Newsletter: September 2024

The visit to Sitka wasn’t simply a social call. It was also an occasion to perform what I might call a philosophical experiment. I don’t mean anything like experimental philosophy, a trend in contemporary philosophy that doesn’t much inspire me. I mean that the trip provided an occasion to experiment with the contours and limits of some of my philosophical convictions.

Some background first. I’m vegetarian. That said, I don’t find myself much persuaded by the most prominent forms of philosophical argument against eating animals, which tend to come from come from animal rights or animal welfare perspectives. I’ll say a little about the shape of those arguments, a little about what bothers me about them, and then I’ll go on to tell you about how, earlier this month, I ended up clubbing a rockfish to death with a baseball bat.

A common move that philosophers make when they want to persuade you of the moral standing of animals is to ask you about humans. Why don’t we eat humans, why don’t we subject them to painful and deadly laboratory experiments, why don’t we render human body parts and incorporate them into toothpaste, shampoo, bike tires, and many other things? The unguarded answer usually appeals to some special characteristic of humans, like our high intelligence. To which the vegetarian philosopher replies, (a) why does intelligence confer any kind of moral standing and (b) does that mean it’s okay to eat intellectually disabled humans? There are some animals who are more intelligent than some humans. And the same goes for any other criterion: no matter what line you try to draw to put humans above other animals, there will be some humans who fall below it and/or some animals who rise above it.

One very simple reason not to subject humans to deadly violence is that it hurts. “Don’t make people suffer” is a pretty universal moral precept. More generally, bad experiences are bad. But wait, many animals feel pain, suffer, experience things for better and for worse. If suffering is bad, these philosophers argue, it’s bad full stop, and the badness isn’t indexed to the species of creature who’s suffering. It’s “speciesist” to think that human experiences matter more solely because the experiencers are human.

These arguments are clear, simple, and straightforward. They don’t invoke any fancy philosophical footwork. Anyone can grasp them. No wonder they’ve been so influential.

And on a basic level, I agree with them. I do think it’s bad to make animals suffer and I do think that excusing yourself on the grounds that animal suffering is morally unimportant involves some combination of lazy thinking and bad faith. But when you try to give these arguments systematic expression, they end up seeming bloodless and abstract. They aim for universality and objectivity but they do this by putting to one side the particularity and emotional texture that I think is essential to morality as it’s actually lived.

I don’t mean that last paragraph as a knock-down objection. Spelling out what I think is wrong with this reasoning would require an essay of its own, and a much longer one. I just want to register my discomfort with that kind of reasoning while also giving two other reasons why I avoid eating animals, one much simpler and one more obscure.

The simpler reason is this: I can have a healthy, tasty diet that doesn’t involve eating animals, so it seems like a very big ask to expect animals to die unnecessarily just because the taste pleases me. Some fleeting pleasure for me, their entire existence for them: it just seems disproportionate.

The more obscure reason is that, in a way that I still struggle to articulate, eating the corpses of animals seems to me to be spiritually defiling. I don’t derive that conviction from the tenets of any religion, nor do I think that you need a religion to have a sense of spiritual pollution. Nor do I think you need to be vegetarian to see things this way. I was struck a number of years ago by a remark attributed to an Inuit shaman: “The greatest peril in life lies in the fact that human food consists entirely of souls.”

It was this peril that I wanted to explore in more depth on my visit to Sitka. Sitka is an odd place to be vegetarian. If you visit a supermarket, no matter where you are in the world, you’ll encounter a wide array of foodstuffs that were imported from far away. But that’s particularly evident in Sitka, which is about a thousand kilometres from the nearest farm, and where large barges come into port carrying produce shipped up from Seattle. Sitka also abounds in wild food, with fishing as the main driver of its economy and recreational fishing one of its main tourist draws. Most Sitkans I know at least supplement their diet with fish, deer, and other animals that they catch or hunt themselves.

In the fall of 2021, Ilegvak and I were the only two regular faculty at Outer Coast, which at the time had a total student population of ten. I taught philosophy and Ilegvak taught a course called “Relationship with Place,” which dealt with the ways in which Alaska Native culture connects people to the land that they live on—and the ways in which colonialism had disrupted that connection. For Ilegvak, finding nourishment from the land he lives on is a matter of deep principle—at least as deep as the principle that leads me to abstain from eating animals.

We talked a lot about our different relationships with food, and continued to talk in the years since. One reason I made the trip to Sitka this August was to enrich this talk with direct experience.

Ilegvak fishes and hunts not because he believes, contrary to the vegetarian argument I sketched above, that animals lack moral standing. He acknowledges the value of every life—human, animal, and plant—but also recognizes the hard truth that we only live by consuming other living things—beings with souls—and that we, too, are destined to be food for others in our turn. Feeding yourself demands respect and gratitude to the things that you eat. But that respect and gratitude aren’t, for him, incompatible with taking life.

We spent two nights in a forestry hut in the Tongass National Forest. On our first day out on the water, Ilegvak pulled in a rockfish on his fishing line. He said a quick quyana—Yugtun for “thank you”—and then briskly clubbed it with a baseball bat he had at the ready.

The following day, he invited me to give it a try. Rockfish are aggressive hunters and that also makes them easy prey for lures. I don’t think I’ve ever killed an animal larger than a bug, so I felt trepidation as the fishing line went taut and Ilegvak coached me through reeling it in. An orange rockfish, about the length of my size 12 shoe, came up on the hook and into the boat. The word that came instinctively from my mouth wasn’t “thank you” but “sorry.” I picked up the bat and whacked at it. Partly it was the unfamiliarity of the procedure and partly the unfamiliarity of deliberately smacking anyone as hard as I could, but I swung too gently and slightly off target. The poor rockfish flapped about as I inexpertly clubbed it several more times.

Ilegvak gutted and fileted the fish and we steamed the steaks over hot coals after wrapping them in damp skunk cabbage that grows in the forest wetlands. We ate the fish along with a mix of rice and beans. That combination—the meat of an animal that I had personally killed earlier that day and grains and legumes that had to travel across the world to reach Sitka—highlighted to me the difference in these two ways of feeding ourselves.

Food, as I’ve always implicitly understood it, is something you buy at a store. You give them money, they give you food. It’s not that I’ve been unaware that this food originates on farms and in other places and that complex supply chains get the food to the stores. But these things are rarely at the forefront of my mind when I step into a supermarket with a shopping list in hand.

My vegetarianism depends on this system. I can eat a healthy and varied and calorie-rich diet because I have easy access to avocadoes and chick peas and rice and all sorts of other produce I wouldn’t be able to grow in my own garden patch. If global capitalism collapsed, my diet would have to change drastically. (The same, obviously, is true of almost everyone living in rich countries, whatever their diet.)

I don’t mean any of this as an indictment of my choices. The experience in Sitka hasn’t made a fisherman of me and, given the urban shape of my life, a vegetarian diet still seems to me to make the most sense. But the visit to Sitka made me more mindful of that shape. One thing I dislike about the familiar forms of pro-vegetarian argument is their aspiration to universality, as if they’ve uncovered the correct ethical stance no matter who you are or where or how you live. Our choices, and our options, are conditioned by our circumstances and I don’t think you can derive a responsible ethics by abstracting those circumstances away.

The aspiration to derive a universal or objective ethics speaks to a deeper need—felt especially keenly, I think, by philosophers—to find a way of living that’s internally consistent. Clubbing a rockfish to death was wildly inconsistent with my habitual way of living. It’s precisely the inconsistency that intrigued me. Visiting Ilegvak on his turf confronted me with the contours and limits of my own worldview. I doubt that there’s any wholly consistent way to live and there’s much to be learned by applying pressure to deeply held principles.

And despite what I said about philosophers being especially attracted to consistency, I think there’s something philosophical about applying that kind of pressure. A philosopher is, etymologically, a lover of wisdom (philos is Greek for love and sophia is Greek for wisdom). As Socrates explains in Plato’s Symposium, a philosopher is not someone who is wise, but someone who lacks wisdom and, feeling that lack, longs for wisdom ardently, as a lover might. To be a philosopher, then, isn’t to have wisdom, or to lead a perfectly consistent life, but rather to seek wisdom, and to probe the inconsistencies that colour every life. 

Seven Things I Learned in August

1. Termites are among the most flatulent animals in the world and their farts contribute 1%–3% of total global methane emissions. (source)
2. Well before the industrial revolution, most stone sculpture and ornament was semi-mass produced using a method of “indirect carving,” in which a “pointing machine” would create a framework of needles that captured the sculpture’s dimensions. Artists would make a single clay model, or even just a hand drawn model, and the actual stone work would be handled mechanically by less skilled craftsmen working with the pointing machine. (source)
3. Etymologically, “pregnant” meaning “laden with significance” predates “pregnant” meaning “with child”: a “pregnant pause” uses the word in its original sense, not as a metaphor. (source)
4. Half of all the world’s cashews are sold at Costco. (source)
5. Medieval minstrels would travel great distances across Europe to attend annual “schools,” which were effectively minstrel conferences. Minstrels would exchange ideas, instruments, new songs, and styles and sometimes seek jobs. Like with academic conferences today, their travel was often covered by their employers. (source)
6. Humans usually have 33 vertebrae. The slender snipe eel weighs only a few ounces but has 750. (source)
7. Suppose two people standing at arm’s length from one another had just 1% more electrons in their bodies than protons. The repulsive force between them would be as strong as the force that would be needed to lift an object as heavy as the entire Earth. (source)