Building a Sustainable Future for Animal Agriculture: An Environmental Virtue Ethic of Care Approach within the Philosophy of Technology |
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Authors: | Raymond Anthony |
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Institution: | (1) Department of Philosophy, University of Alaska Anchorage, 3211 Providence Drive, Anchorage, AK 99508, USA |
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Abstract: | Agricultural technologies are non-neutral and ethical challenges are posed by these technologies themselves. The technologies
we use or endorse are embedded with values and norms and reflect the shape of our moral character. They can literally make
us better or worse consumers and/or people. Looking back, when the world’s developed nations welcomed and steadily embraced
industrialization as the dominant paradigm for agriculture a half century or so ago, they inadvertently championed a philosophy
of technology that promotes an insular human-centricism, despite its laudable intent to ensure food security and advance human
flourishing. The dominant philosophy of technology has also seeded particular ethical consequences that plague the well-being
of human beings, the planet, and farmed animals. After revisiting some fundamental questions regarding the complex ways in
which technology as agent shapes our lives and choices and relegates food and farmed constituents into technological artifacts or commodities, I argue
that we should accord an environmental virtue ethic of care—understood as caretaking—a central place in developing a more
conscientious philosophy of technology that aims at sustainability, fairness, and humaneness in animal agriculture. While
technology shapes society, it also is socially shaped and an environmental virtue ethic of care (EVEC) as an alternative design
philosophy has the tools to help us take a much overdue inventory of ourselves and our relationships with the nonhuman world.
It can help us to expose the ways in which technology hinders critical reflection of its capacity to alter communities and
values, to come to terms with why we may be, in general, disengaged from critical ethical analysis of contemporary agriculture
and to consider the moral shape and trajectory and the sustainability of our food production systems going into the future.
I end by outlining particular virtues associated with the ethic of care discussed here and consider some likely implications
for consumers and industry technocrats as they relate to farming animals. |
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