There have been a number of interesting responses to my “Which
side are you on?” post, and I want a little later today to write something
rather lengthy about the subject, but first I must take a moment to gasp at the
depth and breadth of the Cloud. I ask,
in a facetious aside, whether a hundred years from now people will wonder how
Noam Chomsky could eat meat, and instantly there comes back a link to a YouTube
post in which Noam is quizzed about just that!
Is this what it will be like when we are all, Borg-like, mergers of flesh
and technology? What will become of those
of us who made a living as scholars when everyone knows everything there is to
be known?
I posted the link to the Chomsky video the other day. (Long time listener, first time caller.) The internet is scary in many ways. I don't host a blog, so I can't imagine what it's like to receive anonymous replies to my idle questions.
ReplyDeleteBut I admit I'm surprised at your response. Maybe that is because I am an animal rights fanatic. (My day job is philosophy professor.) That is, I wonder whether your astonishment at "the depth and the breadth" of the cloud is partly based on the assumption that the sane surveyors of the scene currently regard meat eating as a morally trivial matter. In my view, the annual slaughter of 50 billion tormented land animals (and countless billions of sea creatures) is among the worst atrocities in human history. So I expected that Chomsky has an easily accessible (semi-)published opinion on this. He is our leading public intellectual, after all. I assumed he has an argument about this, just as I assume he has published arguments and statements regarding climate change politics and racial injustice.
In any case, while we're on the subject, I'd love to hear your thoughts on the matter of eating meat (and consuming animal products, more generally). Are there moral limits to our treatment of animals? Do consumers have moral responsibilities to refrain from complicity?
Which side are you on?
For my part, if human poverty were eliminated, and climate change resolved*, I would be all for eliminating industrial farming of animals (and perhaps all agricultural raising of animals), but I only have so much moral bandwidth. So, I direct it to those causes towards which I have the strongest sentiment.
ReplyDeleteA commenter on a different thread cited Hume on sentiment to me, over my despair about the lifespan of human rights. Expanding our sentiment to include animals would certainly not be a bad thing. However, as I don't see the material realities that allowed humans to develop human rights lasting long into the future, I doubt we'll ever actually manage to get humanity to expand it's moral sentiments to encompass animals.
*I realize, of course, that "solving climate change" will almost certainly involve massive reductions in animal agriculture, but if such reductions are ever made, I think it will be for pragmatic reasons, not because of a widespread change in human sentiments about the moral worth of animals.