Individual ethics and the social goals of agriculture

This article is a response to Paul Thompson's recent claim that individual farmers cannot have obligations to practice sustainable methods unless a large number of other producers also use them. Using a moral rights framework, I explain the relation of human interests and needs to the duties of individuals to accomplish moral social goals; i.e., those moral goals whose accomplishment requires the cooperation of other persons. The purpose is to show that individual action to promote sustainability does have moral value. Duties to practice sustainable methods are derived from the rights of all persons to adequate food and nutrition. These rights themselves are grounded, not in individual subjective desires or preferences, but in the genuine interests all persons (present and future) have in the satisfaction of basic biological needs to sustain life and health. The duty of each person is correlative to the rights of the others, and fulfillment of the duty requires social action, in this case practicing sustainable methods in farming. If others are unwilling or constrained from fulfilling their obligations, then duties to take other kinds of actions may be derived from the primary duty to attain the goal of sustainability. Actions to secure social cooperation may include, for example, exhorting others to participate and taking political action to force restructuring of agricultural policy, as well as practicing sustainable methods on one's own farm. While frameworks of individual responsibility have been attacked as failing to capture the moral importance of holistic outcomes, it is argued that such problems are related to human motivation rather than to the structure of our moral systems. I conclude that a properly elaborated system of moral rights and duties connected with an adequate moral psychology can account for our duties to other humans to accomplish the goal of a sustainable agriculture. Copyright Kluwer Academic Publishers 1987