In-Class Essay for ENG 101 Workshop Placement
Fall 2008

The essay that you write on this topic will determine whether or not you will be required to attend the ENG 101 Writing Workshop once a week throughout the semester.  Whether or not you are placed into the Workshop, you are welcome to use the Writing Center for tutorial help on a voluntary basis during any scheduled hours. 

On this page, you will find:

Writing Prompt Instructions for in-class writing

A Carnivore's Credo    

The treatment of animals, like much else that was once the prerogative of religion, has become a matter of ordinary morality, with no shortage of sermons directed at hunters, fur wearers, and carnivores by puritans who cannot abide the sight of sinful pleasure. Eating animals has become a test case for moral theory in Western societies. In confronting opponents of meat eating, we find ourselves exploring the grounds of moral judgments and the nature of the beings who make them.

The moral life, I believe, rests on three pillars: value, virtue, and duty. Some hold that all the weight can be made to rest on only one of them: value, according to utilitarians; duty, according to their deontological opponents. Whether or not any such reductions can be successfully carried, we cannot give a coherent account of the moral life without doing justice to all the conceptions that support it—to value, virtue, and duty—and showing their place, for human beings, in the good life.

I have a strong urge to place at the very center of the subject, especially since the subject is our relation to the natural world, another aspect of human nature, often left out by the standard treatment of ethics: namely, piety. By this I mean a disposition to acknowledge our weak and dependent state and to face the surrounding world with due reverence and humility. It is the residue of religion in us all, whether or not we wish to admit it. It is the attitude that many people—environmentalists, conservationists, and animal welfare activists included—are attempting to recapture in a world where the results of human presumption are so depressingly apparent.

Unlike other animals, we are self-conscious. We do not live, as they do, only in the “world of perception,” to use Schopenhauer’s phrase. Our thoughts and feelings range over the actual and the possible, the probable and the necessary, what will be and what ought to be. Upon these basic facts—traditionally summarized by saying we are rational animals—other and more remarkable facts depend. We have moral, aesthetic, and religious experiences; we pray to things visible and invisible; we laugh, sing and grieve; are indignant, approving, and dismayed. And we relate to one another in a special way. Human beings are actual or potential members of a moral community, regulated by concepts of right and duty, in which each member enjoys sovereignty over his own affairs, so long as he accords an equal sovereignty to others. With all this comes an immense burden of guilt. Morality and self-consciousness set us in judgment over ourselves, so that we see our actions constantly from outside, judged by ourselves as we are by others. We become cut off from our instincts, and even the spontaneous joy of fellowship is diminished by the screen of judgment through which it first must pass.

             Animals rescue us from this predicament. Their mute lack of self-consciousness neutralizes our own possession of it and makes it possible to pour out on them the pent-up store of fellow feeling, without fear of reproach. At the same time, we are acutely aware of their moral incompetence. Their affection, if it can be won at all, is easily won, and based on nothing. However much a man may be loved by his dog, this love brings warmth and security but no release from guilt. It implies no moral approval and leaves the character of its object unassessed and unendorsed. For that very reason, a dog is a far easier companion than a person, and the temptation arises to believe that all animals are really like our pets, with the same moral claims and the same need for consideration that characterizes the animals on whom we depend for companionship. That which distinguishes us from animals—our predicament as self-conscious and judging creatures—leads us constantly to discount the difference, to act as though it were a marginal consideration on which nothing hangs when it comes to the real ethical questions.

But the difference comes immediately to life when we consider the question of eating. Whether or not we think eating people is wrong, we do not think it is on a par with eating other animals. We recoil from the idea that human beings might be on the daily menu along with cabbage, chicken, squirrel, and lentils. This brings to the fore the distinction between our attitude toward the human body, even when dead, and our attitude toward the bodies of other animals. Although elephants and dolphins engage in behavior that shows a partial resemblance to our feelings in the presence of the dead, the emotions with which we approach a corpse are emotions that only a self-conscious being can experience and must be characterized in terms such as “awe,” “reverence,” and “anxiety.” They belong to the philosophically neglected realm of the psyche I have called piety. The corpse is not to be carelessly touched, not to be defiled, not to be abused. Its former occupant surrounds it like an aura, demanding to be mourned.

All this you will find beautifully evoked in the scene between Achilles and Priam in the Iliad, when the old king comes to beg for Hector’s desecrated body. Not all cultures treat this predicament as the Homeric Greeks did, but in all cultures some form of piety is called forth by the human corpse. This is not some arbitrary or dispensable feature of our condition; it is a nonrational consequence of being rational. We can imagine a perfectly good functional justification for these feelings, but it would disappear if we thought of them in purely functional terms. Piety exists only so long as we don’t ask the reason why: that, indeed, is its essence—a sense of duty that does not question what it receives as commands.

So far as I know, people do not eat their pets, even when the pets belong to species that are commonly eaten. Pets are honorary members of the human community and enjoy some imagined version of the nimbus that surrounds the human body—the nimbus Michelangelo presented in his versions of the Pietà. People bury their dogs and cats, often erecting tombstones over their bodies. And even when this seems absurd, some kind of piety is bestowed on an animal whose companionship has been enjoyed when it is a companion no longer.

Pious feelings survive also in the religious prohibitions that attach to the eating of meat. If God takes an interest in what we eat, it can only be because eating and ingesting are acts not only of the body but also of the soul. Yet dietary codes do not prohibit us from defiling the corpses of other animals. They instruct us not to defile ourselves by eating what is forbidden. This is further confirmation of the dramatic way in which animals and people are distinguished in our feelings.

 The fact that eating, for us, is not what it is for other animals is related to the fact that we are moral beings. Eating has in every traditional society been regarded as a social, often religious, act, embellished by ritual and enjoyed as a primary celebration of membership. Rational beings are nourished on conversation, taste, manners, and hospitality, and to divorce food from these practices is to deprive it of its true significance. Rational beings rejoice less in filling themselves than in the sight of food, table, and guests dressed for a ceremonial offering. Their meals are also sacrifices; some anthropologists have argued that the origin of our carnivorous ways lies in the burnt offerings of ancient ritual. At any rate, the giving of food is the core of hospitality.

In the fast-food culture, on the other hand, food is not given but taken. The solitary stuffing of burgers, pizzas, and “TV dinners”; the disappearance of family meals and domestic cooking; the loss of table manners—all these tend to obscure the distinction between eating and feeding. For many people, vegetarianism is a roundabout way of restoring that distinction. Vegetables are gifts of the earth: by eating them we reestablish contact with our roots. They offer a way of reincorporating food into the moral life, hedging it in with moral scruples and revitalizing the precious sense of shame. Meat eating cannot be vindicated without confronting the deep feelings that prompt our dietary habits. The onus lies on the carnivore to show that there is a way of incorporating meat into a life that does not shame the human race, as it is shamed by the solitary “caveman” gluttony of the burger stuffer.

I have hinted that there might be a distinction between virtuous and vicious eating. Virtuous eating involves behavior that is considerate of others and that permits and facilitates the easy continuation of dialogue. Good manners prevent that sudden and disturbing eclipse of the person by the animal, as the fangs sink themselves into the mess on the plate.

It is also a part of virtue to consider what benefits and harms are promoted by your actions—not, I hasten to add, in the manner of the utilitarian, seeking a comprehensive balance sheet of pleasure and pain, but in the manner of the humane person, who wishes to promote kindness and to oppose cruelty—in other words, to promote virtue over vice. The virtue of kindness cannot be understood without also invoking ideas of responsibility, duty, and right. Kindness means treating with gentleness and consideration all those with whom you have dealings, while also fulfilling your obligations toward them. To speak of it brings us to the fundamental question of deontology: What are our obligations, and do they permit us to eat animals?

Animals bred or kept for our uses are not honorary members of the moral community, as pets are. Nevertheless the use we make of them imposes a reciprocal duty to look after them, which spreads forward from the farmer to the slaughterer and from the slaughterer to the consumer, all of whom benefit from these animals and must therefore assume some part of the duty of care. To criticize battery pig farming as violating a duty of care is surely right and proper. But consider the traditional beef farmer, who fattens his calves for thirty months, keeping them on open pasture in the summer and in warm roomy barns in the winter, feeding them on grass, silage, beans, and maize, attending to their ailments, and sending them for slaughter, when the time comes, to the nearby slaughterhouse, where they are instantly dispatched by a humane killer. Such a farmer treats his cattle as well as cattle can be treated, and such animals are as happy as their nature allows. Anybody who cares for animals ought to see this kind of husbandry as a complex moral good, to be defended, on the one hand, against those who would forbid the eating of meat altogether and, on the other hand, against those carnivores who prefer the unseen suffering of the battery farm and the factory abattoir.

The relation between man and animal may not always be as harmonious as it appears in children’s books devoted to life on the farm, but it is only one feature of the total ecology of the countryside. Traditional livestock farming involves the maintenance of pastureland, properly enclosed with walls or hedges. Wildlife habitats spring up as the near automatic byproducts of the boundaries and shady places required by cattle. This kind of farming has shaped the English landscape, ensuring it retains its dual character as producer of human food and a complex wildlife habitat with a beauty inextricably connected to its multifarious life. In this way, what is, from the point of view of agribusiness, a wasteful use of land becomes, from the point of view of the rest of us, one of the kindest uses of land yet devised. The animal brought to the table will have enjoyed the protection of the one who nurtured him, and his death will be like the ritual sacrifices described in the Bible and Homeric literature—a singling out of a victim for an important office to which a kind of honor is attached.

The real force of the vegetarian argument stems, I believe, from a revulsion at the vicious carnivore: the meat eater as he has evolved in the solipsistic fast-food culture, with the removal of food from its central place in domestic life and the winning of friends. From Homer to Zola, meat has been seen as the primordial gift to the stranger, the eruption into the world of human conflict of the divine spirit of peace. Reduce meat to an object of solitary greed like chocolate and the question naturally arises: Why should life be sacrificed just for this?

The question presents a challenge. It is asking the burger stuffer to come clean: to show why it is that his greed should be indulged in this way, why he can presume to kill again and again for the sake of a solitary pleasure that neither creates nor sustains any moral ties. To such a question it is always possible to respond with a shrug of the shoulders. But it is a real question, one of many that people now ask, as the old forms of piety dwindle. Piety is the remedy for religious guilt, and to this emotion we are all witting or unwitting heirs. And I suspect people become vegetarians for precisely that reason: by doing so they overcome the residue of guilt that attaches to every form of hubris, and in particular to the hubris of human freedom.

There is, however, a remedy more in keeping with the Judeo-Christian tradition. We should not abandon our meat-eating habits but remoralize them, by reincorporating them into affectionate human relations and using them as instruments of hospitality, conviviality and peace. That was the remedy practiced by our parents, with their traditional “Sunday roast” coming always at midday, after they had given thanks. Those brought up on fast food are not used to making sacrifices: mealtimes, manners, dinner-table conversation, and the art of cookery itself have all but disappeared from their worldview. But all those things form part of a complex human good, and I cannot help thinking that, when added to the ecological benefits of small-scale livestock farming, they secure for us an honorable place in the scheme of things, and neutralize more effectively than the vegetarian alternative our inherited burden of guilt.

I would suggest that it is not only permissible for those who care about animals to eat meat; they have a duty to do so. If meat eating should ever become confined to those who do not care about animal suffering, then compassionate farming would cease. Where there are conscientious carnivores, there is a motive to raise animals kindly. Moreover, conscientious carnivores show their depraved contemporaries that there is a right and a wrong way to eat. Duty requires us, therefore, to eat our friends.

Definitions

prerogative: a right or privilege.
utilitarians: those who believe that the only measure of value is usefulness.
deontological: relating to ethics, especially with regard to moral obligations.
piety: reverence, religious devoutness.
nimbus: a radiant cloud, like a halo but surrounding the whole figure, associated with gods in Classical mythology or with religious figures in later, Christian imagery.
ingesting: taking into the body, or eating.
onus: burden.
battery pig farming: confining pigs in small cages for maximum use of space, a cruel practice that does not allow any freedom of movement for the pigs and often contributes to injuries.
husbandry: the agricultural practices of cultivating crops and caring for livestock; or, more broadly, managing resources.
abattoir: slaughterhouse.
inextricable: incapable of being untangled or separated.
multifarious: having many parts.
solipsistic: characterized by the belief that the self is the only reality; thus, completely self-centered.
primordial: existing from the very beginning.
eruption: an outbreak of something before contained or confined, often sudden or violent.
hubris: excessive pride, associated with Classical Greek tragedy, in which it brings about the downfall of the person who has it because it implies lack of respect for the gods.
conviviality: festivity, feasting together in pleasant company.
depraved: wicked or sinful.
Schopenhauer: 19th-century philosopher who characterized the basic drive of all creatures as the will to live; he differed from other influential philosophers of the time in refusing to privilege the world of thought over the world we perceive and in seeing the world as fundamentally non-rational.
Achilles, Priam, Hector, Homer/Homeric: In the Trojan War, the great Greek warrior Achilles killed the Trojan hero Hector in single combat. Because Achilles was bent on revenge (Hector had killed Achilles' friend, Patroclus), he dragged Hector's body around the walled city of Troy, refusing to give it up to Hector's family for honorable burial until Hector's aged father, Priam, visited Achilles in the Greek camp and begged to take his son's body for proper funeral rites. This story is told in the epic Iliad by the Greek poet Homer. (The adjective "Homeric" suggests the Greeks that Homer wrote about.) 
Michelangelo, Pietà: One of the world's best-known artists, Michelangelo sculpted the Pietà, a life-size statue of the Virgin Mary cradling the lifeless body of Christ after the crucifixion, out of white marble in 1499. He started other versions of the same subject, but this is the only one he finished. See the Pietà at http://www.saintpetersbasilica.org/Altars/Pieta/Pieta.htm.
Zola: Émile Zola (1840-1902) was a French novelist best known as a practitioner of naturalism, a focus on scientifically objective reporting of the details, unpleasant, of the lives of ordinary humans. His writing would be seen by the author as dramatically different from the glamorizing, heroic style of Homer.

Instructions for in-class writing:

There will be a 50-minute time limit for your writing.  You may make brief notes ahead of time and may use them, along with a hard copy of this passage and a dictionary as you write. (Online dictionaries are fine, if you are writing in a computer classroom.)  Please hand in all papers you have used in the writing with your completed essay.

If your Effective Writing class is meeting in a computer lab, you may choose whether to type or hand-write your essay. If you are hand-writing your essay, please write on every other line, so that you may easily make any necessary corrections when you proofread your essay. (You will deduce from this that proofreading is expected, even though you are writing under timed conditions.)