Consider "ethical foie gras." As municipalities and even a state or two have banned foie gras because of the way it's made - tubes are thrust down the throats of ducks and they're force fed in such a way as to develop a diseased liver ten times the usual size, before being "harvested" - someone in Spain discovered a way to get foie gras "ethically." Noting that migrating ducks and geese gorge themselves in the period before migration, he laid out heaps of the tasty but disease-inducing food. Some ducks then freely partook. When the ducks with the enlarged livers were harvested, their pâté won prizes. Indeed, first prize, in a French national competition. Sacrébleu! Should not this kinder, gentler version of the 5000-year-old specialty (the ancient Egyptians were already stuffing food down ducks' throats, I learned) be permitted? (The French in any case prohibited the Spaniard from calling his product foie gras, as the mode of manufacture is apparently part of its definition as part of France's living patrimony!)
My colleague's interest in this: Apparently this is thought to be "ethical" not because the birds don't suffer degrading conditions (on analogy with free range poultry), but because the ducks "freely" eat of the gras-inducing food - and only those ducks who do are harvested. But are ducks free, can they choose? Can they be said to have chosen their own deaths? If so (lots of big ifs), aren't there disturbing analogs in human life - too obvious to mention in the land of obesity? But aren't these human analogs perhaps what makes this extension of the word "ethical" across species lines possible in the first place?
Meanwhile, the anthropologist told about his brother, who engages in "ethical hunting": he eats what he shoots, and shoots only what he can eat. But apparently it goes farther than that; these ethical hunters spread the blood of their kill over their faces, in some kind of gesture of acknowledgment or relation, probably taken from the practices of some hunting tribes of old.
It does seem interesting to see how words like "ethical" are used beyond human relations (not just how they might be used, but how they already are being used) and to see what lends these uses their plausibility. (Can there really be "ethical" ways of being a predator, though? I mean, for omnivorous species like us, not for those who can't choose to be vegetarian.)
