Thursday, March 8, 2007
Monday, March 5, 2007
On Knowing and Not Acting: Extract from a work in progress
Here is a little excerpt from an article I am writing. In this extract I write about the strange 'reality' that people who call themselves thinking/rational know and understand cruelty but do not act to avoid having it come upon others, particularly nonhuman animal others.
"David Foster Wallace interrogates the issue of animal abuse in his article “Consider the Lobster” (2006). Since his article was first published in a culinary magazine he visits this question via the politics of eating lobster. The issue of eating animals in one sense comes down to longstanding questions concerning aesthetics and morality. There is already an established field in which these two aspects of philosophical inquiry are understood to be intimately intertwined. In life, however, it is convenient to separate the two when it comes to our everyday eating practices; but is this reasonable or responsible? As Wallace points out, particularly in the case of gastronomy, a very large part of the appreciation and experience of eating is the deep level of thinking and knowledge about the food one is ingesting – and yet there is a huge voluntary blind spot in one’s thinking about food preparation (in the case of meat, ‘preparation’ is a euphemism for killing) about the practices of bringing beef to the table, onto the fork, and into one’s mouth.
“For those Gourmet readers who enjoy well-prepared and –presented meals involving beef, veal, lamb, pork, chicken, lobster, etc.: Do you think much about the (possible) moral status and (probable) suffering of the animals involved? If you do, what ethical convictions have you worked out that permit you not just to eat but to savor and enjoy flesh-based viands (since of course refined enjoyment, rather than mere ingestion, is the whole point of gastronomy)?... After all, isn’t being extra aware and attentive and thoughtful about one’s food and its overall context part of what distinguishes a real gourmet?” (Wallace 2006:253-254).
In the case of some individuals this line of question is not cause for concern or worthy of serious consideration. For these individuals Wallace presses further: “is your refusal to think about any of this the product of actual thought, or is it just that you don’t want to think about it? And if the latter, then why not? Do you ever think, even idly, about the possible reasons for your reluctance to think about it?” (Ibid). That is, how much thinking about eating animals is, actually, not thinking about eating animals?
Wallace has approached the question of the rationalization of animal abuse from a decidedly different vantage point. As someone who enjoys eating flesh, he brings a different sensibility to thinking about the possible reasons why animal abuse persists. I hope it will be clear that this is a result, in part, of their lack of victim status, their lack of rights. Lobsters, about whom Wallace writes, are not afforded animal rights. Lobster eating provides a particularly vivid example of animal torture and murder, and speaks directly to the complex issue of inflicting pain and death on another animal – an issue that is deeply entrenched in philosophy. Pain is a particularly salient issue in lobster cooking, since part of the contemporary appeal of lobster eating is ‘freshness’; and hence lobsters are often seen alive shortly before they are eaten and cooks must inflict the pain and death upon the lobster themselves. The question of pain is complicated (though the same can not be said of murder), as Wallace states:
“Let’s acknowledge that the questions of whether and how different kinds of animals feel pain, and of whether and why it might be justifiable to inflict pain on them in order to eat them, turn out to be extremely complex and difficult ... Since pain is a totally subjective mental experience...the principles by which we can infer pain and have legitimate interest in not feeling pain involve hard-core philosophy – metaphysics, epistemology, value theory, ethics” (2006:246).
Added to this problem is the complicating factor that the majority of nonhuman animals cannot communicate in a meaningful way with humans. For Wallace, the fact that nonhuman animals cannot “communicate with us about their subjective mental experience is only the first layer of additional complication in trying to extend reasoning about pain and morality to animals” (2006:246). As I have alluded, the inability of humans to communicate literally with nonhuman animals should not serve as justification for the infliction of pain; this certainly would not hold up in the case of infants or mentally impaired beings. Ultimately, the issue of pain is not the underlying impediment to overcoming animal abuse. Pain, put into an intellectualized, philosophical, or scientific discussion, serves to cloak the foundational human bias to not think directly about animal abuse. Thought of this sort is uncomfortable and as a modus operandi ardently avoided.
In embarking on this project, I have had to acknowledge that for some people this is a difficult topic to engage. My initial feelings on this were that, in part, this is because according nonhuman animals victim status for abuses, such as factory farming, necessarily implies that virtually all of us are accomplices to these crimes. This is an uncomfortable position to occupy, but is one that cannot be denied. It can be taken up in a positive manner as an impetus for change. From Wallace’s perspective discomfort is the main reason why animal abuse is not actively thought about, and hence continues unabated. “The more important point ... is that the whole animal-cruelty-and-eating issue is not just complex, it’s also uncomfortable. It is, at any rate, uncomfortable for me, and for just about everyone I know who enjoys a variety of foods and yet does not want to see herself as cruel or unfeeling” (Wallace 2006:246). The desire to avoid thinking about oneself as cruel can be handily eschewed by not “thinking about the whole unpleasant thing” (Ibid).
"David Foster Wallace interrogates the issue of animal abuse in his article “Consider the Lobster” (2006). Since his article was first published in a culinary magazine he visits this question via the politics of eating lobster. The issue of eating animals in one sense comes down to longstanding questions concerning aesthetics and morality. There is already an established field in which these two aspects of philosophical inquiry are understood to be intimately intertwined. In life, however, it is convenient to separate the two when it comes to our everyday eating practices; but is this reasonable or responsible? As Wallace points out, particularly in the case of gastronomy, a very large part of the appreciation and experience of eating is the deep level of thinking and knowledge about the food one is ingesting – and yet there is a huge voluntary blind spot in one’s thinking about food preparation (in the case of meat, ‘preparation’ is a euphemism for killing) about the practices of bringing beef to the table, onto the fork, and into one’s mouth.
“For those Gourmet readers who enjoy well-prepared and –presented meals involving beef, veal, lamb, pork, chicken, lobster, etc.: Do you think much about the (possible) moral status and (probable) suffering of the animals involved? If you do, what ethical convictions have you worked out that permit you not just to eat but to savor and enjoy flesh-based viands (since of course refined enjoyment, rather than mere ingestion, is the whole point of gastronomy)?... After all, isn’t being extra aware and attentive and thoughtful about one’s food and its overall context part of what distinguishes a real gourmet?” (Wallace 2006:253-254).
In the case of some individuals this line of question is not cause for concern or worthy of serious consideration. For these individuals Wallace presses further: “is your refusal to think about any of this the product of actual thought, or is it just that you don’t want to think about it? And if the latter, then why not? Do you ever think, even idly, about the possible reasons for your reluctance to think about it?” (Ibid). That is, how much thinking about eating animals is, actually, not thinking about eating animals?
Wallace has approached the question of the rationalization of animal abuse from a decidedly different vantage point. As someone who enjoys eating flesh, he brings a different sensibility to thinking about the possible reasons why animal abuse persists. I hope it will be clear that this is a result, in part, of their lack of victim status, their lack of rights. Lobsters, about whom Wallace writes, are not afforded animal rights. Lobster eating provides a particularly vivid example of animal torture and murder, and speaks directly to the complex issue of inflicting pain and death on another animal – an issue that is deeply entrenched in philosophy. Pain is a particularly salient issue in lobster cooking, since part of the contemporary appeal of lobster eating is ‘freshness’; and hence lobsters are often seen alive shortly before they are eaten and cooks must inflict the pain and death upon the lobster themselves. The question of pain is complicated (though the same can not be said of murder), as Wallace states:
“Let’s acknowledge that the questions of whether and how different kinds of animals feel pain, and of whether and why it might be justifiable to inflict pain on them in order to eat them, turn out to be extremely complex and difficult ... Since pain is a totally subjective mental experience...the principles by which we can infer pain and have legitimate interest in not feeling pain involve hard-core philosophy – metaphysics, epistemology, value theory, ethics” (2006:246).
Added to this problem is the complicating factor that the majority of nonhuman animals cannot communicate in a meaningful way with humans. For Wallace, the fact that nonhuman animals cannot “communicate with us about their subjective mental experience is only the first layer of additional complication in trying to extend reasoning about pain and morality to animals” (2006:246). As I have alluded, the inability of humans to communicate literally with nonhuman animals should not serve as justification for the infliction of pain; this certainly would not hold up in the case of infants or mentally impaired beings. Ultimately, the issue of pain is not the underlying impediment to overcoming animal abuse. Pain, put into an intellectualized, philosophical, or scientific discussion, serves to cloak the foundational human bias to not think directly about animal abuse. Thought of this sort is uncomfortable and as a modus operandi ardently avoided.
In embarking on this project, I have had to acknowledge that for some people this is a difficult topic to engage. My initial feelings on this were that, in part, this is because according nonhuman animals victim status for abuses, such as factory farming, necessarily implies that virtually all of us are accomplices to these crimes. This is an uncomfortable position to occupy, but is one that cannot be denied. It can be taken up in a positive manner as an impetus for change. From Wallace’s perspective discomfort is the main reason why animal abuse is not actively thought about, and hence continues unabated. “The more important point ... is that the whole animal-cruelty-and-eating issue is not just complex, it’s also uncomfortable. It is, at any rate, uncomfortable for me, and for just about everyone I know who enjoys a variety of foods and yet does not want to see herself as cruel or unfeeling” (Wallace 2006:246). The desire to avoid thinking about oneself as cruel can be handily eschewed by not “thinking about the whole unpleasant thing” (Ibid).
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