Ethics of food security
Dr Emma Rush
Food Security in Australia Forum and Book Launch
October 2012
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Overview
Ethics
•History of the discipline and some key concepts
•New directions (in the West): environmental ethics
Food security
•‘Framing’ of the problem: anthropocentric vs stewardship?
•Human right to food implies human responsibilities ( politics)
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Ethics (1)
History of thought responding to the question:
“What is the right thing to do in this situation?”
Various competing theories (none perfect)
•Which leads to fewest problems?
•Best fit with ‘intuitions’ (or generally recognised practice)
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Ethics (2)
“What is the right thing to do in this situation?”
•Consequences
•Principles
•Facts
•Values (Which consequences/principles are more important?)
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Ethics (3)
Western: focus on human beings (post-1970: environment)
Non-Western: frequently focus on human beings within broader
environment (e.g., Buddhism, Hinduism, Daoism, various
indigenous ethics)
When it comes to food security, my aims are:
•keep the broader (environmental) ethics concerns on the table
(resist construction of this as ‘privileged’)
•ask some related difficult questions (philosophical tradition)
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Ethics (4)
How do we value the environment/‘more-than-human’ world?
Instrumental: only valuable for its use to human beings (resource)
•“Enlightened self-interest” perspective (risk here – next slide)
Intrinsic: valuable in itself (independent of use for human beings)
•Stewardship perspective
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Ethics (5)
“Enlightened self-interest” (risk here)
[E]very scientific model used to account for human demand and
nature’s supply shows a consistent trend: We are in significant
overshoot, and overshoot is growing… ecological debt, and the
interest we are paying on that mounting debt—food shortages,
plummeting wildlife populations, disappearing forests,
degraded land productivity and the build-up of CO₂ in our
atmosphere and oceans—comes with devastating human and
monetary costs. http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/gfn/page/earth_overshoot_day/
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Ethics (6)
Stewardship, informed by best data available on ecological reality
(and in line with many non-Western traditions)
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Food security (1)
= “food security for human beings” (human right to food)
(food security for the estimated millions – many as yet
unclassified – of other animal species on the planet is accounted
for – if at all – under ‘sustainability/biodiversity’)
Anthropocentric construction
Dilemma: human right to food vs. ecological protection
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Food security
Dilemma: human right to food vs. ecological protection
Problem: But [some level of] ecological health is required for
successful food production, so there is a limit to how far we can
trade off ecological protection for increased food production (after
that, self-defeating).
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Food security
What if we used a ‘stewardship’ reading of food security (i.e.,
inclusive of food security for other species)?
Strategies to increase food production for human beings
need also to reduce (or at least, not increase) ecological
costs.
(Different parameters for agricultural specialists to work within)
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Food security
What if
a human right to food (primarily relevant to developing world)
was seen in the context of
a human responsibility to reduce consumption to within
ecologically sustainable and socially equitable limits (primarily
relevant to developed world)?
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Food security
What if we set ecological limits and social policies first, and then
allowed the market to operate within those limits? (Ecological
economics)
(Currently, we allow the market to determine how resources are
allocated, and then attempt to influence that retrospectively in line
with ecologically and socially desirable goals)
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Food security
Applied ethics leads quickly into political questions, because
politics is the background against which problems arise that
technical specialists are then expected to confront.
•Which problems would you rather be confronting?
•What kind of a world do you want to work towards?
Historical perspective
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