When searching for the terms ‘agriculture’ or ‘farming’ on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, there is not much to see. The most relevant links seem to be to articles on environmental ethics and animal welfare (certainly relevant topics). Other than that, there are mostly references to the views of ancient scholars on the rural underclass. There is a Wikipedia page for ‘Agricultural Philosophy’, but at the time of writing it is not very inspiring. In comparison, there are (as there should be) dozens of articles on SEP regarding medical topics, including such important but narrow topics as ‘The Sale of Human Organs’, ‘Human/Non-Human Chimeras’, ‘Advance Directives and Substitute Decision-Making’ and ‘The Human Genome Project’. Indeed, judging from the SEP selection, there seems to be about as much interest in whether students can ethically use cognitive enhancing drugs as there is in where our food comes from. I take my comparison here to be a useful one, as both medicine and agriculture are fields which affect the lives of almost everyone in important ways, both are undergoing rapid change, though neither has quite the sort of essential connection to philosophy schools that, say, law and computing do.
Perhaps my concern is not so much that there is no interest in these issues, but rather that the interest is too niche: work is happening, but it is not on the radar of most of those doing, broadly, ‘social philosophy’. There is a Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, which publishes quite a bit though does not have a very high impact factor. Many of the papers published here look like they would be equally at home in a bioethics journal, though happily the first issue of the journal includes a paper called ‘On Teaching a Course on Ethics, Agriculture, and the Environment’ by Mark Sagoff. There is also now an Encyclopedia of Food and Agricultural Ethics, 2nd Ed (ed. Paul B. Thompson & David Kaplan), and a journal of Agriculture and Human Values, though this latter seems to overwhelmingly focus on empirical research.
What can agriculture teach philosophy about (and vice versa)? Here is a list that is aimed more at starting a conversation than at completeness:
Property rights: Farmers (or their banks) own an enormous amount of the Earth’s surface – surely this has some significance for any account of justified property rights? Locke and those who’ve tried to follow him come to mind, though in my experience there is not much depth: they tend to talk as if a farm is always a small plot of land intensively cultivated by a family-like group.
Distributive justice: Agriculture is an essential part of the economy, but its returns are highly volatile. Surely, then, it is a useful example in discussions of social safety nets, discussions which seem to overwhelmingly focus instead on the urban poor. Such safety nets are a major feature of agricultural practice, at least in the global North. There must also be a few logical connections here to discussions of ‘price gouging’ in retail or service industries during disaster situations (a phenomenon which is surely much less common than severe volatility in agricultural inputs and outputs).
Ethical consumption: Sections of the public are losing faith in ethical certification schemes such as organic certification, and this is seemingly caused in part by other sections of the public embracing these schemes for highly questionable reasons. So, what does best-practice agriculture look like, in terms of consumer health, just exchange, sustainability, and environmental protection? Do the current certification schemes work, and what can be done to improve them? (I seem to remember a postgraduate position on this topic advertised in Europe recently, but otherwise I do not hear much talk of this.)
Trade-offs between globalisation and biosecurity: This is yet another topic which intersects with live conversations in environmental ethics, while having its own dimensions which are uniquely agricultural. Do we try to preserve traditional regional diversity and uniqueness, or accept the greater homogeneity and artificiality of the Anthropocene? And if the former, how much effort are we prepared to put in?
Commons problems: Of course, a ‘tragedy of the commons’ takes its name from, and is typically illustrated with examples from, agriculture and other primary industries. But discussion then quickly turns to other, seemingly analogous, issues. Sophisticated answers to peculiarly agricultural commons problems don’t seem to get a whole lot of press among philosophers. (Though work by Elinor Ostrom and others is starting to creep in to the discipline.)
The ‘moral community’ of farmers: What are farmers’ rights and responsibilities with regard to others, given that their customers are generally not people in their local communities who they associate with? This should be of huge interest to those, like me, who are interested in the bounds of social contracts. (If, that is, anything like the common-sense division between people of the city and people of the country still exists in the age of industrial-scale agriculture.)
Inter-generational issues: I have noticed, particularly in the work of Gerald Gaus and David Schmidtz, the claim that land with agricultural potential will be better preserved if it is privately owned. The assumption is that the owner will then have a vested interest in maintaining the land. (“What is unclear from The Lorax is who owns the Truffler Trees. If the Once-ler owns them, then he is not only greedy but exceptionally stupid.” (Gaus, Social Philosophy, §10.1)) Leaving aside the question of what sorts of value the owner will wish to preserve, we can rightly ask whether the economic models which give us these generalisations work across the very long term (or, what makes them work if and when they do).
This list is seriously skewed in the direction of topics that I have some interest and/or competence in (i.e. moral/political/environmental themes) – I’d love to hear your suggestions in the comments if you can think of other topics.
[Photo of custard apple plantation at Mountain Produce Farm, Mt Coonowrin in the background.]
The ArachneanMetaxion Point 