By David Cantor - [email protected]
Editor's Comment (from "PSYETA News," Fall 2002, Volume 22)
Psychologists for the Ethical Treatment of Animals
As Kevin Phillips explains in Wealth and Democracy
(2002), the term "plutomania," the fanatical pursuit of money, went out
of vogue in the middle of the 20th century, when New Deal and subsequent
reforms appeared to have restricted the extent to which a few people
could obtain enormous wealth while millions were destitute or
desperately struggling. The recent looting of Enron, WorldCom, Adelphia,
and other publicly held companies at the expense of millions of people
logically should revive concerns about plutomania. So should exposure,
in The Cheating of America: How Tax Avoidance and Evasion by the Super
Rich Are Costing the Country Billions -- and What You Can Do about It
(2002), by Charles Lewis & Bill Allison and the Center for Public
Integrity.
Meanwhile, psychologists and other experts agree that,
beyond meeting basic needs, increasing wealth does not increase its
possessors' happiness. The lure of wealth, rather than the results of
obtaining it, appear to drive some people's apparent mania for it.
Despite indignation about unethical or unlawful money
hauls - and despite such warnings as that issued in economist David
Schumacher's popular Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered
(1973) that the true costs of production are not acknowledged until we
understand that depletion of Earth's "resources" is a capital
expenditure - one hears nothing in public discourse about the suffering
and destruction caused by the treatment of animals as commodities to
mass-produce in the most profitable ways for experimentation, food, or
other uses.
Mass-news-media discussions of families who have "lost
everything" due to the collapse of Enron or WorldCom can be depended
upon to ignore the connection between plutomania and animal abuse. Such
discussions never question whether terrible suffering is inherent in an
economic system that worships wealth and whether our society as a whole
is deluded and in need of genuine education; they restrict themselves to
questions of who broke what laws or regulations and what should be done
to a very few people who "crossed the line." "Corporate ethics" merely
refers to accounting procedures and has nothing to do with choices as to
whom is produced, what is produced, or production methods.
A genuine nationwide concern with ethics would have to
include those crucial concerns. It is indeed unacceptable to deceive
people into losing their pensions and their homes, but when people
experience financial ruin, they are not killed at seven weeks of age
without ever having spent an enjoyable hour in the sun. Nor are they
isolated in cages or tortured with toxic chemicals or experimental
surgical or dental techniques.
On December 2, 1999, the president of the Ohio State
Senate, Richard Finan, appeared on C-SPAN's morning call-in interview
program Washington Journal. A caller asked Finan if he thought it was
right for Ohio, then in the process of becoming a major egg-producing
state, to permit the operation of battery-shed egg factories holding
hundreds of thousands of caged hens per building. Finan answered that
such facilities were "the coming wave of the future �. You just can't
put 'em out of business."
It is naive to think some will not always possess or
wish to possess more wealth than others. It is equally naive to think
corporate ethics are being addressed in the outcry over current
scandals. Most naive of all may be to think justice is related only to
the treatment of fellow human beings and not to human beings' treatment
of nonhuman animals. PSYETA's groundbreaking projects, its directors'
publications, its website (www.psyeta.org), and the Society & Animals
journal uniquely insist that humanity must address connections between
the mistreatment of humans and of nonhumans. Working together, perhaps
we can broaden today's focus on fraud to a more comprehensive discussion
of plutomania's consequences for nonhuman animals. Maybe Finan was
wrong; maybe we can "put 'em out of business."
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