Abstract
Ethical perception involves seeing what is ethically salient about the particular details of the world. This kind of seeing is like informed judgment. It can be shaped by what we know and what we come to learn about, and by the development of moral virtue. I argue here that we can learn to see food justice, and I describe some ways to do so using three narrative case studies. The mechanism for acquiring this kind of vision is a “food justice narrative” that is particular and concrete. These kinds of stories are counter narratives to a popular and dominant “script” about food that disguises the identity of people who eat, and obscures how constraints on free choice are created by particular lived circumstances. Food justice narratives specify the social and political location of individual people who are trying to nourish themselves. Once this contextual surround is included we are in a position to ask why this person, in this set of circumstances, is impeded in their access to nutritious food. This is not a question we are likely to consider if we leave out the identity of food consumers. Food justice narratives are forward looking as well because they bring into clearer focus what actions and kinds of social activism are appropriate responses to constraints on free choice.
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Notes
To read an overview of the concept of food justice, see Alkon (2013).
This example is based on one described by Blum (1994, pp. 31–34).
Blum (1994, p. 33) uses a similar example to say that the lapse of attention is due to “situational self-absorption or attentional laziness.” According to Blum these are deficiencies of one’s moral character that are morally criticizable.
Nancy Sherman (1989, p. 31) writes: “how the end of good living will appear to an agent will have to do with how that agent sees the salient features of circumstances. The end will affect what he sees and how he composes the various scenes.”
According to Aristotle (1999, NE 1142a12-16): “Young people can become mathematicians and geometers and wise in things of that sort; but they do not appear to become people of practical wisdom. The reason is that practical wisdom is of the particular, which becomes graspable through experience, but a young person is not experienced. For a quantity of time is required for experience.”
Aristotle (1999, NE 1143a25-1143b14) says: “For we ascribe consideration, comprehension, prudence, and understanding to the same people, and say that these have consideration, and thereby understanding, and that they are prudent and comprehending. For all these capacities are about the last things, i.e., particulars. … We must, therefore, have perception of these particulars, and this perception is understanding. … And so we must attend to the undemonstrated remarks and beliefs of experienced and older people or of prudent people, no less than to demonstrations. For these people see correctly because experience has given them their eye.”
Admittedly, some of these narratives recognize the limitations on choice that I want to talk about. For example, Food Fight (2008) includes an interview with Will Allen who works to bring fresh food to low-income families in Milwaukie, Wisconsin.
Nelson (2001, p. 7) says that a counter story corrects for the way in which master narratives “misrepresent persons and situations.” I am not entirely convinced that leaving out the identity of food consumers counts strictly as a misrepresentation of persons, though abstracting from particular identities may certainly skew our grasp of what kind of social change or public policy is needed to improve access to nutritious food.
Misak (2008, p. 631) adds the following questions to judge and evaluate the narrator’s account: “In addition to the considerations articulated thus far, we will likely want to include what follows. Does the narrator seem boastful, vain, or self-indulgent, or does he seem focused on wanting to tell a good (perhaps lively, entertaining, or scary) story as opposed to wanting to tell an accurate story? Is there evidence of wishful thinking, bitterness, or external motivations such as ideology, nostalgia, patriotism, or self-hatred? Do the events recounted fit with the known facts? Are the lessons drawn from the experiences such that they resonate with others who have had similar experiences? Are the purported moral insights such that they clash or cohere with other moral insights? Are those lessons and insights well supported by other arguments, or are there powerful arguments which run counter to them?”
We might also use additional readings to supply the critical review of a narrative. For example, one might pair a reading of Farm City together with McClintock (2011). In his study of the flatlands of Oakland, McClintock describes the historical processes that created this “almost entirely treeless and worn landscape of used car dealerships, taco trucks, liquor stores, dilapidated storefronts, and the occasional chainlinked vacant lot” (2011, p. 91). McClintock documents a combination of factors at work over time that eventually resulted in restricted access to healthy food for residents of West Oakland, and unevenly developed the city’s landscape. These include: industrial location, residential development, city planning, and racist mortgage lending (redlining). He calls the structural forces that operated historically on this area, “demarcated devaluation”—a kind of devaluing of capital that targets a geographical location and its residents.
As quoted by Nussbaum (1990: 152): “Moral knowledge, James suggests, is not simply intellectual grasp of propositions; it is not even simply intellectual grasp of particular facts; it is perception. It is seeing a complex, concrete reality in a highly lucid and richly responsive way; it is taking in what is there, with imagination and feeling. To know Maggie is to see and feel her separateness, her felicity; to recognize all this is to miss least of all. If he had grasped the same general facts without these responses and these images, in all their specificity, he would not really have known her.”
These initiatives were, in part, a response to a fractured community, reeling from the 1992 riots after the acquittal of those responsible for the beating of Rodney King.
The city purchased the property from Horowitz in 1986 for $5 million, and sold it back to Horowitz in 2002 for $5 million. The estimated loss to the taxpayers was $10–15 million.
Also militating against this ethical position is the suggestion made in the film that the city was engaged in a “back room deal” when they sold this property back to Horowitz.
To read an excellent and comprehensive account of the tomato industry in Florida, see Estabrook (2011).
The ethical novice probably includes most of us.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the Poynter Center at Indiana University for granting me a non-stipendiary fellowship during the Fall 2012 semester, which provided me with good conversation, space, and resources to work on this topic. I thank also the various audiences who helpfully commented on earlier versions of this paper at the Society for Ethics Across the Curriculum Conference, Grand Rapids, MI; the Poynter Center at Indiana University; the graduate seminar on “Food Choice, Freedom, and Politics” at Indiana University; and the Philosophy Department at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, Vancouver, BC. Additionally, I appreciate the anonymous reviewers of this journal for critical suggestions about how to revise and improve the main ideas I present here.
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Dixon, B.A. Learning to see food justice. Agric Hum Values 31, 175–184 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-013-9465-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-013-9465-3