Two moral conclusions

The vast majority of essays on the site are written by Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D. Unfortunately, he really doesn't include much argument about the rights of sentient and insentient beings. I don't care too much, as long as the theory will support two substantive moral conclusions in which I have a vested interest:

1. We have a right to kill animals for food purposes.
   
2. I in particular don't have a non-contractual obligation to save animals from factory farming processes.
   

Both these requirements are satisfied by the view espoused therein. Requirement 1 comes close to being satisfied in "The Fallacies of Egoism and Altruism, and the Fundamental Principle of Morality":

Since human beings are natural omnivores, and have over the centuries artificially bred many species (like cattle) for food or clothing, there is no intuitive or prima facie moral claim for vegetarianism.

However, the essay reaches no firm conclusion on the matter. Ross holds that animals are sentient beings, and commits himself to the claim that:

Respect for sentient beings imposes duties not to gratuitously or maliciously inflict suffering.

However,

Whether animals have rights to the extent that they should not be eaten or otherwise used by humans leads ... off into more general questions about respect for the dignity of beings in general and what kinds of duties are imposed by any objects as goods-in-themselves.

Ross indeed considers that insentient objects do impose certain duties as goods-in-themselves:

Even if objects are neither rational nor sentient, their dignity can impose duties, e.g. not to vandalize nature.

Ross clearly, however, considers it an open question whether such duties can extend to not killing animals. In attempting to answer that question, he engages in a dialectic with various animal rights activists. He first addresses the most extreme form of animal rights:

Animal rights advocates (e.g. PeTA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) who think that animals must be treated with the very same respect as people, or environmentalists who think that nature must be treated in much the same way, forbidding human "exploitation" of nature (e.g. Earth First!), have absolutized the value of sentient beings or natural objects to the same level as rational beings.

However, he rejects this notion on the grounds that it is not culturally viable:

No human cultures, except perhaps the Jains, have done anything quite like this -- and the Jains, who refuse even to be farmers, are absolutely dependent for life on the activities of others.

Presumably, therefore, we are to reject the strong view of animal rights on the grounds that it is simply irrational. He then goes on to suggest that we might still have a reverence for animal life that is consistent with killing and eating animals. He uses as an example various Native American hunting cultures. These cultures respect their prey as spirits or gods yet still kill them.

They simply do so reverentially (as one sees Russell Means, one of the activists in the American Indian Movement, doing at the beginning of the 1992 movie The Last of the Mohicans) -- though "reverentially," paradoxically, could even mean ritually torturing them.

This principle of reverential killing is addressed by Ross for the rest of the essay. It is not clear whether he means to be playing devil's advocate, or whether he actually thinks that there is something to the notion of reverential killing. Yet this is the only point that he considers when he even addresses the issue of factory farming:

It may, indeed, be reasonably questioned whether "reverence" is possible under the conditions of mass production.

To address whether it is possible, the essay briefly examines reverence in Japanese business practices:

In Japan, where business and production are usually still protected by the Shintô kami (gods), to the point of having Shintô shrines even in laundromats, one may say that the old observances survive even in modern form.

I hardly think that this is adequate treatment of the issues involving factory farming, however. How could a shrine, cross or any other artefact in a factory farm excuse or sanctify some of the processes that can occur in such a place? This focus on reverence and religion seems misplaced. A thorough treatment of the rights of animals with regard to food purposes and mass production should instead focus on the way that they are treated before they are killed. I would certainly deny that reverence could ever excuse ritual torture, for example, as this is practised in some hunter cultures. I think that I need to articulate the Friesian school more here as it pertains to the rights of sentient beings.

Now I shall move on to my second requirement stated above for the moral conclusions of this essay. This requirement is satisfied by what Ross claims earlier about duties of commission and omission. It sounds remarkably similar to my two principles of animal welfare, except that they have been precisified much further. Specifically, we do have a duty to honour contractual obligations towards specific animals. In other words, if we own animals or they are in our care, then we have duties to protect and promote their welfare. We do have certain duties to promote the welfare of those animals that are not in our immediate care, but only if "there is no one else present who has a more defined contractual obligation to help the other (e.g. lifeguard, parent, physician, policeman, etc.) and who is able to do so". Obviously, the owners of the animals before they get killed are the ones who have this obligation, not me. The live animals are not my responsibility, but that of their owners. If the owners are negligent in that responsibility, then the law should come down on them, and as this is occurring more and more, I do not feel particularly worried about it. Having said that, however, obviously more will need to be said about both these moral conclusions--in another section!