Should there be a right to food? Even if you haven’t thought about this question before, you probably find yourself instinctively leaning towards an answer. For some, it’s “of course”. Food is a necessity and given that we have all sorts of rights, surely food must be among them. For others, the suggestion sounds a bit absurd. A right entails that someone has an obligation to fulfil it. But who thinks that anyone is obliged to feed us? For these sceptics, the most a right to food can mean is the right not to have our buying or producing of food impeded.
I’ve been working on a short piece about the right to food and I’ll share it with you in due course. For now, I’m raising it as an example of how when presented with a complex ethical issue that we haven’t analysed in depth, we very often have a fairly confident conviction about what is right and wrong.
There’s nothing wrong with having an instinctive response to a moral question. In fact, it’s good that we do. As Aristotle famously argued, we are creatures of habit and being good requires us to develop habits of good action, so that we tend to do the right thing automatically and don’t have to work out the right thing to do from scratch every time. So when we have an immediate sense of what is right or wrong in a novel situation, it’s just our habitual moral sense kicking into action.
However, Aristotle didn’t think that this meant our instincts are always right. Another important moral skill is the ability to notice that the question we are addressing is novel in important ways, so we cannot trust our instincts. Our sense of what is right has been forged through experience, so if a moral question differs in important ways from others we have encountered, the past can only be a limited guide. We have to think it through. Unfortunately, this is not what most people do. They take their gut feeling to be more authoritative than it is.
Bearing that in mind, let’s think a little more about what a right to food might entail. Accept for a moment that it would make sense for a government to establish a legal right to food. Would that right be met if the food was unpalatable, unaffordable or not nutritious? I think most of us would say not. Any right to food worth its salt has to be a right to “regular, permanent and unrestricted access—either directly or by means of financial purchases— to quantitatively and qualitatively adequate and sufficient food”, as the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the right to food put it.
There is, however, one more feature of this food that many advocates of the right to food, including the Special Rapporteur, insist on: that it is “culturally appropriate”, meaning itg is “food corresponding to the cultural traditions of the people to which the consumer belongs”.
My hunch is that this too will evoke a strong intuitive response in most readers. For some, it will ring true. In a multicultural society we must respect all traditions, which means that of course the food people have should meet their cultural needs. For others, it will sound like the proverbial “political correctness gone mad”. People may have a right to adequate nutrition, but the idea that their cultural preferences should be considered as needs is absurd.
Again, there is nothing wrong with having either instinctive first response. Each is rooted in a wider moral sense as to whether society has gone too far or not far enough in enabling everyone to live according to their own values and traditions. But unless we’ve already done a lot of reading and thinking about this issue, we should quickly realise that our hunches may be very wrong. We need to know much more about what “culturally appropriate food” means in order to decide whether or not we have a right to it.
It is, however, much easier, to reach for an extreme example that proves the point either way. For example, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was surely wrong to serve pork to Muslim detainees in a Miami detention centre, however adequately nutritious it was. Almost everyone would accept that we need to respect people’s religious and moral dietary requirements. On the other hand, it is obviously crazy to say that, as a child of Italian heritage, living in the UK, I have a right to Parmesan cheese and pasta. Whatever “culturally appropriate” means it can’t mean that.
What these extreme cases show is that while total disregard for the cultural appropriateness of food is wrong, the idea that everyone has a right to the food of their cultural heritage is ridiculous. But one should assume that people like the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the right to food are well aware of this. Whatever the right to culturally appropriate food means, therefore, it must be something non-obvious that requires some thought. So let’s think before we dismiss or endorse it.
I’m not going to attempt that thorough think-through here. (Let me know if you want me to take it on in the future.) Again, my purpose in raising the issue is to draw attention to the fact that although our moral instincts, which are so important for making quick decisions in the moment, cannot be relied on when we are ignorant of important features of a moral question. Yet we find it all too easy to trust them.
Let me end with a perhaps more vivid example. In the UK, we have recently been hearing a lot about the Cambridge Professor Jason Arday, who resigned after being accused of plagiarism and embellishing elements of his personal biography. Arday denies the allegations. He also happened to be the university’s youngest ever black professor when he was appointed in 2023. (Stop press: After I finished writing this piece, Arday was found dead, which I think adds awful weight to what I say below.)
Reading or hearing short news items on this, the only rational response is to suspend judgement. Who knows whether the accusations are true or not? But it seems most people lean for or against. And that leaning is not based on the evidence of the case, but how it fits broader narratives we believe about society. Those who think racism is structural and endemic are inclined to believe that Arday is being treated unfairly because he is black, and they will point to the fact that his main accuser, self-defined “race realist” Nathan Cofnas, was sacked from his Cambridge post in 2024 for his bigoted views. On the other hand, those who think that society has become too “woke” are quick to assume that Cambridge failed to follow its usual academic standards and looked away when Arday’s sins should have been obvious, because he was their poster-child for equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI).
But whichever narrative about EDI and “woke” you buy into, the case of Arday is a particular one, and it may not fit either mould. It could be that black academics generally get treated worse but in this case, he really was in the wrong. It could be that EDI is counter-productive or unjust, but that in this case Arday was appointed on merit and is innocent. You can’t know the facts of this case on the basis of a general analysis of race and society.
In a world in which we are told to have the courage of our convictions, I wish we had less of it. As I wrote in How to Think Like a Philosopher, “The courage of your convictions is often the cowardice not to change them.” We should be brave, honest and clear-sighted enough to recognise when our moral instincts run ahead of what we know. As I said at the end of that book, “if you could sum up the key to good thinking in one imperative it would be Don’t jump to conclusions. Crawl to them, on your hands and knees, slowly checking every step of the way. In a world which promises everything quickly and easily, thinking must be hard and slow.”