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Review Of Professor Callicott's 'Animal Liberation: A Triangular Affair'

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Environmentalists and Animal Liberationists - Who gets the last say on factory farming? In ‘Animal Liberation: A Triangular Affair’, Professor Callicott highlighted the close links between ecology and Environmental Ethics. Because of ecology’s holistic nature, Callicott insists that to resist the factory farming of animals alone is not enough; one must also resist factory farming in all its manifestations, even those of vegetable crops. Furthermore, Callicott also suggests that factory farming goes against Environmental Ethics on ecological and environmental grounds, and not on humane grounds such as those espoused by animal liberation. In this paper I will demonstrate why the Environmental Ethics argument against factory farming is flawed …show more content…

There are a multitude of reasons which animal liberationists provide against the practice of factory farming, but none of them are based upon descriptive examples in nature. As Callicott himself observed, they fall either into the Utilitarian school dating back to Bentham and Mill, or the deontological going back to Kant. They all seem to come from some principle or self evident truth which require no validation. Environmental Ethics, with its dependence on ecology, is experience dependent and can change depending on context. In other words, it is based on a posteriori concepts while animal liberation theories are based, or claim to be based, on a priori concepts. A priori concepts have the advantage of being irrefutable, and this generally means that there are a code of values which are always right and one just needs to understand, accept, and apply them to individual cases to have a practical effect. I must caution, however, that while the arguments against factory farming made on animal liberation grounds are based on assumptions which are taken to be a priori, this does not mean that they are in fact a priori. For instance, Singer’s claim of pain being the standard of good or evil (and making it appear as a priori) will not be accepted by Environmental Ethicists such as Callicott as a priori. This is due to the fact that Callicott views pain as having nothing to do with good or evil from an ecological

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