Paul B. Thompson

Abstract   Critics of The Agrarian Vision: Sustainability and Environmental Ethics (Lexington: 2010, University Press of Kentucky) have difficulties with its commitment to agrarian philosophy, and have also suggested that the program described there needs more elaboration of how sustainability might be pursued, especially in its social dimensions. The book draws upon agrarian philosophy to argue that habit and material practice are an appropriate and vital focus of ethics. Attention to habit and material practice will counterbalance an overemphasis on intentions and outcomes in contemporary environmental philosophy. It is in this sense that agrarianism contributes to an ethic of sustainability by showing how contemporary food practices—the culture of the table—might contribute to an enabling sense of community solidarity. The book does not advocate a return to once vibrant agrarian traditions. Content Type Journal Article Category Articles Pages 1-10 DOI 10.1007/s10806-011-9329-z Authors Paul B. Thompson, WK Kellogg Professor of Agricultural, Food and Community Ethics, Department of Philosophy, Michigan State University, 503 South Kedzie Hall, East Lansing, MI 48824-1032, USA Journal Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics Online ISSN 1573-322X Print ISSN 1187-7863.

An analysis of social goals for agriculture presupposes an account of systematic interactions among economic, political, and ecological forces that influence the performance of agriculture in a given society. This account must identify functional performance criteria that lend themselves to interpretation as normative or ethical goals. Individuals who act within the system pursue personal goals. Although individual acts and decisions help satisfy functional performance criteria, individuals may never conceptualize or understand these criteria, and, hence, social goals for agriculture may not be intentionally sought or desired by any human being. The statement of social goals is not, therefore, reducible to statements about individual desires and preferences, and the validity of social goals does not depend upon deriving a social welfare function, nor upon measuring interpersonal utility.The paper examines a series of strategies for defining social goals for agriculture, beginning with the statement of goals offered by William Aiken in 1983. Aiken's view stresses individually based constraints upon action, but social goals cannot be adequately defined on this view. Successively more adequate approaches to the problem of social goals are examined with respect to production and efficiency, Jeffersonian democracy, and ecosystem goals of community and self-reliance. The role of family farms, and the change in farm structure is evaluated in light of this analysis for social goals.

Philosophical food ethics or deliberative inquiry into the moral norms for production, distribution and consumption of food is contrasted with food ethics as an international social movement aimed at reforming the global food system. The latter yields an activist orientation that can become embroiled in self-defeating impotency when the complexity and internal contradictions of the food system are more fully appreciated. However, recent work in intersectionality offers resources that are useful to both philosophical and activist food ethics. For activists, intersectionality provides a way to preserve and strengthen the meaningfulness of protest and resistance, even in the face of complexity and uncertain outcomes. For philosophers, intersectionality chastens the tendency to regard moral problems as inherently solvable, and provides a way use tensions inherent in food system reform as a source of ethical insight.

Paul Thompson’s excellent book, From Field to Fork: Food Ethics for Everyone, argues that contemporary food ethics persistently ignores the nature and actual impact of GMOs, Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, food aid to developing countries, and more. On Thompson’s view, such philosophical analyses must incorporate empirical knowledge. Additional strengths of Thompson’s book: its attention to quality-of-life issues, its openness to the concerns of the marginalized, and its emphasis on the interconnectedness of problems in food ethics. I raise one area of disagreement with Thompson: his treatment of GMOs is, I argue, insufficiently skeptical. I suggest a three-fold revision of the book’s treatment of the precautionary principle, and I levy an additional argument against GMOs, the Inductive Argument. Using the herbicide Roundup as a case study of the ways in which industry urges the use of technologies that have not been fully vetted or monitored, I argue that products originally seen as safe often turn out instead to be harmful to the environment and health. Significant inductive experience with similar cases gives people additional reason to be even more suspicious of GMOs than Thompson suggests.

After centuries of neglect, the ethics of food are back with a vengeance. Justice for food workers and small farmers has joined the rising tide of concern over the impact of industrial agriculture on food animals and the broader environment, all while a global epidemic of obesity-related diseases threatens to overwhelm modern health systems. An emerging worldwide social movement has turned to local and organic foods, and struggles to exploit widespread concern over the next wave of genetic engineering or nanotechnologies applied to food. Paul B. Thompson's book applies the rigor of philosophy to key topics in the first comprehensive study explore interconnections hidden deep within this welter of issues. Bringing to bear more than thirty years of experience working closely with farmers, agricultural researchers and food system activists, he explores the eclipse of food ethics during the rise of nutritional science, and examines the reasons for its sudden re-emergence in the era of diet-based disease. Thompson discusses social injustice in the food systems of developed economies and shows how we have missed the key insights for understanding food ethics in the developing world. His discussions of animal production and the environmental impact of agriculture break new ground where most philosophers would least expect it. By emphasizing the integration of these issues, Thompson not only brings a comprehensive philosophical approach to moral issues in the production, processing, distribution, and consumption of food -- he introduces a fresh way to think about practical ethics that will have implications in other areas of applied philosophy.

This paper was written to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the University of Nottingham’s Easter School on “Issues in Agricultural Bioethics,” organized by Ben Mepham in 1993. At that time, agricultural ethics was being envisioned as an interdisciplinary sub-discipline comparable to that of medical ethics. Agricultural ethicists would co-operate with other agricultural faculty to produce careful articulation, analysis and critique of norms and values being implicitly assumed by agricultural researchers, practitioners and policy makers. Roughly two factors have conspired to substantially limit the realization of that vision in the intervening 20 years. First, the institutional environment within agricultural universities was far less conducive to such an activity than medical schools. Second, while the rise of a food-oriented social movement might have provided new opportunities for food ethics, the social movement orientation has actually constrained the kind of philosophical work typically undertaken by bioethicists. The paper ends with a brief note calling for a renewal of the original vision.

The second edition of this extensive work is the definitive source on issues pertaining to the full range of topics in the important area of food and agricultural ethics. Altogether about 100 new entries appear in this new edition. The start of the 21st century has seen intensified debate, discussion, and criticism of food and agriculture. Scholars, activists, and citizens increasingly question the goals and ethical rationale behind production, distribution and consumption of food, and the use of crops for fuel and fiber. These wide-ranging debates encompass questions in human nutrition, animal rights, and the environmental impacts of agricultural production. The encyclopedia provides a detailed analysis of these issues and hundreds of other topics including the use of antibiotics in animal feedlots, the Green Revolution, organic farming, Islam and Food, and cannibalism.The Encyclopedia of Food and Agricultural Ethics, 2nd edition is an indispensable reference point for future research and writing on topics in agriculture, food, animal, and eating ethics.

Agricultural research and education ended 100 years of funding under the Hatch Act with a decade of unprecedented criticism of goals and outcomes. This paper examines the way that planners can accommodate some of these criticisms within a framework for understanding the ethical and social goals of agriculture that is consistent with traditional practice. The paper goes on to state that some criticisms are so fundamental that they cannot be readily incorporated into this framework. They must be regarded as a challenge, both politically and intellectually, to longstanding practices within academic institutions devoted to agriculture

John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel can be given a reading that links events and the mentality of characters to mainstream schools of liberal and neo-liberal political theory: libertarianism, egalitarianism, and utilitarianism. Each of these schools is sketched in outline and applied to topics in rural political culture. While it is likely that Steinbeck himself would have identified with an egalitarian or utilitarian view, he resists the temptation to deny his Okie characters an authentic voice that matches none of these schools so well as it articulates an agrarian mentality once associated with Thomas Jefferson and today articulated by Wendell Berry. This reading of The Grapes of Wrath, in turn, can be interpreted as both a rebuke to contemporary social theorists who continue to impose an ill-fitting left-right dichotomy on working class political culture in rural America and as a roadmap suggesting ways that philosophy and rural sociology might engage one another more directly and productively with respect to contemporary rural development and environmental quality issues

Information about sustainability in the sense of resource sufficiency is important for planning, but not in a way that adds anything to the traditional statement of utilitarian philosophy. The “paradox of sustainability” arises because substantive, research-based approaches to sustainability may be too complex to effectively motivate appropriate social responses, especially in a culture where science is presumed to be “value free.” Assessing sustainability in such terms presumes that the farmer is outside the system—not outside in the sense that the farmer's actions have no impact on the system, but in the sense that this way of understanding sustainability presumes that there will always be a farmer present to manage inputs.

Though the term “commodification” is used broadly, a theory of the processes by which goods become exchangeable and in fact objects of monetized exchange reveals a key site for technological politics. Commodities are goods that are alienable, somewhat rival, generally with low exclusion costs, and that are often consumed in use. Technological advances can affect all of these traits for certain goods, effectively bringing about a process of commodification by technological means. However, in order to function with specific contexts, technologies are designed and manufactured according to technical standards, standards that in turn take on features of what David Grewal ( 2008 ) has called “network power.” As such, standard setting processes become the potential locus for political argument over the legitimacy of a commodification process. Theorists hoping to develop more democratic theories of technological governance should thus recognize the significance of standards and the role they play in either promoting or controlling social relations organized according to the norms of monetized exchange.

The first European Congress on Agriculturaland Food Ethics was held at Wageningen University andResearch Center (WUR), Wageningen, The Netherlands, March 4–6, 1999. This was the inaugural conference forthe newly forming European Society for Agricultural andFood Ethics – EUR-SAFE – and around two hundredpeople from across Europe (and a handful of NorthAmericans) participated. Following theCongress/conference, a small (16 people), two-dayworkshop funded in part by the US National ScienceFoundation focused on similarities and differencesbetween the US and the EU regarding publicdiscourse/debate on food biotechnology. A briefoverview of the Congress and the follow-up workshopsuggests what lessons AFHVS and ASFS might learn fromEuropean experience of agricultural and food ethics.

The role of Amartya Sen's early work on famine notwithstanding, food security is generally seen as but one capability among many for scholars writing in development ethics. The early literature on the ethics of hunger is summarized to show how Sen's Poverty and Famines was written in response to debates of past decades, and a brief discussion of food security as a capability follows. However, Sen's characterization of smallholder food security also supports the development of agency in both a political and an economic sense. Economic agency is discussed and tied to longstanding literatures on the moral significance of farming within political economy. Finally, while the newly emergent literature on food sovereignty includes many themes, it is shown to be re-articulating arguments that stress smallholder's economic agency as a development goal. This pattern of argument thus provides a way to reconcile at least some of the claims being advanced under the banner of food sovereignty with the human development..

Although cloning may eventually become an important technology for livestock production, four ethical issues must be addressed before the practice becomes widespread. First, researchers must establish that the procedure is not detrimental to the health or well-being of affected animals. Second, animal research institutions should evaluate the net social benefits to livestock producers by weighing the benefits to producers against the opportunity cost of research capacity lost to biomedical projects. Third, scientists should consider the indirect effects of cloning research on the larger ethical issues surrounding human cloning. Finally, the market structure for products of cloned animals should protect individual choice, and should recognize that many individuals find the prospect of cloning (or consuming cloned animals) repugnant. Analysis of these four issues is complicated by spurious arguments alleging that cloning will have a negative impact on environment and genetic diversity.

Critically analyzes and revitalizes agrarian philosophy by tracing its evolution. Today, most historians, philosophers, political theorists, and scholars of rural America take a dim view of the agrarian ideal that farmers and farming occupy a special moral and political status in society. Agrarian rhetoric is generally seen as special pleading on the part of farmers seeking protection from labor reform and environmental regulation while continuing to receive direct payments and subsidies from the public till. Agrarianism should not be viewed as a set of immutable claims about farming and political order, but as a tradition of moral and political philosophy that has evolved and deepened over the centuries. Agrarian naturalism--the belief that culture and conduct are conditioned by nature because they are of a piece with nature--becomes pragmatic naturalism, giving way to a new set of puzzles about how we are to understand the rural landscape and our responsibilities for its use. The agrarian idea that personality and sociability are integrated with the material transformation of the landscape can serve as the basis for a new, pragmatically grounded ethic of natural resources and rural development. The essays in this volume critically analyze and revitalize agrarian philosophy by tracing its evolution in the classical American philosophy of key figures such as Franklin, Jefferson, Emerson, Thoreau, Dewey, and Royce. Three chapters address the belief that farming peoples develop moral virtue and a taste for democracy as it evolved in the American context, and four examine how a reconstitution of agrarian themes might invigorate our nation's thinking on environment, food, and rural development policy. The Agrarian Roots of Pragmatism will be of broad interest to scholars of American philosophy, rural history, history of ideas, geography, and agricultural or natural resource policy.