Agricultural ethics is the study of moral issues raised by farming. These include: human interference with the course of nature; the effects of certain agricultural practices on present social conditions, and on the conditions under which future generations will live; the treatment of animals, especially when its aim is human advantage; and the value of farming as a human activity in itself.
1 Basic justification
Some anti-agriculturalists defend a return to the life of hunting and gathering. Few philosophers have explicitly defended such a view, but it seems a logical consequence of some positions in environmental ethics. (Taylor 1986), for example, holds that all living things including plants have a telos, or ‘goal’, and that we have at least a corresponding prima facie duty not to interfere with them. Most humans could survive, and many could flourish, eating only nuts, berries and vegetable products taken from dead or dying plants. If all living things deserve respect then agriculture, the implements and practices of which are expressly designed to kill targeted plants and animals, might be unjustifiable. Callicott (1989) believes it is our duty genuinely to share the earth with other species, an impossibility when farmers plough up wildlife habitat (see Environmental ethics).
Two popular presentations of the anti-agricultural ideal make explicit its practical implications. In Edward Abbey’s novel, Desert Solitaire, a character laments the oppressive presence of humans in the United States’ Southwest, and opines, ‘I’d rather shoot a man than a snake.’ In Daniel Quinn’s novel, Ishmael, a gorilla explains that the majority of humans are ‘Takers’, who have deprived the world of its wildness and diversity. The preferred form of human life from the gorilla’s perspective is that of hunting and gathering in which ‘Leavers’, eschewing the arts of cultivation, ensure the integrity of nonhuman planetary life.
A more anti-humanistic philosophy seems hardly imaginable when, as Callicott puts it, the measure of a truly ecocentric ethic is the extent of its misanthropy. It would seem to be one of our basic duties, commensurate with others’ basic moral rights, to endeavour to feed the world’s hungry (see Development ethics; Justice,
international). To abandon the arts of cultivation would result in our failing to meet this duty. The justification of the practice of agriculture is secured by whatever arguments justify the existence of the most basic of duties. Many Jewish and Christian theologians formulate duties to nature in terms of stewardship, holding that the earth is a gift of God to humans so that we may use but not abuse soil, water, air and animals. Similarly, many secular philosophers believe that we are justified in cultivating the earth and breeding plants and animals selectively, if we do so in a sustainable way: the entitlement to treat plants and animals as things of instrumental value only is circumscribed by duties to future generations, humans who will need adequate natural resources to grow crops (see Future generations, obligations to).
2 Social justice
Concerns about fairness in the distribution of food and farmland have been raised in both developing and
developed countries. Most of the world’s poor are small tenant farmers. In order to increase the standard of living of these farmers, the governments of many developing countries adopted in the 1970s the policy of
‘industrializing’ agriculture; urging their farmers to copy the model of large successful farmers in developed countries. During the green revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, countries such as India, Costa Rica and Nigeria increased the efficiency of farmers’ yields by borrowing money from international lending agencies such as the World Bank. The funds were used to extend credit to farmers, who were taught to buy high yielding varieties of seeds (such as rice, wheat, and maize) and to use the necessary accompanying technologies: mechanical
implements (tractors) and synthetic chemicals (herbicides and pesticides). Many farmers flourished and nations that once imported grain became self-sufficient in certain crops.
Questions were raised, however, about the equity of the strategy. Critics alleged that industrial farming benefited larger farmers unfairly because they had easier access than small farmers to credit and expanded landholding. As crops were grown in greater abundance, the price farmers received for each bushel decreased and producers were forced to try to spread their costs over more acres. Were the poor and hungry actually disadvantaged by the industrialization of agriculture? Were small tenants dispossessed of land unjustly when larger farmers,
beneficiaries of the new technologies, bought up their smallholdings? Some argue that they were (Lappe and Collins 1979), others that they were not (Ruttan and Hayami 1984). The debate turns on the resolution not only of important empirical questions (for instance, did industrial agriculture reduce opportunities for labour employment and earnings?) but also of significant philosophical questions (for example, is it obligatory or supererogatory to aid unfortunates in other nations?).
In developed countries debate about social justice in agriculture sometimes takes as a focus the structure of the agricultural industry. In the United States, for example, the question has been expressed in terms of the desirability of ‘saving the family farm’. Family farms are medium-sized businesses owned, worked and loved by families, the kind of farm being displaced by smaller hobby farms, on which the majority of income derives from off-farm activities, and by large super farms, often worked by hourly employees who are not stakeholders.
Questions to be addressed here include: Do family farmers practice better stewardship of the land than other farmers? Are rural communities better places to live if they are surrounded by many medium-sized farms rather than a few large farms? Are farm animals treated more humanely on family farms? Can smaller farms take advantage of economies of scale and produce food as efficiently as larger farms?
Another issue concerns the role of governments in agriculture. Should public policy target benefits and subsidies at medium-sized farms, and not at hobby or super farms? Or are such policies inherently unfair in so far as they do not benefit all farms equally?
Finally there are social justice questions related to pesticides and farmworker and consumer health. It has been argued on deontological grounds, for example, that farmers are morally unjustified in using chemicals that are carcinogenic to consumers (see Risk).
3 Nonhuman animals
Perhaps the most controversial matter in contemporary agricultural ethics concerns the moral standing of
nonhuman animals. Some, such as Regan (1983), argue that it is morally wrong to raise and slaughter animals for food because farm animals typically are ‘subjects of a life’ with intrinsic value and basic moral rights of their own. Others argue that animals lack moral rights because they lack conscious experiences, moral autonomy and a sense of justice, and that it is therefore permissible to use cows and chickens in humane ways (see Moral standing; Animals and ethics). Utilitarians generally believe that animal pain counts morally, but they differ over whether the benefits of using animals in agriculture outweigh the costs. The issue gains urgency with the development of powerful new scientific techniques to manipulate the animal genome (see Genetics and ethics §3). As subjects of genetic engineering, farm animals have suffered from unintended deleterious effects, while research animals have suffered the consequences of being intentionally bred for propensity to develop debilitating diseases.
4 Virtue
If we believe Xenophon in the Oeconomicus, Socrates once said that ‘the best kind of work and the best kind of knowledge is farming, by which human beings supply themselves with necessary things’. While some believe that the past ten thousand years of agriculture has led inevitably to irreversible catastrophic environmental degradation, many affirm with Xenophon’s Socrates that there is no better work or knowledge than farming. What did Socrates mean by the idea that farming provides the best kind of knowledge? Perhaps he meant what Wendell Berry meant when he wrote that it is ‘a law’ that
land that is in human use must be lovingly used; it requires intimate knowledge, attention, and care…. A family that has farmed a farm through two or three generations will possess not just the land but a remembered history of its mistakes and of the remedies of those mistakes.
(1987: 349) Why should such knowledge be ‘the best kind’? Perhaps because in it the intellect is uniquely connected with the body, and spirituality to physicality. As Berry puts it, those who farm ‘gain the means of life; … they gain the longevity and dependability of sources of food, both natural and cultural. [On a farm] the proper answer to the spiritual calling becomes, in turn, the proper fulfilment of physical need’ (1987: 351).
To farm may be to practice a virtuous calling, an art with its own intrinsic rewards (see Virtue ethics). For a people Agricultural ethics
to become landless, or to become utterly dissociated from the means by which their most basic physical needs are met, may mean they are destined to become bereft not only of the best kind of work, but of the best kind of knowledge as well.
See also: Applied ethics; Business ethics; Technology and ethics
GARY L. COMSTOCK References and further reading
Abbey, E. (1968) Desert Solitaire, New York: Ballantine.(A novel, set in the author’s home, the American Southwest. Very influential for the ecology movement in the United States.)
Aiken, W. and LaFollette, H. (eds) (1977) World Hunger and Moral Obligation, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.(Widely used collection, including seminal essays by G. Hardin, P. Singer, J. Arthur, J. Narveson, W. Frankena, O. O’Neill, and J. Rachels.)
Berry, W. (1978) The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, New York: Avon.(Very influential book that argues culture in the United States has declined as more and more of its population has moved off the farm.)
Berry, W. (1987) ‘A Defense of the Family Farm’, in Home Economics: Fourteen Essays, San Francisco, CA: North Point Press; repr. in G. Comstock (ed.) Is There a Moral Obligation to Save the Family Farm?, Ames, IA: Iowa State University Press, 1987, 347-60.(Berry, a farmer, poet, and essayist, defends family farms on cultural, moral and spiritual grounds.)
Blatz, C. (1991) Ethics and Agriculture: An Anthology on Current Issues in World Context, Moscow, ID: University of Idaho Press.(Sections on agriculture’s aims, practitioners, conduct and development. Includes a useful bibliography.)
Callicott, J.B. (1989) In Defense of the Land Ethic: Essays in Environmental Philosophy, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.(Argues that animal liberation and environmental ethics are incompatible with the land ethic and attempts to develop a non-anthropocentric holistic ethic.)
Comstock, G. (ed.) (1987) Is There a Moral Obligation to Save the Family Farm?, Ames, IA: Iowa State
University Press.(A collection of essays from theologians, sociologists, economists and farmers focused on the social, economic, and moral dimensions of the ‘farm crisis’ in the United States during the 1980s.)
Comstock, G. (1992) ‘Should We Genetically Engineer Hogs?’, Between the Species 8: 196-202.(Argues that we have a prima facie duty not to interfere with the interests of animals, and that most genetic engineering of animals is morally indefensible in so far as it leads to the frustration of their desires.)
Frey, R.G. (1980) Interests and Rights: the Case Against Animals, Oxford: Clarendon Press.(Argues that animals lack moral rights because they lack language and the ability to take an interest in things.)
Gewirth, A. (1980) ‘Human Rights and the Prevention of Cancer’, American Philosophical Quarterly 17: 117-26. (Argues that the use of carcinogenic chemicals in farming is indefensible.)
Lappe, F.M. and Collins, J. (1979) Food First: Beyond the Myth of Scarcity, New York: Ballantine.(An early and seminal statement of the case against viewing industrial agriculture as the best way to feed the world’s hungry.) Leopold, A. (1949) A Sand County Almanac: With Essays on Conservation from Round River, Oxford: Oxford
University Press; repr., New York: Ballantine, 1966.(An environmental classic containing Leopold’s statement of the land ethic.)
O’Neill, O. (1986) Faces of Hunger: An Essay on Poverty, Justice and Development, London: Allen & Unwin. (Very useful Kantian approach to the problems of world hunger. Includes discussion of the distinction between special obligations owed to particular persons and general obligations owed to others but not to anyone in particular.)
Quinn, D. (1992) Ishmael, New York: Bantam.(A novel in which a gorilla distinguishes between different types of humans - ‘Takers’, comprising the majority, who have deprived the world of its wildness and diversity, and ‘Leavers’, who, by hunting and gathering, eschew the arts of cultivation and thus ensure the integrity of nonhuman planetary life. The novel won the Turner Tomorrow Fellowship prize.)
Regan, T. (1983) The Case for Animal Rights, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.(The first and best account of the case for attributing moral rights to nonhuman animals based on their ability to be what Regan calls ‘subjects of a life’.)
Ruttan, V. and Hayami, Y. (1984) ‘The Green Revolution: Inducement and Distribution’, The Pakistan Development Review 23: 37-63.(Argues that developing countries must develop more productive agricultural
technologies to offset growing populations and to achieve both growth and equity.)
Taylor, P. (1986) Respect for Nature: A Theory of Environmental Ethics, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Agricultural ethics
Press.(Articulates and defends a biocentric theory of environmental ethics in which all living things possess inherent worth.)
Xenophon (c.360s BC) Oeconomicus, trans. E.C. Marchant, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925.
(Discusses proper management of a household and presents didactic material on agriculture, within a Socratic dialogue.)
Agrippa (1st/2nd century
AD)
Agrippa, a Sceptic of the first or second century AD, compiled five general modes of Sceptical argument: the views
of positive theorists are subject to endemic disagreement due to the relativity of appearances, and adjudication cannot succeed, since it will either be mere assertion (and hence will not command assent) or appeal to further considerations, which process will either be infinitely regressive or circular, or terminate in unfounded
assumption.
Agrippa is mentioned only once in our sources (Diogenes Laertius, IX 88), where no information is given about him beyond the attribution to him (and his associates) of a set of five modes with which to commend Pyrrhonian Scepticism (see Pyrrhonism). Sextus Empiricus ascribes these modes only to ‘the more recent Sceptics’ (Outlines of Pyrrhonism I 164), with no mention of Agrippa at all; nor does Agrippa’s name figure in the list of prominent Pyrrhonians with which Diogenes Laertius closes his life of Pyrrho (IX 115-16).
The basic argument schemata of Pyrrhonism - Aenesidemus’ ten modes (see Aenesidemus; Pyrrhonism §2) - collect different types of cases of opposing appearances of one sort or another, and move from the relativity of appearances (and the impossibility of favouring one set over another) to suspension of judgment about the natures of things, although they are less clear as to quite how suspension is to be achieved. The Agrippan modes organize the Sceptical material rather differently, and remedy that last deficiency. The first is that ‘according to which we find that an undecidable conflict has arisen among both lay people and philosophers concerning the matter in hand as a result of which, being unable either to accept or reject it, we end up suspending judgment’ (Outlines of Pyrrhonism I 165). The third asserts that appearances are in general irremediably relative, which is responsible for the dispute in the first place.
By contrast, the remaining modes are general and methodological, designed to undermine the attempts of dogmatists to offer reasoned defences of their positions. The second mode is that of regress: each supposed justification of a position will itself require justification, and so on ad infinitum; but such a sequence offers no ultimate justification at all, and again suspension follows. Dogmatists may sometimes simply offer unargued assumptions, or hypotheses, but these are not compelling since in any case we might equally assume the opposite; this forms the basis of the fourth mode (Outlines of Pyrrhonism I 173-4). Finally dogmatists will sometimes attempt, whether wittingly or not, to show that their suppositions are reciprocally supporting; but, as the fifth mode demonstrates, if p rests on q and q upon p, then neither rests upon anything.
These modes may be (and generally are) deployed in combination against any dogmatist’s claim to have
established a criterion which might distinguish truth from falsity and thus provide foundations for knowledge (see Pyrrhonism §4). Suppose a dogmatist asserts that p. If that is a mere assertion, then the Sceptic produces the fourth mode. If p is in turn supported by q, and q by r, and so on, either that procedure terminates somewhere (in which case the fourth mode again becomes operable); or it does not, committing the dogmatist to regress; or, eventually one of the supporting propositions is itself shown to rest on p, in which case, as the fifth mode has it, the whole structure is built on sand.
The Agrippan modes are weapons of great scope and power; and Sextus’ presentation of the Ten Modes of Scepticism was evidently influenced by them. Indeed, the whole subsequent history of the epistemology of justification may be seen as a series of attempts to evade their purportedly all embracing grasp.
R.J. HANKINSON References and further reading
Barnes, J. (1990) The Toils of Scepticism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.(A detailed and subtle philosophical treatment of Agrippa’s modes.)
Diogenes Laertius (c. early 3rd century AD) Lives of the Philosophers, trans. R.D. Hicks, Diogenes Laertius Lives
of Eminent Philosophers, Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press and London:
Heinemann, 1925, 2 vols.(Greek text with facing translation; IX 61-116 is devoted to Pyrrhonism.) Hankinson, R.J. (1994) The Sceptics, London: Routledge.(Chapter X deals with the Agrippan modes.) Sextus Empiricus (c.AD 200) Outlines of Pyrrhonism, trans. J. Annas and J. Barnes, Outlines of Scepticism,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.(Fine translation with introduction and notes.) Agrippa (1st/2nd century AD)