Porter's Blog

With less land and fewer workers (as of 1993, 1.7 percent of Americans were engaged in production agriculture), it was difficult to keep animals under far-ranging, open, extensive conditions. With fewer people caring for them, animals were brought into closer and closer confinement, both outdoor and indoor, so that effects of temperature, rain, snow, and so on could be minimized. Instead of depending on human labor, farmers began to rely on machinery to feed, clean, water, milk, collect eggs, and so forth. Animal agricultural operations became capital-intensive rather than labor-intensive. Animals began to be crowded together in an attempt to get as many as possible into the expensive production unit. Laying hens, for example, are typically placed 5 to 6 birds in a 12-inch-by-18-inch cage, and up to 100,000 birds may be kept in one building. Broiler chickens are raised in huge open sheds at a density of approximately two birds per square foot. Beef cattle, traditionally raised on range grass, are moved for the latter portion of their lives into feedlots, where they are fed grain diets, thus producing both increased weight gain and an outlet for U.S. grain surplus. Hogs are increasingly raised in confinement buildings where they never see the light of day—buildings holding 500 to 1000 sows are not uncommon. Most notoriously, veal calves are raised in small crates in order to restrict movement and keep their flesh tender, and are also kept anemic or near-anemic to keep the meat “white.” Thus animals are forced into environments for which they are not biologically suited. Because the operations are so expensive, producers are motivated to crowd as many animals as possible into the systems, since profit per animal is small. Thus, even though it is well known that chickens will lay more eggs if given more space, it is more profitable to crowd as many birds as possible into cages, yielding fewer eggs per bird but more eggs for the operation as a whole.

The second question reverses the first: What kind of a
society ought we to want in order that the life sciences will be
encouraged and helped to make their best contribution to
human welfare? The contribution bioethics makes will in
great part be a function of the goals sought by the life
sciences, and those in turn will be stimulated or formed by
society’s goals. The life sciences shape the way we think
about our lives, and thus they increasingly provide some key
ingredients in society’s vision of itself and in the lives of the
citizens who comprise society.
Understood in terms of these two broad questions,
bioethics takes its place at the heart of the enterprise of the
life sciences. Only a part of its work will bear on dealing with
the daily moral dilemmas and ethical puzzles that are part of
contemporary healthcare and environmental protection. A
no less substantial part will be to help shape the social
context in which those dilemmas and puzzles play themselves
out. At its best, bioethics will move back and forth
between the concreteness of necessary individual and policy
decisions and the broad notions and dynamic of the human
situation. It is still a new field, seeking to better define itself
and to refine its methods. It has made a start in shaping its
direction and possible contribution, but only a start.

In its early days, contemporary bioethics was generally seen as an activity on the fringes of research and practice in the life sciences; it had no place within environmental analysis. The dominant view was that the life sciences were a strictly scientific endeavor, with questions of morality and values arising only now and then in the interstices. That view has gradually changed. The life sciences are increasingly understood as, at their core, no less a moral endeavor than a scientific one. Ethics lies at the very heart of the enterprise, if only because facts and values can no longer be clearly separated—any more than the ends of the life sciences can be separated from the means chosen to pursue them. No less important, questions of the moral means and ends of the life sciences cannot be long distinguished from the moral means and ends of the cultures and societies that pursue and deploy them. Here, fundamental questions must be asked. First, what kind of medicine and healthcare, what kind of stance toward nature and our environment, do we need for the kind of society we want? Such a question presupposes that we have some end in view for our society, though that may not be all that clear. What is clear, however, is that it is almost impossible to think for long about bioethics without being forced to think even more broadly about the society in which it will exist and whose ends—for better or worse—it will serve.