Lecture 8: A Circle of Life

1. Lecture 8:A Circle of Life

2. Factory Farming • How do factory farms work? • What’s it like for the animals? • Are animals living out their life naturally (in terms of conditions and their social structure)?

3. Inconsistency • Is there an inconsistency between how we teach our kids about animals and what we do? • Are animals living creatures or just stuff to consume? • Are there other inconsistencies?

4. Different Types of Inconsistency • Holding a belief and its negation or opposition • Holding at least two beliefs that entail others that are contradictory • Acting on a belief in one context but not in another, and without a good reason

5. Common Special Justifications for Doing Violence to Animals • In a laboratory, science gives us leave to perform otherwise cruel or disrespectful things. • When an animal is a pet, it deserves respect that it otherwise does not receive. • When we need food, we are permitted to treat animals as stuff.

6. Thoughts • What do you think of the special justifications? • Do you agree or disagree? Why?

7. Overlapping, a Common Cause of Inconsistency • The same areas of our lives have more than one human good at stake in them. • Often, one of those human goods is covered by the other, producing the moral invisibility of the first. • The underlying issue of respect for life is thereby hidden.

8. Special Justifications • Can we allow the special justifications? • Why or why not? • If we allow it, should it be limited? In what way?

9. Why? Factory Farming Capitalism • How do farmers think of the animals in factory farms?

10. Questions: • Do we know about a lot of the processes involved in our global economic world? • What obstacle is this? • How can we improve our moral perception? • Should people be exposed to the truth of all these practices? • Is that better ecological idealism?

11. Respect, respect for life, thoughtfulness • Are these intensifying concepts? • In our global world, is there a lot we can improve upon in terms of respecting life?

12. A Mark of Human Thoughtfulness To repeatedly clear away and examine our justifications for using life, rethink words that cloak life’s respect-worthiness, and investigate alternative means to taking or using life.

13. Are these ideas and concepts to idealistic and/or impossible?

14. What if we have to use animals? • Minimize pain, waste, and destruction • Be thoughtful about the animal’s life form

15. Suggestions: The Consumer’s End • Consumers see, on the packaging, how flesh is produced. • Consumers who do not go through a short course educating them about the realities and morals of food production are charged a tax when buying flesh. • Consumers make flesh the exception and not the rule at meals. • Courses in public school teach children not only ecology but also the moral consistency of showing restraint and gratitude when eating flesh. • Consumers at restaurants finish their entire portions or are charged double the price of the meal.

16. Suggestions: The Producer’s End • Animals are given adequate room to move. • They are given the material conditions for a normal member of their kind. • They are not allowed to develop sores as a result of the food production. • They are allowed their normal social practices. • They are not biologically altered in ways that create distress for them. • They are not mutilated. • When killed, the killing is done in a way that minimizes pain and distress.

17. Today • How to approach moral invisibility • Respect for life