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Now comes another long thread about ethics, suffering, and meat. Sorry. It's what I do 
I’ve been thinking lately about practical animal ethics in relationship to @alexmotya’s Porkopolis, Lesley Sharp’s Animal Ethos (2018), and the chapter I’m writing about animal welfare and “Interspecies sexual assault” with Joe Fischel.
Sharp’s book is an ethnography of laboratory animals that treats the rhetorical question, “How do you sleep at night?” as a serious inquiry. Rather than arguing lab scientists shouldn’t sleep at night, it asks, “How are ethics produced through violent interactions?”
Sharp finds that labs need acts of violence and care to function and people treat animals differently as individuals and species. A preferred macaque receives different treatment than a disfavored one, while monkeys are treated differently than mice.
Some of this can be justified after the fact by appeals to cognitive capacity or relative levels of sentience, but, for the most part, differentIal treatment is mostly unthought.
Workers don't argue for different treatment on the basis of ethical principles; they assume it.
Workers don't argue for different treatment on the basis of ethical principles; they assume it.
The point here is not that animals are treated inconsistently and in ways that abound with contradictions (they are, but that's obvious). It’s that lab workers do ethics and maintain a concept of an ethical self *through* these contradictions, not in spite of them.
In other words, acts of care, mercy, and love, even in spaces of overdetermined deathly violence, are “how they sleep at night.” They are not experienced as contradictions. They are experienced as forms of ethical agency.
I think Alex makes a similar point in Porkopolis around the care of runty pigs. Industrial sows have been bred to give larger litters than they have teats to feed offspring, meaning runts are a normal, expected, and increasing source of potential loss.
The solution is to have workers bottle-feed runts, caring and nurturing for them in a way that preserve the profitability of the system but is experienced by the workers and pigs as a reduction in suffering. (There's a parallel harrowing story about a sow who dies in pregnancy.)
Again, we might be tempted to call this either inconsistent or hypocritical. This work keeps the slaughter line running, after all. But workers experience it as a form of meaningful and less alienating labor.
IOW, violent systems have the power to generate emotionally and experientially consistent ethical subjectivities. They work not because workers "suppress" contradictions, but because contradictions are part the differentiation and valuation that defines ethical selfhood.
I draw a few lessons from this. First, people tend to experience ethical selfhood through discrete acts of agency even when those acts make violence possible. Knowing how your choice makes an imminent difference is extremely important to sense of self.
Two, charges of hypocrisy, inconsistency, and contradiction, even when accurate, do not match the experiences of ethical agency and may not be responsive to why or how people continue to view their actions (and selves) as ethical despite complicity with violent systems.
Three, this may mean that pointing out contradictions are far more useful when addressing political, rather than ethical controversy. Ethics asks, “How should *I* act?” Politics asks, “How should *we* be governed?”
I would also apply some of these lessons to the problems of meat-eating more directly. First, efforts to point out the hypocrisy and inconsistency of how humans treat different animals may be less effective than one would assume.
For example, calling attention to how a person loves their dog but is happy to eat a cow may have two unintended consequences: 1) the seeming contradiction actually produces its own justification and speciative difference (e.g. cows deserve different treatment than dogs);
2) Comparing “good” behavior the person feels that they have agency over (how they treat their pet) with complicity with “bad” systems that they feel are out of their control (the industrial slaughter of animals) may actually shore up their sense of ethical selfhood.
I.e. "I can't end the industrial slaughter of animals for meat, so eating this hamburger makes no difference. But I can make sure my dog is happy and does not suffering. That I care for my dog is proof I am ethical, while eating the hamburger is proof the world is not."
Second, if, as Sharp suggests, ethics is a doing that takes an object, what is the most plausible *object* of vegetarian dietetics? Because of the structure of the meat supply, the object is, at best, an idealized suffering animal but more likely *the self.*
This would help to explain why vegetarianism often functions as a differentiating identity structure. (I.e. "I'm the sort of person who cares about animals and doesn't eat meat; you're the sort of person who doesn't care about animals so you do eat.")
Vegetarianism as a differentiating structure is, of course, at odds with its rhetorical investment in a more capacious conception of who or what can be a moral patient (contra speciative differentiation). A contradiction (Hah!).
I pose that not as a "gotcha" or critique of vegetarians, but for some analytic clarity about how and why vegetarians think about their own practical ethics.
