The argument in agricultural ethics and policy is over what agricultural systems are *for*, and whether the political community has structural obligations toward the animal subjects raised within its food systems and toward the ecological infrastructure those systems depend on. The framework's recognition tradition reads agriculture as the political community's interface with the biosphere it depends on, with welfare obligations scaled to the empirical evidence on capacity for suffering and with structural maintenance of the soil-pollinator-water-genetic-diversity infrastructure required across intergenerational time. Three contemporary traditions deny this framing at its premise from different directions.

Animal-rights abolitionism (Regan 1983; Francione 2000; Singer 1975 on the utilitarian side of the same critique) presses the use-permission question: where welfare science establishes capacity for suffering in mammals, birds, cephalopods, and fish, the consistent conclusion is abolition of animal-agricultural use, not regulation of its conditions. To regulate welfare within a production system that ends in the killing of beings recognized as capable of suffering is on this reading to license at the framework level what the framework simultaneously condemns at the practice level.

The agribusiness-productivity tradition (Norman Borlaug's Green Revolution legacy; the contemporary 'feed the world' defense of industrial production scale; the Economist-and-Lomborg-adjacent productivity-defense literature) presses the scale question: industrial agriculture at current intensity is what prevents hunger for a population the welfare-improving alternatives cannot feed at scale. The Green Revolution's documented prevention of mass starvation across South Asia and Latin America (Borlaug's wheat varieties; the parallel rice work at IRRI) is the empirical baseline. Preclusions on industrial configurations on welfare or environmental grounds are obligations to whoever absorbs the resulting food-system shortfall, and the abstract welfare arguments fail to engage the aggregate-sufficiency floor that subsistence-failure forecloses participation on the framework's own terms.

The cultural-tradition objection (Jewish *shechitah* (ritual slaughter) and *kashrut* (dietary law) requirements; Islamic *halal* (permitted-foods law) requirements; Indigenous foodways from Lakota buffalo practice to Inuit marine-mammal harvest; regional culinary traditions whose continuity binds collective identity) presses the participation-condition claim from inside the framework: dietary practice is constitutive of cultural identity for many populations, the [§9.2](<9.2 Belonging.md>) derivation protects cultural participation conditions, and abstract welfare derivations applied across cultures override the participation conditions of communities whose food practices are bound to collective identity. The objection is not pro-cruelty; it is that welfare regulation drafted from outside specific traditions tends to confound welfare with cultural-override.

The recognition tradition the section operates within reaches the opposite destination on multiple independent grounds. The classical stewardship tradition — biblical *to till it and keep it* (Genesis 2:15 NRSVUE), Benedictine *ora et labora* tying monastic life to specific landscapes, the Jewish dietary-laws tradition with its explicit welfare elements (the *shechitah* requirements on rapid bleed and minimization of pre-slaughter distress), the Buddhist and Jain *ahimsa* (non-violence) traditions toward animals, the Indigenous lineages of kinship-with-land that long preceded modern conservation language — located the binding force of right relation in divine command, sacred kinship, or cosmic moral order. The modern agrarian tradition (Berry 1977 and subsequent essays; the Catholic agrarian lineage; the Liberty Hyde Bailey country-life tradition) reached for the same binding through the structure of agricultural communities themselves. The animal-welfare science tradition (Fraser 2008; Mellor and Beausoleil 2015; Mellor 2017 on the Five Domains framework; Broom 1991; Mendl, Burman, and Paul 2010; EFSA 2005 on species-specific welfare; Low et al. 2012 *Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness*) supplies the empirical record the framework's welfare-scaling constraint runs on. The capabilities tradition (Nussbaum 2023, 2006, ch. 6) reaches animal welfare through the question of which capabilities species-typical participation requires. Agroecology (Altieri 1995; Gliessman 1998) develops the ecological-infrastructure-maintenance constraint at the production-system level. The food-sovereignty movement (La Vía Campesina from 1996) names the political-economy reform the framework's anti-concentration constraint requires.

The dispute the section frames is whether agricultural ethics can be reduced to a use-permission verdict, an aggregate-sufficiency optimization, or a cultural-non-interference defense (theses pressed by Regan and Francione, by the Borlaug-tradition productivity-defense, and by the cultural-tradition objection) or whether the political community has graded recognition obligations to animal subjects scaled to welfare-science evidence and structural obligations to maintain the biosphere-interface across intergenerational time, theses pressed by the stewardship, agrarian, welfare-science, and agroecology traditions. [§9.6.2](<9.6.2 What is Required.md>) supplies the structural-necessity derivation that takes up the dispute, working from the [§7.8](<7.8 Life.md>) / [§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>) / [§8.11](<8.11 Technology.md>) / [§9.5](<9.5 Environment.md>) grounding to pin down what agriculture must deliver to count as agriculture under a political community that recognizes its non-human participants and its biosphere-infrastructure dependence. *Thus the question stands disputed.*


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← [9.6 Agriculture](<9.6 Agriculture.md>) | [9.6.2 What is Required](<9.6.2 What is Required.md>) →
