Negative obligations means not having to do something, to stop doing something. Not eating meat is a negative obligation. These are a lot more basic and a lot easier to see as necessary/required morally. Positive obligations are more difficult to determine because they require action and thus take time, which might be time that one does not have.
Rowlands comes to the idea that if a law is unjust you can break it and that is morally awesome.
Civil Disobedience : He does make a distinction between acts of rescue- such as stealing a dog that is being abused- and attempts to change society- which might be an occupation of a building to get media attention. Immediacy of situations requires direct action is how he puts it. Going along with this immediacy factor he sees violence as less justifiable in an attempt to change society than in an act of rescue.
I am really glad that he points out that destruction of property does not equal terrorism. Also he distinguishes between intimidation and terrorism- throwing paint on the fur coat someone is wearing is vandalism and intimidation but is not a strong enough action to count as terrorism.
Most animals liberation groups are non-violent and don’t do anything that could be construed as threatening to humans, plus no groups that do things that might induce fear hurt humans and 99.9% of them have policies against hurting any living being. The idea of animal liberators as terrorists is a bit of a hoax.
Rowlands argues that terrorism is wrong, but that terrorism is almost never what happens in animal rights activism.
The last section of the book is called “What Goes Around Comes Around” This seems telling of the connections between treating animals in certain ways and treating humans in certain ways. Rowlands suggests that our instrumental view of animals affects our views of humans – truth comes second to profit. As in we will ignore what is right and what is moral if admitting it would mean needing to change our behavior in some way that would be less profitable.
He talks about how, for instance, eating animals affects humans too. Viewing animals as objects and not worrying about how we treat them makes factory farming an ‘ok’ practice in our eyes. Once you decide it is not worth worrying about the moral implications of toruring and killing animals this type of farming is available. However, being in the framework of treating animals that way leads to poor treatment of humans too. For instance, small farmers are put out of business because they can not compete on the massive scale that factory farming is operated on. So those people and traditions are stomped on. Then, on 199, he mentions how the intrumental view of animals hurts consumers- and this is a pretty interesting point. Consumers who buy the meat that comes from torturing animals are actually buying unhealthy meat- there is fat, hormones, chemicals, pesticides, antibiotics, mad cow, etc. as potential and usual content of the meat. And if the animals were raised, for instance, not in a tiny cage so they gain more weight quickly, then the meat that they had would be more muscle and less fat and at least healthier to consume. Or if they were located in cleaner more spacious environments they would not have to be pumped full of antibiotics all of the time. Environmental issues that stem from this poor treatment of animals also effect humans – such as water pollution, and the inefficient source of protein that meat is which wastes resources.
The framework for treating the world that starts with the animals affects the environment and interpersonal relations because of a tendency to universalfy frameworks.
