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7 Getting Pragmatic about Farm Animal Welfare Paul B. Thompson Philosophical pragmatism presents itself as an alternative to those philosophical schools of thought that descended from the empiricist-rationalist and materialistidealist debates of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. These schools share a commitment to “foundational” strategies that seek to establish (if only by assumption) a small set of basic methodological and metaphysical propositions, then to build the edi¤ce of knowledge and human practice upon them. In ethics, the most likely foundational strategies have been utilitarianism, on the one hand, or some form of rights theory, on the other. Utilitarianism has a fairly coherent history in the writings of Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and Henry Sidgwick, each of whom saw ethics as a project of choosing the course of action that results in an optimal distribution of well-being (pleasure or pain, satisfaction or suffering) for all affected parties. Rights theory has a more complex line of descent that includes natural rights theorists such as Hugo Grotius and John Locke as well as Immanuel Kant’s analysis of duty and autonomy . Here the philosophical task is to identify constraints that must not be violated when framing one’s morally permissible choices. Animal ethics—the philosophical study of human duties to and responsibility for nonhuman animals—has a long history, but few would deny that it took a dramatic turn in the 1970s and 1980s largely as a result of work that extends the foundational strategies of utilitarianism and of neo-Kantian rights theory. Peter Singer has become recognized as the prototypical example of the former approach , and Tom Regan of the latter. In what sense is there a pragmatic response to Singer and Regan? While all the chapters in this volume represent different ways of answering this question, my strategy will be to draw on pragmatism’s unrelenting attentiveness to real problems. The result is not so much an alternative to speci¤c doctrines that utilitarians or rights theorists might propose as it is an alternative way of understanding the philosophical agenda for animal ethics. Two Kinds of Animal Ethics In his 1998 David Wood-Gush Memorial Lecture, David Fraser describes two kinds of animal ethics, arguing that one is helpful for his research, while the other is not. Fraser is a Canadian animal researcher who has long conducted behavioral studies on livestock species (primarily pigs) in an effort to determine how they fare in various agricultural production settings. The aim of his work is to ¤nd a basis for understanding some of the elements of animal welfare that have proved most resistant to measurement. Basic veterinary and physiological indicators of animal health have been available for many years. These include not only rates of morbidity and mortality of animals but also nutritionally oriented criteria such as growth rates, reproductive success rates, and body mass measurements. Optimizing such measures contributed signi¤cantly to the development of intensive, con¤ned animal feeding operations (CAFOs) during the past three decades. Such facilities allowed farmers greater control over the feed and environmental conditions in which their animals live, and have made record keeping and administration of veterinary care more costeffective . While these changes have (mostly) led to improvements in the survival of farm animals—clearly an indicator relevant to their welfare—the CAFO offers livestock signi¤cantly altered opportunities for movement, socialization, and the performance of typical behaviors (such as nesting), as well as signi¤cantly different sensory stimulation, when compared to traditional extensive animal production environments (i.e., barnyards and pasture and range settings ). Fraser has been attempting to understand the signi¤cance of these differences for animal welfare. Fraser’s task is a blend of science and ethics. The science part consists in developing methods of observation, measurement, and controlled experiment that make possible comparisons between production systems with respect to speci¤c aspects of animal behavior.Thus Fraser’s work enables one to document aversive behaviors (such as fear) to determine how much effort an animal will expend in order to attain or avoid a given state, or to ¤nd out which environment animals will tend to prefer when given the opportunity to select from two or more options. The ethics part comes ¤rst in deciding which aspects of animal behavior to measure. Attributing evaluative signi¤cance to these observations requires, for example, the judgment that aversive behavior is a bad thing. Second , some method must be found of weighing the value that is associated with isolated experiences...

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