I opened the egg carton and noticed a tidy note floating on top of the eggs. The opening line: “Follow the journey of an ethical egg!” What does that mean?
My puzzled response reminded me that the words ethics or ethical have no meaning by themselves. Each person and community has to determine within the context of their various relationships what behaviors are going to count as ethical.
Let’s take that sentence apart from the bottom up. First, ethics is always about behaviors. Individuals, organizations, companies do something—take some action—and that action is then judged as ethical, neutral, or unethical depending on the criteria against which the behavior is judged. Others pass judgment, but the decision maker also assesses their own action to see if their own standards were met. What had to happen for this egg to be judged as “ethical”?
Next, ethics always has a context. Behaviors cannot be judged unless we know where and under what conditions the action took place. As I had this wonderful piece of information and marketing in my egg carton, the ethical egg is to be judged within the context of egg production in the United States.
Then we have the community. Individuals and the various stakeholders—people who interact with those doing the activities—have expectations for what counts as “good” behavior. Within the context of this particular egg producer, being ethical means (a) reducing the impact of egg production on Mother Nature, (b) maintaining the chickens’ pasture to the USDA Organic Standard of land management, (c) building storage that conserves energy, and (d) practices that accentuate the humane treatment of farm animals as the central tenet.
Now, I’m old enough to remember the world of egg production where no one particularly worried about organic farms or humane treatment of farm animals. But the Organic Foods Production Act of 1990 (OFP) required the US Department of Agriculture to define national standards for organic products with the final rules being published in 2000. During the ten years between passing the law and final promulgation of the standards, people who cared about organic farming were consulted and influenced those standards. And—we had criteria for what counts for an ethical egg.
The journey of an ethical egg reminds us that what behaviors count in any particular context as ethical or unethical is never settled. Philosophers talk about “thick concepts” such as truth-telling where every community on the planet has some understanding of not lying. However, what specific behaviors count as unethical depend on the context and the community.
Chelsea Schein and Kurt Gray have described that process in what they call the Theory of Dyadic Morality1. They assert that the key to determining whether a community determines a behavior is ethical or unethical depends on the amount of harm the behavior causes. In their framework, someone intends to and does something which causes harm to another person (or even the environment). The more harm done, the greater the chance the community will name the behavior as unethical.
Thus, within the context of deciding whether we have an ethical egg, we have chickens who are cooped up in pens and may never go outside in their lives, we have free-range chickens, which may only mean that they have a door open in their coop and may or may not ever go outside, and we have chickens who are truly pasture raised.
How then do we decide as a community what eggs are ethical? The first question is whether we are persuaded that traditional methods of raising chickens and harvesting eggs are harmful to the chickens, the environment, or people who eat the chickens and the eggs. That conversation is held in the court of public opinion, through marketing efforts, research, and opinion pieces on what constitutes ethical raising and selling of chickens. Once individuals are persuaded, they vote with their dollars: Are people willing to pay a bit more for chickens that are raised in a kinder, gentler manner? How much do we value happy chickens and ethical eggs?
This ongoing conversation among individuals and the larger community shapes our understanding of ethics: How are we going to treat each other on this journey we call life? Our ethical standards are not static; they change with new technologies and novel problems. We then have to build the capacity for the conversations. Strategies for building that capacity will be our next topic. Stay tuned!
1 Chelsea Schein and Kurt Gray, “The Theory of Dyadic Morality: Reinventing Moral Judgment by Redefining Harm,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 22, no. 1 (2017): 32–70, https://doi.org/10.1177/1088868317698.