Discuss what your family eats and how your own dietary and cultural habits might intersect with the views expressed in the novel. You might want to consider the following topics: your parent’s/guardian’s religious or cultural attitudes towards food; your Thanksgiving holiday; what your family eats at different holidays or occasions. Food is a part of our heritage: what we eat and what we do not eat helps to structure our cultural and religious identity. Would Elizabeth Costello understand your family’s values?
2) Modern Americans look back on many past practices with pride, but we also see many with a sense of regret, if not embarrassment or shame: slavery, genocide of American Indians, environmental abuses, poor sanitation, unequal rights of women and minorities. Steven Pinker argues that we can thank our Enlightenment ideology for making progress on these fronts.
Do you think eating animals could be a future past practice Americans might one day regret? With the widening availability of plant-based meats, including availability at national fast food chains, do we still need to eat animals? What if convincing knock-off of a T-bone steak made of pea protein is right around the corner? Will we come to regret our treatment of nonhuman animals?
3) Elizabeth Costello explicitly compares the treatment of livestock animals in modern day nation to the torture of the Jewish population by the Third Reich. Abraham Stern derides her metaphor as a cheap rhetorical tactic and an insult to the lives of his Jewish ancestors.
What do you make of the debate between these two scholars? Does Costello’s metaphor go to far? What do you think of the treatment of animals on feed lots and in slaughter houses? When is it or is it not acceptable to compare humans to animals?
4) Why do we modern Americans tend to eat some animals (like pigs) but not others that are just as intelligent and social (like dogs or horses)? What is the line between animals we eat and animals that we label “companion species,” and who exactly decides this line? Are there instances where this boundary becomes questionable or blurred?
You might want to consider your relationship to your pets. You might also want to consider recent controversies, such as shark fin soup bans, foie gras bans, dog meat farm busts, or other events.
5) Elizabeth Costello contends that the main reason humankind abuses and eats the animal world is because humankind does not award reason or language to animals. Following Descartes logic, “I think therefor I am,” a human being is defined by his or her ability to think. A human being is a rational creature made in the image of God, who is Reason himself (Genesis: “Let there be Light.” God creates order, structure, separation of land and water, night and day, taxonomy of nature).
Man can think and reason like God, but an animal cannot, so an animal can be dinner instead.
Follow along with one of the philosophers Costello cites. Can you think of your own view regarding Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Kafka, or St. Thomas?
In addition to citing The Lives of Animals, you may also want to consult the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: https://plato.stanford.edu/ (Links to an external site.)and/or read the philosophers directly, like we did with Kant.