On Trespass

As I have come to know animal rights activists and vegans, I have spent a lot of time trying to place their positions as moral stances, to  understand what kind of claim they are making. This paper is one part of that effort. (It was never given. Nobody liked it.)

Taking Appropriate Account of Evil Histories

Peter Shea

September, 2008

Abstract: Vegetarians and some consumer activists recommend renouncing taking advantage of available resources because of the history of those resources. I try to understand what this recommendation means, in part by considering what it would mean to renounce trespassing.

Introduction

In recommending that someone change his or her life, I might be pointing out a good way to live, asking the person to compare that way of living with his or her current way – to take it seriously as an option. I might also be alerting someone to an obligation that he or she has ignored or slighted or just overlooked. That’s more urgent than suggesting a good way to live, even suggesting a morally good way to live. There may be lots of good ways to live, and some of those may exclude others. But if I say to someone, “You are neglecting your obligations,” that should make the person stop and listen, reconsider his or her way of living right now.

In the last few years, Compassionate Action for Animals has urged University students to become vegetarian, to consider becoming vegan. I have watched this organization with great interest, because the changes people make in their lives, in response to this urging, seem to me good. But I have wondered what kind of recommendation CAA is making, whether they are pointing out an obligation or urging upon people a good way to live, or something else altogether.

The moral concern that CAA raises is in a family of concerns based on history. “Here is a piece of meat. It has a history of cruelty and abuse behind it.” Similarly, one says: “Here is a soccer ball. It has a history of cruelty and abuse behind it.” Sometimes, the argument goes directly from there to “Don’t purchase or consume this product.” Sometimes, there’s an intermediate premise. I can think of two possible premises:

1. If you refrain from consuming this, you will contribute to stopping future cruelty and abuse.
2. If you refrain from consuming this, you will declare yourself --and help to make yourself -- the sort of person to whom cruelty and abuse are terrible things, not just accepted things.

A and B are the bare bones of utilitarian or consequentialist arguments that take the cruel history of this product as their starting points.  If one moves directly from the statement about the cruel history of this product to a conclusion about action, one is conceiving obligation as depending on something else besides consequences. One way of saying this might be: “I reject what I would be doing if I knowingly consumed a product that had a cruel history – whatever the further consequences of that might be, for the world or for my development as a moral person.”

As I listened to various vegetarian speakers in the events around Peter Singer’s visit to the University of Minnesota a few years ago, I couldn’t quite understand what sort of recommendation people were making, but some of what I heard suggested that people thought that the information about the horrific conditions under which farm animals are raised was alerting people to an obligation they might have overlooked or slighted. Partly, the source of this impression was discussions about where to draw the line. Is eating fish ok? Can one consistently abstain from meat but still eat eggs? Is organic meat ok, while factory farm meat is not? Those sounded like discussions about whether it is lying to just smile when the inept teacher asks whether you thought his lecture was good. People assume that there is a fact of the matter about obligations. Since obligations constrain one’s life, it is very important to know just how far they reach. I need to know what lying amounts to because I am committed to move heaven and earth to avoid lying. On the other hand, good lives can be undertaken in many ways. There’s not the same urgency about what goes into a particular sort of good life as there is about the content of an obligation. So when I felt this urgency about definition, I thought that people must be conceiving their recommendation as pointing out an obligation to people.

In the discussions, I raised what I thought was an objection to this way of thinking – an objection I wish to explore further here. People don’t have the same scruples about trespassing that they have about eating meat or buying carpets made by imprisoned children. But the structure of the cases seems to me similar, and so, I think, there’s a puzzle about why people acknowledge the one sort of obligation and not the other, if what is at stake is in fact an obligation. If, instead, people are recommending some of these ways of living that take account of history as good ways to live, the problem evaporates. No one could possibly live in all the good ways one could live. One has to choose.

Some thoughts about trespassing

Consider some recent news. People arrested at protests are often charged with trespass, suggesting that property lines are taken very seriously in our moral culture. Property lines are matters of history: one owns property because of something one did or something one’s ancestors did, because of a line of descent.

But consider the irony of police enforcing trespass laws in St. Paul. Surely, it would take very serious historical research to determine whether 99.9% of the population of St. Paul is trespassing, given the shenanigans surrounding the treaties that passed this land to anglo control. If we know anything about the history of the treaty disputes, even fairly recent history (the appropriation of reservation territory to build power plants on Niagara Falls in the early Twentieth Century), we know that much of the territory of the United States is contested, that any given citizen is quite likely to be trespassing  -- on any moral view that goes beyond the letter of enforceable law. Leave aside the individual frauds perpetrating on Native peoples; to the extent that the acquisition of the southwestern states is plausibly construed as naked territorial greed and power politics, the U.S. has about as much right to that portion of its anatomy as Germany has to Poland. But nobody wanted to say, after World War II: the means of conquest were hideous, but “what’s done is done.” Let’s visit shame and opprobrium on the expanded Reich but let it continue to be – the expanded Reich. The allies said, “You stole the territory, and you have to give it back.”

So, I want to ask, “How come no scruples here from the normally scrupulous?” One could imagine them coming up in all sorts of ways: people might decide to take the boring road through North Dakota and Montana west rather than the interesting road through South Dakota and Wyoming, since the Black Hills is claimed as sacred land and since tourist use of sacred land violates the wishes of the most plausible owners in a way that traversing contested land in Montana does not. One can imagine the Society of Friends researching the history of the sites on which it holds its annual meeting and sending rent checks to the appropriate tribes. One can imagine home buyers asking for clear moral title, as well as clear legal title, to houses, and opting to rent in perpetuity where such title could not be established.

What puzzles me is the total lack of acknowledgement here. With respect to consumer goods and animal products, morally sensitive people admit that they can’t be completely clean, that they are part of a society that benefits from morally unacceptable practices and that they cannot help partaking in those benefits, unless they retreat entirely. But, with respect to these other issues, that thought doesn’t lead to total disregard but to intense deliberation. Some people who are upset about the way animals are treated refrain from veal and pate, others eat only organic meat and free-range eggs, others raise their own animals and slaughter them humanely, others forsake meat but are willing to tolerate fish. All of these positions are taken seriously and all have a moral rationale. What puzzles me is that there is no comparable spectrum with respect to trespass.  Is there some principle about when a history becomes morally extinct or about which histories matter?

One might take one sort of consequentialist or utilitarian approach, claiming that historical information is only morally interesting as it predicts future abuses that might be prevented by raising moral awareness, broadly. An animal was raised and killed in an evil way. If I consume its flesh without protest, I encourage animal-raisers to perpetuate evil practices.

Whatever the forward-looking rationale might be for abstaining from meat raised under horrific conditions or products made by child labor, the same kind of rationale seems to apply to trespass. Governments are still in the process of working out their claims on lands that were occupied by indigenous people. In Australia, societies with the oldest continuous history of any peoples in the world, and thus in one sense the strongest possible claim to territory, especially sacred territory, are fighting to preserve their artistic heritage (extensive rock carvings forming galleries from the coast deep into the heart of the country) and to preserve the cultural heritage of ritual actions that depend on these carvings. This is largely a losing battle; local economic interest in exporting iron and other resources wins in the state legislatures. What is needed is international support, but how can foreigners who affirm without qualification the land-grabs of the 1860s raise any intelligible objection to the land-grabs of 2008? If the moral baseline that’s established is: it’s ok to steal land, but let’s not be piggy about it – well, that’s not a principle that’s going to do much work.

I think of the change in consciousness about eating meat. Years ago, I didn’t know any vegetarians, veganism wasn’t even imaginable, and the moral questions one heard raised in restaurants were about goose pate and veal. Even that seemed strange: someone was having moral worries about the menu. A principled refusal to eat veal was a radical, gutsy move. Now, many different moral considerations are directed to the restaurant menu: how animals were raised, the safety of foods, the conditions under which food is raised and prepared, the energy consumed in bringing it to the table. Whichever decision one makes about what one orders – or where one eats – the presence of moral deliberation in this context is normalized, and stances that would have been odd and heroic 40 years ago are now at the minimal end of a continuum in the public mind; it isn’t so radical to refrain from veal when there are serious advocates of eating only locally grown vegetable products, minimally processed. To the extent that more people have comparable scruples about trespass, this may create a moral ‘environment’ hostile to the most egregious current and prospective land theft, in the same way that the vegetarian movement encourages outrage at the most egregious abuse suffered by animals.

One might distinguish the cases by arguing that theft is not as bad as cruelty, so that the reasons for not benefiting from theft are weaker than the reasons for not benefiting from cruelty. That might have something to it, when it comes to buying suspicious lawnmowers that might have been lifted from suburban garages. But the kind of theft that is in question with respect to indigenous people amounts to sustained cruelty, imposing on generations of people pain, disorientation, the destruction of relationships, a lack of meaning. This process is well documented in Australian history, in which policies crafted to destroy indigenous family life were in place into the 1960s. I can’t see that the claim of an animal to be free of unnecessary pain and to perform those activities natural to its species is any stronger than the claim of group of people to continue their customary way of life on land their people have occupied for thousands or tens of thousands of years.

A third line of objection would hold that most contemporary descendents of the original owners of stolen land have made their peace with history. To remind them of their claims is to reopen old wounds and to stir up pointless public controversy, since there is such an extensive investment in most of this territory that there is no reasonable hope of it ever reverting to the descendents of its original owners. Protesting against animal cruelty makes sense, because future cruelty can thereby be prevented. Protesting against the theft of land makes no sense, because that theft, at least in the United States, is complete. There’s no more land that’s easy to steal, and so there is a general public sentiment abroad that land grabs are henceforth not nice anymore.

There’s surely something to this argument. Those who are engaged in the struggle for native education, for health initiatives, for economic development on poor reservations may not find radical allies helpful, in just the same way that conventional farmers who care about their animals may be at odds with vegetarian critics. Surely, the assimilation of stolen property is far more advanced in the United States than in other, more primitive countries like Australia, and so protest here may bear its best fruits abroad. It isn’t true that globally, theft of property is a dead issue. But one needs to take very seriously the possibility that any radical acknowledgment of property theft may seem extreme and crazy to most people and so hamper more modest efforts to improve the lives of Native Americans. But this is a strategic question that is has equally weighty counterparts with respect to the CAA vegetarian campaigns: there was debate in that organization about whether to continue primary emphasis on encouraging people to become vegetarians or to lobby for the use of cage free eggs in the University dining services – risking that such lobbying might seem to endorse poultry farming methods that many of their members would find morally repugnant.

I do not see any clear difference between scruples about eating meat and scruples about trespass. If one acknowledges one sort of obligation, it is hard to avoid acknowledging the other.

There is no similar problem, I think, with saying that refraining from eating meat is a component of one kind of morally good life: a life in which sympathies and sensitivities are nurtured within a community that provides an attractive alternative to the dominant culture, and so has some hope of weaning that culture away from its most cruel practices. If one sees the moral project in that way, then there will be interesting constraints on what causes or issues one makes central to ways of life. Too many scruples hedge people in. If one is constrained at every turn, one’s spontaneous activity – the source of considerable happiness – is greatly limited, and one’s moral effectiveness is limited. One declares oneself to be unusual so often, in so many small ways, that one loses the moral and practical power that comes from being taken to be a regular, ordinary, common-sense person. Vegetarians who are otherwise pretty normal make a strong case to the community that vegetarianism is a serious position, compatible with a rich life. Vegetarians who have 15 other crusades at the same time, with massive constraints on where they can go, what they can buy, what language they can use, are likely to be written off.

The problem with developing scruples about trespassing is that one cannot, so far as I can tell, work within those scruples to build a coherent and interesting way of living. One is simply inconvenienced at every turn. If one is obliged by the history of this country to refrain from trespassing, then that inconvenience is simply the price one has to pay for being a morally aware person. However, if the acknowledgement of history is instead one of the constraints on constructing a morally good life, one might plausibly decide that one’s life will not contain this particular value in a central role. One must choose what kind of good life one will have; one cannot have all the kinds there are.