on the article |
Lisa, I'm glad to find someone on the same wavelength. Alex, of course you're right that we can survive without eating meat, but what I think we have to ask is whether we have any right to demand of other people that they do this; whether we can say that this is one of those moral principles that demands universal adherence. On the other hand I think we can definitely claim that industrial meat farming is absolutely wrong, and we can push that argument a really long way.
So I think what I think is that we've got to get real with the politics of this. Aside from the fact that I don't myself think that killing an animal for food is necessarily wrong in all circumstances, the main thing we need to do is get more people to eat less meat. And we're less likely to pull people in if we don't appear to be condemning as very wrong something that for most people is utterly banal.
Blake, you're asking a very fundamental question there. Morality needs a source. It doesn't just come from nowhere. I'm not too impressed with revealed (religious) morality, where things are right or wrong because some god or other says they are. I'm much more interested in dialogical concepts of morality, where moral precepts are recognised as being the outcome of open discussion and deliberation. So the things that are inherently wrong are those things that we agree are inherently wrong -- with the proviso that everyone has the possibility of participating freeling in the deliberation. This is a difficult thing to put into practice i know, but as a procedural definition of morality it takes some beating. -
Conor commented on the article |
A fair point about respect -- I've been reading Michelle Paver's 'Chronicles of Ancient Darkness' series of novels with my kids and I think I've got a bit carried away by her picture of a paleolithic teenager thanking each animal that he has hunted for giving up its life to sustain him and using every last part of the animal for some useful purpose (don't get me wrong though -- they're great stories).
I suppose the real question is whether you can respect something while at the same time killing and eating it. This is where I think we need to get away from thinking about respect for individual creatures and start thinking about respect for natural systems. Predation is part of the Earth's ecosystem, and for that reason I would find it hard to argue that killing animals for food is inherently wrong in the same way that killing people (for whatever reason) is inherently wrong. But respecting the ecosystem is a different matter, and we undoubtedly all agree that industrial farming is clearly a long way over the boundary there.
One of the reasons this debate is so important is the need to have a clear message to direct at meat-eaters. At the moment I think we're making it too hard to be a vegetarian because vegetarianism is tied in the public imagination to strong views about animal rights that meat-eaters take as personal criticism of their lives. This is getting in the way of the argument against industrial farming and other important arguments for eating less or no meat, like the CO2 emissions argument (Emily Gertz has some great stuff about this over on the Stop Global Warming cause).
I'm not saying that animal rights are unimportant in all of this, but I am saying that we have to be careful how we use those arguments. -
Conor commented on the article |Emily, you are a beacon of light in an often stupid world. You take account of the numbers -- eating local maybe isn't such an enormous benefit to our carbon footprints as we might think -- while recognising that there is a lot more to the argument than that. Eating local is a good idea for all the reasons you cite and more. But that doesn't mean we should get obsessive about it, and it also means that eating produce from far away that has been ethically farmed and fairly traded is actually OK. But maybe the most important point is that going veggie is one of the best things you can do for the environment.
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Conor commented on the article |
OK guys, lets just get a couple of things straight. The cognitive dissonance involved here is not about eating meat per se. It's about the way that meat was raised. There is nothing incoherent itself about loving a dog but also eating meat. Apart from anything else, what are you going to feed the dog? I think we vegetarians and vegans need to make it clear that animal rights are not absolute, certainly not in comparison (for example) with the rights of the people in the world who belong to animal-raising cultures like many of the First Nations in Canada or the Sami in Finland. What you'll notice is that these cultures have a respect for animals that goes way beyond what you generally find in the Europe or the US. So it's not about the meat, it's about how it got to your plate. (I'm still not eating it, though).
