Peter Singer and Jim Mason, "Meat and Milk Factories "

As even his opponents, like disability rights lawyer Harriet McBryde Johnson, are willing to admit, Peter Singer may be “the most influential philosopher of our time.” There is little doubt that he is the most controversial: when he joined the Princeton University Center for Human Values faculty in 1999 after teaching for over two decades at Monash University in Australia, the incipient protests led to multiple arrests.

Singer is best known for his work in applied ethics, a style of philosophy that brings theoretical ethical constructs to bear on real-life situations. In the over forty books that he has written or edited, the most influential being Practical Ethics (1979), Singer returns repeatedly to questions of responsibility. What responsibility does a person have with respect to another person? To a less privileged person? To members of other species? To the environment? What has made Singer’s work so controversial is that he challenges the conventional understanding of what it means to be a person, arguing that disability and other factors that influence an individual’s self-realization over time can make someone more or less of a person and thus more or less entitled to various rights and privileges.

Though in recent years he has drawn the most criticism for his contentions about the nature of humanity, Singer rose to international prominence for his passionate defense of animals, first outlined in Animal Liberation (1975). He condemns “speciesism,” or discrimination based on morally irrelevant physical details, and calls for changing the relationship between humans and other animal species. He considers the claim that animals have less intelligence or self-awareness invalid, arguing that some developmentally disabled humans are less mentally capable than some animals yet they are still afforded privileged treatment for their membership in the human species. Thus, our ethical responsibility to reduce suffering applies beyond the confines of our species out to any being capable of experiencing suffering.

In an immediate practical sense, this means attending to the animals we see after their suffering is over: the ones that we eat. With Jim Mason, an attorney who grew up on a Missouri farm, Singer has co-authored two books that address this issue, Animal Factories (1980) and The Ethics of What We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter (2006). “Meat and Milk Factories,” a chapter drawn from the latter of these two books, is an inside look into the industrial practices of America’s pork, dairy, and beef producers. Drawing on the visits that they and others have paid to massive farms, as well as on research into the conditions that are optimal for the animals themselves, Singer and Mason make clear the differences between the conditions in which the animals are forced to live, and the conditions under which they could live comfortably. They point out case after case where the profit motive supercedes ethical responsibility. By emphasizing the richness of the animals’ cognitive and emotional lives when treated well, Singer and Mason compel us to wonder why we have come to allow industrial-scale farming.

Singer, Peter and Jim Mason. The Ethics of What We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter. Emmaus, PA.: Rondale, 2006.

Details in the first paragraph is drawn from “Unspeakable Conversations,” a February 16, 2003 New York Times article by Harriet McBryde Johnson.

Digital images drawn from the Princeton University website, and from the Vegetarian Society of Hawaii website.

Link to Explore:

Peter Singer's utilitarian.net profile.

The Pursuit of Happiness, a Reason magazine interview with Peter Singer.

Part one and part two of Peter Singer's appearance on The Colbert Report.

Ethics Bites, a podcast interview with Peter Singer.

Jim Mason's offical website.

Question for Connecting:

• In “Another Look Back, and a Look Ahead,” Edward Tenner describes what he terms “the revenge effects” of technology and the unitended consequences that follow from these acts of “revenge.” Do you think that Tenner would be likely to share Singer and Mason’s concerns about the factory farm? What “revenge effects” might Tenner expect to see follow from intensive farming? On balance, do the benefits of the factory farm outweigh the dangers and the ethical dilemmas posed by the way animals are treated on these farms? Is there an objective way to assess the ethical benefits and costs of this system?

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