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The Price of Responsibility: Ethics of Animal Husbandry in a Time of Climate Change

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Abstract

This paper examines the challenges that climate change raises for animal agriculture and discusses the contributions that may come from a virtue ethics based approach. Two scenarios of the future role of animals in farming are set forth and discussed in terms of their ethical implications. The paper argues that when trying to tackle both climate and animal welfare issues in farming, proposals that call for a reorientation of our ethics and technology must first and foremost consider the values that drive current livestock production. This paper sets forth and discusses the broader societal values implicit in livestock production. We suggest that a virtues approach would improve our thinking and practice regarding animal agriculture, facilitating a move from livestock production to animal husbandry. This change in animal agriculture in a time of climate change would stress virtues such as attentiveness, responsibility, competence, and responsiveness as central elements in any mitigation or adaptation program.

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Notes

  1. This can be observed and has been confirmed numerous times. Within the scientific community, there is a large degree of agreement that these changes are largely caused by human emissions of green house gases, especially carbon dioxide and methane (IPCC 2007; Richardson et al. 2009). These issues are still debated though, and the scientific discussion is still reverberating, especially regarding the causal effects of climate change. This discussion has had severe political implications, as the political decisions about the adequate human response to climate change have been tightly linked to climate research. For more on the influence of climate research on the political discussions, and the influence of political discussions of climate change on climate research see Heymann et al. (2009) and Meyer and Lund (2009). In this article, however, we have chosen to follow the most commonly held views among climate scientists and lean on the reports from the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC 2007), and the synthesis report from the climate change conference in Copenhagen (Richardson et al. 2009). We do not discuss whether climate change is real, or what its possible causes might be. Rather we take the assertion that anthropogenic climate change is a serious problem as our point of departure, and move on from there. For a brief overview of the latest discussions of the credibility of the IPCC reports please see Borenstein (2010).

  2. “Mitigation” is the commonly used term for strategies that seek to decrease the human impact on greenhouse gas levels, e.g., switching from fossil fuels to alternative energy sources such as wind and sun. “Adaptation” is the commonly used term for the human activities that seek to change societal structures to be ready for the expected climatic conditions in the future, e.g., enhancing dykes above the current need to prepare for future rises in sea levels.

  3. Animal agriculture can have many shapes. In this paper we distinguish between livestock production understood as the intensive, conventional, industrialized production of meat, milk, eggs, and other animal products, and animal husbandry understood as producing animal products with an emphasis on sustainability and the virtue ethics approach discussed later in the paper.

  4. The number published in the Steinfield report from 2006 has come under recent criticism from Pitesky et al. (2009). The Steinfeld report postulates that around 18% of the collective green house gas emissions can be blamed on animal agriculture. However, Pitesky et al. conclude that the methods used to calculate the contribution of animal agriculture and the transportation sector differ too much from each other to be comparable, and that the impact of animal agriculture is lower than has been estimated. On the other hand, Goodland and Anhang (2009) estimate through life cycle analysis that more than 50% of the total green house gas emissions can be linked to animal agriculture. In this paper, we conservatively estimate 15%, and maintain that such a number warrants our serious attention in a situation where mitigation and adaptation strategies are needed for all areas that contribute significantly to anthropogenic climate change.

  5. Whether this is at all possible is an open question that we will not discuss here. As the interest lies in the ethical evaluation of the hypothetical scenario, for the sake of argument we simply assume that this is possible, although in reality the claim initially seems rather flawed (Steinfeld et al. 2006).

  6. Peter Singer (1991) is the most well-known utilitarian defender of respect for animal preferences.

  7. Derek Parfit discusses this seemingly inevitable conclusion in Reasons and Persons from 1984 in relation to human welfare. He calls it the repugnant conclusion—a name that obviously can also be used when applying the same logic to animals.

  8. Tom Regan is the most well known animal rights proponent. See Regan's The Case for Animal Rights. A recent analysis of Animal Rights Theories can be found in Karlsson (2009).

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Food and Resource Economics, Danish Centre for Bioethics and Risk Assessment, University of Copenhagen, Rolighedsvej 25, 1958, Frederiksberg C, Denmark

    M. Gjerris

  2. Institute of Forest & Landscape, Danish Centre for Bioethics and Risk Assessment, University of Copenhagen, Rolighedsvej 23, 1958, Frederiksberg C, Denmark

    C. Gamborg

  3. Department of Ethics, Centre for Theology and Religious Studies, Lund University, Scania, Sweden

    H. Röcklinsberg

  4. Department of Philosophy, University of Alaska Anchorage, Anchorage, AK, USA

    R. Anthony

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  1. M. Gjerris
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Correspondence to M. Gjerris.

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Gjerris, M., Gamborg, C., Röcklinsberg, H. et al. The Price of Responsibility: Ethics of Animal Husbandry in a Time of Climate Change. J Agric Environ Ethics 24, 331–350 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10806-010-9270-6

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