Redesigning Animal Agriculture

that ethical norms and ethical vocabularies
are interwoven with ordinary practices
in very complex ways. They suggest that
people have very sophisticated abilities to
make ethical discriminations independent
of any exposure to philosophical ethics. As
such, it is wise to be cautious in developing
theoretical approaches in ethics that imply
radical departures from ordinary common
sense. On the other hand, it is clear from
history that entire societies and cultures
have tolerated or even embraced practices
that do not appear defensible given contemporary
understandings of ethical norms.
As such, any philosophy must address the
question of how and under what conditions
common-sense understandings should be
challenged. One key element of pragmatist
doctrine, in this respect, is that no normative
understanding or practice is exempt
from critique or revision; hence it is indeed
possible to radically rethink responsibilities
to non-human animals. However, pragmatists
would reject wholesale upheavals in
the entire framework of common, everyday
ethical understandings as leading to conceptual
incoherence, rather than insight. As
such, proposals for ethical reform or change
are viewed as hypotheses that must be subjected
to a number of philosophical and also
common-sense, public tests.
Bryan Norton (2005) has produced
a careful philosophical treatment of how
pragmatism might reshape the way that
ethics is integrated into environmental
decision making, and what he has written
provides the philosophical backdrop for
what is being said here in summary form.
Pragmatism has its philosophical roots in
observations on scientific method made by
Charles Sanders Peirce in the 19th century.
Peirce argued that science is a particular
form of rule-governed social enquiry. The
warrant for scientific results does not consist
in their consistency with some predetermined
metaphysical standard for what is
real, or in their meeting epistemologically
derived standards for truth. Rather, scientific
results derive the authority that they
have from the way that scientists establish
networks of researchers who not only utilize
publicly reproducible (and hence testable)
Ethics of Livestock Science 43
methods to generate their results, but who
actually undertake the testing and reproduction
of each other’s results. Given infinite
time and resources, Peirce argued, the
results that such a community of enquiry
would produce are indeed true and factual,
but it is not truth or factuality that is most
important in the real world of limited time
and resources. Instead, it is the collective
result of scientists’ compliance with these
public methods of enquiry that provides the
justification for regarding science as providing
the best warranted basis for human
action, even while most scientists expect
that their results will eventually be overturned
by future studies (Norton, 2005).
Beginning with John Dewey and subsequently
with the German philosopher Jürgen
Habermas, pragmatism in ethics has similarly
moved toward a more procedural approach,
one in which establishing the parameters
for good discourse is seen as equally important
as the specific norms or claims generated
by moral discourse. Unfortunately, the
positivist legacy in the sciences has made
scientific researchers among the most resistant
to actually participating in open, public
argumentation on ethical norms, values
and responsibilities. Ironically, scientists’
reluctance to engage in continuing ethical
debates over activities such as animal biotechnology
has almost certainly contributed
to the public’s suspicion of genetically engineered
crops (Thompson, 1997). But it is not
enough simply to make public statements
about biotechnology’s benefits. It is also
necessary to engage one’s critics on a level
playing field, to be willing to respond to criticisms
in the same kind of ethical language
in which they are advanced. Thus, a key
problem of the sciences is that when they
do engage in ethical discussions they are too
narrowly focused on risks and benefits, that
is, on the consequentialist dimension illustrated
above. It is equally important that scientists
learn to speak the language of rights
and virtues (Burkhardt, 1998).
Interestingly, it seems likely that a concerted,
institutionally organized and publicly
visible effort to engage in serious practical
deliberation about the ethics of animal transformation
might be precisely the sort of thing