AB Division Member Chang has raised the issue that there is one estimate in the Cowie Report that suggests largest amount of seal products that entered the EU at the time the EU measure was imposed were for processing and transit, which are permitted under the scheme. He is pressing on the issue of whether a public morals basis for the EU measure is coherent, if it is permissive of EU nationals handling seal products for transit and processing purposes. In other words, if the moral standard relates to unjustified suffering of seals and the objection to EU nationals becoming compllicit in that, then why isn't the same morally objectional complicity involved in handling for transit or processing as opposed to consumption? The EU is responding to Chang by focusing on statistics. But he is raising not just the question of the relative importance of say processing to other imports but why it wouldn't processing be as morally objectionable as consuming on EU territory?
An adequate answer to this question has several dimensions. First, as the EU concedes, including procesing does reduce somewhat the contribution of the measure to upholding the stated moral standards. The interest in the name of which that reduction is concerned is comity, namely recognizing that people elsewhere may be legitimately permitted by their own governments to consume seal products, because those societies have a different evaluation of public morals. Thus, by permitting inward processing and transit there is a balance between asserting the EU's moral standards for its own consumers and deferring to other societies' moral standards with respect to their own consumers. It seems to me that this doesn't at all undermine the coherence or consistency of the EU's moral standards for EU consumers. If there were no comity concern, then it would be fair to ask why there is no moral concern about the inherent complicity with unjustified suffering of seals that occurs in the handling for transit and processing. In sum it is not the EU moral standard itself that is variable but rather its application to different kinds of complicitly with unjustified seal suffering-but this variability is not incoherent or contradictory, when one takes into account the other relevant concern, namely comity. Secondly, there is significant evidence that the EU measure has in fact contributed to the reduction in demands for seal products outside the EU, through the contagion effect of moral expression. Thus, even with the transit and inward processing implicit exceptions, the overall effect of the EU measure is greater global consciousness-raising about the moral unacceptability of unjustified suffering of seals. Third, much animal welfare legislation that deals with moral concerns is, as Langille and I point out in our article, inherently incrementtal given the transitional effects on other interests and concerns in moving to a regulatory approach that fully reflects the evolving moral standards of the community. Beginning with a focus on the complicity of consumers but not immediately addressing complicity in handling for transit and processing, is quite consistent with a step-by-step or incremental approach, as long as the overall effect is a clear move toward reflecting the moral standards in question. And the EU measure has been perceived both in the EU and globally as such a clear move.
