Re: Frost, Ben (2017) Ecorazzi January 9, 2017
Why the Mainstream “Animal Movement” Promotes Peter Singer
Stevan Harnad: Such a pity — a tragedy, actually, for the (animal) victims — this needless, destructive, dogmatic divisiveness. So few vegans in the world, yet the “abolitionist” zealots fight with them instead of trying to reach the hearts of carnivores. This is not the way to cultivate compassion. Nor to reduce suffering. Nor, for that matter, to convert most people to veganism or abolition. — A Non-Dogmatic Abolitionist
Gary Francione: What are you talking about? It’s not a matter of being “divisive.” It’s a matter of criticizing an ideology which holds that, because animals (supposedly) have a qualitatively different level of self-awareness, they lack an interest in, or have a qualitatively different interest in, continuing to live. That is the basis of the welfarist movement, which holds that killing animals per se is not to harm them and that the focus should be reducing suffering. This has nothing to do abolition. One cannot be “divisive” unless there is a unitary whole that can be divided. There isn’t.
I have attempted to engage you before. You never deal with the substantive issues. You simply repeat the welfarist PR slogans. You’re doing it here.
Gary L. Francione. Rutgers University
P.S. If you would like to have a public discussion about this, let me know, We could do something on a platform like Skype. Let others determine whose position is correct.
Stevan Harnad: Hi Gary,
Thanks for your reply. Here are a few clarifications that I think might help:
1. I too am a vegan abolitionist (activist).
2. This means that I do anything I can to help and protect animals.
3. I don’t eat or wear or use animals in any way.
4. I do anything I can toward abolishing the use of animals.
5. I do anything I can to try to encourage people to become vegans as well as activists doing anything they can to help and protect animals and to abolish their use.
I realize that most people in the world are carnivores and do not (yet) share all of 1 – 5. So I think that the more people begin to do at least part of 1 – 5, the better for the animal victims, present and future.
I don’t hold any part of the ideology that you attribute to the welfarist movement. I am sure that there are people who hold some or all of those views, but they are not vegan abolitionist activists.
I am an abolitionist vegan activist who is also a welfarist, and so are many others. I think that not only do I not fit the stereotype you describe as the ideology of “welfarists,” but that that stereotype does not fit many other abolitionist vegan activists who are also working for animal welfare, including those who are provisionally making common cause with non-vegans who are merely trying to reduce rather than abolish animal suffering.
I would be very happy to have a public discussion with you. I admire your heart, your feelings towards animals, and all you are trying to do to help animals and to abolish the horrors. But my public discussion with you will be ecumenical, because I do not oppose the positive efforts of fellow abolitionist vegan activists to end the horrors. I just greatly regret divisiveness among abolitionist vegan activists as well as negative stereotyping. I don’t think fighting with one another helps the countless animal victims that we are all fighting to help and protect from the horrors.
Best wishes, Stevan
GARY FRANCIONE: You say: “I am an abolitionist vegan activist who is also a welfarist, and so are many others.”
No, you’re not an abolitionist.
In the 1990s, many welfarists said they really wanted to achieve animal rights (which required abolition) but they supported welfare as a means to that end. I wrote a book in 1996 (Rain Without Thunder) in which I discussed this phenomenon, I called it “new welfarism.” I explained the theoretical and practical problems of that position. What you are articulating is *exactly* that position: you’re an abolitionist but support welfare. Abolition is a position that says that the means must be consistent with the end. You cannot simultaneously support abolition and welfare,either in some absolute way or as a supposed means to the end of abolition. You are articulating a new welfarist position. You either are not familiar with my work or you don’t agree with it but I have yet to see you make a single substantive argument against it.
You say: “I don’t hold any part of the ideology that you attribute to the welfarist movement.” But you say: “I am an abolitionist vegan activist who is also a welfarist.” So you’re a welfarist but you don’t embrace the welfarist ideology? Sorry, that makes absolutely no sense.
There is no divisiveness amongst abolitionists. There are abolitionists and there are new welfarists. They are two separate approaches to animal ethics.
Stevan Harnad: Hi Gary,
I know your position and I know your work and I admire and value it, as I do the work of all sincere, dedicated vegan abolitionist activists.
But yes, I cannot agree with you that one cannot be working toward complete abolition while also working for immediate welfare improvements along the way. I know you hypothesize that this entrenches and reinforces animal exploitation and the industries that thrive on it.
That is a hypothesis. It might be right, it might be wrong. I believe it is sometimes right but often wrong. I also cannot bring myself to not do whatever I can to lessen the current victims’ immediate suffering on the strength of a hypothesis. I might have been able to do it (for a while) if there were overwhelming evidence to support the hypothesis, and if abolition were around the corner, but neither of these is alas the case.
One is free, of course, to define “isms” in any way one wishes. You are working toward the total abolition of animal use by humans. So am I. I would say that by the ordinary rules of nominalizing verbs in English, that makes us both “abolitionists.” On the road to abolition, I am also working toward reducing ongoing animal suffering as much and as soon as possible, by any means possible. Knowing your compassion and motivation, I am absolutely certain you are too.
It seems reasonable to say that working to reduce animal suffering is working to increase animal welfare. But the path from a noun (welfare) to an ideologized hyper-noun, “welfarism,” is more arbitrary and subjective. And I think you have projected an ideology onto those who are trying to reduce current animal suffering on the path to total abolition, describing them as people who are delaying or deterring abolition, either inadvertently, or deliberately, for their own interests.
There do indeed exist many people who are deliberately or inadvertently delaying or deterring abolition for their own interests. Such people, either knowingly or unknowingly, really aren’t abolitionists.
But that simply does not cover all the people who say, truthfully, that they are abolitionists, and act accordingly, and who also say, truthfully, that they are “welfarists” as well, trying to reduce animal suffering along the way, and act accordingly.
Nor is there any reason to believe that formulating a hypothesis or attributing an ideology makes real people fit one’s hypothesis or one’s attribution as a matter of fact. That rather exceeds the definitional power of language.
I will be directing a Summer Institute on “The Other Minds Problem: Animal Sentience and Cognition” in Montreal in June 2018. The daytime sessions will be scientific ones, focussed on sentience and biological/psychological needs, species by species, from invertebrates to fish to birds to mammals to primates. The evening sessions will be about ethics and practical activism for immediately reducing and eventually abolishing animal suffering. I hope you can come and give a talk.
With best wishes,
Stevan
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On a long walk in Princeton many years ago I asked David Lewis whether the distinction between what’s necessary and what’s contingent might be just an epistemic (based only on what we do and don’t, can and can’t know), rather than an ontic one: The things we regard as necessary are the ones that are either provably necessary, on pain of formal contradiction with our premises, such as the fact that 29 is prime or that “p or q” implies p, or are thought to be “nomologically necessary,” based on current causal theory and evidence, such as that apples fall earthward rather than skyward because of gravity. The things we regard as contingent are just the ones that are not provably necessary, nor thought to be nomologically necessary..jpg)