I recently had the pleasure of giving a talk on ethics and sustainable agriculture. I have been reading, discussing, and thinking about those topics for a number of years, so I was very grateful for the opportunity to try and articulate some of the positions I’ve come to and engage in a Q&A session. There is no better way to refine one’s own thinking than having to explain it to others and field their questions and objections. Inspired by that event I thought I would start outlining some of those ideas in this medium.
One of the things I’ve learned in reading the work of a number of excellent thinkers is that the right answer requires the right question. That is, to arrive at an answer that corresponds to reality one has to begin with the kinds of questions that will get you there. Of course, it is only in retrospect, whether reflecting upon our own or another’s inquiries, that we discover whether we began with the right question(s). If we find ourselves at a investigative dead-end, unable to proceed forward in our thinking without landing on an absurd conclusion, then that is a sign that somewhere earlier in our line of reasoning something went wrong. In some instances, what went wrong is that we asked the wrong question.
One clue that our reasoning has strayed off course is that it becomes internally inconsistent. A guiding question, then, in my study of ethics and reflections on farming has been: Is there a coherent and consistent way to think about agricultural ethics and the ethics of everyday human living? Is there a consistent way to think about the good/bad or right/wrong in agriculture and perennial ethical themes such as lying or theft?
My best-answer-so-far is “Yes”.
I will try to layout how I arrived at that “yes” and thought it helpful (at least for myself, and I hope for you, too) to begin with a roadmap of where this is going and how I want to get there. It goes something like:
First, there are, broadly speaking, two approaches to agriculture. The first (we’ll call it conventional agriculture) understands nature to be reducible to quantifiable parts that can be comprehended through the scientific method. Such comprehension, conventional agriculture will claim, allows us to conform nature to our purposes by recreating natural processes through technology. The second (we’ll call it sustainable or regenerative agriculture) understands nature to be comprised of organisms that cannot be entirely reduced to quantifiable parts. As such, we cannot transform nature to our purposes through technology without disrupting something essential to nature.
Second, there are a wide variety of approaches to ethics. These varying approaches, or traditions of thought, are often incompatible with one another. But one tradition of ethical inquiry known as “virtue ethics” shares certain fundamental assumptions with the latter agricultural viewpoint, making a “virtue” based approach to ethics consistent with the view point of sustainable agriculture.
Third, there is a strong argument to be made that sustainable agriculture’s premises about nature are a better model of reality than conventional agriculture. I have written a little bit about this on the blog already and will continue to write more.
Fourth, there is a strong argument to be made that virtue ethics is a truer-to-reality account of human life than other ethical traditions. This, I recognize, is a strong claim to make and would require hundreds, if not thousands, of pages to begin an adequate defense. Given my inability to write those thousand-plus pages, I will at least try to articulate some of the arguments that have convinced me of this position.
Fifth and finally, if premises one through four hold true, then one can say that there is both a consistent and accurate approach to ethics that can inform our approach to agriculture and our every-day life.
Stay tuned for future posts diving deeper into these points! Or if this post bored you to tears, let me know I should just stick to photos of cute calves!
