Ethics Is Disturbing
“We all have a tendency to complacency with our own ways…”
A brief conversation I had yesterday illuminated this argument well:
“I don’t want to talk to you because you always have a way of making me want to be vegetarian.”
“Why?”, I asked politely.
“Because it’s not right what we are doing. I was a vegetarian for about three months but a friend made some food one time, and well…I just don’t think about it anymore.”
Consider for yourself what this response reveals, and if it parallels your own arguments against those who ask, “Shouldn’t the suffering of everyone capable of suffering count?”
Simon Blackburn writes in Being Good,
“We do not like being told what to do. We want to enjoy our lives, and we want to enjoy them with a good conscience. People who disturb that equilibrium are uncomfortable, so moralists are often uninvited guests at the feast, and we have a multitude of defenses against them. Analogously, some individuals can insulate themselves from a poor physical environment, for a time. They may profit by creating one. The owner can live upwind of his chemical factory, and the logger may know that the trees will not give out until after he is dead.
Similarly, individuals can insulate themselves from a poor moral environment, or profit from it. Just as some trees flourish by depriving others of nutrients or light, so some people flourish by depriving others of their due. The western white male may flourish because of the inferior economic or social status of people who are not western, or white, or male.
Insofar as we are like that, we will not want the lid to be lifted.”
We exist in an ethical environment:
“This is the surrounding climate of ideas about how to live,” Blackburn writes. “It determines what we find acceptable or unacceptable, admirable or contemptible…It shapes our emotional responses, determining what is a cause of pride or shame…what can be forgiven and what cannot. It gives us our standards - our standards of behavior…It shapes our very identities (emphasis added).
This environment enables the monster of a paradigm animals-as-property. It justifies our collective speciesism. We avoid, because of the prevalence of this standard, the question begging nature of making species membership - a human genetic code - the necessary requirement for membership in the moral community. This, then, results in fallacious reasoning and undefended assumptions that are generally accepted, often unconsciously, as perfectly valid.
These are stories we tell and re-tell to defend our actions to ourselves. Therefore, when the pattern is interrupted our intuition responds with A) anger, B) “I don’t want to talk to you because…”, or C) mere dismissal, which is made possible by the majorities’ position of numerical and power superiority.
As Blackburn argues, “Ethics is disturbing.”
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Crossposted @ That Vegan Girl
This is part of what makes drawing the line between good activism and bad activism so difficult. If you get to people at all, they tend to dislike the message. And they aren’t usually so honest about why they dislike the message. So sometimes they skirt around the real issue - animal rights and veganism - by attacking side issues, things that matter, but aren’t the crux of the message.
We can see this clearly in the letter PETA sent to Ben & Jerry’s suggesting they use human breastmilk. Certainly, there are reasonable complaints of PETA’s tactics. However, very few non animal people paid any attention whatsoever to the real issue - cows and cow’s milk. That wasn’t just PETA accentuating the non-animal issues, that was also omnivores deliberately skewing the message so they wouldn’t have to think and talk about cows.
This is a good post and came at the right time for me, as I’ve been facing people like this.
~ Recent blog post: Defensive Reactions to Animal Rights at [site] ~
Indeed, Eccentric Vegan. Ben and Jerry’s’ response to PETA actually illuminated the underlying message of the advertisement campaign: A mothers milk is for her child, and therefore, forcefully taking that milk ought to raise questions.
~ Recent blog post: Logic of Domination ~