Gary Francione is Wrong (Vegan / Vegans / Veganism)
26 January 2016 [link youtube]
Youtube Automatic Transcription
Guerry Franchione a is one of the most
prominent theoreticians of animal rights and the vegan movement today this video is not offering a critique that you have heard before if you have been reading his work reading critiques of his work looking up debates he's already provided to the world via a radio via YouTube by other platforms that I can tell you this is not telling you something you have already heard a half dozen times part of what makes Francie ohne a distinct and memorable voice in the vegan and animal rights world is that many decades ago he broke away from Petta People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and his engagement the issues has partly been framed as a critique of Pettus methods it's eddie'll its ideology the limitations of what it does and I'm sure for many people especially in France he on his own generation who discovered veganism as adults who first had a dalliance with so-called animal welfare scauses and who gradually progressed from shall we say softcore to hardcore veganism I'm sure his story is a sympathetic one and the critiques he offers are both useful and also have some real emotional resonance because they'll reflect issues many people will wrestle with themselves there are people who you know at age thirty were still involved with trying to get puppies out of the pound but we're still eating beef and then made a gradual progression from you know to not eating red meat but still eating cheese and taking up a bunch of kind of halfway positions and only very gradually coming to the set of realizations that Gary fraccion a presents to you fully packaged as being look either this is a fundamental question of principle either this is a fundamental question of animal rights or it is not and he's inviting you to take that leap to engage with animal rights seriously become fully vegan and support the complete abolition of animal exploitation an abolition is definitely his key word let me tell you now in this video I'm gonna tell you why I think everyone is wrong even though I am myself a vegan and I think I could be described as an abolitionist vegan um in seeing that he is wrong I want to start by clarifying does not mean that his work is completely invalid that it's of no value to anyone that it should be discarded political science and economics are really fundamentally different from the pure Sciences in that we very often have theories that are valid within limits we have theories in the social sciences that are valid and useful in reference to some examples and not others that are useful in some contexts and not others you can have a theory in economics that explains inflation in highly industrialized countries and yet it is not useful at all when you're looking at inflation in a small third-world country that does not have industry and that perhaps isn't connected to other markets that may sound like a shallow distraction to you but actually it's kind of a profound point in physics either you have a theory of gravity or you don't I'm not allowed to give you a theory of gravity that only makes sense here on earth and then to say well you know my calculations that make sense on earth but for some reason they don't make sense on the moon so you just forget about it on the moon different rules apply no you have to work systematically figure out the principles of gravity in a way that will both explain what we observe here on earth and what we observe on the moon in a way that's consistent reducible to one rule well the social sciences are not like that or at least specifically political science and economics are definitely not like that I would note that anarchism is an example of a whole set of theories that often work as a critique of a particular issue of a particular set of issues but then when you take them outside of their comfort zone and you apply them to other situations and the questions they become irrelevant they become incoherent or they become false if regarded as a set of factual claims I have never seen a serious anarchist attempt to deal with sewage treatment how are we going to have sewage treatment without laws how are we going to manage wastewater being put into a lake that millions of people live around in an industrialized Society with factories that have hazardous waste with sewage treatment plants and with people relying on that same lake for the drinking water those are difficult questions but their questions governments have to deal with every day and while an anarchist or libertarian may be sort of working to their own strengths theoretically when they're addressing government corruption government incompetence police brutality or a number of other themes suddenly when you want to talk about sewage treatments this whole approach seems to fall apart so this is in effect what I have to say about Gary Franchione a that he has devised an approach that has some strengths and some weaknesses that is valid in reference to some examples and not others francy on his approach the distinctive crucial aspect is his claim that we must recognize that all animals have the rights not to be property so the sort of route most basic right is in his words a negative right it's not the right to do something it's not even the right to live it's the right not to be the property of a human being and therefore not to be exploited for human use for human consumption etc if we accept this principle and it is a matter of principle we must therefore abolish the whole institutional structure of the meat industry and in general all of his strengths are in addressing factory farming and in this critique of what he calls single issue causes now this approach has some strengths he is quite strong in pointing out the ways in which there are subtle hypocrisy within animal welfare ISM he is quite strong and pointing out the ways in which a campaign from an animal rights group can end up glorifying or encouraging a meat corporation iterate what do you want me to say here a slaughterhouse owning corporation or a food a purveyor of meat like McDonald's by rubber-stamping by endorsing by approving of one set of animal sporting practices over another because they caused 10 percent less suffering or give chickens ten percent more space in their cages to be sure he has a set of valid and interesting and provocative points here and I think that even most people who disagree with frenzy only agree that these are issues really worth thinking about now I would say the weaknesses become evident though when we switch the flame frame of reference to habitat conservation and wild animals that I find in general he almost never mentions so part and parcel this approach Gary Francie on his approach is the refusal to break down and address single issue causes and just how bitter he is about that comes out his hotline debates so for example he is vociferous in his disavowal of the banning of foie gras he hates this with a passion the idea that you know exploiting animals in one particular way should be targeted and addressed in restaurants or in food production that you know production of foie gras is more cruel than just the production of duck meat pure and simple and that people should be trying to pass a law to ban foie gras in particular well now again he raises some interesting points and questions you know why do we care about this one method of feeding and killing ducks as opposed to other methods of feeding and killing ducks chickens cows oysters turkeys or monkeys or anything else okay interesting critique I used to live in a small poverty-stricken country in Southeast Asia called Laos we had a situation there where I believe a species of indigenous dolphin was down to just seven members I could be misremembering the number but it was an incredibly small number of this species of dolphin remained alive now if you want to save that species from extinction you are looking at a single issue cause of exactly the type that Fran Sione hates and one of the reasons he hates them is that these single-issue causes do draw you into negotiations with you compromises with - discussions with people who profit from animal exploitation now although he has some interesting observations there I have some interesting observations of my own - um yes if you want to save those dolphins the Mekong River dolphins the last few families of dolphins the last few breeding pairs you are going to have to enter into complex arrangements with fishermen yes evil fishermen people who kill and eat fish every day for a living that's exactly who you need to make a compromise with and you don't have the luxury of just making it illegal to catch fish entirely which is exactly Gary France a oneís abolitionist approach was okay well ban fishing entirely it's all bad it's all killing animals well we got a problem here and now with one particular species and right now in whatever 2016 as soon as possible if radical but practicable I don't just say practical but practicable action is not taken then there's no chance for the species to survive and yeah that is a single issue cause and it's a single issue cause that will lead you to perhaps not only make compromises with fishermen trying to sort out where they can fish and with what methods trying to ensure enough habitat is reserved for the dolphins and the dolphins are getting enough of the species they need to eat etc etc all these peculiar dotted lines in a map you know crow guess what you're also probably going to be making compromises with corrupt government officials you're probably gonna making compromises with exactly the people who themselves have been exploiting these animals and driven driving them to the edge of extinction people whose whole economic existence is probably centered on the exploitation of this same stretch of river where you're now trying to save the last few dolphins francy only definitely opposes ever making animals into legal property but very often with animals in the wild and indeed this even happens sometimes with animals and laboratories when you're trying to liberate animals that exploited for scientific research what is necessary is precisely to have someone who gives a voice to the voiceless a wild animal or an animal that has been discarded by a lab that has no owner has no voice and again this is in the year 2016 we're not talking about a science fiction world in the future we're not talking about an ideal world that vegans created and some parallel universe if you're down to say the last 20 wild elephants living in a troop somewhere and some little patch of jungle they have nobody to advocate for them they have nobody represent their interest say in conflicts with the government say in conflicts with a logging company very often one of the things you try to do is to declare those elephants the property of the state the property of the king the property of some millionaire patrons someone like Bill Gates if someone can intervene and actually claim the animals as their property then they can very often exercise protections for those animals because there is now a lawyer and there is now a bank account connected to those animals and I have seen that happen with personhood cases for apes people were a saying look you've got an ape that has some background whether it's a former circus performer or a former victim of gruesome experiments and laboratories they look we need to create a legal status for this ape for this elephant or what have you so that it can be legally defended even if it is being defended simply in it's right to sit alone in the forest and forage for food and a daily basis okay I think I've said enough because I'm trying to keep this video somewhat brief and snappy um I do not think that the themes and issues that Gary franciotti is raising are meaningless I think he has created a number of very interesting and worthwhile debates and I would assume that several decades ago people found what he had to say quite shocking in contrast to what was the accepted norm surrounding animal welfare ISM groups like pata People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and what-have-you in the year 2016 it's probably a very positive thing that so many of France Sione's views now seem outmoded and old-fashioned I think that's a sign of progress as always one of the practical issues I raised is the the comparison to cigarette smoking the solution for tobacco and cigarette smoking has not been to simply declare that nicotine is illegal that the tobacco plant is illegal and to make cigarettes disappear no matter where you are watching this video from please try to imagine just how short a distance you would have to walk to buy a pack of cigarettes if you wanted to and if you're watching this video in China Greece or Italy you may be watching in a society where people still smoke to a remarkable extent but we've entered into a transitional period with cigarette smoking even though it is legal even though it is socially acceptable to some extent in some contexts when someone lights up a cigarette the most common reaction for the people around them is man do you really have to do you really have to smoke it is simply perceived right now in 2016 as a bad thing parents do not want their children to smoke even if the parent smokes cigarettes themselves think about what a different world we would live in if we lived in a world where parents didn't want their children to eat bacon even if they ate bacon themselves we're a long way away even from hitting that transitional stage even from being in a society where meat is perceived as problematic enough for people to say man do you really need to eat meat but we can get there and we're not going to get there by taking this impossible science fiction shortcut to living in a world where we can simply declare oh nobody can eat any fish fish are illegal they're for saving the dolphins isn't a problem no no in the next century in the next 10 years we'll have a plurality of genuinely valid single issue causes attached to veganism and if you're a vegan there is no legitimate reason why you can't be a vegan and can't at the same time also be committed to helping a particular population of dolphins in a particular body of water or helping a particular ape in a particular cage in a particular lab dealing with single-issue causes remains meaningful and it's good our main meaningful week to week and month to month because ultimately we're all human beings we all have only two hands to work with two eyes and 24 hours in the day so yes you will engage with single-issue causes and particular single-issue causes whether it's a particular ape a particular cow etc they are not all evil in the way that Gary Fran Sione claims they are on the basis of examples because he selects good examples he selects examples of some single issue causes that you should consider evil because they draw vegans in to fundamentally unethical compromises
prominent theoreticians of animal rights and the vegan movement today this video is not offering a critique that you have heard before if you have been reading his work reading critiques of his work looking up debates he's already provided to the world via a radio via YouTube by other platforms that I can tell you this is not telling you something you have already heard a half dozen times part of what makes Francie ohne a distinct and memorable voice in the vegan and animal rights world is that many decades ago he broke away from Petta People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and his engagement the issues has partly been framed as a critique of Pettus methods it's eddie'll its ideology the limitations of what it does and I'm sure for many people especially in France he on his own generation who discovered veganism as adults who first had a dalliance with so-called animal welfare scauses and who gradually progressed from shall we say softcore to hardcore veganism I'm sure his story is a sympathetic one and the critiques he offers are both useful and also have some real emotional resonance because they'll reflect issues many people will wrestle with themselves there are people who you know at age thirty were still involved with trying to get puppies out of the pound but we're still eating beef and then made a gradual progression from you know to not eating red meat but still eating cheese and taking up a bunch of kind of halfway positions and only very gradually coming to the set of realizations that Gary fraccion a presents to you fully packaged as being look either this is a fundamental question of principle either this is a fundamental question of animal rights or it is not and he's inviting you to take that leap to engage with animal rights seriously become fully vegan and support the complete abolition of animal exploitation an abolition is definitely his key word let me tell you now in this video I'm gonna tell you why I think everyone is wrong even though I am myself a vegan and I think I could be described as an abolitionist vegan um in seeing that he is wrong I want to start by clarifying does not mean that his work is completely invalid that it's of no value to anyone that it should be discarded political science and economics are really fundamentally different from the pure Sciences in that we very often have theories that are valid within limits we have theories in the social sciences that are valid and useful in reference to some examples and not others that are useful in some contexts and not others you can have a theory in economics that explains inflation in highly industrialized countries and yet it is not useful at all when you're looking at inflation in a small third-world country that does not have industry and that perhaps isn't connected to other markets that may sound like a shallow distraction to you but actually it's kind of a profound point in physics either you have a theory of gravity or you don't I'm not allowed to give you a theory of gravity that only makes sense here on earth and then to say well you know my calculations that make sense on earth but for some reason they don't make sense on the moon so you just forget about it on the moon different rules apply no you have to work systematically figure out the principles of gravity in a way that will both explain what we observe here on earth and what we observe on the moon in a way that's consistent reducible to one rule well the social sciences are not like that or at least specifically political science and economics are definitely not like that I would note that anarchism is an example of a whole set of theories that often work as a critique of a particular issue of a particular set of issues but then when you take them outside of their comfort zone and you apply them to other situations and the questions they become irrelevant they become incoherent or they become false if regarded as a set of factual claims I have never seen a serious anarchist attempt to deal with sewage treatment how are we going to have sewage treatment without laws how are we going to manage wastewater being put into a lake that millions of people live around in an industrialized Society with factories that have hazardous waste with sewage treatment plants and with people relying on that same lake for the drinking water those are difficult questions but their questions governments have to deal with every day and while an anarchist or libertarian may be sort of working to their own strengths theoretically when they're addressing government corruption government incompetence police brutality or a number of other themes suddenly when you want to talk about sewage treatments this whole approach seems to fall apart so this is in effect what I have to say about Gary Franchione a that he has devised an approach that has some strengths and some weaknesses that is valid in reference to some examples and not others francy on his approach the distinctive crucial aspect is his claim that we must recognize that all animals have the rights not to be property so the sort of route most basic right is in his words a negative right it's not the right to do something it's not even the right to live it's the right not to be the property of a human being and therefore not to be exploited for human use for human consumption etc if we accept this principle and it is a matter of principle we must therefore abolish the whole institutional structure of the meat industry and in general all of his strengths are in addressing factory farming and in this critique of what he calls single issue causes now this approach has some strengths he is quite strong in pointing out the ways in which there are subtle hypocrisy within animal welfare ISM he is quite strong and pointing out the ways in which a campaign from an animal rights group can end up glorifying or encouraging a meat corporation iterate what do you want me to say here a slaughterhouse owning corporation or a food a purveyor of meat like McDonald's by rubber-stamping by endorsing by approving of one set of animal sporting practices over another because they caused 10 percent less suffering or give chickens ten percent more space in their cages to be sure he has a set of valid and interesting and provocative points here and I think that even most people who disagree with frenzy only agree that these are issues really worth thinking about now I would say the weaknesses become evident though when we switch the flame frame of reference to habitat conservation and wild animals that I find in general he almost never mentions so part and parcel this approach Gary Francie on his approach is the refusal to break down and address single issue causes and just how bitter he is about that comes out his hotline debates so for example he is vociferous in his disavowal of the banning of foie gras he hates this with a passion the idea that you know exploiting animals in one particular way should be targeted and addressed in restaurants or in food production that you know production of foie gras is more cruel than just the production of duck meat pure and simple and that people should be trying to pass a law to ban foie gras in particular well now again he raises some interesting points and questions you know why do we care about this one method of feeding and killing ducks as opposed to other methods of feeding and killing ducks chickens cows oysters turkeys or monkeys or anything else okay interesting critique I used to live in a small poverty-stricken country in Southeast Asia called Laos we had a situation there where I believe a species of indigenous dolphin was down to just seven members I could be misremembering the number but it was an incredibly small number of this species of dolphin remained alive now if you want to save that species from extinction you are looking at a single issue cause of exactly the type that Fran Sione hates and one of the reasons he hates them is that these single-issue causes do draw you into negotiations with you compromises with - discussions with people who profit from animal exploitation now although he has some interesting observations there I have some interesting observations of my own - um yes if you want to save those dolphins the Mekong River dolphins the last few families of dolphins the last few breeding pairs you are going to have to enter into complex arrangements with fishermen yes evil fishermen people who kill and eat fish every day for a living that's exactly who you need to make a compromise with and you don't have the luxury of just making it illegal to catch fish entirely which is exactly Gary France a oneís abolitionist approach was okay well ban fishing entirely it's all bad it's all killing animals well we got a problem here and now with one particular species and right now in whatever 2016 as soon as possible if radical but practicable I don't just say practical but practicable action is not taken then there's no chance for the species to survive and yeah that is a single issue cause and it's a single issue cause that will lead you to perhaps not only make compromises with fishermen trying to sort out where they can fish and with what methods trying to ensure enough habitat is reserved for the dolphins and the dolphins are getting enough of the species they need to eat etc etc all these peculiar dotted lines in a map you know crow guess what you're also probably going to be making compromises with corrupt government officials you're probably gonna making compromises with exactly the people who themselves have been exploiting these animals and driven driving them to the edge of extinction people whose whole economic existence is probably centered on the exploitation of this same stretch of river where you're now trying to save the last few dolphins francy only definitely opposes ever making animals into legal property but very often with animals in the wild and indeed this even happens sometimes with animals and laboratories when you're trying to liberate animals that exploited for scientific research what is necessary is precisely to have someone who gives a voice to the voiceless a wild animal or an animal that has been discarded by a lab that has no owner has no voice and again this is in the year 2016 we're not talking about a science fiction world in the future we're not talking about an ideal world that vegans created and some parallel universe if you're down to say the last 20 wild elephants living in a troop somewhere and some little patch of jungle they have nobody to advocate for them they have nobody represent their interest say in conflicts with the government say in conflicts with a logging company very often one of the things you try to do is to declare those elephants the property of the state the property of the king the property of some millionaire patrons someone like Bill Gates if someone can intervene and actually claim the animals as their property then they can very often exercise protections for those animals because there is now a lawyer and there is now a bank account connected to those animals and I have seen that happen with personhood cases for apes people were a saying look you've got an ape that has some background whether it's a former circus performer or a former victim of gruesome experiments and laboratories they look we need to create a legal status for this ape for this elephant or what have you so that it can be legally defended even if it is being defended simply in it's right to sit alone in the forest and forage for food and a daily basis okay I think I've said enough because I'm trying to keep this video somewhat brief and snappy um I do not think that the themes and issues that Gary franciotti is raising are meaningless I think he has created a number of very interesting and worthwhile debates and I would assume that several decades ago people found what he had to say quite shocking in contrast to what was the accepted norm surrounding animal welfare ISM groups like pata People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and what-have-you in the year 2016 it's probably a very positive thing that so many of France Sione's views now seem outmoded and old-fashioned I think that's a sign of progress as always one of the practical issues I raised is the the comparison to cigarette smoking the solution for tobacco and cigarette smoking has not been to simply declare that nicotine is illegal that the tobacco plant is illegal and to make cigarettes disappear no matter where you are watching this video from please try to imagine just how short a distance you would have to walk to buy a pack of cigarettes if you wanted to and if you're watching this video in China Greece or Italy you may be watching in a society where people still smoke to a remarkable extent but we've entered into a transitional period with cigarette smoking even though it is legal even though it is socially acceptable to some extent in some contexts when someone lights up a cigarette the most common reaction for the people around them is man do you really have to do you really have to smoke it is simply perceived right now in 2016 as a bad thing parents do not want their children to smoke even if the parent smokes cigarettes themselves think about what a different world we would live in if we lived in a world where parents didn't want their children to eat bacon even if they ate bacon themselves we're a long way away even from hitting that transitional stage even from being in a society where meat is perceived as problematic enough for people to say man do you really need to eat meat but we can get there and we're not going to get there by taking this impossible science fiction shortcut to living in a world where we can simply declare oh nobody can eat any fish fish are illegal they're for saving the dolphins isn't a problem no no in the next century in the next 10 years we'll have a plurality of genuinely valid single issue causes attached to veganism and if you're a vegan there is no legitimate reason why you can't be a vegan and can't at the same time also be committed to helping a particular population of dolphins in a particular body of water or helping a particular ape in a particular cage in a particular lab dealing with single-issue causes remains meaningful and it's good our main meaningful week to week and month to month because ultimately we're all human beings we all have only two hands to work with two eyes and 24 hours in the day so yes you will engage with single-issue causes and particular single-issue causes whether it's a particular ape a particular cow etc they are not all evil in the way that Gary Fran Sione claims they are on the basis of examples because he selects good examples he selects examples of some single issue causes that you should consider evil because they draw vegans in to fundamentally unethical compromises