In Rain Without Thunder. The Ideology of the Animal Rights Movement (1996), Gary Francione writes in "Conclusion": "Finally, I emphasize again that my analysis is not concerned with, and should not be read as, criticizing in any way the motivations of any particular people or groups. I assume that everyone is well-motivated and that these are simply difficult issues that have not been subjected to a great deal of intramovement discussion..." (p. 224).
Since then, Francione has, with some regularity, in his online writing emphasized that he does not question the sincerity of those whose policy on animal advocacy he criticizes.
As guest on NZ Vegan Podcast, hosted by fellow abolitionist Elizabeth Collins, he addresses in episode 75 (March 2011) the "idea...that the people who work at these organizations know that they are doing wrong by promoting animal welfare regulation but they are doing it anyway just to make money" and commented: "Are there people like that? Yes, I suppose there are, but it's a lot more complicated. I think people talk themselves into things...A lot of these welfarist people are probably sincere and think that they are doing something good because they've talked themselves into it."
Referring to academic supporters of welfarism such as Peter Singer and Robert Garner, and to welfare organizations such as HSUS, PETA, RSPCA, Francione notes:
"Do I believe that the people who are arguing that with me believe in in good faith that animal welfare regulation works? Yes."
He emphasizes that he thinks welfarists "really believe on some level" in what they promote.
In order to assess Francione's comments, it is necessary to distinguish between welfarism on the grassroots level, on the one hand, and welfarism on the corporate and academic level, on the other. The latter, in contrast to the former, consists of people who, in one way or another, but always in substantial ways, gain personal benefit or profit from employing, or promoting, a welfarist policy in animal advocacy. It is Francione, first and foremost, who has been continually pointing out that welfare organizations are businesses, some multi-billion dollar businesses. Those who run them and those who work for them have a vested interest in keeping the business running safely, efficiently, and profitably, to borrow a phrase from slaughterhouse designer Temple Grandin. These organizations are not, for that reason, designed to become superfluous by eliminating what purportedly makes them necessary, i.e., animal exploitation. They depend entirely on the financial support of a public which, being overwhelmingly nonvegan, generates the problem that welfare businesses are purportedly there to solve, in the first place.
Welfare organizations are sustained by people who have an interest in exploiting animals, in consuming animal products, particularly; people who, in return for this support, are furnished by those organizations with handy pretexts, convenient excuses, not only but especially in the form of 'humane' animal products, for continuing their participation in the primary practice of animal use, that of eating animals.
An individual or group that is not independent of the support of those whose interests are in opposition to the avowed goal of its policy stand in a manifest conflict of interest which corporate welfarists seek to obscure by identifying their own interests with animals' interests. Such an economic conflict of interest deprives welfarists' defence of their policy of the authority needed for it to be deemed worthy of serious consideration.
Those who make money – a living or a fortune – or otherwise benefit personally from making the public feel better about consuming animal products may or may not sincerely believe in what they do; they simply cannot "afford" to be convinced by the better argument – not, at any rate, when it speaks against welfarism. They will buy into, and promote, whatever ideology serves to provide a justification for welfarism.
That is why corporate welfarists' "arguments" are in need not of being rebutted so much as exposed - exposed as being in the service of a business agenda.
The relationship between the two is quite clearly reflected in Francione's comment:
Do I think that being involved in one of those organizations facilitates your buying into the mythology that animal welfare regulations is a good thing? Yes.
How "helping the animals" and making money conveniently come together has been shown in detail by Francione in his books and online writing. A particularly illustrative example is his blog essay, "Save a Seal; Eat Non-Canadian Seafood"(April 2010), which deals with HSUS's "Save A Seal Today" campaign, calling for people to boycott Canadian ''Sea Food'' until the seal cull stops, and employing an effective marketing tool to get people to make donations. Francione's judgement here is rightly unrelenting: "It is, of course, terrible that the seals are being killed. But it is also terrible that some use this tragedy to rake in a few more dollars."
HSUS's CEO Wayne Pacelle is paid $300,000 per year; that's 300,000 reasons for him to ''believe'' that he is doing the right thing.
Given his own analyses, one is left sincerely wondering how Francione can maintain that corporate welfarists act in "good faith." Is this not a pious fiction, sustained by ignoring their conflict of interest?
As for "sincerity," what could it mean in this context other than self-servingly participating in collective rationalization? And, to the extent to which welfarists "talk themselves into" the identification of their own economic interests with animals' interests, a grotesque self-delusion? The application of the notion sincerity and good faith here is unintelligible so much the more given that Francione's well-founded work exposing the problems with welfarism has been publicly available at least since 1995 – and has, since then, been ignored or dismissed.
In academia, like the rest of society, welfarism is the prevailing paradigm the challenging of which comes at the cost of losing peer support and, possibly, career advancement. Academic proponents of welfarism, providing its theoretical justification, benefit, although they may not be on an animal organization's pay roll, through having their books promoted among animal advocates and being given ample opportunities for self-promotion on ''animal rights conferences'' and internet sites.
Grassroots advocates who support welfarist corporations need to be educated about the structural conditions under which these organizations and their academic ''think tanks'' act, and the role welfarist ideology plays in obscuring these conditions.
Let's not get into judgements, let's get into analysis. (Francione on NZ Vegan Podcast, episode 75)
In so far as "judgements'' here is meant to stand for judgementalism or unsavoury moralism, we could not agree more. However, any suggestion, approving or disapproving, concerning someone's motives, constitutes judgement. And judgement, we think, should be identified with analysis, not of someone's motives, but of the credibility of welfarists' professed beliefs in the light of their organizational policies, scrutinized in terms of whether the latter can be understood as credibly consistent with the former.
It is to be critically noted that Francione's comments concerning welfarists' ''sincerity'' are not a remedy of judgementalism so much as its reverse mirror image.
The idea that the other [the opponent] sits around and says, 'I'm evil, and I enjoy being evil', is cartoonish, it is simplistic, it is ridiculous. (Francione on NZ Vegan Podcast, episode 75)
We fully agree with Francione that such an idea would be grossly inadequate to an understanding of the problem we are faced with, i.e., welfarism, and no serious animal advocate would resort to demonizing a political opponent as ''devil with scorched wings,'' who in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov appears in a vulgar form (''rather shabby,'' out of season). That, however, does not, in our understanding, mean the concept of evil is invalid or illegitimate. Evil is something that people do – and those who do it are not Satan but evildoers.
Regarding institutionalized injustice, Hannah Arendt's analysis of what she famously termed ''the banality of evil'' reveals its nature as born out of the utter absence of reflection, the refusal to think, in the service of self-interest – not out of devilish, demonic desires to destroy what is good and right.
In a recent online column, "The Careerists," Chris Hedges quotes Arendt from Eichmann in Jerusalem: "The trouble with Eichmann ...was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal."
Hedges writes:
The greatest crimes of human history are made possible by the most colorless human beings. They are the careerists. The bureaucrats. The cynics. They do the little chores that make vast, complicated systems of exploitation and death a reality.… They work in corporate advertising and public relations. They issue the forms. They process the papers.… They enforce the laws and the regulations. And they do not ask questions.… They are there to make corporate systems function.…
The most dangerous force in the industrialized world does not come from those who wield radical creeds, whether Islamic radicalism or Christian fundamentalism, but from legions of faceless bureaucrats who claw their way up layered corporate and governmental machines.…
These systems managers believe nothing.... They do not think beyond their tiny, insignificant roles. They are blind and deaf. They are, at least regarding the great ideas and patterns of human civilization and history, utterly illiterate.… Men and women who know no history, know no ideas. They live and think in an intellectual vacuum, a world of stultifying minutia.…They find their self-worth in the prestige and power of the corporation, in the status of their positions and in their career promotions. They assure themselves of their own goodness through their private acts as husbands, wives, mothers and fathers.…
Little acts of kindness and charity mask the monstrous evil they abet. And the system rolls forward.
Safely. Efficiently. Profitably.
