Jana Jacobs

Even though many consumers are worried about harmful practices against farmed nonhuman animals, they still want to consume meat. This is known as the meat paradox and causes consumers to experience cognitive dissonance. In order to alleviate this tension they apply coping strategies to fit their belief that it is justifiable to harm animals for their meat consumption. These coping strategies are part of what we call the carnist bias, defined as: the beliefs and associated attitudes in favour of the interest and desire of humans to consume animal-sourced foods over the interest and desire of farmed nonhuman animals not to be harmed. The carnist bias allows consumers to suppress their empathy and moral virtue of compassion for farmed animals while at the same time maintaining a positive image of themselves as morally good persons. We suggest that an intervention including Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) could (1) raise awareness on and challenge the carnist bias through interpretation and critical thinking, (2) motivate empathy for farmed animals by eliciting cognitive and emotional responses, and (3) initiate reflection on the insights gained during the VTS-sessions in order to support participants in setting implementation intentions for alternative and feasible behaviours to current meat consumption. In this way the intervention could be a tool to support consumers in making an informed moral decision on whether their current meat consumption still aligns with their own (renewed) moral virtue of compassion.

This paper argues that in modern biotechnology, naturalness as an argument contributed to a stalemate in public debate about innovative technologies. Naturalness in this is often placed opposite to human disruption. It also often serves as a label that shapes moral acceptance or rejection of agricultural innovative technologies. The cause of this lies in the use of nature as a closed, static reference to naturalness, while in fact ‘‘nature’’ is an open and dynamic concept with many different meanings. We propose an approach for a dynamic framework that permits an integrative use of naturalness in debate, by connecting three sorts of meaning that return regularly in the arguments brought forward in debate; cultural, technological, and ecological. We present these as aspects of nature that are always present in the argument of naturalness. The approach proposes a dynamic relation between these aspects, formed by gradients of naturalness, which in turn are related to ethical concerns. In this way we come to an overview that makes it possible to give individual arguments a relative place and that does justice to the temporality of the concept of nature and the underlying ethical concerns stakeholders have in respect to innovation in agriculture