Consider the Farm

At the end of class yesterday, the general consensus was that most people feel extremely uncomfortable talking about the boiling alive of lobsters. I said in class that the reason most people don't feel a morale obligation towards animals is that we as humans have effectively removed ourselves from nature. I think that this is also the reason we feel so uncomfortable when discussing things like this. Humaneness towards animals was never even up for discussion before recent times. The Native America of life on earns philosophy on nature was that they were very much a part of it, co-equal with animals, plants and all. Whenever they hunted and killed an animal for food, though they may not have done so humanely, they treated their kill as a victorious pro sports team would treat the loser of a game-they respected it, because they saw themselves as being on the same playing field. They therefore never had any moral qualms about killing animals or the methods they used to do so. In western philosophy, I would submit that a similar way of thinking prevailed in ancient times. As Christianity and the enlightenment influenced western philosophy, however, our views began to change. Christianity suggested that humans were higher than other natural things in the hierarchy of god's kingdom, and the enlightenment reinforced this view by removing internal motion from natural things. As technology progressed rapidly, we became separated more and more from nature, using it as a tool/resource. Today our science, technology and overall knowledge of the natural world has led us to dominate all other forms of life, while at the same time we have come to widely accept the theory of evolution, which suggests that we are the product of evolutionary coincidence, rather than the special stewards/ rulers of the natural world, a notion that threatens to put us on the same playing field as everything else again. The industrial food chain has developed in such a way that we breed and create creatures like cows, chicken and even shrimp solely for the purposes of our eating them, effectively denying them any form of their own internal teleology. I think that as the christian and enlightenment philosophy of nature fades from our consciousness and the notion of modified teleology as suggested by evolution gains broader acceptance, we are left with a way of doing things that is no longer supported by a way of thinking. This clash leaves us feeling guilty, and we prefer the ignorance of bliss to the hard questions. We can justify our actions by focusing on humane ways of killing animals, but invariably attention to that issue calls us out on the humanity of killing animals at all, and we are afraid that a discussion on that would threaten to challenge the whole system that we currently enjoy.