#342 — Animal Minds & Moral Truths
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1 hour and 2 minutes
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163.25238
Summary
Peter Singer is often called the father of the modern animal rights movement, and was named one of the most influential people in the world by Time Magazine. He is an Australian philosopher and a professor of bioethics at Princeton, he has contributed to more than 50 books in over 30 languages, and he is the founder of The Life You Can Save, a non-profit which recommends various effective charities. And his seminal book, Animal Liberation, has been revised and published under the title Animal Liberation Now, which is the main topic of discussion today. In this episode, we talk about the moral status of non-human animals, the ethics of moral hierarchies, speciesism, the tragic case of Sam Bankman Freed, some concerns about effective altruism, and the problems with focusing on existential risk. We also discuss the important work of Derek Parfit, whether there are objective claims to make about right and wrong and good and evil, and other topics. And now I bring you Peter Singer, I am with Peter Singer. I am your host, Sam Harris, and I am here to bring you the first part of this conversation. This is the Making Sense Podcast, and it's my pleasure to have him on the show. If you enjoy what we re doing here, please consider becoming a supporter of what we're doing here. You can see the charities we support at the Waking Up Foundation over at wakingup.org, and you can also consult Peter Singer's organization, which also recommends effective charities over at the Getting What We Can Save. And you can read The Buddhist and the Ethicist, The Buddhist And The Ethicist by The Dalai Lama over at The New York Review of Books, which I haven t read, I haven't read yet. And I have a new book coming out coming out, The Buddha and the Buddhist And the Buddhist and The Buddhist and I can t wait to read The Dalai and I don t know what I do not have a book about that yet. I have not read that yet, but I am going to read it yet, I'm going to do that, I hope you're not doing that, and so on and I'm not doing it, I'll read it, and all of that, so I'm looking out for that, right and I think that I'll do it right, I've checked out that, you can do it, right have that, etc., etc., and so much more, etc. -- Sam Harris
Transcript
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Peter is often called the father of the modern animal welfare movement, and was named one
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of the most influential people in the world by Time Magazine.
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He is an Australian philosopher and a professor of bioethics at Princeton.
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He's contributed to more than 50 books in over 30 languages, and he's the founder of
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The Life You Can Save, a non-profit which you can find online that recommends various
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And his seminal book, Animal Liberation, has been revised and published under the title
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Animal Liberation Now, which is the main topic of discussion today.
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We talk about the moral status of non-human animals, the ethics of moral hierarchies, speciesism,
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the scale of animal suffering, animal experimentation, the tragic case of Sam Bankman Freed, some concerns
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about effective altruism, the problems with focusing on existential risk, the comparative
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nature of human suffering, the important work of Derek Parfit, whether there are objective
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claims to make about right and wrong and good and evil, and other topics.
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I should say, on the topic of effective altruism, both Peter and I continue to support it, just
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The crucial thing for me is that systematizing one's philanthropy seems like an objectively good
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Deciding, for instance, to give 10% of one's pre-tax income away each year to the most effective
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And in my experience, it's a fairly revolutionary thing to do in one's life.
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As many of you know, I took that pledge through Will McCaskill's organization, Given What We
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Can, and I've since heard from Will that over 10% of the members who have taken that pledge
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have referenced this podcast in their explanation of why they decided to do that.
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And that represents over $300 million in pledged donations, which is amazing.
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And Will tells me that even on a conservative basis, which takes into account pledge attrition,
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as well as how much would have been given away anyway, and factors time discounting, that's
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worth at least $20 million in present value to top charities.
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Of course, this is the time of year where many people think about giving.
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So if you want some recommendations there, I suggest you check out Giving What We Can
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You can see the charities we support at the Waking Up Foundation over at wakingup.com
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And you can also consult Peter Singer's organization, The Life You Can Save, which also recommends
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One is a revision of your classic Animal Liberation.
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And then you have a new book coming out, which I haven't read, The Buddhist and The Ethicist.
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And we can talk about, I want to talk about both of those, but let's jump into Animal Liberation
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now because it's, remind me, the book first came out in 71?
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It's 50 years since I first actually published something on this topic, which was an article
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called Animal Liberation in the New York Review of Books in April 1973.
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Well, that has been, you tell me, you're often credited as being the real father of the animal
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You know, you detail in the book some of the history of our callousness toward animals and
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how we made some moral progress, however incremental.
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What was your experience as a philosopher writing a book of such compelling social importance?
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And that's not the common experience of academic philosophers.
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So tell me what happened to your life when you wrote that book.
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Yes, well, it was very interesting because I really had no idea what it would do to my
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philosophy career at that stage, which was really just beginning.
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And philosophy was just on the cusp of coming out of this ordinary language mode of philosophy,
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as it was sometimes called, or linguistic philosophy.
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And some of the leading philosophers in that area had expressed the idea that philosophy really
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has nothing to say about what is right or wrong, doesn't give advice in ethics.
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Ayer, who was a very prominent philosopher at the time, said, that's the business of the
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politician or the preacher, and we should leave it to them.
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But what I was trying to do was to write something that would be both intelligible to
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ordinary people, but still of philosophical interest.
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And I wasn't really sure whether that was possible, but I was so compelled by the need
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to write this book that in a way, you know, if it had harmed my career in philosophy, well,
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I could see myself having had a career as an animal activist, I suppose.
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But fortunately, the reaction was actually very good from philosophers.
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The ones who wrote about it mostly welcomed it.
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There were a couple who ridiculed it, but most of them said, you know, yes, this is important
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In the 1970s, as I say, it was on the cusp of change because there were other philosophers
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who wanted to discuss, for example, the war in Vietnam, the right to civil disobedience,
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and of course, the civil rights movement, which had been unfolding in the United States
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And what was your experience of, because, you know, subsequent to your publication of
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this book, you have been no stranger to controversy.
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I mean, you're a, unlike almost anyone else in your line of work, you're often noticed
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by the wider public in terms of how your arguments brush up against concerns about public policy
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And we'll get into some of the reasons why, and we'll talk about the foundations of your ethics.
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But what has been the experience of being an academic philosopher whose work is so often cited
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to resolve or to confound questions of public policy?
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I've felt it was important, if you're writing in ethics, to contribute to some of the deeper
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ethical questions that, you know, underlie our decisions about life and death, for example,
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about what we eat, about what we do with our spare cash.
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And to some extent, they're novel questions in that they're being asked in a different world
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So, to me, it's been, in a way, the stimulus to work hard in ethics and philosophy that
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I can have an influence and that these are important questions.
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I'm not just writing for my fellow philosophers to read and ponder and write replies to.
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I'm also trying to change the world for the better.
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Well, I share that aspiration, and I should say that your work has been very influential
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in my life, both directly and also as a result of the other people you have influenced who
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have, in turn, influenced me, people like Will McCaskill.
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So you're also credited with being, in some ways, the father of the effective altruism movement,
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I mean, Sam Bankman-Fried was also on this podcast back in the day.
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But let's talk about the revised book, Animal Liberation Now, and your central argument against
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And just to kind of make the case here over the course of a few minutes, what is our current
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And what do you think would be ethically normative?
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Well, I think our current prejudice still is that members of our species, members of the
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species Homo sapien, have automatically, and just in virtue of being a member of that species,
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have a higher moral status than any other beings.
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And that means that we are entitled to use other beings for our own ends, even when those
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ends are not absolute necessities, even when they're not saving our life.
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But for example, because we prefer a particular taste, a particular kind of food, that that
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entitles us to rear and then kill vast numbers of animals, and not even to give them minimally
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decent lives, but to lock them in huge sheds by the thousands or even tens of thousands in
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the case of chickens, just to produce their flesh more cheaply than we would be able to
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do if we gave them a life that is more normal for them, in a flock of 30 or 40 hens or chickens
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And I use the term speciesism, which I didn't invent, but I found in a leaflet published in
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And to me, when I saw that word, it's like a light bulb went on.
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Yes, there is something going on here that is parallel to racism or to sexism or some of
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I say parallel, it's not exactly the same, obviously.
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But in all of these cases, we have a group that is able to be dominant over others.
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So at least, say, in the 18th century, when the slave trade was at its height, that group
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was Europeans who had technology that Africans did not have and could capture or buy Africans,
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send them on a horrible voyage across the Atlantic in a ship, and sell them into slavery.
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And obviously, they could do that because they had that technology, and then they developed
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The idea that Europeans are superior, maybe that we were even helping these Africans by
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Christianizing them and then saving their souls, or finding verses in the Bible that justify
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There were slaves referred to in the Old Testament.
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And similarly, with men over women, there's also an ideology that it's natural for women
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And so women were denied equality in terms of, certainly in politics, they didn't have
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In some countries, they did not have the right to own property.
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If they were married, their property automatically all belonged to their husbands.
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So when it comes to animals, we have the same attitude.
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We can do all kinds of things to them that they cannot really resist.
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And the ideology might, once again, be a religious one.
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It says in the book of Genesis that God gave us dominion over the animals, so they're ours
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Or it might be that this is a natural arrangement in some way.
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We've always done this, and therefore it must be okay.
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But again, I think it's unjustifiable to think that species membership somehow makes a crucial
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That, you know, just as being, we now recognize that being of one race or another or one sex
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or another does not give one a right to rule over the other.
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So I think we should recognize that being of the human species does not mean that whatever
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your interests are, override the interests of another sentient being, that is, another
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being who can feel pain, whose life could go well or badly, and whose pain, you know, humans
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It matters just as much whether it's experienced by a human or a cow or a dog or a chimpanzee.
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What matters is how severe the pain is or how great the suffering is, but not.
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Well, I think most people have a natural or culturally acquired intuition that there is
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I often think about this in terms of what I'm now going to dub as the windshield test.
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I mean, if you're driving home in a car and a bug splatters on the windshield, you may
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I mean, it's not, it's certainly not a moral emergency.
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And the absence of feeling there is based on an intuition, however, in Coet, that not
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much has really happened, all things considered.
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You have not, this is not a tragedy that you have to spend the rest of your life trying
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to figure out how to find some emotional equanimity over because you don't attribute that much
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sentience or perhaps any sentience to bugs, right?
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So if I say it's a bee, and this is both positively and negatively valenced, right?
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So in terms of their capacity to suffer, if it exists at all, you must imagine it's minuscule
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compared to that of more complex animals and certainly compared to humans.
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And in terms of the type of happiness they might have enjoyed, but for the fact that they
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came into contact with your speeding car, the loss of opportunity for that enjoyment
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But as you move up the hierarchy, you know, phylogenetically, as you, you know, if you run
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over a squirrel or somebody's dog or in the worst possible case, a person, what you recognize
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there with each step up is kind of the wider implications of suffering and deprivations of
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happiness and also the, you know, the social context in which that may or may not be happening.
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So with a dog, you immediately think of the owner of the dog and the suffering of that
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And with a person, if you run over somebody's child, this is the sort of, you know, life deranging
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catastrophe that, you know, you may never get over given its implications.
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Now, part of your argument suggests that that moral hierarchy is not ethically defensible
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or at least not fully defensible as given, or if we're going to defend it by reference
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to capacities, capacities for suffering and capacities for happiness, we have to recognize
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that those capacities don't, in every individual case, track the boundaries between species.
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So just react to my intuitive sense of there being a moral hierarchy here and how one might
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Well, I think what you said is really compatible with what I said before.
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I said that pain is pain and it doesn't matter what the species is.
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Now, what you're suggesting is that a bug that hits our windscreen may not be capable of
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suffering at all, and I agree, that's, it's certainly, we can't be certain that insects
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And if it does suffer, then we assume that the suffering is in some way less than ours,
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that the capacities for suffering are far less, you know, the bug has far fewer, vastly fewer
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neurons than we have and, you know, may not suffer at all or may have a quite different
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So I think that's what, that's what we hope is going on.
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And if we get up to, you said, do you hit a squirrel or a dog perhaps?
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I think if we do that and we get, we stop the car, hopefully, and we see the animal is
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injured and not dead and presumably suffering from the injury, I hope we would be concerned
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And if we think the injury is serious and probably this animal is not going to survive, I hope we
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do something about it, actually, you know, and maybe people would be reluctant to do
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this, but I hope that we find a big piece of wood or a rock and we crush the squirrel's
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head so that the squirrel is not going to have a slow, drawn out death.
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Because I don't think in the case of a squirrel or even a dog, really, it's the killing that
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is so significant because I don't think that they are beings who, like us, live as much
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over time, have a sense of their biographical life and have hopes about what they're going
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So I think that if we're just talking about the fact that a being is killed, those cognitive
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But if we are talking about the pain that they're feeling, then I think they're less
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They may, of course, as in the case of the bug and possibly in the case of the squirrel
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and the dog too, there may be lesser capacities for pain, but I think we're on pretty shaky
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ground if we assume that with other birds and mammals that there is a lesser capacity
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It might be different things that make them suffer.
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But I think most people who live with dogs would think that their dogs are certainly capable
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of suffering quite acutely in some circumstances.
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But one of the implications of your argument is that these distinctions cannot be made neatly
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So for instance, if we had a, I think you used an example of an anencephalic child, you
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know, a child born without a cerebrum, you know, just with a brainstem keeping the child
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But, you know, there's zero hope of a fully human existence and probably no reason to
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This is a human child, but not one destined to become a person, really.
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And our intuition is that still this child is, you know, however compromised, is more important
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than any non-human animal by virtue of her humanness.
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Because if we're going to, if suffering really is the point, if sentience is the point, and
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if we want to extend that by reference to various mental capacities, I mean, you just added
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this sense of, you know, biographical continuity in time and, you know, future expectations of
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the future, if that, you know, further elaborates one's capacity for suffering and happiness,
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well, then this child is not the locus of any of that and never will be, and therefore
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has to be morally less important than any fully intact dog or squirrel or chimpanzee.
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So these distinctions do kind of run roughshod over any kind of species boundary.
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In a way, that's the other side of my view about species not counting.
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On the one hand, it means that non-human animals, at least those capable of suffering or enjoying
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their lives, matter more than we generally attribute the significance of their pain or suffering.
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And on the other hand, the idea of the equal value of all life or of the lives of all members
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of the species Homo sapien is also criticized by the view that I take.
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Because as you correctly point out, if there is a child who, an anencephalic infant has only a brain stem,
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They're not brain dead because there is a functioning brain stem and that means, you know,
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they can breathe and the heart beats, but they will never be conscious.
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So I think that actually their life in itself has less significance or importance than the life of
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a dog or a cow or a pig because those beings can experience things and can have good lives
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Now, I say with the infant taken in itself, if the parents somehow want this child to live
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and want it to be treated, well, that's another factor to consider.
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But the example I give in the book, which I think I use to illustrate how far we go in this speciesism,
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is one of a baby who was born with anencephaly.
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And the parents actually, recognizing that this was a tragedy and understanding correctly
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that their child would never become a person, would never recognize her mother or smile at her mother,
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And so they asked if the babies could be an organ donor
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and if her organs could be given to, for example, another baby who was born with a major heart defect,
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And when babies are born with heart defects, with what's sometimes called a hole in the heart,
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it's very hard to get organs for them because, of course, there are very few babies who die,
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or injured, say, in a car accident and are brain dead and from whose hearts might then be removed.
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So there was some potential for something good to come out of this.
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But the hospital said they couldn't do it because that would be killing a human being.
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And the parents even went to court to try to get that overruled.
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You can't cut the heart out of a living human being,
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even if that human being has absolutely no potential to ever become a person,
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to ever walk around and enjoy their lives or experiencing anything.
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On the other hand, we do, of course, experiment on animals all the time,
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including removing their hearts and trying to do transplants of their organs,
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trying to overcome the rejection that typically follows if you take an organ from one species
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And we do this with a variety of animals, including baboons.
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It's been done with and it has been done with a chimpanzee as well.
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And, you know, without recognizing that, well, this being is far more conscious,
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far more aware of the world, has far more of a life to live than the anencephalic baby.
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Yeah, well, this actually connects to some other useful fictions, which,
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I mean, so when you discuss this early in the book,
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you say that this notion that all humans are equally valuable is not a statement of fact.
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It's a prescription for how we should treat other human beings.
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And so this is a statement of political equality and it is in some sense just a heuristic for
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fairness and justice and arranging a sane society under some quasi Rawlsian principle of
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that's going to ensure the best outcomes for most of us most of the time.
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But it's not strictly true and it's not strictly true even in
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situations quite a bit divorced from what we're currently discussing.
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So you just imagine like a hostage situation where
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Well, no one imagines that that is going to be treated
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the same way as any other routine hostage situation.
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The U.S. president is going to be treated as more valuable
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given his or her role in the world and et cetera.
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And no one's going to think it's a total derangement of our ethics
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or a few people will think it's a total derangement of our ethics
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for us to be prioritizing saving the president of the United States
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over any random person who may need their life saved on any given Thursday.
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So this notion that all human beings are equally valuable is not something that
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It struck me in reading your book that there...
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One analogy came to mind which, again, it's just a heuristic
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Peter, have you ever spent much time firing guns or working with firearms?
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This is a bit of an American obsession, I think,
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So when you're working with firearms, there is a dogma that one is wise to always observe,
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which is to treat a gun as though it is always loaded, right?
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And even if you, you know, if you're handing me a gun, you will check to see that it's loaded
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and you'll check in a way that is quite redundant.
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I mean, it really is a kind of an acquired obsessive compulsive disorder.
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I mean, you'll look into the chamber and you'll look to see that there's no magazine in it
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and then you'll look into the chamber again and then you'll look to see that there's no magazine in it
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and you might even do that a third time before handing me the gun.
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And even if I have just watched you do that, I too will check to ensure that the gun isn't loaded.
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And even once it's been established that it's not loaded,
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which is to say I won't randomly point it in your direction
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or in the direction of any living being that I wouldn't want to put at risk, right?
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So that kind of discipline is the only thing that ensures that as you spend more and more time around guns,
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the probability that you are going to get killed or injured by them inadvertently
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or kill and injure somebody else isn't going to increase intolerably over the months and years.
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But it is in fact true that when, you know, if you have just handed me a gun,
00:27:26.860
which I've watched you check to see whether or not it's loaded,
00:27:29.300
and I've checked it once and I've checked it twice,
00:27:32.240
it's not true that I actually believe the gun might still be loaded.
00:27:41.820
And now when I'm checking it again, I'm engaged in a kind of religious ritual, right?
00:27:47.400
And yet it is a truly wise one that has consequences in the real world.
00:27:52.680
And to not observe this kind of redundancy, you know, has obviously negative consequences.
00:27:58.100
And every negligent discharge of a firearm that results in the injury or death of some innocent person
00:28:03.880
is always the result of a failure to practice this kind of obsessive attention to this sort of detail.
00:28:11.280
So this analogy occurred to me in defense of something like speciesism with respect to people.
00:28:20.200
And so it's the valuing of a life that we know is not actually valuable in the case of a human being
00:28:27.680
is a kind of bulwark, you know, an attitudinal bulwark against some of just the most obscene
00:28:35.900
departures from normativity we know we've accomplished in our past.
00:28:42.000
I mean, when you just look at the, you know, the Nazi doctors or, you know, the Nazis prior to the Holocaust
00:28:47.260
in full swing just deciding, okay, well, it's time to sterilize all of these mental defectives.
00:28:53.740
And, you know, now that we're sterilizing them, why don't we just start killing them en masse
00:28:59.380
I mean, there's a slide into evil which could be prevented if you just had this sort of blind heuristic
00:29:09.600
which is to value human life simply because it is human at every stage of its capacity,
00:29:22.480
And I just wanted to get your reaction to that.
00:29:24.960
Yes, that argument was widely used in the debate about voluntary euthanasia when it first got started
00:29:33.900
in the Netherlands in the 1980s when doctors began assisting patients to die on their request.
00:29:42.400
And the courts allowed them to do that saying that they faced a conflict of duties because of the
00:29:50.180
And many opponents said, this is going to lead to a slippery slope.
00:29:54.800
We will end up killing off people who are, you know, regarded as useless or intellectually disabled
00:30:05.000
And that argument in the early 1980s perhaps seemed to have some weight.
00:30:13.220
We were not familiar with the idea of the legal or open performance of voluntary euthanasia or medically assisted dying.
00:30:21.940
Actually, Peter, let me just add one caveat to it because it never occurred to me as what I just put forward,
00:30:27.360
it never occurred to me that it would be an argument against euthanasia in the case of there being real suffering
00:30:35.680
So I fully take your point that, you know, excruciating suffering is something that we want to relieve,
00:30:43.400
And if euthanasia is the only way to do it, well, then the door is open to that.
00:30:47.380
It's more this argument that even in the case of a person who's no better than an animal,
00:30:57.180
You know, the person in the lifeboat who is less intelligent than the most intelligent chimpanzee for whatever reason,
00:31:06.080
it still might make sense to privilege their humanness over the chimp given a triage situation.
00:31:14.300
And looking strictly at capacities that cross the species boundary seems like perhaps a dangerous way to go.
00:31:25.160
Okay. So in that case, it's not the suffering of the being whose life we are ending that is relevant.
00:31:31.440
But I do think we need to look, again, back at the other side of this,
00:31:35.960
because we are then still preserving the idea that every member of the human species is in some way more important,
00:31:42.420
or their lives are more sacrosanct or inviolable than every member of any other species.
00:31:48.580
So at a moral level, we're preserving this gulf between humans and non-human animals.
00:31:55.160
Now, your argument suggests, well, we're doing this to prevent a kind of slippery slope that gets us to Nazi holocaust or something like that.
00:32:04.020
And, you know, obviously, I don't want to take steps down that particular slope.
00:32:09.380
But on the other hand, it also allows us to treat the non-humans in this way that I think is totally horrendous and is on such a vast scale that you don't want to say this really,
00:32:24.120
but the scale of it is far greater than anything that has happened to humans because there are only 8 billion humans on the planet.
00:32:33.080
And each year, at present, we are killing about 200 billion vertebrate animals, raising and killing for food, 200 billion vertebrate animals, and inflicting miserable lives on them.
00:32:49.440
And I think that that's a huge cost that we need to think about as offsetting the risk.
00:32:57.540
I would see it as a rather small risk, but, you know, I don't deny that I'm not saying it's zero risk.
00:33:04.000
I think that breaking down this barrier and suggesting that, for example, in the case of that an encephalic baby,
00:33:10.120
it would have been all right to remove her heart and give it to a baby who needed a new heart,
00:33:16.200
that that kind of treatment is going to lead to these really, you know, great evils that we have certainly seen in the past.
00:33:24.040
And, of course, that we still see in different ways, although not quite in the same way that the Nazis did it.
00:33:30.360
Hmm. Well, I want to talk about some of the suffering you detail in your book.
00:33:36.060
But before I do, I just have a—I kind of want to jump to an ethical punchline question.
00:33:44.180
Because so all of this has to do with, you know, the cash value, the ethical cash value of everything we're going to talk about
00:33:50.500
comes down to questions of suffering and, you know, whether the lives of certain animals are net negative
00:33:58.680
based on, you know, how we raise them and how we treat them and how we kill them.
00:34:03.360
But what if—and I think, you know, and we'll get into some of the details,
00:34:06.980
but, you know, I don't think many readers of your book would be tempted to defend
00:34:12.620
most of the details you describe in your book around the use of animals in experiments
00:34:20.320
and their treatment when raised for food on factory farms.
00:34:27.000
But what about the more enlightened or most enlightened smaller organic farms that may or may not yet exist?
00:34:37.060
I mean, just the ideal condition of, you know, pasture-raised cows or chickens, say,
00:34:42.900
if we agreed that animals raised under those conditions, you know, albeit raised for food
00:34:50.500
and eventually killed, live net positive lives, right, which is to say it would be better
00:34:55.720
to have been such an animal than to have not been at all, right?
00:35:00.220
Certainly better than to have been a wild animal that lives its entire life fleeing predators.
00:35:05.760
And it's certainly quite unlike what is happening on our industrial-scale factory farms.
00:35:14.760
If such idyllic or organic farms exist, and certainly some of them are currently advertised to exist,
00:35:23.180
would eating those animals be not only ethically permissible, but better than shunning all animal agriculture?
00:35:38.060
I accept that there are a small number of farms that do treat animals well, that give them good lives.
00:35:46.480
But especially if they can kill them on the farm, which in the United States is only possible for small animals
00:35:51.740
like chickens and ducks and rabbits, because otherwise you're not really allowed to kill them on the farm.
00:35:58.540
But if they have good lives and they die without suffering, I think there is a case for saying that we are not harming them by purchasing those products
00:36:10.300
because, on balance, their life was a good thing.
00:36:13.400
And if nobody purchased those products, then clearly they would not have existed at all.
00:36:19.900
Now, that gets you into this quite difficult philosophical argument that was first raised by the Oxford philosopher Derek Parfitt
00:36:27.020
in his book, Reasons and Persons, about whether bringing more beings into existence, if they're going to lead good lives, is actually a good thing.
00:36:35.840
And of course, here there's also the question, does it in some way compensate for depriving an existing being of their life?
00:36:41.840
But, you know, I'm prepared to say that the answer to that question, maybe yes, it is a good thing to bring beings into existence
00:36:50.000
And if the only way to do that is to, at some point in their life, kill them without suffering and sell their products,
00:36:57.480
that might still be, overall, something that you can defend.
00:37:02.140
So, to that extent, although I'm a, well, I call myself a flexible vegan, I'm always vegetarian,
00:37:09.080
and I'm vegan when I'm shopping and buying for myself, but it's not always easy to stick to that when traveling or moving around.
00:37:16.640
So, although that's my preferred way of eating, I don't really reject people who,
00:37:23.180
there's sometimes called conscientious omnivores, who really search at these small places where they can be confident
00:37:32.540
And I think it's difficult to find because you can't always believe the labels.
00:37:37.280
I think you really need to visit the farm and talk to the people who run it and make your own judgment
00:37:42.300
about how genuine they are in terms of what they're doing for animals.
00:37:45.700
But I'm not going to deny that some of them do exist.
00:37:49.240
So, you know, many of my fellow animal rights activists would say,
00:37:53.900
no, that's still a violation of the animal's rights.
00:37:58.200
But I, as I say, to me, that's a difficult argument to make.
00:38:03.140
And I'm certainly not going to say confidently that that argument is wrong
00:38:07.200
and that that's why you should be a strict vegan or vegetarian.
00:38:12.820
But I am just pointing out that that's, you know, fewer than 1% of the animal products
00:38:18.400
raised in the United States or other affluent countries would meet that criterion,
00:38:26.400
So it's not going to sustain the kind of diet that most Americans or most people in affluent countries will be eating.
00:38:35.400
And at the very least, we would need to drastically reduce our consumption of animal products
00:38:39.960
in order to be able to only limit it to animals who've had good lives.
00:38:49.320
I think, you know, you see you're referencing the somewhat fraught discussion of population ethics
00:38:56.380
and whether it is justifiable in the end to just talk about the, you know, aggregate suffering and well-being
00:39:09.080
But the math is, however we do it, it's at least implicit in more or less everything we say on this topic
00:39:16.760
because, I mean, as you said yourself, just the sheer magnitude of animal suffering
00:39:21.240
is what raises it to the current level of moral concern that you are giving it, right?
00:39:27.980
I mean, the fact that you're giving numbers like 200 billion animals a year,
00:39:32.320
the reason why that is more important than most other things or really all other things
00:39:39.520
It's because of some sense that more is different,
00:39:42.700
which is to say more suffering spread over billions is more important.
00:39:48.520
And if we could reduce the number of animals treated in appalling ways,
00:39:53.260
well, then that would be making progress toward the good.
00:39:57.420
And it's just, perhaps we even spoke about the repugnant conclusion
00:40:01.660
and other paradoxes thrown up by Parfit's work in previous podcasts,
00:40:05.260
but it is, in fact, difficult to do the math under certain rather novel framings
00:40:12.240
of the sort that Parfit seemed to produce, you know, every minute of the day for decades.
00:40:18.420
But, I mean, it strikes me as morally uncontroversial
00:40:22.900
that the misery and death of X number of people or animals is just, you know,
00:40:29.040
all things being equal is not as bad as the misery and death of 1,000 X number
00:40:36.960
And that's, I think, you know, that's everyone's intuition.
00:40:42.420
Okay, so actually the most disturbing chapter in your book,
00:40:46.140
I think it was probably because I was much less familiar with the details,
00:40:50.060
was for me the chapter on animal experimentation,
00:40:53.780
which is, I have to say, it's like, it's almost unbelievable that,
00:40:58.400
you know, especially in psychological science that we did and continue to do,
00:41:04.760
it sounds like, these experiments that just seem not only pointless and unnecessary,
00:41:11.600
but just sadistic and insane to the point where I don't know how these experimenters
00:41:17.680
do this type of work, and I certainly don't know how they attract graduate students.
00:41:22.340
What is the state of current practice now, and what sort of pressure has been put on
00:41:28.660
the scientific community to stop these types of experiments?
00:41:33.600
I mean, feel free to describe what I'm talking about, but I'm thinking in particular of,
00:41:37.260
you know, the learned helplessness experiments that supposedly offer some models of depression
00:41:43.820
And it was quite amazing to discover that Martin Seligman, who's often credited as the
00:41:49.840
father of positive psychology, was among the people who has done these experiments and
00:41:55.080
seem to have endorsed them as important even up to the present.
00:41:59.380
The details are actually jaw-dropping, so I don't, you know, we don't need to be pointlessly
00:42:05.220
gruesome here, but it's just amazing what you describe in your book.
00:42:10.600
Yes, I have to say, I was really disturbed in writing that chapter.
00:42:17.300
I was disturbed in writing the experimentation chapter in the original edition in 1975, but
00:42:23.280
I had expected things to have improved more than they have.
00:42:29.700
They have, but there is still, as you say, a lot of quite horrendous things continuing.
00:42:35.980
And I expected things that improved because one of the things that it has happened and was
00:42:40.540
a result, I suppose, of pressure on scientists from the animal community, was the introduction
00:42:45.720
of what are generically known as animal experimentation ethics committees, but in the United States
00:42:52.100
are known as institutional animal care and use committees.
00:42:55.760
And these are committees that look at proposals for experiments from people in the institution
00:43:00.300
that may be going forward for applications for funding or just to be done.
00:43:09.940
And I'd been led by some people to think that they were doing an effective job.
00:43:15.160
Steven Pinker, for example, wrote in Better Angels of Our Nature that when he was a graduate
00:43:21.800
student in psychology, he did what he says was one of the worst things I've ever done.
00:43:26.740
And he himself describes it as torturing a rat to death.
00:43:29.880
He didn't really mean to torture it to death, but he set up an experiment, left it overnight
00:43:36.540
And he concluded that it had effectively been tortured to death because it was getting electric
00:43:40.620
shocks and had not learned to stop the shock in the way that he or his supervisor had expected
00:43:49.900
But he then says, you know, well, that happened, whatever the date was in the 1960s, I guess,
00:43:54.900
when Steven was a graduate student, but the difference now is like the difference between
00:44:04.620
Unfortunately, there is still a lot of research that gets through these institutional animal
00:44:09.940
care and use committees that really should not be done.
00:44:13.280
That is clearly very painful and distressing to the animals.
00:44:17.280
And that is being done in the United States, but also in many other countries.
00:44:22.040
So the learned helplessness experiments that you talked about, that Martin Seligman and
00:44:27.440
others were involved in, was an attempt to produce an animal model of depression.
00:44:35.100
And the idea was that you train an animal to be able to escape an electric shock.
00:44:41.580
So a dog, for example, would be put in a sort of cage enclosure that had two sides to
00:44:48.460
it and it had a wire floor on both sides, but you could electrify the floor on one side and
00:44:55.000
the dog would then feel the shock and would rapidly jump onto the other side of this box
00:45:02.080
where there was no electric shock and it would learn to do that.
00:45:04.460
But then at some point, you put up a barrier so the dog can't jump away from the electric
00:45:09.820
And as the experimenters themselves describe, after a large number of attempts to escape,
00:45:15.040
and I think they used things like running around, urinating, defecating, yelping, the
00:45:20.720
dog will eventually give up the attempt to escape and will simply lie on the electrified
00:45:28.880
And the idea was that this would be in some way a model for depression and that maybe we
00:45:33.580
would learn to treat depression, which of course is a terrible condition when humans
00:45:37.260
have severe and untreatable depression, from doing this to dogs.
00:45:41.080
But this went on for decades and we never learnt anything that enabled us to treat the severe
00:45:50.480
And although it's now accepted by the experimenters themselves that this was not a good model of
00:45:55.840
depression, in fact, and that even the label they'd given to it, learned helplessness, turned
00:46:00.200
out to be wrong because it wasn't actually learned behaviour.
00:46:03.400
It was something that was more biologically innate.
00:46:05.920
But, you know, after they'd given up using that as a model for depression, somebody then
00:46:11.500
had the bright idea of saying, well, maybe this is not a good model for depression, but
00:46:14.900
how about post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD, which is a problem that, you know, we talk
00:46:21.640
So then they said, well, yeah, could we use it for that?
00:46:24.900
And then they said, hmm, but maybe it's not traumatic enough or, you know, maybe there's
00:46:30.540
a theory that PTSD comes from early childhood abuse and then that is reignited by a later
00:46:38.820
So one of the experiments I describe, done with rats, attempts to replicate this, attempts
00:46:44.660
to say, okay, we'll give them some abuse when they're very young and then we'll abuse them
00:46:51.360
And they set up things where they do a whole variety of different forms of trauma to them.
00:46:57.160
So one is giving them inescapable electric shock, another is dropping them into a sheer
00:47:03.840
sided container of water where they have to swim to stay alive and you have what's called
00:47:12.720
You let them for 20 minutes where they can't get out of this container, they have to keep
00:47:16.960
swimming and swimming and probably they're fearful, of course, of getting tired and drowning.
00:47:25.720
You put them in plastic cones where they can't move at all.
00:47:29.160
They're completely immobilized in all their limbs.
00:47:35.460
So again, a lot of pain and distress is being inflicted on animals.
00:47:40.040
And is this really a model of human post-traumatic stress disorder?
00:47:43.600
It seems very unlikely because it seems that we have a different kind of awareness of what's
00:47:54.800
We may feel that we were humiliated because we were abused and mistreated, which perhaps
00:47:59.320
a rat does not feel or not feel in the same way.
00:48:02.580
So it is a kind of continuation of saying, well, we use animals in this way.
00:48:06.960
What else can we think of that we will use and abuse?
00:48:11.920
But very little of this translates to being useful for humans.
00:48:17.280
You can't say it's zero, but there's an immense amount of pain and suffering inflicted on animals
00:48:22.240
in the hope that it will do some good for humans.
00:48:29.980
It takes scientific, talented scientists to work on this.
00:48:33.800
And who knows if we use those resources and those talented people to more directly try
00:48:39.320
and treat people with the disease, do research, clinical studies of humans with the condition.
00:48:44.900
Maybe we would have got better treatments for these conditions without abusing animals.
00:48:49.980
Well, also in the context of that discussion, you make the quite astute point really devastating
00:48:58.660
for the whole enterprise, which is to say that if this work really is to translate into
00:49:04.160
our understanding of human suffering, it will only translate because these animals are deeply
00:49:12.540
And if they are deeply analogous to humans in their suffering, well, then that makes our
00:49:21.080
So insofar as this work could be useful, it approaches the ethical asymptote of just
00:49:29.080
the monstrosity of treating other sentient beings in this way.
00:49:34.180
And insofar as they're not at all analogous and the suffering is, you know, in a Cartesian
00:49:41.180
Well, then why are we doing the work in the first place?
00:49:45.580
It's a dilemma that people who do this kind of work on animals in psychology
00:49:51.480
Either the animal is really like us in terms of its psychology and its mind, its mental
00:49:56.320
states, in which case, how can we possibly justify doing this?
00:50:02.620
And then what are we going to learn from doing these things to the animal?
00:50:06.420
So yeah, I don't think they can win that argument.
00:50:08.720
Yeah, I think the most depressing studies you cite in the book, I've now forgotten whether
00:50:15.980
these are more from the first edition or whether this kind of work has continued up to the present,
00:50:22.840
But it's all the maternal deprivation stuff with monkeys and apes where, you know, they're
00:50:28.540
given a, instead of, you know, access to their actual mother, they're given access to
00:50:33.660
a, you know, a wireframe simulacrum of a mother.
00:50:37.660
But, you know, every sadistic permutation of this seems to have been explored, including
00:50:44.020
mothers that, you know, pointlessly shock them or stab them or, you know, screech with
00:50:49.640
Or, I mean, if you just imagine an alien race coming to Earth and beginning to treat
00:50:55.140
us this way, you know, the only theory of mind you could have about them is it's just
00:51:01.860
I mean, it's just like there is no greater evil than the adumbrations of those experiments
00:51:06.980
that some brilliant grad student or his or her supervisor has designed.
00:51:15.220
And if so, what is the possible justification for it?
00:51:22.000
Harry Harlow was the one who really started this series of experiments back in the 1950s.
00:51:26.880
And then, yeah, I mean, he really did horrendous things, as you say, that you have to suspect
00:51:32.500
there was some kind of sadism behind this from the things he did and from the way he wrote
00:51:38.440
I mean, he used terms like he created a tunnel of terror, he calls it, to frighten these monkeys
00:51:44.140
to see if he could see what, you know, pathology, mental pathology developed.
00:51:48.660
And then he got these neurotic female monkeys and he wanted to see how they reacted with
00:51:54.860
their own babies, but they wouldn't allow the males to mate with them.
00:51:58.680
So then he constructed what he calls in his own paper, a rape rack, basically tying the females
00:52:07.000
And, you know, then sees how they are, what sort of mothers they are with their babies.
00:52:12.020
And he describes how one of them takes its baby face down on the floor and rubs its face
00:52:21.320
So, you know, there's generations of suffering that he is causing.
00:52:25.960
So he trained his graduate students to continue to do this work.
00:52:29.840
One of them was Stephen Suomi, who continued to get large grants from the National Institutes
00:52:36.420
of Health in the United States, supporting this research.
00:52:40.000
Until finally, people for the ethical treatment of animals, PETA, as it's more commonly known,
00:52:48.080
And I think they stopped in 2015, something like that.
00:52:51.820
But so these experiments had gone on for 60 years, this vein of experiments.
00:53:02.620
And there are other things that may be almost as bad that are still continuing.
00:53:08.400
Well, so now this is a line here that, you know, I don't know how to specify it.
00:53:14.020
But I mean, my associations with PETA as an organization, you know, albeit distant associations,
00:53:18.820
I've never had any direct experience of the group.
00:53:21.560
But I just, from the kinds of protests I've heard them, you know, perform, it has seemed
00:53:28.160
to be against all animal experimentation, no matter how seemingly sane and necessary it is,
00:53:37.100
So, like, granted, the experimentation you describe in your book is something that I see
00:53:44.880
But again, I believe I can imagine the judicious and careful use of non-human animals for the
00:53:52.320
purpose of mitigating the most appalling forms of human suffering.
00:53:56.640
And that there may not be any, you know, computer simulations that can come to the rescue here
00:54:02.840
to make that kind of work no longer necessary, right?
00:54:06.140
So, you know, I'm not sure what the best examples are at this point, but I imagine there are some.
00:54:12.520
So, can you speak to that issue of just the potential animal rights extremism here that would
00:54:18.100
prevent us from figuring out how to cure our children's cancers or spinal cord injuries or
00:54:25.220
Right. So, I think actually that Peter does tend to focus on the experiments which are
00:54:30.220
not curing our children's cancers, and that's obviously good tactics if you want to change
00:54:36.020
something. You don't want to tackle the hardest cases, you want to tackle the cases that will be
00:54:40.560
more widely accepted by the public. But there's a lot of pressure, of course, you know, as with
00:54:46.760
any group or political group of activists or lobbyists, there's a lot of pressure to sort of
00:54:52.700
stick to a party line and not allow much nuance in your position. And I think that that's probably
00:55:00.280
responsible for the fact that there certainly are organizations against animal experimentation.
00:55:06.220
Whether or not Peter is one of them, I'm not quite in a position to say. That would say,
00:55:09.980
we're against all animal experiments, even the ones that will cure the cancer of your children.
00:55:16.420
So, I'm not in that position. I do think that you have to accept that there can be potentially
00:55:23.880
justifiable experiments. Now, always, of course, I think first you should see, as in fact you
00:55:29.640
suggested, is there some non-animal-using way we can make progress on this issue? And you mentioned
00:55:35.420
computer simulation. For some cases, it might be growing cells in vitro, where there's no conscious
00:55:41.240
being, but just cells that are being worked with. There's a whole range of fields of developing
00:55:47.080
alternatives to animal research. In fact, at the end of August, I attended a conference at Niagara Falls,
00:55:53.140
in which there were several hundred scientists from 40 different countries, all exchanging notes on
00:55:58.480
on where they were making progress. But, you know, I certainly acknowledge that there are
00:56:04.380
experiments going on now that we cannot replace with non-animal-using methods. And some of them
00:56:10.020
will have benefits that are sufficient to say, yes, reluctantly, at the moment, we are justified in doing
00:56:17.680
this with animals, while trying to minimize their suffering to the greatest extent possible. One example
00:56:24.380
that I give in the book is research to alleviate the symptoms of Parkinson's disease, which many
00:56:30.340
listeners will know, somebody who has Parkinson's disease or may have it themselves in their early
00:56:35.440
stages. And it is a terrible condition. And it affects millions of people worldwide. So if you could
00:56:44.200
find, if you have something that really has good hopes of curing the disease, or in the case of the
00:56:50.080
research that I mention in the book, alleviating the symptoms of the disease, which is an important
00:56:54.480
part, of course, it's a slow-acting disease, I think, you know, you could defend that if there were
00:56:59.900
really no other way to find that treatment. So, yeah, it makes life more complicated to recognize
00:57:06.460
that. And then you have to start drawing lines. It's a lot easier if you just say, well, no harmful
00:57:10.900
experiments can be done on animals at all. But the cost to that is that you have far smaller chances of
00:57:18.240
actually obtaining public support. Because, of course, the lobby that wants to continue to do
00:57:23.040
animal experiments, which is not only the scientists, but also the big commercial companies
00:57:27.920
like Charles River Laboratories that produce millions of animals for use in laboratories and
00:57:34.040
make good profits from it. So the lobbyists are well-funded, and they will place ads, you know,
00:57:39.580
basically saying, your child or the rat, here are these fanatics who want us to stop, you know,
00:57:45.800
promising research to save your child from cancer, and they want to stop it because we're using rats.
00:57:51.900
And clearly, at this stage anyway, the public is going to say, oh, I'll choose my child, thank you
00:57:57.780
very much, not the rat. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, well, this is one of those instances where the perfect
00:58:04.680
and the pure can be the enemy of the good. And yeah, I would agree that it's important to be
00:58:11.460
pragmatic as well as principled here. But let's talk about effective altruism, because this is
00:58:16.960
this is something that I have, I know you and I have spoken about it before. I've certainly spoken
00:58:22.820
to Will McCaskill and many times on the podcast and Toby Ord, at least once. This is a movement that I
00:58:31.120
have, I've never been officially an adherent of, though I've been very directly informed by it.
00:58:39.000
You know, it's representation online in a, you know, in the branded culture of effective altruist
00:58:48.460
has always struck me as not perfectly passing the smell test. I mean, there's something quasi-cultic
00:58:55.220
about it or dogmatic or something that always concerned me, and this is something I've spoken
00:59:00.120
to Will about, at least. But generally speaking, it seemed like a major advance over the normal way
00:59:07.420
of approaching philanthropy, which is just to let your sentimentality and good feels be your guide
00:59:13.280
and to really have no rational accounting of the good you're doing or the harm you may be causing
00:59:18.720
apart from that. So it's, you know, it really has informed the way I give to causes very directly.
00:59:26.320
And then here comes Sam Bankman-Fried, who was very clearly the poster boy for the ultimate
00:59:33.460
instance of what effective altruists call earning to give, where, you know, you're a smart person
00:59:40.060
whose talents could be easily monetized and you recognize that it's far better than joining an
00:59:45.320
organization like, you know, Doctors Without Borders or anything else where you're explicitly doing good
00:59:52.360
in the world. It would be better to earn all the money you can earn and support those organizations
00:59:58.040
because then you have the effect of hundreds or thousands or even tens of thousands of people
01:00:03.220
doing that good. And in his case, he seemed to earn more money than almost anyone in human history
01:00:09.840
and he was earning it explicitly for the purpose of doing all the good he could do.
01:00:15.180
And quite unhappily, the cynicism with which this project was viewed by many people who take a dim view
01:00:23.960
of effective altruism and or even a view of altruism, a dim view of altruism as well. I mean,
01:00:29.280
just the kind of the Ayn Rand types in Silicon Valley who think it's all just virtue signaling and
01:00:34.280
any pretensions to the contrary is just kind of human vanity and, you know, status signaling under
01:00:41.500
some other guys. I'm not going to name names, but there are many people who view really any
01:00:46.360
any philanthropy along those lines. And he seemed to be the living confirmation of all of their
01:00:53.780
prejudices. And because I won't have to go into details here, I think everyone will be familiar
01:00:59.960
with just how fully it really became a Greek tragedy, at least when viewed from the point of
01:01:05.080
view of Sam Bankman Freed's parents, I think, just how fully he soared in the estimation of everyone
01:01:11.060
and then immolated. What's been your experience as certainly one of the patriarchs of effective
01:01:18.060
altruism in the advent of the Sam Bankman Freed catastrophe?
01:01:25.220
Well, it has been a tragedy. I think that's a good way to describe it. It's a tragedy viewed from
01:01:31.280
many different perspectives. You mentioned Sam's parents were professors of law and STEM.
01:01:38.720
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