Industrial Farms are not Rockwellian. Rockwell's vision of agriculture is, perhaps slightly cloudy. I've talked about it in a few places, such as here and here, and I've had a little bit to say about Rockwell's own uneasy relationship with the rise of mass culture of the sort we have--the sort that is so easily accepting of things like industrial farming. But you don't need to think super hard about things to see that Norman Rockwell wouldn't have had anything very nice to say about contemporary factory farming. And I say this despite my rejection of standard hyper-simplified takes on Rockwell's work.
But enough with my clumsy justification for writing about factory farming on a blog that is supposed to be largely about Rockwell.
Timothy Hsiao has recently published an article defending factory farming. This article is apparently not very popular among facebooking philosophers. A couple of months ago I decided to more or less pull the plug on my attempt to get with the world of facebook, so I haven't followed the Hsiao-related postings, but I did see a blog post that criticized (justly, it seems to me) the claim that Hsiao's paper should not be assigned in philosophy classes because it argues for a harmful thesis on a closed topic.
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