More than three decades ago, Peter Singer suggested that our moral obligations transcend our species. Nicolas Kristof wonders if we're finally catching up to that rather revolutionary ideaIn an April 8 op-ed, New York Times columnist Nicolas Kristof takes California's landmark Prop 2 legislation -- which affords some basic standards of care to farm animals -- to ponder the animal rights movement, saying that the new law deals with the "overarching ideas about the limits of human dominion over other species."
Kristof notes that the movement was fomented not only by the public's emotional reaction to the distressed conditions farm animals are put through, but also by "Animal Liberation," a seminal 1973 article written by Princeton scholar and applied ethics expert Peter Singer that was expanded into a book in 1975. That book, Kristof says, "helped yank academic philosophy back from a dreary foray into linguistics and pushed it to confront such fascinating questions of applied ethics as: What are our moral obligations to pigs?"
In a live discussion with Singer in December at the Center for Inquiry, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins said, "What I am doing is going along with the fact that I live in a society where meat eating is accepted as the norm, and it requires a level of social courage which I haven't yet produced to break out of that. It's a little bit like the position which many people would have held a couple of hundred years ago over slavery. Where lots of people felt morally uneasy about slavery but went along with it because the whole economy of the South depended upon slavery."
Perhaps California, that restless state of innovation and manifest destiny, will one day be looked at as a major influence in the nation's rethinking of its huge appetite for animal flesh. And while Prop 2 is certainly not the Emancipation Proclamation -- its relatively modest goals include making sure that pigs live in cages at least big enough for them to stand up and turn around -- it represents a tremendous step towards a world where humans care not just about what they eat -- but also the underlying moral question of how these animals end up on the dinner table.
GET INVOLVED
- Sign the Humane Society's petition urging Congress to pass a law that gives poultry the same humane slaughter rights currently afforded to other farm animals
- Join the Farm Sanctuary's Advocacy Campaign Team
- Cook these vegetarian recipes from the Humane Society
- The Gloomy Dean (January 30, 2009)
- If We Really Are What We Eat, Most of Us Are A Bit Disturbing (October 17, 2008)
- Californians to Vote on Landmark Anti-Cruelty Act (September 22, 2008)
- University Threatened by Animal Activists (Radio Netherlands, March 20, 2008)
- Fur Is Down (Wayne Pacelle, Humane Society of the United States, April 8, 2009)
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