Building a Sustainable Future for Animal Agriculture: An Environmental Virtue Ethic of Care Approach within the Philosophy of Technology

Abstract

Agricultural technologies are non-neutral and ethical challenges are posed by these technologies themselves. The technologies we use or endorse are embedded with values and norms and reflect the shape of our moral character. They can literally make us better or worse consumers and/or people. Looking back, when the world's developed nations welcomed and steadily embraced industrialization as the dominant paradigm for agriculture a half century or so ago, they inadvertently championed a philosophy of technology that promotes an insular human-centricism, despite its laudable intent to ensure food security and advance human flourishing. The dominant philosophy of technology has also seeded particular ethical consequences that plague the well-being of human beings, the planet, and farmed animals. After revisiting some fundamental questions regarding the complex ways in which technology as agent shapes our lives and choices and relegates food and farmed constituents into technological artifacts or commodities, I argue that we should accord an environmental virtue ethic of care-understood as caretaking-a central place in developing a more conscientious philosophy of technology that aims at sustainability, fairness, and humaneness in animal agriculture. While technology shapes society, it also is socially shaped and an environmental virtue ethic of care (EVEC) as an alternative design philosophy has the tools to help us take a much overdue inventory of ourselves and our relationships with the nonhuman world. It can help us to expose the ways in which technology hinders critical reflection of its capacity to alter communities and values, to come to terms with why we may be, in general, disengaged from critical ethical analysis of contemporary agriculture and to consider the moral shape and trajectory and the sustainability of our food production systems going into the future. I end by outlining particular virtues associated with

Robotic milking technologies and renegotiating situated ethical relationships on UK dairy farms

“…Importantly, the process of technologically framing the world tends to be instrumentalist, reducing the world to a set of resources and cutting us off from other relationships with it (Wolfe 2013). This clearly resonates with the point made at the start of this section concerning the objectification of livestock, and indeed Anthony (2012) argues that contemporary agricultural technological systems focus on productive efficiency above all, simultaneously 'disburdening' us from more affective or caring relationships with farmed animals. Although we can point to studies that suggest the persistence of more complex and affective relationships with farmed animals (e.g., Brandth 2006;Convery et al 2005;Holloway 2001;Wilkie 2010), it is doubtless the case that at a systemic level a technological framing that instrumentalizes animals pertains (Rollin 1995).…”

“…However, we differ from Anthony's position in that he allocates responsibility as "caretakers" for implementing an EVEC to "industry technocrats" (Anthony 2012) and to consumers who should demand that their food is produced more 'care-fully'. Farmers themselves are given the more marginal role of "caregivers," meting out care on behalf of consumers, policymakers, and business within particular farming situations.…”

“…Agricultural technologies are not ethically neutral, and new technologies pose new ethical problems because of how they intervene in and change existing relationships (Anthony 2012). In exploring the implications of AMS, we are thus particularly concerned with how the ethics of human-cow relations are contingent on the changing technological conditions of dairy farming.…”

Animals and Organisations: An Ethic of Care Framework

“…As an environmental ethic, the ethic of care highlights our connection to the natural world and the interdependent nature of living in holistic ecosystems (Anthony, 2012), embracing the "underlying picture of the earth as one body, and of ourselves as part of this body" (Manning, 1992, p. 84). Widely used approaches to environmental ethics, such as holism, often focus on evaluations of entire systems, rather than on the intrinsic worth of individual members of the system themselves.…”

Extending Social Theory to Farm Animals: Addressing Alienation in the Dairy Sector

“…Under capitalism, relationships changed to treat livestock animals as tools for production and as commodities themselves, prioritising exchange‐values over use‐values (Gunderson, forthcoming; Bobrow‐Strain ; Van Ausdal ; Anthony ). According to Dickens (, p. 62), ‘[m]odern capitalist societies bring not only people but animals into the circuit of money capital, treating them as inputs to a process of commodity production’.…”