Clemens Driessen

Pig towers and in vitro meat: Disclosing moral worlds by design

Technology development is often considered to obfuscate democratic decision-making and is met with ethical suspicion. However, new technologies also can open up issues for societal debate and generate fresh moral engagements. This paper discusses two technological projects: schemes for pig farming in high-rise agro-production parks that came to be known as ‘pig towers’, and efforts to develop techniques for producing meat without animals by using stem cells, labelled ‘in vitro meat’. Even before fully entering our world as actually realized systems or commercially viable products, these technologies disclosed societal concerns over animal agriculture. These concerns were expressed through active public responses and were informed by formal methods of assessment, such as applied ethics and lifecycle analysis. By closely examining how features of these designs entered public debates and ethical thought, we trace the moral world-disclosing character of technological projects. We find that these proposals generate occasions for debate and gather new societal actors to form new coalitions or rifts. Both technologies gave rise to particular understandings of societal issues. As the central means through which problems were discussed changed, new types of arguments were considered relevant and ontological shifts could even be seen to occur with what was considered ‘real meat’ and the ‘true nature’ of animal farming. We argue that world disclosing involves a renewed sense of the character of political and moral agency, whereby the sensibilities that constitute a moral subject are redefined. Finally, we explore the inner tensions and ambiguities of this process of moral and political change by confronting the notions of ‘world disclosure’ developed by Dewey and Heidegger, thereby connecting to recent debates within both STS and political theory on how to understand political processes in a technological culture.

From “Nazi Cows” to Cosmopolitan “Ecological Engineers”: Specifying Rewilding Through a History of Heck Cattle

Rewilding has become a hot topic in nature conservation. Ambitious schemes are afoot to rewild continental Europe and North America. Hopes are being invested in the political, economic, and therapeutic potentials of future wilds. Popular and scientific enthusiasms for the wild are frequently ahistorical and apolitical, however. This article begins to address this problem. It offers one genealogy of rewilding, focusing on a history of Heck cattle and their deployment in European rewilding projects. These animals were back-bred by two German zoologists in the 1930s, with Nazi patronage, for release as hunting prey in the annexed territories of Eastern Europe. Some cattle survived the war and their offspring have become prominent, alongside new back-breeding initiatives, in contemporary efforts to rewild a unifying Europe. Cattle now figure as cosmopolitan ecological engineers, whose grazing will create functional, wild landscapes. This genealogy examines what and where is understood to be wild and who is authorized to make such decisions in this story. Drawing cautiously on this extreme example, it examines historic rewilding as a form of reactionary modernism. It critically traces the emergence, persistence, and transformation of various ontologies, geographies, and epistemologies of wildness in Europe to position contemporary rewilding as a mode of ecomodernism. When compared, rewilding under Nazi rule and in the contemporary European Union are found to be different in every relevant problematic respect. Reflecting on differing conceptions of what it means to be modern helps specify a multiplicity of rewildings past and present. The article concludes with a set of criteria for discriminating among rewildings to inform the emergence and analysis of this conservation paradigm.

In awe of fish? Exploring animal ethics for non-cuddly species

Though rarely counted as individuals, fish are by far the most consumed animals in the world, outnumbering all other food animals combined. These widely eaten animals are generally conceived of as dull and mindless creatures, ‘swimming protein to be plucked from rivers and seas’. Over the past several years, however, evidence has been amassed which indicates that fish are more sentient and intelligent than their alleged ‘three second memory’ would imply. Thus far these findings have had only limited success in arousing public interest in fish welfare. Today still fish are rarely discussed or treated as sentient beings that feel pain and suffer. A series of exploratory workshops with professionals working in a variety of fish-related fields suggested that the reason that people have a hard time appreciating the perspective of fish is not so much a lack of knowledge about fish sentience. Instead it may have more to do with the perceived inability of fish to strike up meaningful relations with humans: they are quintessentially non-cuddly animals, cold, slimy, and with their unblinking and sideways directed eyes they don’t have a ‘face’ to us. Many people however know that some fish species display amazing abilities, such as being able to swim to the Sargasso Sea and back to the river they came from, as the eel does. Such animals seem to generate awe and perhaps respect not for to some extent resembling humans, but by their being different and quintessentially ‘other’ – precisely for us having trouble to imagine their life form. The type of affect generated by this sense of otherness differs markedly from the common modes of caring about animals based on nearness, empathy and direct interaction, and is more akin to aesthetic experiences evoked around environmental concerns. In discussion with recent work in relational animal ethics, environmental aesthetics, and more-than-human geography, this paper explores the potential of the experience of awe as motivating and guiding an ethics for (farmed) fish. By attending to discourses and material practices concerned with fish, fisheries and fish farming, the challenges of particular understandings of an ‘ethics of awe’ are considered, including the question of whether and in what ways awe could be expressed as and translated into consumer preferences.

Comment: Caring for Captive Communities by Looking for Love and Loneliness, or Against an Overly Individualist Liberal Animal Ethics

Animal ethics in its liberal, analytic style of academic writing can suffer from a form of excessive individualism that lacks a full view of life as experienced by many animals. A range of arguments against using and enclosing animals, or in favour of certain (pre)conditions of captivity, can be found to have a tendency to focus on generic and isolated individual organisms. In its most extreme form, this type of ethical thought sets up a truncated notion of the animal as separate from their conspecifics, limits animal interests to the desires of solipsistic individuals, fails to appreciate meaning that may emerge in human-animal relations , and renders invisible a range of concerns of animal ethics in view of the communal character of animal lives. Through a critical reading of the previous four chapters, this one will trace the extent to which reasoning in terms of welfare, freedom, capabilities or dignity may lead to granting attention and value to (many) animals as the idiosyncratic, relational, sociable beings which many of them are. Or can be, even in captivity , and even in the age of humans.