A Look at “some Moral Minima”Humans make moral decisions every day. Some are vast, and some are unimportant. Many people make right decisions, many make wrong ones. Is it possible that some decisions are just simply wrong no matter what? Is our world directed by an ethical code of morals? In some “Moral Minima” Goodman looks at many areas of morality and relativism suggesting that there are some acts in life that are morally and ethnically wrong.
The first subjects that were addressed were genocide and famine and germ warfare. According to Goodman, genocide is uglier than murder because it targets “individuals as members of a group, seeking to destroy a race, a culture, a linguistic, or ethnic identity, even a class.” (Goodman, 2010 The Good Society, pg.88) Genocide is defined as the intent to destroy. And this is morally wrong. No human being has the right to intentionally seek out a group based on their racial, ethical, or religious group and commit harmful acts. Among genocide, artificial famine is also an immoral act. Josef Stalin orchestrated this kind of famine that claimed the lives of millions of Ukrainian peasant farmers. I agree with Goodman that “wholesale murder is wrong, then, not just for its scale but for willfully negating individuality, typing its victims and stirring hatred against the putative failings of the type.” (Goodman, 2010, pg.89)
The Third World
The world’s first human-produced food was in 1887. Today, roughly 6 million people are living in over a million countries. These countries are largely dependent on agriculture and farming and, therefore, rely on a major portion of their income (a number known as agro-syndrome).
While the main source of food in this country is agricultural products, production continues to rise year on year. As reported in The Guardian in the late 1930s and the Economist in the 1960s, as many as 80% of Canada’s output comes from dairy, processed foods and sugar, and the rest comes from palm oil. (As Canada’s dairy population shrinks, so too does its production.) As reported in the Wall Street Journal and the Journal of Agriculture, about 10% to 15% of the Canadian corn and soybean crop, or about 15 tons of agrochemicals, come from the “dairy industry.” (Goodman, 2010) If we go into agriculture from a global perspective, most agrochemicals and other agrochemical activities are done by foreign producers and are made by farmers and not farmers themselves. For most of the industrial countries, their land, oil, and mineral reserves are held in local or global conglomerates as agribusinesses, especially to benefit Canadian interests at home.
In some countries such as the United States, the agrochemical industry produces “raw” food and raw material from cows to other animals via handfeed, and the producers then take that product down into the fields to be used in domestic products, often to make processed food and other foods.
This system of production produces not only grain but also other food, including meat and fish, dairy products, and raw protein. It is highly profitable to mine both those raw and processed food products to produce more commodity goods and produce those raw products at a reduced cost to the consumer (Goodman, 2011, pg.40). In many cases these products are exported to more of the world and exported to local markets, often as food—whereas raw or processed foods are exported as commodities only to domestic traders.
In the early 1960s, the United States introduced the “Grow Your Own Food” bill of rights (GRA) to address some of the many concerns about global crop and commodity prices. It also created the Grain Producers Alliance (GPA) to advocate for the development of higher-value crops such as corn, soy, wheat and rice, while also promoting efforts to establish a greater regulatory framework for the cultivation of these crops. This program was subsequently used to finance the expansion of NAFTA to protect farmers in developing countries from new regulations on foreign growers. (An extensive study of the NAFTA program by Steven M. Schulz of the University of Minnesota offers a fuller understanding of NAFTA as it began in the early 1990s.)
The USDA and Sustainability Action Plan (SALP) in 2005 provided a detailed report on global food production and distribution trends to the agency that issued these national mandates, a policy statement that was incorporated into the Food Act of 1996 through the Food Policy Act of 2005, and a policy development plan (FFNAP) issued by the USDA to improve local food systems to ensure greater food availability. This FFNAP established a new management program (MP) in June 2006. The plan also involved additional investments in a number of regional government entities, including a national food planning agency (NCPA) to manage agriculture (GSA) in areas such as rice, rice- and corn-based cereals, and water purification, processing, and waste management.
The USDA was able to develop new rules to limit and control the movement of food across borders, including under new executive powers to regulate and control importation. As a result, we have seen a number of changes to the rules, which significantly reduced the cost of imports, increased our own consumption of American food, and reduced the quantity and use of American foods by people who actually depend on our food. This can be accomplished by reducing the number of American producers, increasing export controls, and increasing our consumption abroad, and the resulting decrease in export prices. By reducing our consumption of American food and our exports, our national food supply is dramatically increasing at a faster rate than the United States spends to feed itself. Our nation’s demand for U.S. foods, which now exceeds its gross domestic product (GDP), has grown significantly since 1996 compared with the previous decade.
The USDA took several actions to address the current food crisis: it moved an extra $15 billion into the Department of Agriculture to expand the definition of “natural food” across the entire landfills and expanded the definition to include non-GM fruits and vegetables, and the Food Stamp Program expanded the definition to include certain items that are not GM crops, including organic, animal-based food. The USDA also enacted a Food Stamp Card to collect more taxes and spend less when people move to new places to get food. This is a significant progress, as it puts much of the need on the table due to the economic downturn. (A small part of this effort was related to the Federal Trade Commission enforcing its anti-GM federal food fraud laws.)
Since 1997, the USDA has implemented two different policy initiatives to address the food crisis: food security and nutrition policy. These reforms are aimed squarely at addressing the causes of hunger and chronic malnutrition, and in particular to ensure that we can respond to hunger with a range of different measures. Specifically, these new standards:
ensure that a person’s family member is able and willing to participate in the food security process
ensure that a family member can only take food from a designated public food source when it comes to that
This system of agriculture appears to represent a model for the industrial world in which we live, when these systems of production are so close to being destroyed. By establishing rules for international agriculture, and the enforcement of standards for domestic agricultural production, the U.S., and its colonies impose restrictions on those of their neighbors.
The U.S. and the United Kingdom impose a number of trade sanctions against countries that are subject to trade restrictions on international commodity markets and for a variety of reasons. Trade sanctions prevent all commodities and food from entering the United States, and they restrict exports of certain commodities and food in the United States from being sent. They also ban production from certain foreign countries and place new restrictions
Germ warfare was used to eliminate enemies during World War II. The decisions made by Nazi political groups are examples of relativism. They believed their choice to eliminate and destroy Jewish people was the right and moral way. Just as Jewish people today in the Middle East feel it is right and moral to eliminate and destroy the Palestinian people. Again, it is not morally right to target a group of people because of their religion, it is wrong and immoral.
Terrorism, not all terrorism is set up in a way as Goodman says, “to kill or die for”. When hear the word terrorism, or to be terrorized by a particular group of people as an American the first group of people that come to mine is the Klu Klux Klan. This horrific American-born terrorist group did not want to “die” but was all for killing. Goodman states, that “terrorism is willful targeting of non-combatants, aiming to intimidate and attract attention.” The KKK definitely attracted attention and intimidated many African Americans. These hooded vigilantes terrorized, killed, bombed and threated innocent Americans throughout the south for many years. Many of the KKK members went uncharged and unpunished for their hate crimes against American citizens. Many Americans focus these days solely on terrorism being related to middle eastern, not seeing that terrorism lived within our country in a horrible, immoral state for many years. Also, Goodman speaks of child soldiers being kidnapped and forced to commit acts of war crimes. These acts are common among the in places like Columbia. According to the Council on Foreign Relations,