PETA vs. Fishmongers -- Legitimate Advocacy Or Hypocrisy?

Great Debates
1

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/archive/2004/11/16/national1426EST0601.DTL

I don’t want to debate PETA’s underlying (to me, ridiculous) position on the personalities of fish or the joys (I’ll just bet) of tofu chowder. So, that’s for another thread.

What I’m specifically asking about is the portion of the PETA argument that is premised on avoiding fish because they may have mercury in them. Now, the scientists have figured out what this risk is and how to manage it – but PETA would apparently have us believe it’s more serious than portrayed.

Who cares? Why should we take PETA seriously when it’s acting solicitous of our health, when we know that their principal and driving concern is the welfare of the fish?

Is anyone expected to believe that if science found a way to neutralize mercury in swordfish and tuna, PETA would be copacetic with long-line fishing?

In short, isn’t the argument just a makeweight, an insincere distraction, an attempt to frame the argument in terms (“public health is in danger!”) that would probably appeal to a much broader audience than their real argument (“Oysters are people too!”)?

Or . . . is it a legitimate form of arguing in the alternative, whereby they say “You and I may not agree on the specific reasons for avoiding fish, but we can still arrive at the same conclusions, i.e., don’t eat fish?” But that still leaves the problem that if fish is “unsafe” but then becomes “safe,” I won’t agree any longer with the PETA position, and I doubt they’d say that was cool.

Or . . . is it a legitimate rhetorical tactic to express their gut belief that eating fish is so intrinsically wrong and unnatural that it has manifold problems that pop up across the spectrum, thus making it overdetermined that eating fish is bad?

I see this kind of argument in other highly-charged social debates. “Abortion/RU486 is bad for the woman’s health.” Ah – then we’ll make a safer abortion method/pill. Problem solved!" “Diversity is important because today’s companies/clients will demand a diverse workforce from their vendors.” Nope – my client base is all white/all black and doesn’t give a rat’s ass who does their work as long as we’re the cheapest bidder – problem solved!

I understand that people are free to use whichever rhetorical appeals they find effective. But I find it almost a per se refutation of the arguing party’s position when he invokes harms that he obviously is not principally concerned with, and whose obviation would not change his underlying position a bit.

2

[Irish balladeer]

She was a fishmonger, and sure it was no wonder
For so were her father and mother before.
And she pushed her wheelbarrow, through streets broad and narrow
Calling “Put down your sign, you bleedin’ wacko!”

You bleedin’ wacko-o
You bleedin’ wacko-o
Get out of my way, you bleedin’ wacko.

[/Irish balladeer]

3

PETA is guilty of many sins, but hypocrisy is not one of them – they are very clear on what they stand for and why. Their aim is to prevent what they see as animal abuse, and to reach that goal they will use whatever argument they think may work. If they can convince you to stop eating fish through ethical arguments, that’s great; if they can convince you that fish is bad for your health, that’s fine, too. Since they’re not exactly shy about what their real motivation is, I don’t see that as hypocrisy.

Any debater knows that the key to success is to choose arguments that will appeal to your audience, not neccesarily to yourself.

4

An analogy: let’s say that you are a committed member of political party X, and you want to convince as many people as possible to vote for X and against Y. Now, you may have a particular reason for being eneamoured with party X. However, you realise that not everybody agrees on the importance of that particular reason. So, you collect as many pro-X, anti-Y arguments as you can find, and whenever you are talking politics with anyeone, you choose the arguments which you believe will work best on them – be it terrorism, gay marriage, medicare or whatever, even though those may not be the reasons why you, personally, want people to vote for X. Is that hypocrisy?

Or let’s say you are applying for a job. Your primary reason for wanting the job is that you need the money. However, the company where you are applying does not care about your needs, only about their own. So, instead of going into great detail about how badly you need that job, you concentrate on explaining wat they will gain by hiring you: your experience, your fluency with languages, whatever. Is that hypocrisy?

Whenever you are trying to sell something, be it a product, an ideology or yourself, you are dealing with at least two different sets of motivations: your reasons for wanting to sell it, and the buyer’s reason for accepting it. The two sets of reasons are seldom completely identical, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with that.

It’s called a win-win situation: you win because you no longer get mercury poisoning, and PETA wins because people stop torturing fish. Now, if they were knowingly lying about the risk of poisoning, instead of merely exaggerating it, that would be something else, but it still wouldn’t be hypocracy – just lying.

5

Okay, so what you’re saying sounds sort of like what I was getting at.

I understand coalition building. I understand spin, and choosing poster-child arguments rather than unpopular ones.

But party politics or the job market don’t, on their face, present explicitly moral venues or interactions. Isn’t there something less attractive about using a utilitarian or practical argument to sell what is ultimately nothing other than a moral absolutist case, than in using a utiliatarian approach to cobbling together a consensus on the agriculture budget or on how hard I’m going to work and how much you’ll pay me?

6

Not really, in my mind. PETA has two separate goals:

a) Converting other people to their ideology.
b) Protecting animals from getting hurt by people.

Of these two, “b” is ultimately the more important to them, at least in theory, and “a” is a means to that end. However, “a” is the only reliable way of achieving “b” because, as you note, as long as people don’t buy “a” they can only hope to achieve “b” as an accidental side effect of something else.

The mecury poisoning argument falls squarely in the “b” category. Don’t think of it as a way of converting you to their side; think of it as something which falls in the same category as painting seals with red paint so that they become worthless as fur coats, getting laws against animal cruelty passed, or promoting vegetarianism for health reasons. None of these have anything to do with selling their moral/ethical case. But they have everything to do with reaching their goal, which is to stop you from hurting the poor little fishies.

(By the way, in case I made the wrong impression: I am most certainly not a PETA member, nor am I a vegetarian)

7

Less attractive, yes. Hypocritical, no. PETA would love to convince you of their moral case, but for all their delusions they are smart enough to realise that the majority of the population is not going to believe that “oysters are people too” anytime soon. So they take what they can get.

Think of a parent threatening to punish their child if it doesn’t behave, because the child is not (yet) capable of understanding the ethical reasons for not setting the cat on fire. Hopefully, the child will eventually grow up and then the threats will no longer be needed, but in the meantime we can at least contain the damage. It’s not hypocrisy, just a matter of setting attainable goals.

8

Thr problem with your position Martin is that adult humans are not children. Unlike children they are not less deserving of respect for their mental faculties or ability to decide the morality and consequences of their action.

If PETA is acting out of the motives you outline then they may not be hypocritical but they are certainly being cynical, disingenuous, manipulatiuve and arrogant to an unbelievable degree.

PETA has a belief that something is ethically wrong. They do not however seek to convince other rational adults that they are correct in that view. Instead they seek to use a backdoor method of achieving the same end by cynically manipulating these people. Rather than accepting that this is a democracy and a free country and that other human beings are their equals whether they disagree with them or not PETA instead assumes that others are incompetent to a childlike degree and seeks to manipulate and coerce them into acting in a manner they approve of for reasons they do not actually endorse.

Tell me Martin, do you feel the same way about creationists using the same tactic? “Creation scientists” wish people to stop teaching that evolution has more scientific credibility then the Bible. Like PETA they know that they can not convert people to that position by a reasoned argument that respects others as their intellectual equals. So instead they seek to have stickers placed on science books stating that evolution is a theory and not a fact. Just like PETA’s efforts here the actual argument is perfectly true as far as it goes. Nonetheless we all accept that Creation ‘scientists’ are not asking for this change because they intrinsically value rigorous honesty in presentation of that science is.

The aim of Creation ‘scientists’ is to stop the teaaching of evolution as more valid and just like PETA they are prepared to do so using whatever argument they think may work. If they can convince you to stop teaching evolution as more valid through ethical and logical arguments, that’s great; if they can convince you to stop teaching it in the interests of rigorous academic honesty, that’s fine, too. Since they’re not exactly shy about what their real motivation is, I assume you don’t see such a tactic as being objectionable?

I see it as highly objectionable. It may not be hypocrisy but it sure isn’t honest. It’s equitable to the worst presented by Mike Moore or George W. in the election campaign. Neither of them told lies. Neither of them were hypocrites but they sure as hell deceived and manipulated people into acting as they wanted them too by less than honest means. Like them PETA is acting here in a manner that is cynical, manipulative and less than honest. It may not be hypocrisy, but on a board dedicated to fighting ignorance there ought to be worse things than hypocrisy.

9

PETA routinely executes homeless animals. Feel free to check out Yahoo for the poop.

Marc

10

Yes they do. If you read the OP’s article, you will see that their primary argument is that fish are intelligent, can feel pain, and deserve to be treated with the same amount of respect as a dog or cat. The “eating fish is unhealthy” argument is just a side issue.

So their position is basically: “Look, we’d love for you to stop eating fish because you agree with us that filletting a fish is morally just as bad as killing a human. However, if you don’t accept our view on that point, can we at least convice you to stop eating fish out of rational self-interest? Here, we have collected all this helpful information about how bad eating fish is, to help you make a decision.”

Of course, they don’t stock information about the health benefits of fish, because it it not in their interest to do so, for the same reason that Microsoft is never going to send you a free booklet about the superior qualities of Linux. Now, if Microsoft presented itself as an objective software review committee, or if PETA pretended to be a public-health information clearinghouse dedicated to help you make the best dietary decisions, that would be dishonest. But when I go to microsoft.com or peta.org, I don’t expect to get both sides of the issue – I expect to get “the case against Linux” or “the case against eating animals”.

In so far as creationists are using arguments which are true, even if one-sided, and do not misrepresent their motives: yes, I feel the same way about it. That is, I vehemently disagree with just about everything they stand for, but I don’t fault them for doing their best to get their side of the issue out. After all, since we’re all rational adults in a free democracy, we ought to be able to withstand a couple of shrill voices in the debate (or, in the case of creationism versus evolution, pretending that there’s a debate when there isn’t)?

However, creationists often go beyond merely collecting one-sided information and presenting it in a biased-but-not-technically-false way. PETA did not need to make up studies about mercury and other poisons being present in fish: those studies exist, and they come from real, honest-to-God scientists. With creationists, however, there is not a scrap of evidence supporting their theory outside of the Bible, so the best they can do is sift through the writings of actual evolutionary scientists, collect little disagreements and inconsistencies, and present those as “proof that evolution is false”. So far, so good: if, for any reason, you need a list of every existing disagreement or unanswered question in the field of biology, just contact the Institute for Creation Research and they’ll be glad to help you out.

But where they go from “openly biased” to “dishonest and manipulative” is when creationists call themselves “creation scientists” or “creation researchers”, downplay the Biblical basis of their beliefs, use terms like “intelligent design” instead of “divine creation” and pretend to be a group of serious scientists proposing an alternative scientific theory which just happens to be compatible with fundamentalist Christian beliefs. That’s like PETA people pretending to be biochemical researchers and thus speaking from a position of authority, instead of merely reporting truthfully that high levels of mercury have been detected in some fish.

Actually, creationists in the US appear to be depressingly effective at doing just that. The arguments they use in public are pretty much what they presumably believe in private: that people were created out of dust because the Bible says so, and that evolution is just some hare-brained idea thought up by atheist scientists. The reason those arguments work is that most people are in fact the intellectual equals of the creationists, as opposed to having the intelligence and the scientific background to understand the intuitively less obvious evolutionary theory.

Nope. I find their beliefs objectionable and, frankly, stupid. And I am deeply disappointed in the percentage of my fellow humans who fall for their transparent arguments and obsolete beliefs. But assuming that they honestly hold those beliefs, I don’t have a problem with them doing what they can to get “equal time in the classroom” for their idiotic theories.