In Michael Pollan’s “An Animal’s Place” Pollan provides an argument on whether or not Americans should consume animals, and specifically, if the fashion in which animals are farmed and slaughtered respects their capacity to suffer. Pollan illustrates his personal dilemma particularly when he ironically points his debate on whether or not to eat meat began while he Nov 10, · An Animal’s Place By Michael Pollan The New York Times Magazine, November 10, The first time I opened Peter Singer’s “Animal Liberation,” I was dining alone at the Palm, trying to enjoy a rib-eye steak cooked medium-rare. If this sounds like a good recipe for cognitive dissonance (if not indigestion), that was sort of the blogger.comted Reading Time: 8 mins Thesis: In his article “An Animal’s Place”, Michael Pollan deals with the rights of the animals and examines the various aspects of the arguments made by the supporters of animal liberation. Section 1: Introducing the concept of animal liberation
An Animal’s Place | Michael Pollan
If this sounds like a good recipe for cognitive dissonance if not indigestionthat was sort of the idea. Singer and the swelling ranks of his followers ask us to imagine a future in which people will look back on my meal, and this steakhouse, as relics an animal place michael pollan thesis an equally backward age.
The recent civil rights past was prologue, as one liberation movement followed on the heels of another. That animal liberation is the logical next step in the forward march of moral progress is no longer the fringe idea it was back in A growing and increasingly influential movement of philosophers, ethicists, law professors and activists are an animal place michael pollan thesis that the great moral struggle of our time will be for the rights of animals. So far the movement has scored some of its biggest victories in Europe.
The farming of animals for fur was recently banned in England. Thirty-seven states have recently passed laws making some forms of animal cruelty a crime, an animal place michael pollan thesis, 21 of them by ballot initiative, an animal place michael pollan thesis. meat industry slaughters animals. Agribusiness and the cosmetics and apparel industries are all an animal place michael pollan thesis to defuse mounting public concerns over animal welfare.
Once thought of as a left-wing concern, an animal place michael pollan thesis, the movement now cuts across ideological lines. And once outlandish ideas are finding their way into mainstream opinion. A recent Zogby poll found that 51 percent of Americans believe that primates are entitled to the same rights as human children. What is going on here? A certain amount of cultural confusion, for one thing. For at the same time many people seem eager to extend the circle of our moral consideration to animals, in our factory farms and laboratories we are inflicting more suffering on more animals than at any time in history.
One by one, science is dismantling our claims to uniqueness as a species, discovering that such things as culture, tool making, language and even possibly self-consciousness are not the exclusive domain of Homo sapiens. Yet most of the animals we kill lead lives organized very much in the spirit of Descartes, who famously claimed that animals were mere machines, incapable of thought or feeling.
Half the dogs in America will receive Christmas an animal place michael pollan thesis this year, yet few of us pause to consider the miserable life of the pig—an animal easily as intelligent as a dog—that becomes the Christmas ham. We tolerate this disconnect because the life of the pig has moved out of view.
Except for our pets, real animals—animals living and dying—no longer figure in our everyday lives. Meat comes from the grocery store, where it is cut and packaged to look as little like parts of animals as possible.
This is pretty much where we live now, with respect to animals, and it is a space in which the Peter Singers and Frank Perdues of the world can evidently thrive equally well. That eye contact, always slightly uncanny, had provided a vivid daily reminder that animals were at once crucially like and unlike us; in their eyes we glimpsed something unmistakably familiar pain, fear, tenderness and something irretrievably alien.
Upon this paradox people built a relationship in which they felt they could an animal place michael pollan thesis honor and eat animals without looking away. But that accommodation has pretty much broken down; nowadays, it seems, we either look away or become vegetarians. For my own part, neither option seemed especially appetizing. Because Singer is so skilled in argument, for many readers it is easier to change.
Take the premise of equality, which most people readily accept. Yet what do we really mean by it? People are not, as a matter of fact, equal at all—some are smarter than others, better looking, more gifted.
But fewer have taken the next logical step. But humans differ from animals in morally significant ways. Equal consideration of interests is not the same as equal treatment, he points out: children have an interest in being educated; pigs, in rooting around in the dirt. But where their interests are the same, the principle of equality demands they receive the same consideration. And the one all-important interest that we share with pigs, as with all sentient creatures, is an interest in avoiding pain.
Here Singer quotes a famous passage from Jeremy Bentham, the 18th-century utilitarian philosopher, that is the wellspring of the animal rights movement. Bentham was an animal place michael pollan thesis insoon after the French colonies freed black slaves, granting them fundamental rights.
nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer? for short. It goes like this: there are humans—infants, the severely retarded, the demented—whose mental function cannot match that of a chimpanzee. Even though these people cannot reciprocate our moral attentions, we nevertheless include them in the circle of our moral consideration. So on what basis do we exclude the chimpanzee? But the differences between blacks and whites are trivial compared with the differences between my son and a chimp.
Singer counters by asking us to imagine a hypothetical society that discriminates against people on the basis of something nontrivial—say, intelligence, an animal place michael pollan thesis. If that scheme offends our sense of equality, then why is the fact that animals lack certain human characteristics any more just as a basis for discrimination?
Either we do not owe any justice to the severely retarded, an animal place michael pollan thesis, he concludes, or we do owe it to animals with higher capabilities. This is where I put down my fork. For the time being, I decided to plead guilty as charged. I finished my steak. But Singer had planted a troubling notion, and in the days afterward, it grew and grew, watered by the other animal rights thinkers I began reading: the philosophers Tom Regan and James Rachels; the legal theorist Steven M.
Wise; the writers Joy Williams and Matthew Scully. Will history someday judge us as harshly as it judges the Germans who went about their ordinary lives in the shadow of Treblinka? Precisely that question was recently posed by J. Coetzee, the South African novelist, in a lecture delivered at Princeton; he answered it in the affirmative. Yet Singer and his allies managed to trump almost all my objections.
My first line of defense was obvious. Animals kill one another all the time. Why treat animals more ethically than they treat one another? Murder and rape are natural, too. Though if my cat, Otis, is any guide, animals sometimes kill for sheer pleasure. This suggests another defense. If all the world were Jewish, there would be no pigs at all. Animals on factory farms have never known any an animal place michael pollan thesis life.
Sounds good, and yet all the animal people are asking me to do is to stop eating meat and wearing animal furs and hides. Right here is where you run smack into the A.
And all of us have been, and will probably once again be, marginal cases ourselves. A utilitarian like Singer would agree, however, that the feelings of relatives do count for something. Yet the principle of equal consideration of interests demands that, given the choice between performing a painful medical experiment on a severely retarded orphan and on a normal ape, we must sacrifice the child.
Because the ape has a greater capacity for pain. Here in a nutshell is the problem with the A. Giving up our speciesism will bring us to a moral cliff from which an animal place michael pollan thesis may not be prepared to jump, even when logic is pushing us. Too bad; it would be so much easier! In everyday life, the choice is not between babies and chimps but between the pork and the tofu, an animal place michael pollan thesis. And if we do owe them moral consideration, how can we justify eating them?
This is why killing animals for meat and clothing poses the most difficult animal rights challenge. In the case of animal testing, all but the most radical animal rightists are willing to balance the human benefit against the cost to the animals.
So the argument over animal testing is really in the details: is this particular procedure or test really necessary to save human lives? But if humans no longer need to eat meat or wear skins, then what exactly are we putting on the human side of the scale to outweigh the interests of the animal? I suspect that this is finally why the animal people managed to throw me on the defensive.
Whether our interest in eating animals outweighs their interest in not being eaten assuming for the moment that is their interest turns on the vexed question of animal suffering. Vexed, because it is impossible to know what really goes on in the mind of a cow or a pig or even an ape. Can we say that about animals? Yes and no. The general consensus among scientists and philosophers is that when it comes to pain, the higher animals are wired much like we are for the same evolutionary reasons, so we should take the writhings of the kicked dog at face value.
Otherwise, why would cosmetics testers drip chemicals into the eyes of rabbits to see if they sting? Why would researchers study head trauma by traumatizing chimpanzee heads? That said, it can be argued that human pain differs from animal pain by an order of magnitude, an animal place michael pollan thesis. This qualitative difference is largely the result of our possession of language and, by virtue of language, an animal place michael pollan thesis, an ability to have thoughts about thoughts and to imagine alternatives to our current reality.
The philosopher Daniel C. Dennett suggests that we would do well to draw a distinction between pain, which a great many animals experience, and suffering, which depends on a degree of self-consciousness only a few animals appear to command. Suffering in this view is not just lots of pain but pain intensified by human emotions like loss, sadness, worry, regret, self-pity, shame, humiliation and dread.
Consider castration. No one would deny the procedure is painful to animals, yet animals appear to get over it in a way humans do not. Surely the suffering of a man able to comprehend the full implications of castration, to anticipate the event and contemplate its aftermath, represents an agony of another order. By the same token, however, language and all that comes with it can also make certain kinds of pain more bearable. As humans contemplating the pain and suffering of animals, we do need to guard against projecting on to them what the same experience would feel like to us.
If we find suffering, we will recognize it without difficulty.
How to Change Your Mind - Michael Pollan - Talks at Google
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In Michael Pollan’s “An Animal’s Place” Pollan provides an argument on whether or not Americans should consume animals, and specifically, if the fashion in which animals are farmed and slaughtered respects their capacity to suffer. Pollan illustrates his personal dilemma particularly when he ironically points his debate on whether or not to eat meat began while he An Animal Place Michael Pollan Thesis, Paragraph Relationships In Academic Essay, Resume Writing Job Description, Beautiful Business Plan Example Order Now I did not have experience with any other writing companies, but this one blew my mind/10() Nov 10, · An Animal’s Place By Michael Pollan The New York Times Magazine, November 10, The first time I opened Peter Singer’s “Animal Liberation,” I was dining alone at the Palm, trying to enjoy a rib-eye steak cooked medium-rare. If this sounds like a good recipe for cognitive dissonance (if not indigestion), that was sort of the blogger.comted Reading Time: 8 mins
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