Affected Ignorance And Animal Suffering: Why Our Failure To Debate Factory Farming Puts Us At Moral Risk

Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics (2008) 21:371384DOI 10.1007/s10806-008-9087-8 Springer 2008

NANCY M. WILLIAMS

AFFECTED IGNORANCE AND ANIMAL SUFFERING: WHY OUR FAILURE TO DEBATE FACTORY FARMING PUTS US AT MORAL

RISK

(Accepted in revised form January 8, 2008)

ABSTRACT. It is widely recognized that our social and moral environments inuence our actions and belief formations. We are never fully immune to the eects of cultural membership. What is not clear, however, is whether these inuences excuse average moral agents who fail to scrutinize conventional norms. In this paper, I argue that the lack of extensive public debate about factory farming and, its corollary, extreme animal suering, is probably due, in part, to aected ignorance. Although a complex phenomenon because of its many manifestations, aected ignorance is morally culpable because it involves a choice not to investigate whether some practice in which one participates in might be immoral. I contend further that James Montmarquets set of intellectual virtues can provide a positive account of what it means to act as a responsible moral agent while immersed in a meat eating culture; they also represent the moral and epistemic framework for the kind of public discourse that should be taking place.

KEY WORDS: aected ignorance, animal suering, cultural membership, factory farming, intellectual virtues, meat eating, moral ignorance, responsibility

1. INTRODUCTION

Aected ignorance, the phenomenon of people choosing not to investigate whether some practice in which they participate might be immoral or rife with controversy, has received considerable attention recently from the philosophical community.1 For the most part, the debate examines the conditions as to when it is reasonable to ascribe blame or moral exemption to average moral agents who fail to investigate or know the immoral status of conventional practices, values, and beliefs.2 Are slave owners in ancient Greece or Nazis in 1930s Germany, for instance, morally responsible if they fail to debate the moral status of their socially accepted but immoral

1 Cf. Moody-Adams (1994); Levy (2003); Slote (1982); Calhoun (1989); and Ikuenobe (2004).

2 Average moral agents is dened as normal adult human beings who can be held morally accountable for the acts they perform or fail to perform. Because they have the rational ability and agency to deliberate about which moral principles to act...