Council for Agricultural Science and Technology—1 Il for Agricultural Science and Techn Logy

INTRODUCTION It is widely known that agriculture has a long history. Starting approximately 12,000 years ago, the domestication of plants and animals began independently in several different places, including centers in West Asia, East Asia, Central America, and South America. Domestication also may have occurred in other locations, although convincing archeological evidence has not been found. In the domestication process, humans manipulated animals, plants, and the environment in various ways to increase the availability of the desirable species and desired traits of these species (Anderson n.d.). It is less widely known that religious, political, and philosophical reflection on agriculture and the environment also has a long history. Early in the Hebrew Bible (or Old Testament), God promised the children of Israel an abundance of land flowing with milk and honey (Deut. 3:8; 15:4); the Bible also prohibited the acquisition of small farms by large landowners (Lev. 25:13, as noted in Spiegel 1991). Centuries later, the Greek philosopher Plato discussed the importance of reconstructing agriculture after the mythical Deluge, and his student Aristotle commented on the importance of agricultural knowledge in the quest for the “good life” by the individual and the polity. The fundamental value of agriculture was highlighted by Enlightenment thinkers from John Locke to Thomas Jefferson, who underscored the political, economic, and philosophical importance of “tillers of the soil” (Spiegel 1991). In the United States, problems faced by farmers became the focus of the nineteenth-century Populists, and their legacy continues today. Suffice it to say that agriculture has long been the focus of questions about values, priorities, practices, and policies. In the late twentieth century, systematic thinking about the values and norms associated with the food system—farming, resource management, food processing, distribution, trade, and consumption—came to be referred to as agricultural ethics. Agricultural ethics incorporates elements of philosophical ethical analysis with concerns about particular issue areas that arise in connection with the food system. As practiced by philosophers and scholars from religious studies, the social sciences, and the agricultural disciplines themselves, agricultural ethics has grown from the work of a handful of philosophically trained individuals in U.S. land-grant institutions to a large, worldwide collection of academics, scholars, farmers, policymakers, and activists, thinking and writing about these issues. In this paper, the authors examine the nature of ethics as applied to agriculture (as well as the environment), discuss briefly how ethical concepts and TASK FORCE MEMBERS: Jeffrey Burkhardt, Chair, Department of Food and Resource Economics, University of Florida, Gainesville; Gary Comstock, Department of Philosophy and Religion, North Carolina State University, Raleigh; Peter G. Hartel, Department of Crop and Soil Sciences, University of Georgia, Athens; Paul B. Thompson, Department of Philosophy, Michigan State University, East Lansing; REVIEWERS: Maarten J. Chrispeels, Center for Molecular Agriculture, University of California–San Diego; Charles C. Muscoplat, College of Agricultural, Food and Environmental Sciences, University of Minnesota, St. Paul; Robert Streiffer, Department of Philosophy, Department of Medical History and Bioethics, Department of Medical Sciences, University of Wisconsin AGRICULTURAL ETHICS