Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times by Alexis Shotwell

Author:Alexis Shotwell [Shotwell, Alexis]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781452953045
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
Published: 2016-12-05T23:00:00+00:00

Are the Ethics of Embodiment Individual?

In this section, I argue that theorists on the ethics of embodiment extend a focus on individual behaviors and individual responses to their thinking about systems. I will for the most part focus on eating. There is a great deal of philosophical and popular material on the question of whether one ought to refrain from or pursue eating meat. Because meat-eating stands for and crystallizes a wide range of other ethical issues involved in food production and consumption, I will focus on it here. Notice, though, that many of the ethical questions put down to meat-eating are broader: ought we minimize or refrain from the use of fossil fuels to transport things (like food) long distances? Ought we care about the conditions under which sentient beings labor and die for our pleasure or benefit? What weight should our pleasure take in relation to other beings’ discomfort or pain? Who counts as a being for the purposes of assessing suffering? Is suffering always bad? Frequently questions about eating practices do not limit themselves to easily assessed ethical areas, and this is one of the virtues of centering food and eating in inquiries about the relations among individuals and systems.

Ethical vegetarians, vegans, locavores, and people who believe that it is good for humans to kill and eat animals share alike an orientation toward how individual people enact ethical assessments of their need for nourishment. This is not to say that writers from all orientations mistake the ethical situation we’re in; thinkers who come to vastly different conclusions about how and what to eat can agree that in eating we’re engaging with a vast and complex system. Through engaging with food systems, theorists worth their salt know that we traverse vast scales—from microorganisms up to the stratosphere and down to the bottom of the ocean. It is striking, then, that so many thinkers answer the question “How should I eat” with an answer that centers on individual food choices. Even Lierre Keith, author of an antivegetarian call to arms, who emphasizes repeatedly the need to understand eating as a system, and as a system within which we are never free from death, devotes her energies toward convincing vegans and vegetarians to change their individual eating practices on the way to destroying agriculture (Keith 2009). (It is bracing to see that Keith accords so much power to the between 1 percent and 4 percent of the North American eating public she seems to address—current vegetarians and vegans.)

Sherwin’s critique of ethical individualism is highlighted in thinking about food and eating because while it is more obvious than in some situations treated by traditional bioethics that no eating choice is truly individual, eating still feels personal, intimate, and our own. More interesting is the fact that discussions of the ethics of food frequently appeal to the very global quandaries we face collectively. Appeals for people to go vegetarian, for example, argue that meat production uses more land, more water, more resources

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