Hi-Phi Nation
Season 3, Episode 8: Uncivil DisobedienceFull Transcript [Music] Barry: Gippy Goat farms is one of those wondrous little places where you can pet your own food. It's a goat farm and petting zoo. You can sample goat milk, goat cheese, and, well, goat. All the while, you're feeding and snuggling with the kids that'll be tomorrow's dinner, John Colemans runs it.Tape: Colemans: Yes, the goat milk dairy milks 2,000 goats here, twice a day. Richard: Then something happened last year, the day after Christmas, Boxing Day. Barry: That's Richard Rowland. He'll be reporting half the story today. Tape: At about 6:30, a mobile of vegans showed up, and very quickly stole three animals from the petting zoo. And then they went up to the dairy and stole one animal out of the yard that had a bit of a sore foot. And then the police arrived. The police requested that they leave, but they refused to do so. Barry: Chris Delforce is an animal activist and filmmaker, and founder of a group that's responsible for the targeting of Govin's farm. Delforce: Gippy Goat is a business that is bludgeoning 10,000 baby goats on the head every year. That's just what they do. They separate the the babies, and they kill all the males, because the males will never be able to produce milk, just like the cow dairy industry.Richard: The event Gippy goat were part of a series of increasingly disruptive actions by animal activists in Melbourne over the last year. The situation became even more intense with the public release of a map that Delforce's organisation crowd-sourced from the animal rights community.Delforce: It's an interactive map based on Google Maps covering factory farms slaughterhouses and other animal exploitation and facilities across Australia. There's over 5,000 facilities located on that map. David: It isn't just a map of factory farms.Barry: David Killoran will also be reporting this week.David: Each little location has an icon of an animal, a pig, a cow, or a goat. And there are descriptions of slaughtering practices, even photos and videos taken undercover. And there are addresses, and in some cases, names of the farm owners. Delforce: It's just this whole new culture that we're trying to push towards, where everyone knows where these places are, and what they're doing, and they're no longer able to operate in secrecy.Jochinke: The reality is, it's also a map of people's houses, people's places of work. Tape: David Jochinke is the president of the Victorian Farmers Federation, and a farmer himself. Jochinke: And what was the map intended to actually produce? It's the incitement of collecting information without the permission of farmers. And for the mere fact that it is on farms, and not a map of either race, or religion, or creed, that is another whole discussion of where is society going, what are we accepting as a community. David: Farmers say the map has been the source of a lot of stress, fear, and heartache .Jochinke: Last night I was at a meeting in particular, where I met a farmer who was on the map. And it absolutely cut him to the core, because he felt like he was tried and prosecuted without any chance for him to tell his story. All the good things that they actually do. They have the best health and safety records, and that the amount of compliance and regulation that we actually adhere to-- none of that gets told in this story. If you're putting private information, and inciting for the general public to gather information, and some regards trying to catch people out, being in many ways put up and said that you were doing something wrong, you were doing something evil. That's disgusting. And we've encouraged them to actually contact the author of the map, and asked for them to be removed-- of which those requests have been refused.MusicTape: From Slate, this is Hi-Phi Nation, philosophy in story form. Recording from Vassar College, here's Barry Lam.Barry: If this conflict seems familiar to Americans, it's because we go through periods like this all of the time with activism. Some group raises an injustice, the public doesn't care or doesn't respond, and so activists get louder and more disruptive with their tactics. Eventually, they, too, might publish maps, home addresses, and names of people who then feel targeted. This happened with anti-abortion activism in the 90s. It happens with online doxing today. It's been happening in the environmental movement for some time. Meanwhile, people who aren't activists complain about incivility, or militancy, or extremism. And this cuts across political lines. All you need is an interest group engaging in a moral crusade against something that is perfectly legal, about lives that they believe should be protected. What are the limits to what you can do in the course of that crusade? Because, of course, all the sides think they're on the right side of morality. Is there even a way to divorce the morality of the issue with the morality of activists tactics? Well, this week two philosophers report from Australia as to how the debate is playing out there. Richard Rowland and David Killoran are philosophers at the Australian Catholic University in Melbourne. Richard is the British voice you've been hearing. David is the American voice. They produced this story.MusicRowland: We noticed this wave of activism picking up speed in Melbourne in January 2018, about a year before the Gippy Goat action. Joanne: It was about 30 of us. We walked inside the steakhouse, we addressed the room through a megaphone, and we said, 'We're here to speak up for the animals on these plates as if it was us, or our families or friends on these plates.' Killoran: That's Joanne Lee. She's an animal activist who led the steakhouse protest. Lee: There's no humane way to kill somebody who doesn't want to die. So we were probably inside for about twenty minutes. The police did take a little while to arrive. It wasn't necessarily about targeting the diners in that restaurant. It was really about occupying a space where violence is being consumed and being normalized, and really just disrupting that space to take it over and say, 'Hey, we're here, we're speaking up for these animals like we would want to be spoken for.' Killoran: The steak house protest created a firestorm on social media and in the popular press. Joanne was interviewed on major primetime news shows, and she sees those interviews as successful.Lee: We weren't being ridiculed. We weren't these crazy vegans anymore. For the first time it's been seen as a serious issue, not just some fanatical crazy select little group of people doing this. Peter Singer: They're annoying people, maybe, and they're interrupting their meals.Rowland: This is Peter Singer, internationally renowned philosopher, and a hugely influential figure in the worldwide animal liberation movement. Singer: But they don't go on about it forever. I mean it could be taken to limits where people would feel that it was a kind of coercion.Killoran: Annoying people in steakhouses is only one of the tactics used in the animal rights movement. Delforce: Aussie Farms is an animal rights charity.Killoran: Chris Dellforce, animal activist and filmmaker.Dellforce: Very small group, basically. We started in when we captured and released footage inside the gas chambers at Australia's largest peak slaughterhouse. And gas chambers are used in most large pig slaughterhouses in Australia. I'd say it accounts for well over 90% of pigs killed. They're sent into a carbon dioxide gas chamber that the industry was calling humane for over twenty years. What we saw in that footage was every piggy goes into that chamber is screaming and thrashing in agony for thirty seconds. It's the furthest thing imaginable from humane, and we captured the same thing at, now, five different slaughterhouses. So that was what launched Aussie farms, and the idea from the start was that we just wanted to force transparency on an industry dependent on secrecy. We want to put everything out there into the open and allow consumers to make up their own minds.Singer: If you can get videos of animal suffering in factory farms, or part of the live export trade here in Australia, if you can get that on to primetime television, that really does stir people up.Tape: Philosopher Clare McCausland.McCausland: The reason you know about what happens in a factory farm is because someone went in there illegally. The owners of those farms do not want you there, so we rely on people sacrificing their own liberty to tell us what we need to know to make our own decisions. Rowland: Taking undercover videos of the cruel treatment of animals is generally regarded as a good tactic in the animal liberation movement. Activists use the Aussie Farms maps to find places to take videos of the cruel treatment of animals. We asked Chris Delforce, the man behind the map, what he would say to farmers who said the map makes them afraid.Delforce: No activist has any interest in the homes of these farmers. But if you're going to, basically, abuse animals en masse, you can't expect to do that in secrecy anymore. You cannot have these massive sheds full of hundreds of thousands of animals and expect that to be done privately. If you then choose to live on that same property, that's your choice. Jochinke: I don't know the man from a bar of soap. Tape: David Jochinke.Jochinke. But if I was to attack his family for whatever reason of their religion, belief, creed, I would want to know what he would feel about that. Because that's a personal attack. Unjustified, unauthorised, unbaked personal attack.Delforce: My family in my home did not have giant sheds with animals. We're not making money by telling people that we're treating animals humanely while we're treating them awfully, and sending them off to be killed. We're not making money through deception. This is not about targeting families. It's about targeting businesses that are misleading consumers. Talking about families and farmers themselves is just a distraction, a deflection from what's happening to animals.Singer: Speciesism is a bias or prejudice against taking seriously the interests of beings who are not a member of our species. The term exists to stress the parallel between racism and sexism, which most enlightened people reject. MusicKilloran: Delforce would acknowledge that there's a cost to farmers. But there's overwhelming suffering of animals on the other side of it.Rowland: At the same time many people sympathetic to the plight of animal suffering think that activists need to be less confrontational in their actions. Tyler Paytas is a philosopher at ACU who wrote about the steakhouse protests for the ABC, which is the Australian equivalent of the BBC. He's among those who think the process was a bad idea.Paytas: My view is that such actions, there's a good chance that they're gonna do more harm than good, and the main reason I hold this view is because, ever since I became a vegetarian many years ago, I've noticed this very strong anti vegan sentiment among people. There is really an urgency to get people to not think of vegans as strange, or militant, or sort of, outside the norm, and making it more attractive as something that is not a radical departure from normal life. And I've worried that, occupying the steakhouse and shouting as a demonstration, that's going to fuel the the tendency to think of vegans as crazy unorthodox people who do strange things.Rowland: There seems to be some basis for Tyler's concern. Direct action in the animal liberation movement in the 80s crossed enough lines that it sent the movement back.Singer: I think you do have to be careful with nonviolent activities, that they are actually really going to resonate with people in a positive way. The opponents of the animal movement, successfully, I would say, branded the movement as terrorists. This was before September 11th, so the the secretary for agriculture, for Ronald Reagan, secretary for agriculture said that publicly in speeches. I felt that the movement was getting somewhat of a bad image, rather than a positive image, which is really important for it. It was demoralizing for people in the movement to be described that way. People who were totally nonviolent. Of course, It was a tiny percentage of the movement who was engaged in this, but, nevertheless, it seemed to stick. You know, I think the movement really does have to present itself as taking an ethical stance. It's very hard to your mind taking an ethical stance with being prepared to maim or even threaten to kill people who are involved in exploiting animals MusicKilloran: Singer is adamantly anti-violence. Because he believes that it is counterproductive, not because he's against violence in principle. In general, he sees the justice of activists tactics as wholly dependent on their effectiveness. As a utilitarian, he's not moved at all by the idea that activism has some kind of intrinsic symbolic value. We asked Peter Singer whether groups like those in Melbourne, that go into restaurants and chant, are bad for the animal rights movement.Singer: I honestly don't know whether that's having a positive or a negative effect. I'm sure that some people don't like it. But perhaps it also or wakens some people to really thinking about the animals that they're eating. I'd like somebody to do some good research on that. Killoran: Jacy Reese is co-founder of the sentience Institute and author of the book "The Dnd of Animal Farming," and he studies how effective particular tactics are in animal rights activism. There's a kind of disadvantage that animal rights activists face up front that is unique to their cause. It's something that constrains how effective they can be when they take direct action.Reese: We can't kind of directly defy the practice that we're opposing. It's not like, you know, people of color coming into a restaurant and sitting at a place where they are not allowed to sit. Where you're kind of very directly saying, 'This is the law or the practice that exists in society, and I am standing up against it, because I am one of the oppressed.' We can't bring the animals into a place of animal exploitation. Instead we have to have humans, you know, yelling and disrupting. And this leads to a very different psychology, a very different, you know, perception of it. Rowland: Reese says that because animal rights activists are always in a position of advocating for others rather than for themselves. How people perceive character and seriousness of the activists plays a big role in how effective that activism is. He argues that animal rights activists should adopt tactics that are perceived to be serious rather than silly. Adopting these tactics connects animal rights activists to the longer tradition of protest movements for human civil rights.Reese: So in serious activism, I would put, for example, a large march. Or I would put someone, you know, chaining themselves to a, bullfighting, chaining themselves to the fence so that the event can't go on or something. And these are kind of the tactics that have been used throughout a lot of historical social movements. And they convey a sense of seriousness, even though they also cause a lot of opposition because they are disruption. But then we also have confrontational tactics that are less serious and that are things that don't have as much historical precedent. So this is something like the sex sells activism, or something like the cute, cartoonish, you know, animal costumes that you could use, or something like throwing fake blood, going to restaurants or other places of animal exploitation and yelling or holding signs and is often seen as more aggressive and more adversarial. So when it comes to civil disobedience, or at least comes to confrontational activism in general, I'd like people to air towards the more serious, the less gimmicky, the, the more in line with historical tactics. The things that put the animals stories up front. Killoran: According to Jacy, unserious gimmicky tactics are examples of merely frivolous activism. That includes stunts by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or PETA. They've run attention-grabbing campaigns, worn funny costumes, and even presented naked women in cages. Jacy says that this kind of activism doesn't increase sympathy for the plight of animals. It just makes people antagonistic to the people advocating for them. Rowland: PETA, on the other hand, begs to differ.Tape: Those campaigns are the ones that generate the most debate.Rowland: That's Paula Hough, vice-president of PETA Asia-Pacific.Hough: There is a lot of white noise in the media. It's increasingly hard to be heard on topics that make people uncomfortable, and we have found that our more colorful, racier actions do get the most coverage that leads to the highest web traffic to our website. The more controversial videos, that people come to our website to watch in anger, leads to the highest number of views of the undercover investigation video that immediately follows. And they leave having ordered a vegan starter kit. And if we just politely ask people to listen to us just on the facts alone, none of that information would get out there. Rowland: Well it seems to me that Jacy and Tyler are right that confrontational activism is polarizing. Some more think that it's silly or pointless, it will annoy and offend a lot of people. But activists don't need to get everyone or even most people on their side. Erica Chenoweth and Marius Stephan comprehensively looked at activist movements in the 20th century. Every movement that they looked at that gained the sustained participation of 3.5% of the population succeeded. So activists just need to build up the numbers. I mean, to get at least 3.5% of the population involved with activism against steakhouses and factory farms. MusicKilloran: There has been a big turn toward measures of effectiveness all over the activist and philanthropic world in recent years. And there has been concern about whether this kind of turn misses the point of some of the more disruptive forms of protest.Sebo: While it is good overall that we are focusing on effectiveness in the movement, it can create a bias in favor of the kinds of interventions where the benefits are direct and measurable, and against the kinds of interventions where the benefits are indirect and structural.David: Jeff Sebo is a philosopher and director the animal studies MA at NYU.Sebo: And I think with moderate conciliatory activism, the benefits are direct and measurable. You can bring people in, have them hear what you have to say, create these incremental reforms. But with confrontation, disruption, people going into restaurants and saying things, when people are trying to have dinner... If those have benefits, I think those benefits are going to be in the form of planting a seed of doubt. Challenging the status quo may be paving the way for moderate reform, which can then pave the way for radical change. And that might be a little bit more indirect and harder to measure. And so if we focus too much on measurable evidence as a proxy for effectiveness, then we might create a movement that over-values the kinds of moderate conciliatory approaches that bring people in immediately, and undervalues the kinds of radical confrontational approaches that might alienate people initially, but then lay the groundwork for making real change in the long run. MusicRichard: So Sebo thinks that focusing on effectiveness might itself be ineffective. But there's another problem with activists restricting themselves to polite tactics. Lauren Gazzola is a prominent activist who is well known for her lengthy imprisonment on animal terrorism charges.Gazolla: The idea that we, for example, do something that makes us look bad, I think, is much less of a problem than that we moderate our position because we're afraid we will look bad. Because the question of whether we look good or bad is a function of social norms, and so, when we're trying to change those norms, we shouldn't be guided by them. We have to be willing to look bad, and I'm much more concerned about the animal rights movement being too soft on our moral position than I am about us being too hard on our tactical position.MusicBarry: When we come, back a discussion of the ethics of civil disobedience, and perhaps even a case for uncivil disobedience. When Hi-Phi Nation returns. Music, messagesBarry: This week, philosophers David Killoran and Richard Rowland of the Australian Catholic University, examined the activists tactics of the animal liberation movement. David Killoran. David: Activists see themselves as involved in a principled morally motivated violation of the law. This is a type of activity known as civil disobedience, or more broadly, principled disobedience of the law. And there's a vast literature about it. It largely follows John Rawls, the eminent mid 20th century American philosopher known for his groundbreaking book, "A Theory of Justice."Rowland: Civil disobedience rules has to be open and in public. Privately disobeying a law doesn't count.David: Also, when you break the law you need to do it conscientiously you can't just break the law because you feel like it. You have to think that it's morally the right thing to do.Brownlee: Your breach of the law also has to be nonviolent.Tape: And finally, you have to be willing to accept jail time or a fine for your actions. Brownlee: A third piece of Rawls is picture that's interesting is the general fidelity to the legal system. So in his mind, civilly disobedient actors are not revolutionaries. They are broadly faithful to the system.Tape: That's Kimberly Brownlee, a philosopher at the University of Warwick, and an expert on the morality of protest and civil disobedience. Her view is that Rawls thinks of civil disobedience as a way of working within a system to fight a part of it that you believe to be unjust. Civil disobedience, on this view, requires you to embrace certain parts of the system in order to highlight the injustice of other parts of it. So in many ways, civil disobedience is a relatively conservative art. This explains some of the conditions that justify civil disobedience on the classic Rawlsian view.Brownlee: A just cause.David: The cause that you're fighting for has to be, in fact, right. It's not enough that you sincerely believe that it is right. There are these objective conditions for justice that have to be met. Brownlee: A second condition is that you're resorting to this when you've tried everything else. So this is a last resort.Rowland: Because you're trying to embrace as much of the system as you can, breaking the law can't be a first option. It can only be your last one.David: Rawls' third condition is some attempt to coordinate with other dissenting groups, other minority groups.Rowland: This condition is there to make sure that your cause isn't too much of a burden on the public. Make sure everyone is together, unified, to bring a list of grievances all at once, rather than having disparate groups trying to monopolize the public's time about an issue.Brownlee: Likelihood of success. So if your efforts are going to be futile, well, then you actually shouldn't resort to breach of law. Engaging in illegal protest, even if it's fairly constrained, brings risks. There's the risk of violence. There's the risk of inspiring other people who are less civil, less constrained. There's the fact that you change the conversation with the law when you break the law in protest. You essentially require law enforcement to pay attention to you in a different way. You better be fairly confident you going to do some good with this, otherwise you shouldn't be resorting to breach of law.David: This is why many animal rights activists are preoccupied with effectiveness. They're not interested in pointless, ineffective, and risky activism. They want their activism to make a difference, and to bring about the end of factory farming-- not to harm people for no tangible benefit. The idea that it's okay to take action that does more harm than good violates everything that utilitarian animal activists like Singer and Sebo stand for. But these moral conditions on civil disobedience aren't the only game in town, and they really are contrary to the approach to activism of activists like Joanne Lee. Candice Dalmas, a philosopher at Northeastern University in Boston, says there's also such a thing as uncivil disobedience. And sometimes uncivil disobedience is what's called for.MusicDelmas: Uncivil disobedience is not necessarily communicative. They may be covert, where the agent hides their identity. Evasive, they seek to evade punishment or arrest anonymous violent involving some property damage, or coercion, or injury to others. Or deliberately offensive, so in violation of decorum or social norms of civility. And examples include black bloc tactics, riots, sabotage, leaks of classified information, distributed denial of service attacks, guerillas theater, roadblocks, street art, vigilantism, and also much of what animal liberation and environmental activists engage in, such as monkey ranching and tree spiking, anti-whaling piracy operation, heckling and storming of, you know, restaurant, or splashing of paint on fur, and of course covert and open rescue operations. David: Even some people who think that civil disobedience is a good idea will say that uncivil disobedience is beyond the pale. But Delmas believes that uncivil disobedience can play a variety of important social roles.Delmas: When some citizens are effectively denied full and equal status, in a society that otherwise is committed to respecting everyone's full and equal status, and when the injustice of this denial is not publicly recognized, then you may have the conditions in place for uncivil disobedience to force the community to confront the disconnect between its reality and its professed ideals. Incivility can call civility's bluff by questioning the rules of public engagement and their exclusionary affects: Who gets to speak, where, when, and how. By highlighting the deceptions of civic friendship. And so I think that even when there is no hope of moral persuasion, and even no chance of inducing shame, in fact, uncivil disobedience may still have intrinsic value. Just as as a feeling response to injustice, an expression of warranted frustration and distress, that society, given its failure to treat some members as full equals, it can be a worthwhile exercise of individual and collective agency. It can be an expression of dignity. It can be an expression of solidarity. And again, it can do all these things even if it fails to contribute to a long-term goal of reform. Music Richard: Maybe it's just right to stand up against and reveal injustices. We don't need there to be good consequences of an action to do this. Sometimes this is called a purely expressive reason for engaging in a type of activism. But it's controversial whether these kinds of reasons can ever fully justify highly disruptive process, even for a just cause. Peter Singer.Singer: There's this certainly idea that, you know, if there's an injustice, you were to stand up against, it whether it makes any difference or not and you know we can admire people who do that. But ultimately, again, if you feed me a hypothetical example, and you say well 'It's, you know, here's somebody who will protest. They will be harmed, they will be worse off, and there's zero probability that any good will come out of it.' Then I would say, don't do it. Richard: David, what do you think Delmas means by calling civility's bluff?David: I think she means that niceness and decorum and civil disobedience can create an illusion. That, even if the status quo isn't acceptable, it might be within the ballpark of acceptability. Incivility can disrupt that illusion and make it possible for us to attend to injustices that we otherwise would not be in a position to see, or would not fully and vividly see. I think that illusion is the bluff that incivility calls, on her view.Richard: That makes me think of sea shepherds. So sea shepherds patrol the seas on the lookout for whaling vessels. They're not even pretending to be like it, like civilly disobedient, that's clearly uncivil. We talked to Claire McCausland, who's an Australian philosopher who studies animal activism, and also a sea shepherd in particular.McCausland: They engaged in propeller-fouling, they threw acid onto the ships of Japanese whalers, ostensibly with a view, and I believe with the view to spoiling the whale meat, so that it wasn't suitable for consumption. But this is still pretty reckless behavior, and I think it's very difficult to describe that as civil activity, in that understanding of civil as nonviolent. When we asked say shepherd activists, 'Did you see violence at sea?' However, their responses are 'Yess we saw heaps of it on the part of the Japanese whalers,' right, so they feel that they're engaged in a battle. David: When we think about the sorts of actions that a sea shepherd is engaged, in we might suppose that the whole point is just to stop whalers from whaling. And that does seem to be at least part of the point. But another function of their actions might be more subtle. In engaging in uncivil acts, Sea Shepherd might be said to call civility's bluff. In Delmas's terms, and perhaps that will function to open the eyes of the public, even if it is not immediately effective in stopping Whalers.Richard: Many people will agree that principled disobedience is at least, in some cases, justifiable, something that's morally ok for you to engage in. But Delmas takes a radical view, that uncivil disobedience is more than morally permissible. It's sometimes obligatory. If you're not engaged in it for at least some causes then you're doing something wrong.Delmas: I try to show that benefiting from an exploitative or harmful scheme of coordination, what, so a social scheme, you know, some arrangements, under certain conditions involves the same kind of wrong as free-riding does. So if you benefit from an unjust scheme, you're doing something similar than you are when you free-ride, which is that you're objectionably arrogating privileges to yourself. Or you're just wrongfully exploiting others. Fairness benefiting from exploitative or harmful schemes. So you have done of a duty to cease cooperating with that system from which you benefit. And the way to cease benefiting from an unjust scheme of coordination is to try to change it, so that it no longer exploits and harms other people. And in this case you can just free-ride on others resistance efforts so there's also this fair-play argument for joining others in an anti oppression struggle. The unjust treatment of animals actually seems like a clear case of exploitation and generation of problematic benefits. So it sounds like a fertile ground to think that we have obligations to resist at least some forms of animal exploitation. MusicDavid: So, Richard, I think we should zoom in on one of Candace Delmas' really important ideas. According to Delmas, if I am the beneficiary of a given form of injustice, then that gives me a special new kind of reason to resist, or fight against that injustice. What do you think about that idea?Richard: So I'm not a utilitarian like, Peter Singer and Jeff Sebo, but I do share kind of one thought with them. You know utilitarians think you shouldn't cry over spilt milk, you shouldn't think about features of the past's giving rise to obligations, for you to do things. All that matters is the kind of future consequences. You should look forward rather than backwards. It's about the benefits you can bring about by your actions not anything in the past that matters. And so I kind of agree with them and not with Delmas that, if we do have obligations to be activists, it can't be because of the of our benefiting from injustice in the past. It must be because we can bring about the end of injustice in the future. David: Just to illustrate the point, it might be useful to have an example. Imagine two business executives, Pete and Samantha. Samantha has profited from some unjust labor laws, whereas Pete has not benefitted from those unjust labor laws. Both Pete and Samantha are equally well-positioned to do something to correct the injustice of those labor laws. So I take it that on Delmas's view, Samantha has a special kind of reason that Pete doesn't have to do something about the injustice of those labor laws. Whereas I take it that, on your view, given that both of these individuals are equally capable of doing something about the injustice. They have the same reasons and same obligations to that injustice. Is that about right?Richard: Yeah, I think that's right. I think we are morally obliged, like Candace Dalmas thinks, to get involved in a certain kind of activism. But that's because we can, as a member of an activist groups, achieve pretty significant change in the future together. Richard: Well, it seems to me that we probably aren't obligated to be involved in the kind of activism that people like Chris Delforce and Joanne Lee are involved in. The kind of activism that they do is really burdensome. They incur really serious personal costs, you know, in terms of like harassment from people on the other side of the issue, or just in terms of the amount of time and in some cases legal fees that they have to pay. There's an obligation to do that kind of thing, that's a very demanding obligation, and it's not really clear to me that morality is quite that demanding.David: Yeah, yeah, I mean, Chris Delforce is getting getting harassed a lot of the time in activism. It's like the entirety of Joanne Lee's life, yeah. You might not, not necessarily obligated to get involved in activism in that way. I think we have quite a lot of latitude in the way in which we do get involved in activist movements. But that we have, maybe obligation to do some kind of activism we have a lot I've last stood over the means that we take in activism some people might ought to get involved in activism in the way that Joanne Lee does, or in the way that Peter does, by, you know getting engaged in attention-grabbing newsworthy activism. Or you might be able to get involved in that citizen by going to protests and handing out leaflets, in ways that, like Tyler Paytas would like. But we have an obligation to do something. We just have latitude about the means that we we take up.Richard: There's a further question we could ask about the causes that we get involved in. We could ask, is there an obligation to be an animal activist in particular? Or is it okay for us to focus on other kinds of causes? Do we have to do something about each and every important cause? Or can we just sort of pick the ones that we want?David: yeah this is a kind of quite complicated question. So some people, like effective altruists, like Singer it will think that you should get involved in the cause that you're able to achieve the most good by getting involved. It's, I don't, I'm not really attracted to that. So I think you have latitude with regards causes, as well as regards to means. So I think there's a lot of serious injustices that are happening. I'm for anti-climate change and our governments not stopping. That the awful things happening to animals, the awful things happening to refugees, the awful things happening in the third world, you know, I have latitude in which these different injustices, you get involved in a movement to to bring about change regarding. David: This reminds me of a conversation that we recently had with the well-known Marxist philosopher, Brian Leiter, who also is, in general, concerned about injustice. But Leiter happens to be very skeptical of the animal rights movement.Leiter: There are tens of thousands of people living in miserable circumstances. And, in that context, it always just struck me as a little perverse, and kind of a little depraved, almost, to be spending your time talking about chickens and pigs and calfs. David: The priority for Leiter is fighting the capitalist structure of our societies.Leiter: I do think that many of those you know involved in things like, you know, animals rights and animal ethics, probably consider themselves somewhat on the left. They probably should reflect a little harder that I think they typically do about the genuine structural causes of harms to well-being of both human and non-human animals. Local forms of activism are not going to topple, you know, the fundamental economic relations in our society, and now in most of the world. David: Peter Singer.Singer: When people tell me that what we need to do is to overthrow capitalism, rather than provide bed nets for kids who are going to die from malaria, or for that matter reduce the suffering of animals in factory farms, there's two questions that I want to ask them. One is, so, what exactly you're going to replace capitalism with? Because I'm not aware of any alternative economic system that has actually been tried out on even a fairly modest scale, and has shown to be successful in producing the kind of goods that people want, and are using. And secondly, even if you did show me that there was a better example that we could have reasonable amount of confidence would would work better than capitalism, how are we going to get from here to there? Nobody's given me a halfway plausible answer to the question as to how capitalism is to be overthrown. So if the suggestion is that, well, for the next or a hundred or a thousand years that it's going to take to get rid of capitalism, those babies are just going to have to go on dying from malaria, or those chickens are going to have to go on suffering in factory farms, that seems to me the wrong answer. The other thing that I would add, specifically with regard to the animal movement, is that when we had alternatives to capitalism on a large scale, namely under Soviet Communism, they set up huge factory farms too- and it's not as if the animals under Soviet Communism really suddenly had all their interests taken into consideration. Not at all, they were just as much things and means to the ends of people as they are under capitalism. so I think actually speciesism is more fundamental than capitalism.Richard: I don't buy Singer's skepticism about anti-capitalism. But I think he is right that abolishing capitalism wouldn't necessarily lead to less animal suffering. I think that animal rights is an important cause, but it's just one among many important causes.But what do you think, David? What do you think of Brian Leits's view? He thinks that animal rights activism is perverse and depraved.David: My view is that animal rights is a pretty good candidate for being the most important cause available to us in the present moment. And that's partly because of the scale of the problem that the animal rights movement is trying to solve. There are many tens of billions of animals being kept in miserable conditions, and violently killed each year. The number of individuals is many times larger than the human population, so the amount of harm that the animal rights movement is trying to prevent is really unimaginably huge. And further, I think that animal rights is one area where we really have a chance of making a difference. We currently have the technology and the ability to feed and clothe ourselves adequately, and to have healthy and happy lives, while at the same time dramatically reducing our collective dependence on animal exploitation. And if we were to do this we would spare trillions of individuals.Music Barry: Richard Rowland and David Killoran are philosophers at the Dianoia Institute of philosophy at the Australian Catholic University in Melbourne. They produced that piece for us. Since the events reported in this episode, vegan protests have continued to spread across Australia. And they're becoming more disruptive, particularly in Melbourne. In one recent protest, 39 people were arrested and charged with blocking the busiest intersections, train, and tram lines. After the first Gippy Goat action on Boxing Day, the goat that was abducted, Angel, was returned to the farm, only to be abducted again a month later. Then ffinally on April 6th this year, Gippy Goat closed its cafe, and closed the farm and petting zoo to the public. The Attorney General of Western Australia, John Quigley, recently proposed allowing five-year restraining orders against quote "Mushy headed vegans," to prevent them from returning to farms. If you want to hear more, this week we have a bonus episode exclusively for Slate Plus members. Since you didn't hear much for me this week, I decided to have a panel discussion with Slate's very own Steven Metcalfe from the Slate Culture Gabfest. We sit down and talk about what we think of the issues raised in this episode. Here's a sneak preview.Stephen Metcalf: Absent something like a Rawlsian, or liberal framework, within which to settle these disputes how do you have any principled way of distinguishing between a moral hero, and a terrorist, for example. To ground the argument a little bit, I want to, just before we finish, I would love to hear you talk a little bit about... I know you're an empiricist, right?Barry: Generally, yeah, orientation, yeah, yeah.Stephen: You have no, as a humanities professor, you have no aversion to turning to empirical data. 3.5% has a very special place in this episode. Barry: That's right.Stephen: I thought it was fascinating. Maybe talk a little bit about that. Barry: Yeah, so, according to this data, if 3.5% percent of the population happens to identify enough with your cause to engage in some form of activism, it doesn't have to be uncivil disobedience, right? It doesn't even have to be civil disobedience. It's just enough then the society will change in the direction of that cause.Stephen: I mean that's just an astonishing number, and you know, so now you have to imagine, let's say your cause is, at, you know, assuming for the purposes of this argument, you could know this, your cause is at 3.3%. You're just beneath the threshold where change might happen. You can very often do something that's just grotesque, right? It's kind of a grotesque form of public theater. It's intended to be completely outrageous. It does, in fact, outrage people, and it drives an enormous amount of traffic to a video. Some percentage of the people going to that video may be an overwhelming percentage of the people going to the video... are going there to be disgusted at your at your public display and your public incivility. But some small percentage, actually, suddenly is clicking other links on your website and is suddenly educating themselves to the cause and maybe you're at 3.3% and you do something appalling to the sensibility of the general public. And you drive an immense amount of traffic to your website. That's gonna bump you over three and a half percent, and an actual social change is gonna happen. I mean what turns on whether or not that gets you from three point three to three point six or from three point three to three point one? I mean let's say it drives you down to two point eight percent! How much do we allow the our sense of intrinsic justness to wobble in the face of numbers like that? Because in some sense, we don't want to live in a moral majoritarian universe. There has to be some notion of the intrinsic justness of causes.MusicBarry: you can get this, and all other Slate bonus content including, ad-free episodes of every Slate podcast, by signing up for Slate Plus. Just go to hiphiplus, or click the link in the show notes. Tape: Hi-Phi Nation is produced and edited by Barry Lam, associate professor of philosophy at Vassar College. For Slate, podcast editorial director is Gabriel Roth. Senior managing producer is June Thomas. Senior producer is TJ Rafael. Production assistance this season provided by Jake Johnson and Noah Mendoza-Gute. Visit for complete show notes, soundtrack, and reading lists for every episode. ................
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