MULTIFUNCTIONALITY
AND ETHICS ARE BOTH UNAVOIDABLE
Purpose
The purpose of this article is to
help all thoughtful agriculturalists, but especially researchers, feel
comfortable about the use of ethics, to the extent of even using it using it
themselves, in handling the multiple and often conflicting demands, the multifunctionality, which portions of the public are
pressing upon agriculture. There is no question that for three or four decades
pressures have been brought to bear upon farming and those who serve it in any
capacity to widen the list of tasks to which agriculture should be devoted. And
one tool sometimes used to press those demands is an appeal to ethics. This
appeal can appear to suggest that agriculturalists have been ethically
negligent. Every agricultural ethicist (all dozen or so) knows by experience
how poorly received that suggestion is.
Agriculture is a vocation or profession which prides itself on the
unquestionable value, even nobility, of its work. And without the help of any
academic ethicist, they know that it is ethical to work energetically in the
pursuit of things of great value to mankind. One readily grants that human
medicine needs some sophisticated ethical reasoning. The simplicity of healing
has long been lost with the realization that too much medical attention is
almost as bad as too little and that HMOs have conflicting goals. And a
confusing “multifunctionality” has been pressed on
medical science as it is asked for cures for things that aren’t diseases, help with eternal youth, good looks, good
shape without exercise, and better offspring than natural, and finally help
with killing the tired of life and the untried of life. And that business and
commerce needs ethical re-examination no one doubts. But agriculture? Given the
obvious and urgent natural value of food, fiber and forest products, if an
academic ethicist so much as clears his or her throat while reviewing the basic
business of farming and its allied technology and science, the inferred hint of
ethical deficiency in the agricultural enterprise causes immediate bristling.
The present author sometimes feels
that a suitable answer to the ethical confusions which surround medicine these
days would be to say. “Don’t take on the new multifunctionality,
especially the killing. The value of life and the trust needed to employ its
often distressing tools conflict with any permission to kill.”
But for agriculture? Is it not abundantly clear and simple that
its overarching value and purpose is to grow things for human use? Who needs
ethics to complicate that simplicity? Who needs an ethics concocted by a
profession, philosophy, decorated with practitioners not especially known for
preaching any really self-recommending ethics, let alone practicing them? [1]
Which brings me to three
sub-purposes in this essay, to offer answers to whether agriculture should be
multifunctional and how/when the currently disputatious multifunctionality
came into being and finally why did a new discipline of agricultural ethics get
selected to organize if not settle the disputes.
Contemporary neo-classical agricultural economists are
exasperated by the so-called Jeffersonian
ideal, as if it were an ideal farm, overlooking that Jefferson imagined
that a principal value of such farms was to underpin an ideal democracy with
hard-working independently minded and independently supported citizens who
would more easily avoid the vices, civic and personal, of an urban laboring
class. In other words, agriculture’s function was dual: to produce solid
citizens as well as food. That
·
A theme will
emerge from this essay that “multifunctional” value conflicts within
agriculture will arise largely out of the means used for agricultural production
and not solely out of the ends. And from this we can expect that any mature
agricultural ethics will have to offer principles which can guide the choice of means and the policies surrounding alternative ways of
farming.
Although the name “agricultural ethics” might wait
two centuries, enough ethically complex good and bad multifunctionalities
were born the day our nation’s leaders saw farming as fit topic for deliberate
policy. John Adams on his debt-free but not yet large farm at
The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to
every view the palpable truth , that the mass of mankind has not been born with
saddles on their backs, nor a favored few, booted and spurred, ready to ride
them legitimately by the grace of God. These are the grounds of hope for
others…. (McCullough, 2001, 645),
[2]
As
a lesson in farm economics, the freeing of
As contemporary Midwestern farmers
are further displaced by huge pork and poultry operations, many of them are
aware that their labor is valued at the price of the minimum wage immigrant
worker without health benefits or union protection. Having tax payers pick up
the health costs of these workers is one “efficiency” of such operations. Animal welfare, environmental and community
survival advocates wonder whether agricultural economists have given an honest
accounting of other such “efficiencies.” Adams and Jefferson would wonder too.
Is a socially just farm sector one of agriculture’s functions?
More directly production related
issues arose early both in Adam’s
Soil erosion concerns and the value to be
protected, soil conservation, arose early with terraces appearing in Virginia
in the early 1800’s By 1899 the USDA began issuing reports on soil erosion.(Trimble,
1985,163)[6]
There is a logic to the birth of new functions in agriculture: It is only when a value is being destroyed
that a sense of moral urgency to act in defense of the value arises. Many
values are implicit and only need to be actively cultivated when their good is
positively threatened. So when “dust-bowl”
farm soil coated the shiny black cars of congressmen in
Nevertheless the tensions between soil scientists
and production scientists are historic. It is not entirely an accident that in
many agriculture schools early soil scientists, who originally, due to Justus Liebig[8],
referred to themselves as chemists, were housed with their laboratories among
the non-ag science faculty.
·
A second
theme emerges from this history: Multiple values with the multiple functions
they command always have a potential for conflict, no matter how deeply
connected and interdependent they are.
Following the logic of threats to implicit values
begetting new explicit functions, agriculturalists were well aware of the
nearly primitive conditions of rural life and its frequent grinding poverty.
The 1887 amendments to the Hatch Act explicitly allowed research into the
social aspect of agriculture beyond its concern for plant and animal
production.(Pinkett, 1984, 367)[9]
But it was a largely non-rural and religiously motivated compassionate Country
Life movement which concerned itself with the arduous character of farm and
rural life at the turn of the century.(Kirkendall,
1987, 86) [10]
Theodore Roosevelt was inspired by this movement to establish the County Life
Commission in August of 1908. It lacked the time and the courage to look at the
peonage system in the South as suggested by W.E. B. DuBois,(Pinkett, 1984, 356) [11]
but nevertheless its report at the end of January of the following year was, in
the words of Clayton Ellsworth, the “first recognition by a federal agency that
the production of more excellent citizens on the farm was at least as important
as the production of more, bigger and better hogs and cotton, and that the
current emphasis upon more scientific production would not solve a host of farm
problems.”(Ellsworth, 1960, 156 and Pinkett, ibid.) [12]
Of course what the do-gooders saw was not an
absence of research but a starkly distressing rural life only short buggy rides
from their homes where no indoor plumbing or electric lights and very little
money and health care were the rule. What motivated them was also what inspired
many of the founders of the Bureau of Agricultural Economics(BAE) in the USDA,
a mix of genuine religious motivation to alleviate human suffering with a
social Darwinist view that only improved conditions of rural life and farming
could keep the best racial and cultural types on the land.(McDean,
1983,71 and 1984, 392)[13]
Henry C. Taylor took over the Office of Farm Management in April of 1919 and by
1922 had formed the new BAE, a process which involved replacing all the old
agronomists with top flight academic economists.(McDean,
1983, 73). It was not just new tools and new credentials which were sought. It
was a much more vigorous and embracing social/economic agenda, an agenda we
might find offensive today in its goal recasting rural
The rural crises brought on by falling farm prices
in the 1920’s and by the depression made this concern for farm life a permanent
fixture and popular with legislators who still had significant farm
populations. The Purnell Act of 1925 explicitly
included research to improve farm homes and rural life. Farm population
actually grew from 1930 to 1933, but then a steady decline set in. The New Deal’s
Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) device of production controls as well as the
conservation set-asides of the Soil Conservation Service were both aimed at
preserving family farms. Other agencies, such as the Resettlement
Administration and the Farm Security Administration used other devices to help
farmers with too little land or who did
not own their land to improve their lot and stay on the land.
But then, perhaps because farm population became a
smaller proportion of the
So where did agricultural ethics come from amid
all this? It was not yet ready to appear. There is no question but that
agricultural economics ought to have functioned as the “bridging” discipline in
agriculture among its unavoidable
multiple functions and disciplines. It alone possessed the tools, the
traditions and motivations to arbitrate conflicts and seek outcomes for the
human good. It was too obvious to everyone that over-production was a constant
threat, exacerbated by modernization. And agricultural economics ought to have
led the way to designing policies which could protect the rural sector, ease
the transition to modernity, preserve what could survive in the agrarian ideal
and resist policies which gave artificial “pecuniary efficiency” (efficiencies
solely on monetary/tax policies and not on any actual farming resource
efficiency) to already huge farm operations. The harm to smaller farmers,
especially black farmers was clear.(Brown, 1986, 112-119)[14]
The shift toward larger and fewer farms became dramatic and received an
antiseptic name: “the structural problem.” Of the two values (goals) which
But things
were happening which would soon require more than that. One of them was the
dramatic drop in farm population to around 4% of the nation in the 1970’s down
from 23% in 1940. The need for farm kids to stay on the farm dropped with
mechanization and so did the need for these kids to go to agricultural schools.
But city kids were getting interested in agriculture in the 60’s and 70’s
partly because some horrendous famines were occurring world-wide, which along
with a devout Hubert Humphrey, they hoped American agriculture could cure. The schools were happy to accept them.
Meanwhile, in 1962, Rachel Carson had begun serializing in The New Yorker what was to become Silent Spring. This famous
attack on the side effects of modern agriculture in its use of pesticides and
herbicides was not well received by agricultural academia, which tried to
suppress essentially the same information by one of its own wildlife
biologists, Robert L. Rudd in his Pesticides and the Living Landscape.(1964)
[15] Carson’s first installment made some insightful administrative reader in
the University of California nervous who then called the university’s Science Guide and instructed its editor
to omit further references to Carson’s series. But Rudd’s work finally was
published by the
And so did some farmers, who found the costs of
pesticides and herbicides skyrocketting. There must
be some way of farming which can reduce those costs, and since production is
not their economic goal, but rather net income, some reduction in yield is
bearable. Pressure from legislatures had to be brought to bear on some ag
schools to find ways to reduce toxic chemical applications through a more
scientifically informed approach which
received the name “integrated pest management” (IPM). Early IPM programs were
no more easily accepted than soil science was before and constant accusations
of the work as being “soft science” (a earlier, less frantic form of “pseudo-science” attacks today) were heard.
Environmental values, like all values, might as
well not exist if they do not have a strong constituency and in short order the
nature lovers were joined by consumers as EPA mandated animal feeding tests of
popular biocides showed considerable chronic as well as acute toxicity for
vertebrates. The EPA set up the Office of Pesticide Programs (OPP) in 1970 to oversee
the safety evaluation of agricultural
chemicals. The short story is most of
the chemicals are not safe, they are toxic and therefore risky to use, to have
in the environment or on our food. So, as the National Research Council (NRC)
summary, Regulating Pesticides (NRC,
1980) puts it, the issue is one of weighing those risks against the benefits.
Economists, at the time, were drafting some rather unconvincing formats for risk/benefit analysis and
evaluation. To be fair, it is hard to imagine how any format would have been
workable even if a convincing one were
found. As the NRC described the issue: “The benefits are largely, but not
entirely, an increase in the availability of foods and natural fibers and a reduction
in the amounts of resources needed to produce them. … The benefits, for the
most part, are the monetary equivalent
of economic resources.” These
benefits are to be weighed against the
risks of pesticides which include “increases in [human] mortality and morbidity
and impairment of environmental vitality and amenities of all kinds.” Wisely this NRC report recognized that this
would not really be an “economic” calculation, as it goes on to say, “[T]he
risks concern depends partly on the [EPA] Administrator’s personal scale of
values and partly on his or her perception of the values held by the society in
whose behalf he or she acts. That is to
say, it is partly a moral and partly a political judgment.” [Emphasis
added.](NRC, 1980, 3) More than one reader would summarize this as: “They are
asking us to accept small amounts of poison in our foods to save themselves
production costs.” And to admit to such thoughts is to be identified as an
“activist.”
Without needing any ethicist to point it out,
agriculturalists always knew that their moral, i.e. ethical, responsibility in their vocation was the
production of healthy (nutritious and not poisonous) food, in the same way that
doctors knew they should not cause sickness in curing. But now, like doctors who
became convinced, after Semmelweis and Lister, that clean looking hands could carry deadly
infection and needed careful washing between each patient, agriculturalists now had a new explicit value to pursue: food
cleanliness. But unlike medicine’s decision to avoid any and all known sources
of infection danger, agriculture was allowed a different standard which quickly
dropped any effort to measure benefits and simply tried to minimize risk by a
system of tolerated levels of toxicity on foods. The benefits, successful
suppression of pests, were assumed to both exist, and to be known by farmers.
Among the benefits was not seriously included any social need for increased
production, but only reduced production management/costs.
That the food-safety issue is a kind of
uncomfortable multifunctionality (which is not to
suggest that farmers don’t care whether their food is safe) is illustrated by
how the benefits to farmers were treated. EPA abandoned fairly early on any
mandatory reporting of the “efficacy”(whether it killed the pests)of compounds
, and when, in testing for safety under EPA contracts, university researchers
who discovered little or no efficacy found no ear at EPA. EPA was not
interested in benefits, which left economists nothing to calculate and
ethicists much to wonder about (NRC 1987, 32). Meanwhile the foundations for
organic agriculture had been laid.
As early as the mid sixties, even fairly
unsophisticated agricultural school adminstrators
became aware that the nobility of USAID task of agricultural development in
developing countries which their institutions were leading were often not
justified by the motto “Teach a man how to fish and you alleviate his hunger
for life.” Too often it was “Lend a man a lot of money to buy a huge net and soon
he will be shipping fish back to the
One way to excise multifunctionality from the soul of agriculture would be to
declare its tools and policies “value neutral.” The “value neutral” approach
was common, as noted above, by economists. Dealing with the issue of farm size,
the literature on new farm technologies and policies contained claims to “scale
neutrality”, i.e. not favoring large farms over smaller farms. Family farmers did not see it that way. In
domestic agriculture the “structural” shift continued unabated. Eventually
small farmers and farm workers sued the
A thriving statewide “
What this history reveals is that values implicit
in agriculture or impacted by its tools become “new” values to be positively
pursued as explicit functions of the agricultural enterprise when those values
are clearly endangered, or at least clearly obvious to some adequately vocal
constituency. Such multifunctionality would produce
tensions and conflicts in any profession or vocation, so it is not surprising
that annoyance and nostalgic desires for greater simplicity are expressed in
agriculture. Current events mirror this historic pattern, as consumer constituencies
oppose genetically modified foods and/or seek their labeling, environmental
constituencies press agriculture to protect clean air, animal welfare interests
press for more humane living conditions for meat animals, or on the other hand,
corporate constituencies enlist the USDA
in producing genetic infertility in farmers’ seeds in the pursuit of the value
of “intellectual property.” In one way or another exquisite reasoning will find
infertility of a food crop an agricultural value. Like the earlier capturing of agricultural
biotechnology research by corporations interested in enhancing their pesticide market, detailed by Martin
Kenney (1988), “terminator technologies” simply reveal what can hardly be considered
a scandal, namely that new functions are effectively introduced by new (or old)
constituencies who have means and motives to make those functions congruent
with the institutional or personal needs of those who will have to work at
those functions. And, as we have seen, the motives
can range from the common sense of maintaining
the soil and keeping food clean
to deeply religious convictions about social justice, environmental
integrity and animal welfare. But all too often the only effective means to increase or decrease multifunctionality is
politics resulting in legislation or financial incentives which promote
or sustain research and development in certain directions.
This review is not aimed at a cynical acceptance
of policy chaos in agriculture but rather to finally raise the point of whether
there are tools to introduce some reasoned order into this chaos. Astute social
scientists warned me, in the early 1980’s, not to become co-opted by those who
hoped to construct the perfect risk/benefit analysis into the toxics issue, and
cost/benefit analysis into the “structural” (family farm) question. Such
schemes were efforts to resolve serious social conflicts with “bureaucratic
rationality” which too often meant simply arbitrary removals of the losers from
the debate. Others, like Lawrence Busch and William Lacy, went in a more humane
direction of full negotiations concerning conflicting values with the broadest
representation of truly impacted parties.
Agricultural Economics needed to play a role, but “efficient use of
resources” was way too limited in its ignoring
of flesh and blood as Patrick Madden liked to point out.(Madden, 1991
PAGE?)[17] And that “negotiations” could fail in that
way too, I realized in Congress in 1981 as I and some idealistic lawyers stood
with dropped jaws as a representative of a pesticide lobby argued with a
congressman over whether it was fair to legislate for a full medical investigation in a pesticide incident
where only one farmworker went “down.” He proposed
instead that six “downs” was more fair,
and called the lawyers’ shock simply evidence that they had not been out of law
school long enough and did not know how “democracy” worked.
In this story you see the birth of an agricultural
ethicist. Negotiations are critical in a civil society, but are there not some
universal principles about what is right or at least what is least harmful?
Ethics does not create values, nor does it mandate the priorities among them.
But as one of many “definitions” of ethics, the
science of those actions which tend toward human happiness, indicates
ethics does recognize values and proposes norms to secure them. Clearly an
agricultural ethics will not normally be so broadly conceived as to take on the
responsibility of leading a society toward happiness. Its ethics will deal with
its values: food and the means of
production. But if someone proposes that the convenient use and regulation of
agriculture requires that we treat seriously serious harm and death in farm
workers only when six have been harmed in a single incident, a norm will have
been established which will make all of us very unhappy in the long run, to say
nothing of the workers’ families in the short run, as the outcome of tolerating
enslaved farm workers made clear. Denying any formal status to the
investigation and systematization of norms in agriculture, such as that invoked
by the Supreme Court in 1980 in its Benzene Case : Part of the cost of doing
business is the cost of doing business safely, suggests some sort of “moral
inferiority” in agriculture. When an agriculture dean came to review an
agriculture ethics course we were building in the mid 1980’s he asked: “Why agriculture? Why now? Is there some
special scandal you and your colleagues (a soil scientist and an institutional
economist) are focusing on?” I answered truthfully if disingenuously “Any
mature discipline or enterprise has its professional ethics.” Disingenuously
because agriculture is the most mature
profession/vocation and it has wended it way through a myriad of value
conflicts without an explicit ethics until now. The problem is that the
religious norms which worked powerfully in the past were felt by many as ill
suited to the “pluralism” of public education, on the one hand, and on the
other the economists seemed to claim access to a neutral, “objective” norm not
requiring ethics.
But about
this same time Glenn Johnson, an agricultural economist, was calling to the attention of his
colleagues that all their “factual” and quantitative arguments contained at
least one normative (“ought”, “should”, “must”) premise if there were to be any
policy recommendation in the conclusion, and that there is certainly no
self-evident reason why all those normative premises should be trumped by
considerations of efficiency. That this insight into the structure of policy
argumentation was remarkable and disturbing was itself remarkable to us who
were not wedded to neo-classical economics and had some experience in applied
ethics. Glenn was not a “red” and definitely not what we would call a “green”
today. He just wanted to end the pretense that anything significant is
accomplished in agricultural policy argument without some normative
justification. Unspoken and therefore un-inspected premises, especially
normative ones, will come back and bite you. Apart from any human kindness, “A
living wage for full-time agricultural workers is not obligatory” will lead
to rural counties burdened with a huge
poverty class, costly public health problems and a generally depressed local
economy, all in the form of a subsidy of slightly cheaper food in some distant
city. But human kindness counts too. Or does it? As Cesar Chavez’s successful
grape-boycott in the mid 60’s revealed, long before there was an “agricultural
ethics,” significant portions of the
The situation in the 1970’s and 80’s was one of a profusion of values
being both recommended to agriculture and being injured by it. Rural churches
were convening regional and national convocations to state solid consensus theological and scriptural
principles for maintaining family farms and
rural community life. (Dundon, 1991a, 63). The Kellogg Foundation leadership
also felt that the urbanization of
None of these sources of the ferment was in the
possession of an organized treatise on
the applied ethics of agriculture. To be effective, they needed no more
foundations in some fancy ethical theory than medicine did. The values involved
were all that mattered. Public university philosophy departments, wags in the
1960’s said, had killed God and anything else humanly relevant in philosophy,
including ethics. “Applied philosophy” was like “square circle.” And about
ethics the question was whether it exists, given that no sensory experience
corresponds to the word “should” or “ought.” At least one prominent American
philosopher considered the ability of philosophers to convince trustees of
major universities to fund philosophy departments one of the best evidences of
their intellectual agility. This was not a group likely to mine documents from the
Church of the Brethren or the United Church of Christ for some ethical
principles on the defense of family farming. Yet only the churches had a
credible voice in the countryside on normative matters.
The truth be told, there was not then and is not
now much in agricultural ethics which gives a philosopher center stage for
his/her philosophic agility. The philosophers who first began to engage in
agricultural issues seemed not the slightest interested in choosing between varieties
of ethical systems, varieties of utilitarianism, deontology, or rights
theories. They were moved by the values
they saw threatened or in conflict with other values of importance in
agriculture. They worked from the values out. One can find in the literature an
occasional effort to find a system, e.g. utilitarianism with Tweeten(Tweeten, 1987, 246)[18], and some innovative uses of other systems
included in Charles Blatz’s anthology Ethics in Agriculture (1991) including
his own. Those systems are frequently aimed at the somewhat intellectualized
goals of philosophers such as simplicity, unity and consistency, and, for some,
quantitative measurability. The early agricultural ethicists were intensely
pragmatic, meaning committed to saving what they regarded as the most critical
values impacted by agriculture. Ethics would be subservient to the preservation
of those values. Hardly a debasement of ethics, this pragmatism is a
recapturing of the medieval “first principle of ethics” which always seemed
circular to undergraduates, but obvious to their parents: “The good is to be
done.” Or “Harm is to be avoided.” The
good or harm are not moral good or moral evil but some kind of natural
good/harm, including physical, social, psychological, emotional, or economic.
Policies are morally good because they protect or create what is physically good. Jeff Burkhardt in struggling with the warring values of an
agricultural clientele that now includes chemical companies and machinery
manufacturers makes one of these pragmatic efforts in saying that everywhere
(and a fortiori in agriculture) the first criterion of the [physical,
non-moral] good is serious human need. All other human pursuits presuppose that
needs fundamental to human life have been met. So those fundamental needs are
the first in the order of urgency.
Such needs include: (1)
adequate, affordable…nutritionally adequate food; (2) adequate, affordable, or
at least available, clothing and shelter; (3) a livable environment; (4) secure
means to provide one’s livelihood; and (5)accessible educational opportunities.(Burkhardt, 1986, 35) [19]
An intensely
pragmatic agricultural ethics writes, endorses, or advocates those
normative principles which protect those values, principally the ones listed in
(1) in Burkhardt’s list. Each profession/vocation
dealing with basic needs has a conventionally assigned portion of human needs
as it basic goal values for which it is responsible. No one professional
enterprise is responsible for the whole of the human good. But other ethical
norms arise, as we have seen, when the means by which the profession attains
its goal values begin to impact on important
other values. Farmers, farm workers and their families and the
conditions in which they live and work because of their involvement in
agriculture are among the principal
values which arise with production values and conflict with them. The “rural
life” values are equally urgent with production goals as we discover in any
other profession when the rewards are so bad that the professionals leave the
profession in large numbers. It would have been impossible to find a
philosopher in those days who eyes would not have opened rather wide upon hearing the principle of “the infinite
mobility of labor.” It struck me at the
time that many agricultural economists were like doctors all of whose patients
were dead or dying and who then decided they were not doctors after all. With
the exception of a few mavericks, the profession was of little help to the
philosophers. And it was not as if they did not care about multiple values in
farming. It was simply that the idea that a distinctly ethical set of norms
might direct them seemed odd. When I would announce to my ag economist
colleagues that I had received an NSF fellowship to study the ethics of
agricultural economics, slow, gentle smiles would spread over their faces as
they would ask: “What ethics?”
Burkhardt’s pragmatic focus on basic needs values is one of
the things which makes doing agricultural ethics easy because those needs are
so obvious and basic that there is not a lot of debate about them. A
realization that the Golden Rule includes people who are distant from us in
time as well in space gives us a way to call for sustainability in food
supplies as well as in our choice of agricultural tools. But it was not as if
reflective agriculturalists did not intuit the moral wrongness of wanton
destruction of non-renewable agricultural resources.
So what do you need to do agricultural ethics?
·
Be governed
by the human needs which are agriculture’s goals to satisfy:
1) Sufficient, 2) healthy and 3) sustainable food
(fiber) supplies.
·
Then
incorporate all the legitimate multifunctional elements under the rubric:
4) by means which respect the rights
and dignity of all the participants.”
·
Then express
normative, ethical principles which protect and provide a reasonable
prioritization among those values, keeping in mind that absolute priority
and priority due to urgency in point of
time are separate issues. You can see some of this done at www.soulofag.org where the process is used
in the defense of family managed farming. Industrial agriculture which could
satisfy the norms there would be much
more ethically defensible.
·
Don’t
hesitate to use traditional Judeo-Christian normative principles regarding
farming, land use, the dignity of labor, care for animals, since those can be
stated without appeal to religious authority and since they are principles
which are culturally strong in the country-side. (Dundon, 1991a)
·
Don’t
hesitate to use the Golden Rule. It is hardly sectarian. Or Kant’s: “Treat all
persons as if they are also ends, not as if they are purely means to your
ends.”
·
Respect,
while using them, the inherent goodness of animals and the environment
·
Consult
trained ethicists when dealing with complicated conflict issues involving
“middle level principles.” One example is the“ precautionary principle.” A not
very significant elaboration of “look before you leap”, it is astonishing to
see serious players in agriculture maintaining that one does not need to look
before leaping unless one has solid demonstration that a cost effective looking
is called for. Some common sense ethics
is called for if someone proposes a substitute “principle”: If delay for looking is costly, leaping without looking is o.k.
because risk-taking is the price progress. Even if the risk is imposed on
uninformed and unconsenting parties.
·
Don’t be
afraid of hokey sounding but effective
principles like: “If you don’t want to see it in the newspapers after
some suitable time, don’t do it.”
·
Avoid ethical
bad habits by, for example, a comparison with medical ethics principles of
informed consent when dealing with the issue of labeling genetically modified
(GMO) foods. Informed consent is treated with great care in medicine where the
benefit is to the patient, why not in agriculture where it is not clear who
benefits?
·
Become
acquainted with the history and philosophy of the sciences involved in any
question. The less mature the science, the more astonishing the dreams of future novel products and methods, the more
risk is likely to reside in regions “not sufficiently understood” where all
risk resides.
·
Note the
potentially corrosive character of the claim: “There was no other way.” An adequate
search for alternatives to costly or risky technologies is of the essence of
good ethical policy making.
·
Be wary of
the tendency of institutions and agencies to sanctify the means over the ends.
The ethical agent allows the ends to determine the means however much that may
mean that his/her professional tool box may not be needed in this case or must
be loaded with new or different tools.
·
Your
conviction that the best science available must guide our practical decisions
should be shored up with wariness about today’s world where speedy action, huge
profits, skilled public relations firms and “proprietary” knowledge are often
involved. It must be kept in mind that there is no a priori quality that
assigns the name good science or junk science to any proposition. It is only
patient, thorough and carefully replicated testing by many parties, and open
debate of all the results by objective critics that leads to science. And
therefore if it is secret, it is not science,
no matter how true and well established it seems to be to the holders of the
secrets.
[1] At least one well-known philosopher has given approval to a rather odd use of agricultural animals, which fortunately has not been included among the functions of agriculture by any other commentator. In the defense of this philosopher, who shall remain nameless to allow him time to recover from his utilitarian fever, he did note a need for compassionate restraint with respect to chickens, thus protecting his voice in the field of agricultural ethics.
[2] John
Adams, by David McCullough, p645, (Simon
and
[3] Ibid. 648-49
[4] Oswald Schreiner, “Early Fertilizer
Work in the
[5] Wayne
Rasmussen, 1960,
[6]
[7] Sandra S. Batie, “Soil Conservation in the 1980s: A Historical Perspective”, Agricultural History, 59,2, April 85, p. 108
[8] Liebig was an early German expert on plant nutrition who determined the needs of plants by chemical analysis of their tissues. This approach, for a long while, offered the seductive hope that agricultural soil science could become a white-smock laboratory science appropriate even to Harvard dons and rarely requiring trips to muddy fields
[9] Harold Pinkett, “Government Research Concerning Problems of American Rural Society”, Agricultural History, 58, 3, July 1984, 367.
[10] Richard
Kirkendall, “History of the Family Farm” in Is There
a Moral Obligation to Save the Family Farm? Ed. By Gary Comstock, Iowa State
Univ. Press,
[11] Harold T. Pinkett, “Government Research Concerning the Problems of American Rural Society” Ag. History, 58, 3, July 1984, p. 356
[12] Claton S. Ellsworth, “Theodore Roosevelt’s Country Life Commission, Ag. History 34, 3, October 1960, p. 156, cited in Pinkett, loc.cit.
[13] Harry C. McDean, “Professionalism, Policy, and Farm Economists in the Early Bureau of Agricultural Economics,” Agricultural History, 57,1, Jan. 83, p. 71, Also his “Professionalism in the Rural Social Sciences1896-1919, Ag. Hist. 58, 3, July 84, p. 392
[14] Adell Brown, “Economic Factors Affecting the Survival of
Black Operated Farms, in Human Resources Development in Rural
[15]
Madison,
[16] Frank
Graham Sr. 1970 Since Silent Spring,
[17] Patrick
Madden, “Values, Economics and Agricultural Research” Ethics and Agriculture, edited by Charles Blatz, Univ . of
[18] See,
for example, his “Food for People and Profit” in Is There a Moral Obligation to Save the Family Farm?, ed. by Gary
Comstock,
[19] Jeffrey Burkhardt, “The Value Measure in Public Agricultural Research”, The Agricultural Scientific Enterprise, A System in Transition, ed. by Lawrence Busch and William B. Lacy, Westview Press, Boulder, 1986, p 35.