Destiny's Ethics Tested by CosmicSkeptic

damn I didn't know we were gonna get this uh this hardcore fellow stopper but I guess this channel somebody said on that stream that you did they they said to you morality is more complicated than internal happiness to which you said quote I disagree I will wholly argue and stay mad all of meta ethics is [ __ ] trash garbage waste of time it's philosophers that are bored as [ __ ] circle jerking against other philosophers that are borders all of us have things in life that we want we try to satisfy those wants that's all morality is okay so everybody who disagrees suck a dick however four people would have stand in a circle and and three were to say murder is wrong and the other guy say well I think murder is okay it feels like there's no possible thing that you could appeal to or look at or ever have a discussion about to resolve that disagreement I don't know how you would do it yeah I I I think that doesn't work okay would you agree with me that there should be a vegan imperative to genocide all cats on the planet laughs [Music] Destiny thank you so much for being here yeah thanks for having me Cosmic do people call you Cosmic or Alex or what Pete I was going to ask you the same thing not if people call you Cosmic but uh I I tend to prefer Alex in fact I'm considering getting rid of the cosmic skeptic moniker altogether it's kind of a pseudonym that sounds like a game attack that I came up with when I was like 14 which isn't far off what actually happened so I'm considering shaking it off but having a bit of a brand identity crisis so we'll we'll figure that out eventually what a cosmic skeptic come from just early internet edgy philosophy name or what you know what it is there's this guy and there's no reason why he would have any reason to be watching my videos but I think years and years ago we used to I did this thing where we like made music together at some music club or something and I saw that he'd set up this SoundCloud and his name on Soundcloud used the word Cosmic and I was like that's a pretty cool word so when I was trying to come up with a with a YouTube name I thought Cosmic works and I was going to go for Cosmic critic um which sort of makes me internally cringe but then I guess so did Cosmic skeptic at the time but there was the whole I don't know it just sounded a bit better and to be honest it looks nice written down which is I think a slightly underrated quality of a good YouTube name have you seen the thing where the guy it's like a branding guy and he says you know which one of these pictures is Kiki and which one is Boba have you seen that thing I have not no so he gets like a it's like a picture of some sort of sort of spiky 2D object and another one's like this sort of you know this this rounded Blobby object and he says which one of these is Kiki and which one is Boba and the audience immediately identified the spiky one as Kiki and the sort of rounded one as Boba and he's sort of making this point that people sort of people sort of put things together in a way that you you might not expect he asked if lemon the taste of lemon is a fast taste or a slow taste okay and everybody unanimously said fast yeah even though that doesn't really make any sense it's sort of a sense in which you understand what they mean and I think something about the way that Cosmic skeptic looked written down and felt given the nature of the channel was was was something something like that but I don't know if the same is true of you where did Destiny come from uh just really early on um geez I must have been what probably 14 15 when I just played games on the internet I just had like uh when you make your name for Battle.net I chose Neo Destiny because there were just two words that I thought sounded cool and that was literally it and now that's kind of my yeah my online moniker that I'm a little stuck with but they do sound cool man um so do people call you Stephen or destiny in these contacts and which do you prefer uh definitely Stephen is what I should be called and definitely stupid is what I prefer yeah for sure okay so Destiny let's jump into things you just got me oh all right okay yeah yeah don't worry I'm I'm I'm messing Stephen Stephen it is my British sarcasm whatever humor radar is not on right now so sorry okay go for it what I'm hoping to do Stephen and I'll I'll emphasize that from my throat Stephen is something that I think I've well I've had a lot of requests to speak to you in in various different contexts usually people want me to talk to you about something sort of vaguely philosophical okay and uh when I was thinking about what to speak to you about uh I I was told by a friend that you had this entire uh sort of page on your website dedicated to explaining what your views were on certain things and there's this whole entry on philosophy now I don't know when you wrote that or how old that is I also saw that you put out a video a couple of years ago trying to sort of systematically go through what your your I guess your ethical uh worldview is what your position is on things and I gave it a listen and there were a few things that sort of made the eyebrows race to the to the back of the head and I was hoping that what we could do was talk about your worldview your philosophical world you your ethical worldview what it is uh sort of how you might justify it and and then we can maybe talk about its implications on on the practicalities of the things you believe as well yeah sure a little bit of a philosophical audit if you will yeah I guess so and and obviously this is going to have implications I mean a lot of people want me to talk to you about your your views that you sometimes expressed about animals which I do want to talk about um because I think I've heard you in the past say that you essentially just don't care about animals in an ethical context that might have changed I might be wrong about that is that the case no it's pretty close yeah because we're definitely gonna sort of lock horns there um I think that having listened to what you said I I'm trying to understand what you're saying but I think there might be some ways to push back but I think in order to do that we need an idea of what you actually think so if you were to sort of give uh an overview for someone who wasn't familiar with you there might be people listening who who haven't listened to you talk about ethics what your outlook is here how do you determine what the right thing to do is when you're going about your ethical conduct sure so on a um on a very very fundamental level I essentially want to create like the best world for me like a world that kind of maximizes the experience that I have um there are a couple of assumptions that I have that kind of go along with this um one assumption is that two people together can create more happiness utility whatever you want to call it um then two people individually so if one person on their own can create like 10 units of happiness and another person could create 10 units of Happiness when they come together they create together like 30 or 40 units of happiness so some level of collaboration is essential to I think like human flourishing or human happiness um and then typically whatever um whatever system of Ethics I have it kind of only works if other people are on board with the same type of thing there has to be some level of reciprocation uh so for instance I can't have like a system that says I'm not going to steal or kill people and then collaborate with people that think they can steal from me or kill me so whatever ethical system I have has to be universalized to some extent so whatever rights or privileges I demand for myself I also have to extend to other people and I just kind of function in a way that I hope that everybody could kind of share the system and it kind of works for all of us to maximize the amount of happiness I guess we can all produce together essentially that's like on a very very fundamental view that's kind of what's going on that's what I try to generate from there this sounds a bit utilitarian is that essentially what you're driving at um yeah I guess you yeah sure I guess you can call it that yeah because what it seems to me like you're doing here is is extrapolating from something like a a basic uh intuited truth that my well-being or sort of pleasurable experiences uh are seemingly good for me and the painful experiences are bad for me and there's a sense in which I just have this basic desire this want to maximize my positive experiences what I'm interested in is how you're extrapolating from that to treatment of other people do you think that the well-being of other people only matters insofar as it has an effect on your well-being I think at a really fundamental level I think yes um yeah I think so yeah because I've heard uh for instance in this uh on this on this page you gave the example of some chocolate bars you said look there are sort of five people and five chocolate bars and and you might want to say well if you're just interested in maximizing your own experience why don't you just eat all five chocolate bars and you said something like well that's because if if I ate them all myself then these people would be less likely to be my friends you know they wouldn't be as kind to me it would actually have a negative effect on me in the long run I just thought to myself I mean suppose that they just didn't know that these chocolate bars existed suppose that that still they're going to suffer you know they're let's say that this is the only food available you're on some desert island and you just discover sort of buried in the sand this food and you can eat it all yourself and they're never going to find out do you think there can be such things as an ethical obligation to share that food or do you think it if you're if your worldview is that maximizing your own positive experiences is the right thing to do then in fact you might have something like an obligation to not share that food because in doing so you wouldn't be maximizing your own positive variants um I think I I guess I would hope that there is um I guess I would hope that in whatever Society I create there's going to be some I guess some type of Virtues that all of us kind of hold to and and try to do our best to uphold irrespective of if we get caught or not but I don't really know if I expect the average person to do that so this is why I usually advocate for some level of social dynamics or some level of governmental pressure um to kind of keep people in line so you know given the opportunity to pay like if our taxes were hidden and nobody knew if we paid or not and you had the opportunity to pay your fair share or not pay anything at all I don't know if I would trust everybody to pay everything so this is where I would figure that like government would step in and say like hey like you have to pay this like this is your obligation not to bring up a whole tax debate or whatever um and then same thing with like some types of social norms as well that hopefully you would enforce some type of social norms that would in places where people could get away with things that they otherwise wouldn't get caught for there's going to be hopefully some sort of social consequence there but um I guess I have a hard time there is an attraction to thinking of a more um of some other sort of system that I guess necessitates or requires you to have ethical obligations that have no sort of like um actual reinforcing mechanism so for instance like if you found something and you had the opportunity to sneak it or share it hopefully you would always share it I have a thought of a way to to say like well look because of this reason you should always be obligated to share it other than kind of these like very broad uh utilitarian arguments you know that like well if you were on a lost island and everybody found secret stuff you know you you'd probably all be better off sharing than just a couple people hiding or stealing things but yeah I I don't know really how to like objectively build that out other than starting from a place of personal preferences I guess yeah well this is my concern with building an ethical worldview on the basis of personal concern is that if you say something like look I just don't have a way of saying that this person should should share this food I mean you even said then well I would hope that they would share this food yeah but why I mean on like is that a sort of a I guess like a moral hope is that so well I know I hope that people are good people I would hope because if I was the person that didn't find the food I would want some yeah so so this was this was another interesting sort of rubbing up against each other of two different intuitions you seem to have this this egoism of saying you know what I what I care about here is essentially the maximization of my own uh well-being but then in situations where it's it's clear that that your positive experience is going to be maximized by doing something that intuitively most people consider to be immoral we can appeal to something like a different principle something like a rulesian veil of ignorance and saying well look if I didn't know who I was going to be in the circumstance if I didn't know if I was going to be the person who gets the food or the person who doesn't I'd want the food to be shared and yeah there's have you um all right yeah go ahead yeah but but surely that circumstance if if you know what circumstance you're in if you're not behind a veil of ignorance if you know that you're the person who's going to benefit to make an appeal to the fact to say something like well if I were the person who wasn't going to get the food I'd want them to share fine but you're not so what does that matter I feel like there are so many different um uh there are so many different interactions in life with different things that at some point like it's very rare that you're going to be on top on every single level um so so you would hope that there are there are times that you give a little and hopefully there are times where other people give a little because it all balances out in the end but I mean um the direct actually the direct example of this have you seen the movie it's a Spanish movie called the platform I think I haven't oh [ __ ] it's like it's basically like this moral principle for like an hour and a half where um it's like a hundred prisoners every month get shuffled on a hundred floor prison and there's a thing of food that goes from the top to the bottom I'm sure you've heard of this I've heard of this yeah it feels like a freshman in uh High School philosophy or whatever decided to make this film to like illustrate this principle um but yeah I I guess um my hope would be that there are so many different transactions in life that like in some sense like yeah you could probably Flex somebody over with no um consequence at all but at some point you're going to be on the receiving end of something whether it's in old age um whether it's if you're down on your luck financially whether it's you happen to be on a public area and somebody is trying to kill you or whatever that like we're all kind of motivated to realize that you know if we peel behind that curtain you know we might be in the upper position here but you know we might not always be in that upper position um yeah and maybe this is why we want some kind of law enforcement to to force people to share in situations where they could keep things for themselves and this would be something like a taxation system but sure speaking sort of morally here like you could in theory at least in some circumstances just get away with this that is like yeah I'd rather live in a world where if the government Were Somehow omniscient and knew whenever somebody discovered food and other people were starving could force them to share it but in this circumstance you know you're going to get away with it no one else is going to find this you can eat the food right there and then a normal know that you've eaten it and and nothing is going to come of it now it you can say yeah but you know in in you know 10 minutes time I might be the person who requires the altruism of other people but there's no reason for them not to give it to you because they don't know that you've been selfish they they they have no idea the only thing in other words that could call somebody in that specific instance to share the food would be some kind of care or concern with the well-being of others for its own sake it can't be based on a sort of reciprocal notion because in this situation there is no there is no situation in which they even find out that you've stolen the food you see what I mean yeah I understand what you're saying um yeah I don't know what you what's your solution and I think I think well I think it potentially leads to to some quite dangerous implications like you could imagine somebody listening to this resonating with what you're saying and saying you know what that's a that's that's a good point all I care about is maximizing my own pleasure and saying that um and and that other people only matter in so far if they have an effect on me and you can imagine somebody who discovers a way to get away with not paying their taxes or discovers a way to exploit other people politically without them realizing that that's what's happening and just decides to do it because you know what moral uh what moral intuition is there to the country and I I just wondered I imagine that if you were speaking in a in a political context and somebody was and you were sort of criticizing somebody for acting immorally and they said well look I just guess I never thought I was going to get found out and you say but still that's evil that's terrible I can't believe you've done this thing and they say well I mean to be honest I was just following your advice and trying to maximize my own experience where did I go wrong um yeah I don't know I like um it's something I've thought a lot about but I I guess when I when I when I think about these kind of like principles I just think of um I try to think of like what how do humans behave and then what standard of behavior Can you realistically hold people to and I just haven't been able to think of any like objective moral principle that says you know well by this principle like at um damn [ __ ] I didn't know we were gonna get this uh this hardcore philosophy but I guess here this channel um I'm just gonna ask you questions okay actually because if you have a solution for me then [ __ ] that'd be great I wasted so much time reading this [ __ ] on meta ethics I basically met at anything in philosophy I hate all this even ethics even normative ethics I hate now but um I'm curious if you can tell me what is the value of um well let's say you've got two people on an island right and you're trying to enforce like some sort of behavior what what is the value of being able to say something is right or wrong if the other person disagrees with you can you tell me that what is the what is the value of doing that yeah so you've got a big guy in an island he could beat you up take all your stuff and his life would be fine and you've got a small dude on an island he can't really do anything like what is the value of being able to say like what's right or wrong in that circumstance I'm curious well the value of being able to do that is I think essentially uh in line with what you're saying which is something like self-preservation it's it's similar to sort of the early justifications for government which is essentially just giving up some of your freedoms in in uh in return for some kind of security and I think this is something that slowly happens over the evolution of our species now myself I'm I I essentially uh conform to a view called ethical emotivism which has gone a little bit out of fashion uh I think perhaps unfairly but I think that ethical expressions are essentially just emotional Expressions but I think about it's like some form of kind of like ethical non-cognitivism basically or yeah yeah it is um so moral statements don't actually have truth value at all that there is no yeah it's not the kind of sentence that can be true or false saying uh that something is bad or expressing a moral discontent with it is a bit like saying murder no or or don't or don't or even don't do that like a like a command I think there's a bit more of a prescriptive element it's not just an expression of boo murder but also something like don't murder which equally is something that doesn't have truth value but there's some kind of normative Force to it but it is essentially an expression now I I would imagine that what's happened here is what you've described which is uh thinking well if if we can sort of engender a situation where people generally do share that when I'm the person who needs to be shared with I'm going to receive the goods I think this is essentially what's evolved in human psychology but it's not a conscious thing in the way that an ethical framework might be you might sort of think to yourself well I'm I'm not I'm going to share this food because one day I might need the food shared back I think this is something that's happened subconsciously in the way that we evolve lots of Behavioral and physical traits that we don't quite know why they're there but they serve some purpose and I think the purpose of something like uh compassion and altruism are ultimately self-serving because the chances are you are going to get found out every now and again right yeah but this is purely descriptive this is just sort of describing why it is that people feel empathetic and I think you can show that if evolution works at the level of the gene it seems let's say suspicious that our level of altruism and willingness for self-sacrifice seems to map on to how closely genetically we are to the person that we're considering making the sacrifice for somebody might be more willing to save their brother or their son than a cousin or a cousin then you know a stranger in it and in fact although people are sort of working to to to ethically step out of this people generally I think have biases towards people who look like themselves they might be more likely to uh donate to a charity that helps people at home rather than abroad for example and if the reason why this empathetic quality has evolved is just essentially for the benefit of the genes it would make sense that this would map on perfectly there's even some interesting thought along the lines of of saying well why is it that somebody would care differently for say like uh what is it like a a Sun versus a brother or a brother rather than a parent even though you should share the same amount of genes and they suspect it's because of the fact that a lot of people would have actually been half brothers because of the fact that men were going around impregnating lots of different women in our evolutionary history so if you had a brother it was more likely to be sort of a half brother whereas your son was going to share more of your genes so like so much about who we care for why we care for them it seems to be dictated by a gene so I I think what you're describing there is descriptively what actually happened but it's left us essentially with with an inability not to feel a certain level of compassion to other creatures and that motivates us to share our food even when we might rationalize that I don't need to share this food I can't help but feel compassionate to the other members of of this you know desert island tribe and so I share the food but that doesn't confer an obligation to do so it just sort of describes why I happen to feel like I want to you know what I mean sure yeah I guess I don't know if I believe in in real ethical obligations then I guess or if I could like objectively say like someone ought to have some sort of ethical obligation so when I think of like navigating the world with a system of Ethics I try to think of what maps on the closest to what's going on what's like the least exploitable by another by like a malicious party um and then what could be like universalized through everybody and everybody would kind of work pretty well so together so when I think for instance of that Island example if I was somebody that um was of the idea that like I can make absolute moral statements and I could tell this other person like hey um you can't bully me or steal my food or kill me because that would be wrong um and if the other person disagrees with me then well I'm I'm in a lot of trouble and my moral statements don't really serve me very well I don't do anything they don't help me navigate the world in a positive way but if I come at it and I assume like okay well this guy is is coming at this from a self-interested perspective and I'm kind coming at this from a self-interested's perspective and if I can't like if I can't demonstrate some value or something to this dude or put him in some sort of conundrum he's probably gonna kill me and take all my stuff so the actions that would motivate me to do would ensure my safety and survival um while also I guess taking into account his you know assuming we both have to survive on this island yeah I don't know how would you engage with that well I mean it makes ethics very transactional yeah it means that I think the problem people are going to have with this view is that you want to say that the thing that is wrong with me exploiting another human being the only thing that makes this wrong or in any sort of meaningful sense something that I ought not do is the fact that sort of maybe this might contribute to a culture in which it comes back to bite me yeah or maybe this person sort of escapes my exploitation and ends up with the with the whip in their hand and then I'm screwed or maybe someone sees me do this and thinks well you know why the hell should I share with this person can that be the only thing that is wrong yeah I mean I understand what you're saying that it's not in it it doesn't feel very emotionally satisfying I just I feel like it maps on to the world in a in a pretty good way and I feel like from that perspective like I could generate government policy or prescriptive statements for people um that I can expect people to kind of follow through on um because I would understand that like the only way to get somebody to follow through on something that they might not necessarily want to do is with some sort of either social or legal enforcement essentially so I'm imagining a situation in which you're sort of the things that make you tick are different from other peoples and in fact we can we can sort of talk about the idea I had in mind in a moment because I remember you were asked on this video that I talked about uh somebody I think in your chat or whatever asks you what happens when one person's sort of Base internal preferences contradict another persons because it's easy enough to say we're gonna sort of enter into a transactional relationship where if we share our food you're going to benefit I'm going to benefit you know it's it's all good but if there's a situation in which you have a basic conflict your interests versus somebody else's interests what do you do when they contradict and what you said at the time was a bad preference I and and I'm quoting a bad preference is one that demands other people to violate things that will satisfy their own preferences in my opinion there's like an incompatibility there but I don't think I have any internal preferences that contradict other people's so radically or if they do I would argue that I'm correct and they're Incorrect and [ __ ] them I wonder if that's still the approach that you would take to yeah I think so value conflict it sounds really harsh but at some point it's going to become it would it would just it would turn into violent conflict and it would be a destroying one side and a survival of the other so if there were two civilizations that came into contact and in one civilization they thought that um it was permissible you know if you really felt like you really wanted to kill somebody you ought to be able to call someone on the street just kill them and in another Society they're like we can't we're not doing that um this might be such a fundamental disagreement or the um one civilization of people might be so altered such that this is such a high preference of theirs that they couldn't conceive of living in a world where they weren't allowed to fulfill that but in that case when you've got a conflicting like two deeply conflicting values like that it would have to come out in some sort of violent conflict um because there'd be no other way to resolve it now for would there be any okay sorry carry on I was gonna say for me I I firmly believe that like 99 of humans uh just because we all come from roughly the same genetic stock I think we have roughly the same fundamental preferences I don't I think there are groups of people that have huge differences like that now there might be some that come out through like socializing or cultural stuff so like maybe people's opinions on like LGBT issues but on really fundamental stuff like should I be allowed to steal from you rape you kill you um you know attack you without provocation I think for the most part I think almost all every like human being that isn't that is mentally sound and everything will agree on these things I think uh that that may be true on some sort of very basic assumptions but I think people often overestimate the moral consensus that that Humanity has had throughout its history um yeah views about uh whether you're allowed to sort of kill people um I I think I think have evolved our views on sort of a a nation's right to expand or um ownership of other human beings in in situations of slavery I I don't think it's as obvious as as perhaps you make it out to be in other words I think there can be these conflicts but where there are these conflicts and you say this would have essentially uh evolve into violent conflict did you think there's a sense in which you can say either side is right in that conflict I mean imagining for example uh some version of of World War II where the the the fighting was based on some fundamental value conflict about what you're allowed to do to other human beings violent conflict is there a sense in which we can say that that one side is correct there or do we just have to say that what we're witnessing is might makes right I feel like to say one side is correct um I feel like you would have to be able to ultimately resolve some moral statement down to some truth value there would have to be some moral facts to speak of and I don't I'm kind of cucked I don't really believe in stuff like that so I wouldn't be able to say at the end of the day that like it's right to not want to enslave somebody or it's right to not want to murder somebody I don't know if I believe that any of those moral statements ultimately reduced to some fact of the matter so no I don't know if I could ever say there's a right or wrong side in any given conflict like that there's just the values that I purport to have and hopefully other people around me have them and if some people are so incompatible and we can't find Common Grounds on it then at some point it's probably going to come to yeah some some sort of violent conflict to resolve the difference so the on the other side of this the reason why I have an issue with this is because um I personally have not found a way to resolve uh fundamental moral differences between two people the problem being the commensurality of people's moral systems right you know if some guy says well I read all of Kant and another guy says well I read the entire Bible okay well you it's like you've got a guy speaking a binary and a guy based it like there's just no you're never ever ever going to have any sort of um any sort of like reasonable communication between those two people so I think my biggest problem when people try to tell me what about this don't you think this is right if this is wrong when you come to people that have these like different moral systems built on what they believe are objectively true statements because they're because some of those objectively true statements are like axiomatic to them I don't know how you resolve that difference with somebody else who might have some different fundamentally different axiomatic statements for that their moral system is built off of that's that's the big problem that I have so everything kind of becomes a little bit subjective to me yeah have you tried belief in God um well I mean that works for God-fearing people but then as soon as you some who run into somebody who's not then you kind of yeah you have a whole issue there you know that might solve might solve some of your problems uh with with your ability to rightfully assert your own morality but I guess like you're you're looking at a situation like World War II and saying you know the classic example the classic sort of and it is quite an emotive Point against uh sort of ethical non-realism is to say how do we interpret this so because because you you still I imagine meaningfully use terms like good and bad in sort of everyday conversation or like political debates and conversations you say that this was the wrong thing to do this was a bad thing he should have done this he shouldn't have done that this kind of this kind of yeah are like highly contextual but then like I would also say like I'm a hard-line determinist too but also like you need to make a better choice and it's like well how do you believe in choice that I want okay well within the context of what we're talking about I'm using the word choice right but same thing with like good or bad like this is bad behavior this is good behavior if somebody would have challenged me you know like oh well fundamentally aren't you a moral subjectivist I'd probably just shoot him in the face right like there's there's no meaningful conversation yeah but um yeah no like we I understand I definitely know there's a desire to speak of like moral absence like it feels good we want to be able to say like slavery is morally absolutely wrong or murdering somebody you know killing somebody without propagation is absolutely morally wrong but I don't yeah without having like a belief in actual reducible moral fact I don't know how you can make those statements with that level of certainty do you believe in the concept of moral progress um do you think the world is is better now yeah no I understand 200 years ago like I believe in moral progress I guess but like it's a subjective thing like I mean I'm a I'm a citizen of the world today so I believe that and I like the morals that exist today so I believe there's probably been like some level of progress uh but I don't know if I would have been a person a thousand years ago and maybe I would have felt like this is a moral regression right or yeah so yeah in the same way that we can we can sit here and say well you know there was a time when people sort of hated homosexuals and thought that women should be confined to the home and how crazy is that look at how much progress we've made you know in a in a close possible Universe with the opposite trajectory we could say or you know things revert in 100 200 years time we could be sat here saying gosh I mean you know just 100 years ago people thought that women should be in the workplace and that homosexuals should be able to adopt children how crazy and and awful that was and look how we've how we've progressed in other words do you think that we have to if if we have a worldview similar to yours here just abandon any ability to say that certain States Affairs are are better and worse rather than just saying like I prefer it I mean there seems to be a meaningful difference between me saying I prefer a world in which uh homosexuals aren't persecuted versus saying something like I prefer my showers to be scolding hot rather than just warm you know what I mean that there seems to be a we seem to be talking about a different kind of preference here but if it is all just essentially whatever's going to sort of make me feel better about myself there doesn't seem to be much of a difference between those kinds of preferences right is is that is that your view that the preference that you have that you know people not be racist is similar to the preference that you have of what temperature your shower should be yeah I think ultimately at the end of the day I I think yeah I think I I think I would say it's all roughly the same thing yeah see and and then I would have to say in considering yeah I can't technically believe if somebody would ask me if you believe in moral progress I'd have to say no because progress implies some objective movement from or towards something else which implies there is some like moral goal or whatever um I I can only say that like there's been progress in so far as I guess what I would like to see but ultimately it would all be contextual and subjective so yeah so how do you square that with um I mean I I I'm not entirely familiar with what what sort of you're most interested in right at this moment on a on a political level but I imagine there are certain issues that you care deeply about try to have debates about and make content about with a view to trying to you know mobilize people into into believing something that you believe in saying probably things like this is wrong this is bad this is good this is what you should do how do you square that sort of commonsensical language on the surface level when talking about how to behave with the fact that a little bit of digging reveals that what you're essentially talking about is your favorite temperature or shower I think that the thing that I tried to appeal to is that even if these things are ultimately subjective and even if I can't ground them out in some like Resolute concrete morality um these preferences are real they're strong and they're shared by almost everybody so when I start to argue with people um even my rhetorical strategies are going to be pretty similar if I'm arguing trans issues for instance with a conservative I'm not usually going to argue that like hey don't you think it'd be good if we allowed you know every single type of person in society to have access to the same rights and probably because because your nebulous negative positive rights you're in some weird world I usually do like a direct appeal to hey you're a parent if your child had a medical problem and you had a conversation with your child and your doctor would you want the government getting in between you and your doctor and making a good decision for a child right so even rhetorically I try ultimately at the end of the day to appeal to people's like individual preferences and to try to demonstrate like when I'm really what I'm trying to tell you when I'm arguing with somebody I say I I think what you're doing is wrong um that that's the verbiage that comes out but what I'm really saying about we'll get it in the conversation is hey the thing that you're advocating for I don't think you realize is ultimately contrary to your own self-interests that's essentially what I end up arguing with people yeah that's more or less the approach that I've taken as well you're essentially running a consistency test rather than trying to establish some base moral principles in which you sort of but build up the truth the thing I think is important to realize the only reason why that consistency test works is because we have some shared I hate that I lean into this one for some some shared like moral uh intuition right um which is a phrase that I hated three years ago because I was like we're gonna find the ultimate moral Ball but but now I now I lean strongly on these moral intuitions but this system breaks when you if you run into the occasional you know [ __ ] psychopath right if you start running into somebody who's like well I don't care if somebody tries to kill me I actually would want to live in a world we all fight to the death and it's like okay well you're insane and there is no arguing with you I can't appeal to your preferences because your preferences are so out of line with you know 99 of humanity but um yeah that that's essentially my rhetorical and I guess in which case yes might makes right value conflict it's just whoever's got the bigger guns wins out and essentially yeah and and that's kind of how it I don't want to say should be because that's to import moral language but it's it's not how it shouldn't be yeah I mean I I it's good I think that's a good thing because ideally in the um oh man if I say like uh like angular the conservation of angular momentum does that mean anything to you yeah sure okay like when the when the when galaxies are forming they have an average spin to them and and what happens is after millions and hundreds of millions of years all the particles that aren't spinning in a certain way colliding you get this thing that's like moving in kind of one consistent Direction you're at your angular momentum is on average some direction um for a spinning cloud of stuff I feel like for humans that same concept has to apply that if you had 100 civilizations and 50 of them were kind of like what I'm saying where it's like listen we're all going to work together we're going to be self-interested we're going to do things and then you've got like 50 that are like crazy some are like we're gonna kill people we don't like to blah blah blah eventually those types of thoughts get weeded out and then you're just left with people that are like okay well we might disagree but it's in my best interest to respect your right so that you respect my rights and et cetera et cetera like I think it's okay to not be tolerant of people that are so morally out of line with you that they would be incompatible you know like a free and open Society basically and to be clear that's not because you think that they're sort of wrong or corrupt but just because they disagree with you um they were therefore justified in uh sort of asserting your might yeah and imprisoning or potentially killing them just because they like a different flavor of ice cream to you well hold on no when I say we disagree what I'm talking about is I'm talking about disagreements on fundamental moral preferences right so say you've got four religious groups and three religious groups are like we believe in our God we think that it's wrong to believe in other gods um but if you worship another God that's between you you and whatever that's for you to figure out let's say there's a fourth religious group that says our God is the only God and we're going to kill you if you don't believe that that fourth religious group would have a fundament a deeply fundamentally incompatible view of the world as the other three and I think it'd be okay for the three to be like well listen we can all coexist in harmony with each other even if we have disagreements and you can't so you have to go so the fundamental disagreements I'm talking about are once related to like basically huge infringements of Rights of other people killing people raping people stealing people stuff like that yeah but it would be it would be just as okay for that fourth religious group to try to eliminate the other three yes which do you are you sort of troubled by that implication of your worldview that if if you have this world religion that just says you know what no other God but God and we're going to kill anybody who disagrees and they just start going ahead and doing that the only recourse you have is not to say you shouldn't do that it's not to appeal to any kind of moral principle but just to say I hope that we've got a better military and and that's the end of it yeah so I mean on a couple levels so one yeah I fully believe that two sides of a conflict could be fully justified in in destroying each other uh this comes up interestingly sometimes in some self-defense things where um let's say two people are having a conflict and somebody enters a bar and they're trying to figure out you know uh what's going on and somebody says oh John over there is trying to kill everybody you know help and John isn't trying to kill everybody and so a guy that walks in who heard there was a violent conflict sees John trying to kill every or gets reported to that he might try to stop John from doing it John might try to defend himself and arguably both people have good justification for their actions which is unsatisfying because you want to say there's one right and one wrong but I I think that that's the uh I think that's the reality of the world when we say and then when you use the term like do you want to appeal to some moral right or wrong um I just don't care too much because I don't know if it matters right like I could be the most morally Justified correct person in the world but if the other guy has the means and capability to destroy me that those moral statements mean nothing and and my moral thought will disappear with me as soon as they basically overrun me you know yeah you said that sometimes uh both sides in a conflict are justified in essentially wiping each other out isn't in situations of Basic Value conflict that always the case it's always the case that both sides are equally Justified and just completely when it comes to it wiping each other out just because they have what is a fundamental disagreement but when I said you know which flavor ice cream what I mean to say is that it's of the same nature it might be sort of more fundamental on the sort of hierarchy of their beliefs but it's got just as much input as saying which flavor of ice cream you you prefer you just have this preference yeah but it would be the difference of the imposition of that value on other people right so if you've got a society where you're saying we can only eat vanilla ice cream then you know maybe people have to die for that but if you've got a society we say I wish we would eat vanilla ice cream but people are free to eat other flavors of ice cream right it's the how much do you impose your values on other people is what you run into these fundamental value conflicts right yeah I mean in in that circumstance you know you've got one group that says if somebody tries to eat a different flavor ice cream we're gonna kill you yeah another group says well I don't know if I'm too happy about that so they get killed and what's the problem well the well I mean it depends when you say problem there is no problem the people that kill the people obviously accomplish their own so it's good for them and other people that got killed it's bad for them but um I don't see what the value is in any part of this is of appealing to some moral principle it reminds me of like the comic of like the there's like a guy that's standing at the Gates of Heaven and it's a biker and he's holding onto his bike and God's like well what happened the bike was like I had the right of way I don't know and it's like doesn't really matter if you have right away if the guy ran you over you know um yeah I just I don't see any of the value in appealing to moral principles when it comes to like conflict um yeah do you see a danger that this kind of line of thought could lead to some form of social Darwinism uh a very very popularly after uh the theory of evolution became accepted science or I should say by natural selection people like to point out that some people take this to say well look we're just animals we just have different values we just conflict with each other sometimes people are stronger than others you know and and that's just that's just the way it is you know if if we decide that we're gonna sort of uh embark on a Eugenics campaign to remove disability and we're going to start by killing everybody who's disabled right now because we believe that you know human beings are supposed to be the the most sort of evolutionarily proficient versions of themselves that's what we're going to do this this line of thought seems to not just sort of lead to that but justify that line of thought yeah but if you're fighting if you're fighting back against a group of people that believed that like what would your what you need something more than you just say this is morally wrong I think right and I think even the advertisements I think intuitively most people would even agree even if they wouldn't say so because the advertisements wouldn't just say like this is wrong stop it would probably be showing videos of uh mentally disabled people with families next to them of them doing jobs in society it would be an attempt to appeal whether you like it or not to your kind of these like fundamental preferences right like look first of all they look like humans and you are a human right you know even animals we like because they have human-like features sometimes and we anthropomorphize them and you know you see mentally [ __ ] people that doesn't mean that they're worthless it doesn't mean that they don't have value to family and friends it doesn't mean they can't function in society like ultimately I think the the campaign to argue against the eugenicsors would end up being like an appeal to their preferences you know rather than just saying like this is right or this is wrong yeah and like you said earlier that relies on the idea that there's some that basically most of the time when we have what seems to be a moral disagreement there's actually a lower resolution of thought in which we have a shared moral intuition use the word moral intuition yeah I would agree exactly that like that most a lot of the disagreements we have um so I would almost argue that there is no such thing as moral disagreement among humans um except for the case of like mental illness that a lot of the moral disagreements we have end up being like the second or third order thoughts that are more socially influenced so for instance like how we feel about like LGBT people right yeah that it's not like a basic value conflict if one person is pro LGBT and one person is not there's going to be something more fundamental yeah I definitely want like what's best for society and wants what's best for their family they just think about it a little bit differently right or even like you know uh freedom for human beings when uh you might have like a religious conception of Freedom that means freedom from sin or something but yeah you ultimately want freedom for human beings and the the value is agreed upon yeah but I wonder if there's a circularity lurking in the in the way that you just said I think that you know everybody shares these moral intuitions most fundamentally except in the cases of mental illness would you be defining cases of mental illness there by their disagreement with the moral principles I mean some people might say for example everybody agrees that it's wrong to sort of torture babies for fun and then we say well some people disagree with that but they're mentally ill and we say well what what mental illness do they have well they're you know they're Psychopaths but the reason that we say they're Psychopaths is because they don't share our intuition that uh torturing babies are fun is is wrong if you see what I'm saying so you can't just say something like well everybody agrees except for people who are mentally ill if you're just defining people who don't agree as mentally ill people I mean the same problem that some people don't agree well but I mean you could right that's I think you could make that statement now like what brands you have to say that they're mentally ill well because they um well I guess it wouldn't be mentally ill maybe we just redefine this form of mental illness as like um I guess like morally incompatible or something with like current Society um sure the reason why I guess the reason why I say mentally ill um the reason why I say mentally ill is because I feel like fundamentally most humans have the shared agreement on things and then in order to diverge from this at a fundamental level you're you're essentially it sounds bad to say but you're like almost like not human in the way that you view things like if you were to extrapolate some like types of self-destructive or societally destructive behaviors on a fundamental level to everybody else like Humanity would basically would essentially collapse for if you had a bunch of people that were like I want to kill myself I want to kill everybody around me I want to rape everybody around me or like society would necessarily like devolve into absurdity and disappear pretty quick I think yeah so they're mentally ill because they're in a minority in terms of their preferences um maybe well I'm not defining all mental illness this way the only reason why yeah the only reason why I'm making that carve out for mental illness is because people that are mentally ill um can have psychotic breaks from reality so they're not even interpreting reality of some fundamental fundamental level or they can have like really fundamental parts of their mind that are um are um like manipulative or just not good for society so like say somebody that is a psychopath or somebody with extreme narcissism um people that that that plug into society in a very um exploitative way essentially yeah yeah but but without the without a recourse to objective ethics what you essentially say is that their brains are different for example if we took every single narcissist in the world and we said well narcissism is a form of mental disorder um because you know most human brains work in a particular way but these people are particularly exploitative and lack empathy so they've got this mental disorder and we put them all in a bomb shelter and then we nuke the rest of the world and the only people who are living is me and you Stephen and all of these narcissists guess what suddenly we're the ones who are mentally ill because we're in a minority that seems like a a bad way to justify our conception of what makes a person mentally sound or mentally ill whatever the majority is is yeah I mean is it is it bad have you ever read the book or heard of the book I Am Legend I've heard of it oh that's essentially the um that's essentially the plot of that book there's a guy that goes around hunting vampires all day um and then eventually they trick him they infiltrate his stuff and then he realizes at the end of the book when they're like bringing him to call for count of his crimes um he's in front of it like a civilization of of these like night dwelling people and then he realizes like oh well you know to to them I was or to me they're all monsters but I guess to them I Am The Monster and a Tim coming to that realization at the end um yeah I mean what you're saying a lot of the objections that I hear from you um and I agree with all of these is that sometimes a lot of the things that I'm saying are emotionally unsatisfying like I think we want to have a righteous conviction to say that's wrong don't do that um and I feel that emotionally and I mean even I want that emotionally but one I don't see how logically I can ever deduce that and two um I don't see how it even really matters that much because like you said say we eliminate this Society um and it's just you me and then like 20 of the most intolerant people we know you know if they come for us with axes and we're like well hold on stop like look at this 42 Point syllogism I have to show you why you're actually morally incorrect like they're like okay I don't care and then they would just kill you and it's like oh well I guess my my moral Authority here didn't matter much you know yeah yeah I understand that I mean to be clear in in this particular conversation it's because you said you were making essentially a descriptive claim that yeah most people share their basic fundamental values but you said that there's an exception and again no no moral element here but you just said that there is an exception people who are mentally ill and I'm I'm saying I I guess I'm saying let's be careful not to be circular in saying that we're just going to call anybody who disagrees mentally ill so that we can say well everybody agrees except for those who are mentally ill that would be about me sort of you know what I mean yeah it's like some mentally ill people I disagree with but not everybody I disagree with would be mentally ill they're probably going to be very mentally sound people that we still have like very fundamental disagreements with right like in cases of like nationalistic or religious conflict these people might not be mentally at all but like second order facts have have caused them to take a position against you and the only resolution is through some military conflict or something right yeah although arguably this takes us back to where we started and saying that even the the sort of the nationalists and and the and the and the globalists and the the the religious zealot and the atheists like they they still ultimately are motivated by something like you know maximization of their their own well-being or positive experience or something like this in which case we could say that there's some basic moral intuition that most people share and the reason I wanted to ask you about that was because so much of what we think about the world is based essentially on unprovable intuition yeah for example the existence of the external world the existence of other Minds The are you familiar with the problem of induction for example the fact that we we can't we we have no reason to say that the laws of physics are not going to stop working in five seconds yeah the sun's not necessarily going to come up tomorrow or whatever right yeah exactly and and this is a the reason it's called the problem of induction is because it's essentially unsolvable it might be solvable with theism that's kind of another discussion but it's not a solvable problem but we say we can recognize I have absolutely no way to justify objectively to somebody who disagrees with me that the external World exists or that the sun will rise tomorrow or that other Minds exist any of this stuff but we still believe it right I presume you still believe these things yeah and and so if you're willing to allow unprovable intuitions in the case of General epistemology to to allow you to say well I think it's objectively true that the Earth orbits the sun even though that's based on sort of observations that rest on unprovable intuitions it's just an intuition that the external World exists and you sense data is accurate but you're just going to say yeah but I'm just going to trust it and say that because using that intuition I see that the Earth orbits a certain I'm going to say it's objectively true that the Earth orbits the sun why can't we just do the same thing for Ethics in saying that yeah we have this unprovable intuition that sort of my my well-being is good for me or like maximization of positive experience is a good thing and through that unprovable intuition I see that murder is wrong and so I'm just going to say that murder is objectively wrong it's as wrong it's as true to say that murder is wrong as it is to say that the Earth orbits the sun if if you're going to dismiss one because there's no way to sort of resolve the fundamental conflict of someone who disagrees with you that's true of like all the epistemology yeah okay so maybe you can uh maybe you can solve this one for me because I've had do you know who um perspective philosophy is oh yeah yeah okay I think he's tried to get me on this argument before and we have trouble getting much farther either because my mind's not equipped or because I'm just so correct and I don't realize it okay so you may yeah maybe you can help me throw this out so first let me summarize your argument so you can tell me if I understand this correctly so I'm saying well ultimately there is no such thing as moral fact we can't prove that moral fact so it's silly to pretend like you can make objectively true mortal statements and then you'll say okay sure that might be the case however if we look at things like the problem of induction or if we look at even the manifestation of other Minds in the world you can't prove that any of that exists however you don't go through life uh being like uh like an epistemic agnostic or anti-realist or you don't go through life assuming that you know tomorrow this the plan is going to explode like you go through life assuming these things are objectively true so why would you grant one for like metaphysics or epistemology but you wouldn't do the same for ethics is that essentially kind of a question and to be clear it's it's not just I think I think it's a little bit stronger it's not that it's not just that you you don't go around like acting you know as if these things aren't true you you sort of act as if the external World exists you act as if other minds are true that's true but I think it's stronger that you believe that it's true that other Minds exist as well right it's not just that you act as if that's the case you believe I'm a real person talking to you right now right and and that is based upon let's say if I were to run this argument you might say that is based on as justifiable an intuition as any moral intuition that you could think of okay so we'll see if you get me over this hurdle so my big issue when it comes to things like these um there's a lot of stuff I'll argue about and then it'll boil down to this one point I feel like it's resolving disagreements between people that point me in a direction of something that I'm more comfortable standing on a solid ground on so um uh so for instance when it comes to like existence of external universe or something there are I can talk to a lot of other people and we can have agreements and disagreements on these things but ultimately it seems like like if there are four people standing in a circle and three people are saying I think that the Earth is round and another guy's saying I think the Earth is flat we can run a battery of tests we can take in all the sense data and eventually our our minds can come to some agreement because of our uh ability to interact with the external world and say well look actually we are correct right the world is spherical and the fourth guy you're just wrong you can think what you want but you're wrong however four people were to stand in a circle and and three were to say murder is wrong and the other guy say well I think murder is okay it feels like there's no possible thing that you could appeal to or look at or ever have a discussion about to resolve that disagreement I don't know how you would do it yeah I I think think that doesn't work okay I think because in this in the situation that people disagree about uh something like the shape of the Earth or that the Earth exists let's say this might be based upon some fundamental conflict let's say that I that I said to you like I don't believe that the moon exists right and you sort of said but look I mean can't you see it like can't you like haven't you heard uh haven't you seen like the photographs can't you see it at night and I and I and I say well actually yes I can but you're not getting me what I'm saying is I have a more fundamental skepticism that my sense data is accurate I think we're living in a simulation or something like that okay if if we disagree that the moon exists there is no test you can run to disprove that so long as that's what my belief is based upon because you could say well look let's get a telescope let's look in the telescope and I'll look in the telescope and I'll be like yeah I see the same thing as you there it is there's there's the moon there's the Sea of Tranquility but I still don't believe it's there because more fundamentally I don't think my sense data is accurate I don't think there's an external world right in the same way if you have moral disagreements let's say you're pro-game marriage and someone else's anti-gay marriage and you say right no we can talk this out because look look at this study that shows that when people uh uh a society that accepts gay marriage is on the whole happier than one than one that doesn't and look at this this the fact that uh when people aren't allowed to get married they fall into depression the suicide rate goes up yeah you could look at all these sort of studies and statistics and things but that doesn't get you any closer to solving the problem because of course the the fundamental value conflict is one that is uh is insensitive to empirical inquiry in the case of the basic epistemic intuitions that make up things like belief in the external world or other Minds they're of the same quality if you've got four people in a room and they all agree that sense data is accurate but one thinks the Earth is flat then yes based on that fundamental agreement that sends data is accurate you could draw a consistency test but if those four people in the room if one of them doesn't believe that the external World exists at all and believes that they're just a brain in a vat there is no test you can run you said there's a battery of testing there's not one test you could run yeah to disprove that so okay um let me just try this on some Cuban track of these so here okay so here are a couple issues so I think we both agree that at that if somebody believes in something super crazy that can be resolved with sense data um at some point the person will just be wrong and we could safely discard their opinions about the Earth being flat or round unless we get it a very very fundamental level about like Brandon a vet correct yeah so the guy's saying well actually I don't think the moon is going you're like well look at all these tests and the guy's like well of course you think that the Matrix is telling you to think that like at that point you've yeah so so here is a level where um okay I'm gonna pull out the two most disgusting words ever okay um have you ever heard of I'm sure you've heard of the phrase like ultimate skepticism right oh yeah yeah yeah yeah I was half concerned it was going to be the n-word or something then but oh no no it's even worse than philosopher than the other okay um because as soon as somebody's pulled this trap card out you're basically the whole conversation's meaningless I I would say that at a very very very very very very fundamental level that I would say that I am ultimately skeptical so the strength or the conviction of my statements is only going to be up to a certain point so if I say for instance um and then this is kind of similar to the context we went into earlier where it's like oh uh that's a good or that's a bad thing and you're like well you don't really believe that it's like well I guess that's true when I say good or bad I mean with respect to the subjective moral system if we were to say something like the Earth is flat or there are other Minds that exist I would say that like all of these statements are also contextually qualified within the realm of these are the things that I can know to be true but I'm only going to go like to a certain level of depth with that statement so if somebody says well I'm a brain and a vet what I would say is oh okay I guess you could be and I could be too but whatever brain in the vet you are disagrees with whatever brain of the bat me and everybody else is so that's irrelevant like I would never get to an argument that's like so fundamental that we have to debate whether or not we like actually exist because that would be a thing where I don't know if I can actually justify that or prove that I would act as though I do much the same that I act as though there are things that are right or wrong but I think ultimately that's going to rest on like some subjective Axiom that I can't like fully truly prove unless you've got something for me that that's that's no problem okay um but well I mean there might be problems in the like if ultimately you actually like in fact did not believe uh that the external world existed that's not to say you believe it doesn't but say you were actually indifferent or you really had no reason to know whether induction was true yeah if you actually believe that it probably would have an effect on the way that you behave um but but putting that aside I see what you're saying but why is it that we're treating these cases differently right because you would still use if somebody said like um do you think that propositions have truth value do you think it's possible for a statement like the Earth orbits the Sun to be true or false you'd probably say yes and you'd probably say actually I think it is true and you wouldn't you wouldn't feel the need to sort of issue a throat clearing that said well actually I'm kind of a an anti-realist about facts you would just sort of say Okay technically yeah we could be like massive Skeptics about this whole thing but nobody really is everybody agrees that this is the case and so it's objectively true that the Earth orbits the Sun why can't we just treat morality the same I'm happy for you to say like yeah sure if we dug down deep enough and started questioning our basic moral intuitions there's no way for me to prove that but I'm never going to get into a conversation that goes that deep and in in you know the reality of my life I'm just happy to say yeah it's objectively true that murder is wrong because it's based on the same kind of intuitions that allow us to escape uh ultimate skepticism in other contexts as well yeah I guess I just I feel like the issue is that ultimately there's like there's zero sense data for Morality like when we talk about like um like even like propositional State even like Prop Logic or even when we talk about math right like I can arguably I think or even something I'm wrong like I can actually use sense data a little bit for math like if I take a mathematical truth like one plus one equals two I can actually have one and one things and then put them together and see two but I feel like there's no sense data anywhere to resolve any sort of moral disagreement I'm going back to that yeah you can tell me for this okay um first thing I would say is that I I think there would probably be some mathematical truths that uh are insensitive to sense data for example minus 1 minus 1 is -2 I don't think there's really I mean there might be a way you can sort of map that onto your senses um but I mean I feel like I feel like when observed because of how technologically like math is built I think that like most of it because if we talk about like negative one plus negative one equals two like I can have if I have a foundation I understand what two is I can have a foundation understand what negative one is because it's taking one less and then I can imagine negatives as being the flip side like at the end of the day like there's going to be some sort of like I can map that on what is um what's like the argument against mathematical anti-realist it's like math has an uncanny ability to line up with reality or something like that like I can generate these things yeah but but yeah but I understand that like negative one and negative one but you can argue it's a little bit harder but when I say something like murder is wrong like your mind is blank there's there's nothing that you can think like what does wrongness even look like you know but I think what you're you're doing is you're assuming that the the only kind of evidence the only kind of let's say experiential evidence that could uh count in favor of something is something like scientific empirical uh data that is the things that you can see in here not things that you can feel just as strongly and intuitive as you like in the same way that like when you when you look at something it just sort of strikes your eye you don't sort of choose to see the screen that you're looking at right now it just sort of appears in your brain in the same way like if you have a moral intuition about something you don't sort of choose to feel that it just strikes you and there's there's I guess technically I guess it strikes a part of the brain people would poetically describe it as you know striking the soul and in the way that the screen strikes the eye but ultimately what both are doing are just making a bit of your brain sort of go zing and you believe something in the one case you know through your eyes you know you you see a computer screen but what's actually causing the experience is something prods your brain that makes you go I believe that the screen's there in the same way you see a homeless man getting trodden on the street and something in your brain just goes I believe that that's wrong yeah so I guess my question would have to be that like um or here's a question that I would ask it feels like if I give you four stimuli stimuli or stimulus stimulus is multiple stimulus stimuli stimuli for stimuli okay if I give you four things to look at one thing is a blue circle another thing is a planet orbiting another planet and another thing is a car and then another thing is one person hitting somebody else if I ask you to explain all four things the first three feel like they're fundamentally in a different category than the fourth one if I'm starting to get to statements like this is um somebody is hurting somebody or somebody's doing something wrong I guess like the descriptions of the descriptive things of reality like uh like a blue like a blue circle uh you know it looks blue in my eye and it's got this shape or a tree looks like this or a car ontologically has you know four wheels blah blah blah versus like this is a thing that's going on and it's wrong like to even be able to say that there's already like a lot of things that that are already being processed you know in a person's mind like for instance if they're wearing a certain outfit it might actually be wrong it's like a sexual fetish now you know and that's the relationship between the things is like there's so much more processing there than like what would be like a blue circle or a planet orbiting something or one and one equals two I think yeah it got yeah but I mean to be clear it's a different kind of intuition it would be I mean what you're raising there's a there's a philosophical JL Mackey who famously raised what he called the queerness objection that if moral properties were to exist in the universe they'd be so he uses the word queer so sort of unimaginably different from everything everything interact within the universe yeah that I wouldn't even know how to make sense of it and and people in response tend to sort of say well yeah but that's kind of what ethics is it is this sui generis you know uh totally unique thing and yeah there might be some skepticism in saying well if it's this totally unique thing then how can we even really know anything about it how can we interact with it but as long as you say that most people share a basic moral intuition you're describing the fact that people do interact with it they do have that experiential phenomena of feeling the the moral quality sure but I technically need descriptively I don't have to describe that moral quality as anything different than um than what you said earlier the shower thing right like people will avoid stepping into a cold shower because it makes them feel bad people will avoid socializing with people that hurt others because it makes them feel bad like arguably descriptively I think I can generally generate all of these statements without even needing to invoke ethics and reality I could just do it with the President right yeah okay so so try try this then uh let's say I want to say that sort of morality is objective and I say that's because or even like preferences can be objective and I say that's because you know when I step into a shower and it's too hot it hurts and you say well who cares about her so I say well well if something hurts that's bad for me and you say well can't you just yeah you know that could be false right like and I just say I I just can't imagine what it means for something to hurt me without thinking that it's bad it's just intuitively the case that imagining something harming me is me imagining something bad at the same time and you say well that's just that's just an intuition and I'm like yeah but my brain just sort of does it I can't help it and then I say okay so we both see a we see a guitar sat behind you a Fender Stratocaster I'm imagining and I say you know I think that exists and you say I don't think it exists um or let's say it's the other one you say that that guitar exists I say it doesn't exist and you say but I can I can see it it's right there and I said okay yeah it does exist but it also doesn't exist it exists and doesn't exist so both right would you be okay with that would you just grant that it doesn't exist because I'm saying yeah I don't disagree with you it does exist it just also doesn't exist no I would probably fight you on that why is that because I can go and touch it and interact with it and then so far as anything I've ever thought of yeah of course of course because because it does exist of course you can do that thing it just also doesn't exist at the same time wait how are like almost I'm like very very very fundamental level like if you were to say like we're in The Matrix and it doesn't exist oh on that level I could say okay that could be true but I'm agnostic no no I I mean it literally exists and doesn't exist at the same time oh it's both true and false at the same time and then it doesn't exist way and how or no or tell me what you mean by that right so so notice how your brain just goes no that can't be it's a lot it's what would be described as a law of logic right the law of non-contradiction um we just accept these these axiological laws laws like uh the law of the excluded middle something must be true or false it can't be both it can't be neither proposition lower identity what I've just done there is I've just I've just sort of said to you like well sure I agree with you that the guitar exist but it also doesn't exist and you say well I can't believe that because of this because of this this principle that I have the law of non-conjunction when I say why why not like why can't that be the case you you J your brain just sort of goes sure I would say there are certain logical yeah they were literally in Our Brands but all that essentially is is just this really strong intuition you know you can't really explain it you can't like justify you just say look dude like are you telling me you don't feel that a lot of like just pay attention to your brain like of course it can't be true and false but I would and I feel like that's something like what's going on with like something some kind of Base moral intuitions maybe not quite as strongly yeah there is an analogy that can be drawn here right I I think I would really fight on this I think I would totally disagree with that I would argue that um I think the three I um here oh God who was there was a book I read Bernard somebody I don't even remember um but like when you talk about like non-contradiction excluded middle law of identity these are things where there is no room for disagreement on nobody can disagree with them like arguably your mind is not even human at that point it's almost unfathomable to think that somebody could disagree on them for some of these like a priori truths that I think that are granted to our brains by virtue of Being Human I would argue that those types of um I don't even know if I would call them intuitions maybe that's what we call them intuitions I would say that these are far strong or far different than moral ones which are um is as crazy as it is like we could we can bend some of them right like there might be um in horrible situations there might be some people that think that rape is okay or that murder is okay or that stealing is okay but you'll never be able to convince somebody out of um Identity or convince somebody of contradiction like that's just like unfathomable so I would argue that these types of intuitions are different but good in the same way you wouldn't be able to convince somebody that their their suffering isn't a bad experience for them yeah I would agree with that but I think I can describe all of what you just said with preferences I don't need to invoke morality right like it is a like the way that the shower hurts you when you get in like that sensation of pain you might also get like a sensation of pain when you witness a certain thing that makes you feel a certain way but I don't think I guess I was using the word the word bad there in a moral sense like somebody sort of has uh a feeling that that pain is bad for them it's something that sort of it makes the world a way that it should not be that that there's there's a way that the world should be that it isn't right now um I guess it's just a question of like yeah are those are those technically moral statements or not or is it like a moral um ought like I ought to get out of the shower because it's too hot for you yeah yeah you can sort of have descriptive words or like moral descriptivism generally but I guess I guess what I'm what I'm trying to do here is show that even if I grant you that these intuitions are a lot stronger and there are some senses in which some people can deny certain tenets of what are generally accepted as as logical laws um like the law of the excluded middle uh something a proposition has to be true or false it can't be both it can't be neither people often ask like yeah take the proposition that the king of France has brown hair like is that true or false and people say well it's it's kind of neither right because there is no referent for the king of France because there is no king of France and so you want to say it's false but it doesn't seem quite right to say that it's false that the king of France has brown hair there seems to be a sense in which that that that kind of breaks down um also there are some people who might want to say that there are certain contexts in which you might want to speak of things being true and false at the same time you might fall into the Trap of saying like oh it can be true and false at the same time that it's raining because it's raining in one place but not in another but the proposition would have to be it's you know it's raining at this particular place and it's also not raining at the same time there are like there are interpretations of logic that say that these aren't actually sort of as hard and fast as people tend to think now what what we might say is that yeah sure there are people who just sort of deny that logical laws are the case and I've met Skeptics who when you push somebody's epistemological nihilism to its core and you say well how do you even know that the laws of logic are the case they sort of say well In fairness I guess I can't know that I guess in theory I I actually can't prove the laws of logic fine we just sort of say look I mean there are people who do that but that's such a sort of wacky minority view like can we can we just sort of agree that this really strong intuition is a good reason to base our epistemology on it same thing could be true of Ethics maybe not quite as strongly but yeah there are some basic moral intuitions that yes some people sort of Doubt or disagree with but they're such a minority such a wacky position that you know we can at least build our moral epistemology upon those intuitions I guess we could but like at at some point um at some point I'm probably gonna agree with you but then I feel like uh I guess I would argue that I feel like your position has weakened to become mine I so like if you were to say well hold on we have very strong intuitions relating to the three our three like fundamental laws of logic and I'll go okay sure you know like can we have like really strong fundamental intuitions about like what's morally right or wrong at some point I'll say like you know in the same way that we prefer things to not be contradictory or to have an identity or to either be true or false yeah we can probably have really strong preferences over like what's right or wrong but I don't know if that gets us any closer to saying that like morality or moral fact exists right or that like ethics are some real thing I feel like it's just basically become another way of rephrasing that like yeah we all have like certain preferences in life like we might have a really strong inclination towards Identity or non-contradiction much the same that we probably have really strong inclination towards things like murder or torture but it doesn't necessarily mean that the moral fact is there what it might mean is that we can say something like if there is such thing as truth or I should say accessible truth because really this isn't epistemological problem rather than a an ontology or ontological one by which I mean we're talking about how we might sort of come to know moral truths if we can constantly keep questioning our our assumptions and we could say that like okay uh we can't say that anything is true and that's the problem of universal skepticism that you can't really ground uh an epistemological worldview without pulling yourself up by your bootstraps but I could say that the way I phrased it earlier me saying that murder is wrong is as true or sort of as objective as uh the fact that the Earth orbits the sun maybe maybe both of them are ultimately sort of like based on on totally unknowable intuitions but in the same way that you're willing to just say in the context of General epistemology yeah okay technically sure but come on man the Earth obviously orbits the Sun and that's objectively true why aren't we willing to do the same thing in the ethical framework of saying oh yeah okay technically it's based upon an intuition that you can't prove but come on man obviously torturing babies for fun is objectively wrong yeah I guess it um I'm trying to think if I have like a psychological hump that I just can't get over because the first thing I want to say is that like we have sense data to resolve because We're looping now we have sense data to resolve the thing about the Earth being um round or not but then I think you want to say okay well we kind of have sense data in a way we can sense like morally moral intuition to something being right or wrong not quite what I mean to say is that like the the sort of Earth orbiting the Sun thing is based upon the intuition is not that the Earth orbits the Sun the intuition is that your sense data is accurate yeah that's the intuition right that you just have absolutely no evidence for or against I guess I feel like the difference in the two propositions between like the ethical one and the the Earth orbiting the the the physical one I guess is it like it it is what it feels like to me um there's a room and behind the door I have really no idea what's behind the door and then two people come up and one guy's like I think that I heard a little bit of noise I think there might be like a person behind the door and then the other guy is like okay well I think there might be a beluga whale behind the door and I would look at the guy that says as well behind the door it's like probably not and then he'd say well if you think there could be a person behind the door why not a whale and it's like well I feel like I have a lot more reasons to believe in the person behind the door than the whale although I guess theoretically the whale could be there I guess I feel the same way when we talk about the understanding these physical and ethical statements like physically I feel like we have so many more reasons to believe there's like universally shared consensus around these kind of like basic logical truths um they're testable in so many different ways with multiple sense data that all coincide with each other and we can harshly resolve disagreements and almost resolutely say right or wrong unless you want to be like ultimately skeptical of your own existence about disagreements here but when it comes to these things that's it isn't it as long as you don't have that fundamental disagreement like the same thing with the whale and the human behind the door you're absolutely right that these disagreements can be can be can be clinically solved so long as there is a fundamental agreement on something and in the case of like the the whale and the human the agreement is something like we live in a world that obeys physical laws uh you know that that sort of the world that we observe is real and will resemble the one that's behind the door you know so it's unlikely that the world's going to be there absolutely you can resolve that easily is similarly in a moral case if you just grant some kind of assumption we live in a moral Universe where there are moral properties like goodness and Badness and suffering is bad and pleasure is good then when it comes to moral disagreements yeah you can clinically solve those problems too but what you're going to want to say is a moral anti-realist is like oh yeah of course you can solve these moral problems if you assume some moral Baseline but what's the justification for the moral Baseline and I'm saying sure you can easily solve like is it more likely to be a human or a whale behind the door if you assume that we live in a physical law a physical world that obeys laws that resemble what they did yesterday sure but what's your justification for believing that see what I mean it's like the same question can be asked and I feel like what you're doing is when you say that descriptive disagreements can be resolved really easily you're smuggling in uh agreement upon some fundamental principle that's not justified yeah are you not willing to do the same thing yeah and then I'm essentially holding a higher standard for the ethical propositions than like the physical ones or whatever and I kind of understand what you're saying there um I guess the the only thing is that like yeah and maybe that's just the limitation of my mind like I could fathom that one day will figure out like what is dark matter or we'll figure out the question of some really challenging thing in physics I can't even imagine it almost feels like a like a god question like uh imagine something's impossible I can't imagine ever knowing the fact of the matter of is abortion right or wrong like that it just feels like something that is just so Out Of Reach like almost asking like imagine what it was like to be before you were born and it's like my subjective I can't I can't do that I can't imagine what it's like to not be I can't be and not be at the same time right um yeah and that's what it feels like for like the moral questions it's just like I don't even know what what direction I would even began to step in um fundamentally different than anything else yeah go ahead because you've sort of compared like understanding what dark matter is to uh like fundamental moral truth um it's more like saying well yeah I can't imagine a world in which we sort of suddenly just uncover like the truth about moral intuition we suddenly are just able to prove that pleasure is good or something but I also can't imagine a world in which we're able to actually scientifically prove that the external World exists that we're not living in a simulation I can't I can't I can't believe in a world in which we are suddenly able to prove that induction is true like I I can't see that either while that is true I the difference is is maybe there's a difference you can talk on this I don't feel like there are any real fundamental disagreements on the presuppositions needed to build out like physics and chemistry like nobody's out here seriously saying um you know like um I like I don't believe in uncontradiction or I don't believe that like we can measure anything in a laboratory whereas for the fundamental but the stuff that you need to get morality off the ground there are massive disagreements I uh believe I am only granted things to special Revelation all right God tells me what's right or wrong and then someone else might say like um oh well actually through through reason uh you know every human a perfectly reasonable can come to the same world truth and there's like yeah in physics I don't see these like fundamental presupposed statements even existing it's we all generally come from the same place I'm pretty sure but in ethics how do you resolve people that are coming from fundamentally completely different places like these axiomatic statements how do you ever figure out like who's right or wrong there well for start I think there are people who do uh quarrel with the fundamental axiological assumptions of science generally the scientific Community just looks at them with skepticism and amusement and sort of excludes them from the process but this is kind of like what happens when the the moral there are people who are skeptical of the basic moral intuitions that most people share but what happens then is that the moral Community looks upon them with skepticism and amusement and essentially excludes them it's kind of like what you were talking about earlier you sort of see someone who has a fundamental value conflict and you say well mate you're just not part of our moral Community we're going to throw you in jail we're going to kill you if we need to you're just not a part of this and we almost like sort of laugh at the absurdity of things that they believe similar things can happen in a scientific Community it's just because you're unlikely to need to kill somebody or imprison them for this reason you might have a similar situation in which you have you know those those wackos who make those crazy hippie videos about how like nothing exists man and science is false and all this kind of stuff like there are people who believe that we just think that there are a minority and that intuition is otherwise so widely shared that we essentially just ignore it and don't seriously accept the challenge that they're posing to us which is justify your basic intuitions about your worldview yeah but like I think the same thing's happening in both cases but for science like if you if you progress to a certain point at some point like paradigm shift will happen right like there are people that'll say like well we don't like we're past Newtonian physics we've moved on from that because empirically and we validated so much stuff that now we've moved on to the next Paradigm even if the people that disagreed with it were in a minority initially eventually they can argue for those positions but my understanding today like is Con any more popular now than he was hundreds of years ago or you know how many people are still religious and believe in you know morality coming from the Bible of the crown of the Torah um how many like philosophers like how much closer are we to convening on like any type of like moral truth yeah God you said yourself a moment ago that there are certain very basic moral assumptions I mean in your own words you said that yeah people might disagree about like LGBT or like or this kind of thing but the really basic stuff you know don't kill people for fun that's everybody basically agrees with that all throughout history like there just has been a convergence I think that the majority of moral history if you look at what moral philosophers are doing in many cases they're just sort of trying to justify intuitions or they're trying to explain morality or they're trying to get into grips with what it is and and definitions and and meta ethics but there isn't as much dispute about the kind of things that are that are right and wrong fundamentally maybe I mean of course that does exist um but also like yeah sort of we can say yeah we had Newtonian physics now we have you know Einstein or whatever the trajectory is but there's a sort of more fundamental assumption that's needed for the scientific method which is that yeah Newtonian physics worked yesterday and it works right now if I drop this object it's going to fall to the ground you just assume that that's still going to be the case in 20 seconds I I assume that like I'm not just going to start floating and fly into the ceiling or something like that and the point is I have no way to justify that intuition but I have no way to justify that that belief except intuition people will want to say by the way who are listening to this well can't we say that because it's always for all of history things have fallen to the ground it does not give us a reason to think they'll continue falling to the ground technically no and I don't really have time to get into that now but that's the problem of induction and if you if you want to know why that's the case you know look into the problem of induction it's it's it's fascinating and hugely problematic but yeah like sure you have scientific progress but you've got absolutely nowhere closer to guaranteeing that the laws of physics aren't going to change tomorrow you've got absolutely nowhere closer to proving that the external World exists or that other Minds exist or the very things that the entire scientific project is is based upon you know what I mean yeah I understand what you're saying but I think that uh now I'm going to appeal to the satisfying or unsatisfying thing I think that I feel like that's a emotionally not compelling argument that like well um sure like maybe you know we haven't figured out what is a moral fact yet you feel like we made scientific progress but tomorrow all the laws of physics might change it's like okay maybe but that doesn't feel doesn't feel like a very compelling you know this might happen I guess type of statement and it kind of doesn't feel that compelling that oh well maybe the Holocaust was just fine you know people want to say like yeah I guess I can't like prove that the Holocaust was wrong because you know I I would argue that I think you could justify that um and here's how I would do it and I'm not trying to bring up any of your drama or I don't know if you are comfortable talking about vegan things at all but I think that it is totally possible that in 50 to 100 years especially depending on the practice rank of lab grow meat people might look back and go Holocaust I don't even know what that was I'm thinking about the hundreds of millions of animals that were tortured and murdered on a daily basis and you know the amount of people killed in any War for humans pales in comparison to that but today we are fully on board with like eating and doing whatever the animals and so like in the same way that we might say like I couldn't even imagine uh thinking the Holocaust wasn't wasn't an okay and that was clearly wrong I was like well theoretically 100 years from now people might say the same about meeting eight but you have no feeling about that right now you know yeah I I mean I I think I actually agree with you on that point that people are more capable than they think uh I guess I'm appealing to an intuition here of saying like people are going to hear you say uh because what was it you said a second ago when you were like I'm gonna appeal to the emotional thing now you're like this is not emotionally satisfying yeah it doesn't feel satisfied to say like well couldn't all of signs change tomorrow therefore right yeah yeah sure and in the same way that that I could just say the same thing to you which is like yeah I understand why people would think that but I'm willing to say that people are just actually underestimating their their own sort of uh ability to think certain things right in the same way that we might say well people are going to think I could never see the Holocaust as as right but maybe they actually could if they were born in like 1930s Germany and they were raised in the right environment actually they would uh they would see it that way um but but look I I also sort of we've I don't want to potentially run in circles or go too much back in back and forth on these issues yeah I had another I had another quote from you actually which I which I didn't quite get to bring up yeah which is um somebody said somebody said on that stream that you did they they said to you morality is more complicated than internal happiness to which you said quote I disagree I will wholly argue and stay mad all of meta ethics is [ __ ] trash garbage waste of time it's philosophers that are bored as [ __ ] circle jerking against other philosophers that are bored as [ __ ] all of us have things in life that we want we try to satisfy those wants that's all morality is okay so everybody who disagrees suck a dick um I wonder if some of the the conversational you know tones that we've been playing uh today could maybe persuade some people that it's not quite as dire as you make it out to be because we have essentially been doing matter ethics here yeah I know but then my counter argument to that would be um which I by the way I like wasting my time talking about crazy [ __ ] it's fun for me I shouldn't say waste my time that's mean there's been a fun conversation I enjoy it um but the sometimes I feel like we can spend so much time at a meta level it's like did we get any closer to having an opinion on like should we have socialized Healthcare or not how should we deal with homeless people in the United States uh what's like the correct way to deal with a parent that was abusive in her early years that like on the applied level there are so many fascinating questions on the normative level I think there's a lot of interesting questions that was a lot of moral terms you just used there for an anti-realist sure true yeah well listen that's the correct thing to do what should we do should we have socialized Healthcare well in your view arguably no so this is why the case that we should at The Meta level I just say listen I'm just going to assume we all share these basic like kind of moral truths we generally want to be happy healthy have our families taken care of and be not [ __ ] with and then boom then you're done with it and then you move on and I feel like no matter what any kind of like um ethical philosopher debates more or less we're probably going to come out with about the same answers I would be surprised if there were many uh if there were many like moral philosophers that would come out with like massively disagreements with me unlike some applied level basically that like the way that I get there might be a little bit weird or somebody might say well you're using people as a means to an end or well you know I don't like the fact that you can't say that the Holocaust is objectively wrong yeah maybe probably not these things might not feel that satisfactory but at the end of the day when we get to like our applied statements I have like a very Rosy and view of the world um I think that mostly ethical standards I generate are generally pretty positive and I don't have to waste all this time on the metal level to kind of get there but I understand that that's also it sounds really dismissive and arrogant of me to say that which it is but yeah David Hume said of uh of I don't know if he was talking specifically about the problem of induction or the problems of philosophy in general that you have this this list of problems like the problem of induction that you study for hours and hours and think my God there's no solution to this we have absolutely no grounding for our epistemic world here I have no better reason to think that I'm going to start flying as I'm going to start falling if I jump out of a window but then you close the book you put it back on the Shelf you leave your study and you just act as if you hadn't done any of that at all because of course you don't believe you're going to start flying and and there's a sense in which like even philosophers who do that for a living will agree with you that okay it's not going to change how you feel but the the purpose of this kind of there's constructive and and I guess like destructive philosophy and constructive philosophy might be trying to sort of build up World Views but what we're doing here is essentially saying well we do believe certain things let's try and figure out why we do whether it's Justified and sort of break it down and that's what we're engaged in here but it won't change the fact that we do believe these certain things but since you brought it up I wanted to ask uh while I still have you yeah what do you got against animals man well they taste really good isn't that what meat eaters say that that is what they say and I don't think any vegan would would ever would ever deny that I mean I guess on a since we're doing sort of meta ethics um regardless of whether or not you're going to be a vegan I've heard you say that if essentially if there is such thing as moral consideration or moral worthy it just is something that sort of doesn't apply to non-human animals yeah they're basically I feel like you can start from one of two points you can either say um I value human sentience and that's where I began all of my moral construction from or you can just say that like I value all sentience and that's where vegans typically begin their construction from I don't think there's necessarily a good argument for one or the other um because I view these as being very foundational statements and being a little ethical anti-realist means I can pick whatever one makes me feel better so yeah I just I don't know yeah that's basically where and what what is it that you happen to value um the the human sentence basically human session so so does that mean uh can you just like Define human sentience that the human brain uh seems to produce some conscious experience that I would call a human conscious experience yeah okay is that true of all human beings um probably not I could imagine somebody having enough of their brain removed such that they don't have that experience anymore it's probably possible uh but like would you still sort of value their sentience in so far as they have it just because they're human beings um no if they're not having a human conscious experience probably not so for instance I can imagine a person gets into an accident and the majority of their brain is destroyed or removed but their body is kept 100 alive and healthy um arguably this person would have no moral value other than like what's your family would think I guess yeah so you've got kind of two necessary conditions here one is sentience the other is being a human you sort of need both human sanctions essentially yeah so you could say to be a human and to have sentience I guess but like a human like there's a human conscious experience the the the moral qualifiers I mean I shouldn't say more qualifiers the basically the statements are is do you have a human conscious experience and do you have the ability to deploy said experience those are like the two things I say that give you like as a like give you worthy uh or make you worthy moral consideration so somebody that like has their brain destroyed or is dead for instance like a human body that might have a full brain doesn't have the capability to deploy human conscious experience so they have no moral consideration um somebody who's sleeping does you can wake them up um about an awake alive person somebody with mental disability does but you could conceivably peel away enough parts of the brain I guess that yeah because you can you can have sentience without human beings and you can have human beings without sentience right so I I guess what I'm asking is is it sort of those are the two boxes you have to fulfill if you're sentient but not human you don't care if you're human but not sentient you don't care but if you're human and you're sentient then you've sort of conferred moral value onto this onto this being well I guess the question is are you considering is is sentient is all sentience the same to you like is that just like a thing or I can give me a definition for this yeah I mean I guess by sentence I mean the ability to experience Pleasure and Pain or desirable and non-desirable sure maybe it's essentially the the ability to have preferences I suppose is one way of putting it okay because I feel like human sentence I would view differently than like the sentience of of a lot of animals or other things uh but sure I could say then to be a human and to deploy Ascension experience or conscious experience yeah have Sanchez yeah because the problem that I have with your view is that it's sort of like an on off switch right you've got like this this this care for human beings that extends presumably to political activism to saying that we should hold other people at gunpoint to take their money to make sure that other people aren't suffering like very seriously we're taking this very seriously the suffering of human beings and even like slightly more menial sufferings you know like um you know being cold at night people should be able to warm their homes and so we should sort of have a have a welfare blanket for that kind of purpose you know not not that that's menial but I mean in comparison to something like uh you know being forced into a gas chamber it's it's it's not as bad but when it comes to non-human animals particularly farm animals or farmed animals I should say pigs and cows uh it's just like an off switch is it just like there's just nothing or is it sort of like well they have moral worth they just have significantly less or in your view is it is it just like these are sort of inanimate objects that you can do with as you please yeah they're they're basically philosophical zombies to me I guess yeah is that true of of every animal that isn't a human being yeah I could imagine there might be some animal of different sophistication somewhere in the universe or an Undiscovered one on the planet Earth but in so far as animals on the planet go yeah so wait so it's about sophistication um or something like there could be like other types of animals in the universe that have like a conscious experience I guess that is similar enough to like a human being or something okay um yeah the reason why I see it is problematic to to have it as sort of a binary on and off rather than something like a a scale of gradation is because all life on Earth exists on a scale of gradation that is like no species has ever given birth to a new species so of course like many animals have died in the history of planet Earth but they all lived at some point so you know your parents were humans their parents were humans their parents were humans their parents were humans you go back a few hundred thousand years you've got different uh well this would be sort of pre-pre-human um but you know there will be different species of humans uh at first and then you go back far enough a couple of hundred thousand years and you're looking at sort of apish creatures that are more that more resemble something like a a chimpanzee than they do a modern Homo sapiens and you go further back and you get to a fish right but there's no sort of like distinct boundary here every single animal gave birth to the same species they were just sort of such minor changes that over you know billions of years of evolution we get human beings the problem is that in principle if you if you're just gonna say yeah human sentience Human Experience human beings they matter and any other animal does not and if I were to sort of resurrect The evolutionary chain of human beings back to our sort of common ancestor um there has to be a point at which you just sort of arbitrarily say the sort of apish hominid on this side of the line I I do not care inanimate objects do whatever you want with them and the the ex the sort of identical uh creature on the other side of the line human being sentients care about want to sort of hold people at gunpoint to make sure that they don't get cold at night that to me seems like an entirely untenable position why is that untenable well it's it's untenable in the sense that I mean would you accept that for a start do you think that that's essentially what you would do or are doing or whatever I mean I'm sure I'm sure there'd be some haziness in the middle right much that like I'm sure you believe you have a neck and you believe you have a head but I don't know if you could tell me exactly where One ends or the other begins um yeah so I mean there's going to be some sort of Continuum upon which I'll say like it's probably going to be kind of hazy in here um but but I think roughly yeah that's essentially what's going on yeah because this is the weird thing like as you say um almost sort of I mean I mean you point out to me that yeah like yeah of course you're never gonna be able to draw the line but you can't draw draw the line easily with many things but that's why I think that if your ethical views of sort of what counts is based upon essentially the qualities of the of the animal you have this one animal that has this thing called sort of human sentience and this other animal over here that in your view does not we should be talking about a a sliding scale here rather than an on and off switch because of the fact that you could resurrect every evolutionary link between those two animals and there's no point at which the switch just gets turned off you know what I mean and it seems very strange to say that you've got sort of 100 100 100 100 and then somewhere in the middle it just suddenly goes from like a hundred down to zero not instantly but like over like maybe a few generations and then you'll just write at zero again it seems much more plausible that we should look at this as either going slowly from 100 all the way down to zero at some point over here pretty much equally maybe with a slight curve or something that actually it shouldn't go down to zero altogether sure I mean I could fight with you this is a big problem I think in physics right now is that people feel like they're uh there needs to be some Grand order or some Grand unifying thing um to unite everything in the universe and it might be that there is just no clean way to do it I don't know if it's a reasonable argument to say like well it's unsatisfying therefore it's impossible that our moral consideration would drop off so suddenly but like our capacity for reading does right like we have uh like human human human and we can't read with the next closest thing to us at all like that goes from 100 to absolute zero instantaneously um so I mean yeah I guess it's unsatisfying but uh of course we're in that it's easy to do now we're in that situation now because of the fact that the evolutionary links are dead they don't exist and so we can quite easily isolate you know uh human beings and chimpanzees and dolphins uh I mean there were a time when there were different human beings simultaneously different species of human beings simultaneously walking around the planet Earth that I believe at least some of them could you know breed with each other it's not entirely clear like for example you know let's let's go back to when you have neanderthals you have Homo erectus you have a bunch of different human species are walking around on the planet like are you okay with with factory farming those human beings is it specifically Homo sapiens that you that you care about is it is it human beings broadly is it like I mean what is it that you're sort of basing this distinctive on switch for Morality upon um yeah I don't know somewhere around human conscious experience it's not gonna be very satisfying um I don't know exactly if there were other types of humans that walk the earth I think it would be pretty difficult to do it but um I don't think that a vegan justification of saying like will we ought to Value all centuries I mean I feel like that's about as arbitrary um like why value the sentience of animals over like the existence of nature um like the like why not the grand beautiful structure of a tree versus like the sentient mind of like an animal why odd one be valued over another I feel like fundamentally it's all kind of a bit arbitrary so but potentially but but surely sort of valuing the sentience of a a non-human is much closer to valuing the sentience of a human than it is to valuing something like the existence of nature they're much closer to each other and so if you if you if I speak to someone like you who says well I actually do have this intuition that human beings matter and I say why is that and you say because they have the singled human sentience and I say well there's this thing that other animals have that's a bit like that which would be like animal sentience which I think maybe should count too and you say well that's arbitrary because why don't I care about you know nature in the trees I'm like well that's that's wildly different to the to the thing that we're talking about I'm saying that there's something that seems very similar to what's going on in the human brain in other human brains and in fact again on an evolutionary trajectory it wouldn't really make sense to say that the Consciousness that evolved in human beings is just over completely different kind and quality to the Consciousness that it evolved in other animals like that just sort of doesn't make evolutionary sense I mean but I mean like if you look at the progress of humans on on the planet it is distinctly unique compared to every other species on earth right nobody's even close to anything I don't think any I don't think any other creatures even really have developed language or the capacity for language like humans have um some things can use crude words to describe things but in terms of like being able to imagine things that are not being able to express a negative but yeah like these are the ability to abstract is often pointed as one of the distinctly human and it's not even things that like exist in a gradient it's like this is I don't know what it was or how uh maybe it's the Prometheus alien guys came down or whatever but like this is like a switch that flipped for human Minds it just doesn't exist at all in any other creature on the planet um again I guess like I can understand it being unsatisfying and I we can even appeal to intuition to some extent but then I can also appeal to intuition it's like well every single animal on the planet like tortures and eats other animals um and intuitively I guess like we also kind of torture maybe not torture or I guess we could be argument like eating other animals as well um so I guess it's hard to I feel like you can argue the intuition on both ends there then intuitively humans might feel a certain way seeing an animal die where it makes you feel sad but then intuitively we also you know have all the benefits of eating food um and meat especially that makes us feel good and helps us in a number of Health ways so I feel like appealing to intuitions there is very difficult as well I mean if I would if I were to grant you that um it it certainly wouldn't justify sort of any treatment of other animals I mean you could say yeah well animals sort of predate on each other fine but they don't sort of lock each other into cages and and put them in gas Chambers that would be a very weird and inhuman thing to do and I don't mean in the moral sense I mean inhuman in the sense of what human beings naturally do also I mean the language thing is important I've heard some evolutionary biologists suggest that it might be the fact that human beings have developed complex language that's allowed us to produce you know cities and civilizations it might actually be the fact that we have language that that could be a plausible Contender but also like this this doesn't seem relevant to me to the question of sentience this doesn't seem relevant to me to the question of sort of having preferable states of Affairs in other words if like if I break your arm and I break the leg of a pig I don't see any good reason to think that in terms of their crude physical experience it's somehow worse for you than it is for the pig um indeed it might actually be worse and and I'm not going to claim that it's worse but I'll give you some thoughts as to why it might be worse we accept that other animals are in many cases much more sensory driven creatures than we are and in fact the fact that we have evolved the capability for language and rationality means that we don't need to rely so much on our crude physical Sensations to help us to survive so we don't need as strong a sense in which you know touching the stove hurts your hand because we can tell each other not to do that you know whereas non-human animals don't have that and so they need to rely more more strongly and so for example uh dogs rely on their sense of smell and most people accept that dogs experience smell far more acutely and intensely than we're capable of even imagining and we think that's probably because of the way that they've evolved they're more Reliant upon it okay Hawks experience eyesight far more intensely and acutely than we're capable of even imagining because they rely more heavily upon it to navigate the world if we are these sort of Piper rational agents that have developed language and we can talk to each other we don't need to rely on our sensations of of pain as much to navigate the world so who's to say that these animals when they experience that pain don't experience that pain in a in in a much more acute and intense manner than we're capable of imagining in the same way that they experience smell and eyesight in that way now I don't I don't know that that's the case yeah and like I would say like it's possible but like we can bear we can't even imagine other people's minds how could we imagine that there's any sort of actual experience going on in the mind of an animal yeah but but you care about other humans but you don't care about the pigs right humans because I see that we have the same structure and thus like some conscious experiences obviously arising I would hope from a similar structure but for Animals whose brains seem to have markedly different capabilities than us I don't know if I'm to believe or I'm just supposed to take it on probability that I guess they're probably deploying a similar conscious experience but I have no reason to really believe that well they have similar enough structures to think that when they exhibit uh signs that inhuman beings would indicate experience of severe physical pain that they're feeling that too right um potentially I mean I I could say that like insects exhibit similar Behavior now they don't typically possess all of the different structures of the brain the some of them only have like a nervous system and that's it um but yeah I guess I just I have a hard time buying the argument that like well our brains are kind of similar and I know that we have markedly different capabilities but we should probably just assume that um animals have some sort of conscious experience that's pretty similar or comparable at least to ours I just I'm not sure if I buy into that completely would you say the same thing about like eyesight or hearing like do you think that like you know uh like the eyes of a chimpanzee experience the world like radically different uh differently to the way the human beings do I think there's a bit seems to me that like I would imagine that chimpanzee ears probably work in roughly the same way eyes working roughly the same way maybe they can sort of perceive a slightly uh varied set of wavelengths or something but the the physical experience is probably roughly the same I see no reason to exclude physical pain from that same comparison I I have I have no idea I feel like there's a temptation to say that they must perceive sense data Like Us in terms of like visuals and in terms of auditory stuff um it's tempting to say that but I don't know if there's like a compelling rational reason why you ought to accept that that we just say well I mean if it looks similar enough it kind of appears someone else they have kind of sort of similar brains so they must have the the similar type of things it's not just how they look now but also the origin if we look at a sort of natural selection picture of The evolutionary development and we say well we sort of have a rough idea of how our eyes evolved and how our ears evolved you know we can we can say why they evolved a different sort of uh environmental um pressures and this kind of thing and we can say yeah I mean the same thing is true of chimpanzees I mean the sort of the the eye and the ear developed before our split with the charity like like beings already had eyes before the split between the modern chimpanzee and the modern human being so we we've got good reason to think that they're both basically doing the same thing well yeah but we're not talking about an iron ear we're talking about Sight and Sound right and those are things that happen within the Mind Right regardless of the development of the organ itself um so to uh like again like I'm sure we have a similar organ that is perceiving light in a certain way not I shouldn't even say perception of light that light hits it in a certain way and it is the capability to focus and unfocus on things but is the experience that it produces in the mind the same um I'm not sure are there animals for instance that are there animals that truly create music for instance that would be like a big sound thing I know we've got birds that kind of like sing songs but like are they truly creating like music or is this like a heavily instinctual thing where producers certain songs because it knows it'll get a mate um like that would be for instance a um a thing of like oh well here's like an auditory experience that must be similar to ours um yeah there's evidence that may be again a product of their inability to produce the music I mean you can that there's been research on this I mean you can watch videos on YouTube of animals uh listening to music you can go and stand by like a a field of cows and start like playing the trumpet and they'll just sort of converge and come and listen now I have no idea how they're experiencing that music but like when we're talking about the development of physical pain which seems in almost all in all cases who have evolved as a way of saying this is dangerous this is harmful for you so we're going to give you a negative experience that you would rather not be happening so that the organism avoids that or gets away from it then and avoids it in future that is why we think pain evolved that's why we think pain receptors exist and why we think that sort of human beings are capable of having experiences that they'd rather not have there is no reason to think that the same thing is not true of other animals especially when we share an evolutionary trajectory that that I just don't see a tenable way to suggest that other animals that have brains that light up when you do things to them and they react in similar ways and they scream out in pain and they try to run away and I recognize that you know a plant can grow towards the sun this kind of thing but we're ticking so many of the boxes here I understand at the very least it shouldn't be on me to prove that animals do feel pain before we say we can do whatever we like to them I think it should be on you to prove that they can't before we start doing that you know but I mean like that's the thing though is that neither of us can ever prove one or the other I think it's tempting to say that they must have an experience some of their eyes when it comes to pain because of some outward things that we see but I think that we kind of just like we work backwards and we try to rationalize that just because we see a thing that makes us feel a certain way if I were to talk to you about like two different species and I would have say that they have similar brains evolved from similar things and they can both produce almost identical sounds from their mouths and they have tons of common ancestors or whatever you would assume these two things could communicate with each other but like parrots and crows can basically speak but have like no capacity for language whatsoever um and and I feel like at the very least that that that should be there if they can produce sounds that are almost identical to human sounds um they've got like the ability to enunciate they've got the similar brains they're we're all are there I don't know they're mammals or not probably our mammals but like we have like similar backgrounds and everything like you would expect that that some kind of language back and forth could happen there but like they don't even have the capacity to to to abstract thought like that we also have a rough idea of like the parts of our brain that is involved in the the use of language uh as well as sort of the the process of abstracting the feeling of pain all these kind of we have we have a sort of good picture of which parts of our brain are involved in different kinds of thinking we can look at other animals and see if those parts of their brains are present as well and where they are and where they're lighting up in the same kind of way and having the same kind of uh effect due to the same kind of stimulus I I just think yeah sure you can't prove I I understand there but it seems ludicrous to think that they don't yeah I understand what you're saying there but like you're I think your priest wasn't a lot like if I ask you like can you point to me which parts of the brain like produce Consciousness I don't think you can do that again not like like kind of I mean you you can sort of you can look at the parts of the brain which and and I I wish I could remember um which parts of the brain I'm talking about here it's largely associated with like prefrontal cortex communication but there's even questions of like in split brain people like are there two conscious experiences happening or I think there was a man that had a severe case of I want to say like Hydro Encephalitis or something and like 70 of his brain was like water but he was still like walking around and could talk and communicate with people and it's like is he even having a concert experience or is he an actual living philosophical zombie you know yeah I think and there's there's instances where people's people's brains are damaged in such a way that you can sort of you can show them an image that they're blind to that they they don't know what they've just seen they couldn't tell you what they've seen But if you ask them to draw what's in front of them they can draw it and it seems like the brain's sort of getting split up and and there's lots of philosophical questions as to whether there are sort of two persons there but like it's it's I think I have about as much I if I have more reason to think that you can feel pain then that the pig can feel pain I think I only have like the tiniest amount more reason to think sure okay and maybe it's got something to do with the fact that you can communicate with me maybe it's got the something to the fact that you can tell me but even then like I'm more convinced that you're in pain I'd be more convinced if you just like clutched your chest and started rolling around on the floor than if you calmly told me that your chest really hurt I'd be more convinced you're feeling pain without the language based on just the way that you behave because I identify that behavior with the way that I behave as well and given that we share an evolutionary trajectory given that pain exists in human beings so that we can avoid uh things that are dangerous and so it gives us a negative experience that we'd rather not be the case I just don't see a good reason to think that this doesn't apply to other animals as well and maybe it applies in a lesser sense most people especially either if they're trying to justify our treatment of animals or if they're like religious trying to offer theodicy against the problem of animal suffering they sort of have to believe that it must be different in some way it must be lesser but to completely and utterly deny that these animals have any sense of an ability to feel pain at all just sort of doesn't seem right to me well it doesn't seem right to me that I can't eat delicious cheeseburgers I mean I understand what you're saying um listen we can prepare for a more formal vegan to bed at some point if you want but um it's not so much that I even want to talk to you about about veganism but just like I mean we're doing Master ethics it's like like even if animals taste nice and even if you're justified in inflicting suffering upon them to eat to eat their their products even if that were true to deny that they feel pain at all I mean I I know a lot of people who say yeah animals feel pain but animal suffering doesn't really matter or like you know whatever but but to just deny that they feel it at all I think is is such a rare position that isn't any longer taken seriously by either like either in the the sphere of moral philosophy or in the sphere of like Psychology and Neuroscience I just don't think it's a it's a held position and I have a feeling that there's some motivated reasoning going on that the reason why you might be so reluctant to ascribe any kind of uh you know sentient experience to these animals or to limit it so so dramatically is perhaps because you know it it it it suits uh how you want to treat them if you know what I mean not then you know that sounds very accusatory but but I I I feel like that that's what people are gonna probably assume is going on here yeah probably um but I mean like on the same end I would look to vegans and I would say that like I think that you see something cute and cuddly and it produces like the correct facial expressions to feel good about it and then you produce some motivated reasoning that essentially gives you a reason to like not hurt said cute cuddly things um I feel like there is no like like I I understand what we're saying and maybe it just sounds like I'm not willing to make what some people consider like a very reasonable jump that like a human brain and animal brain are that much different so therefore they ought to be able to deploy a similar conscious experience um but I don't know I just I don't find that compelling to say like well look they're close so that you know they're basically the same um if you want to say like what am I willing to say that animals don't feel pain I think the problem with that feeling thing is there's a lot baked into what it means to feel something like is there going to be some sensation of pain that an animal's like nervous system is capable producing you know to avoid external stimuli or whatever yeah of course obviously I would assume that but it's not really a question of can it feel pain or not feel pain I think the question is whether or not the animal is deploying a conscious experience that's having like the sensation of pain through that experience and I think that's like the question that we kind of get at with veganism um that's really hard to prove other than to kind of like beg you know they're like well look like their brains are kind of close to our brain so their conscious experience should be kind of close to our conscious experience which I just don't find very compelling but I I mean I understand why yeah I didn't ask this earlier because I it's something that I'm sure you've talked about sort of mirror times elsewhere but just just for clarity's sake I mean if if you had a human being with the brain of a pig would that human being just have absolutely no worth to you I think essentially yeah I think yeah I think so yeah because it would be the same as like a human like in a coma or a human that isn't was not deploying a conscious experience at all but I will say that like a human with a pig brain or something would be different than a human that's like disabled like a human with Down Syndrome or a human with autism wouldn't be the same as like a human with a pig brain yeah of course uh but but in the sort of relevant sense of their sentience level if I sort of isolated the sentience part of the human brain and reduce it to the same level as a pig so what you essentially have as a human being who when you prod the human being the human being sort of screams in pain and like exhibits all the signs of experienced physical pain but but they're severely cognitively impaired such that they can't talk to you they can't communicate their ideas to you all you know is that they've got the severe impairment but at the same time when you inflict what you think is a painful experience upon them they scream they real they try to get away they sort of ish they they uh gestures if they want you to stop their brain is still lighting up in a similar way to non-impaired human beings do this kind of thing would you just say ah yeah well I mean I know they're exhibiting all those signs but like I mean you can't prove that they're feeling pain and they're so impaired that I'm just gonna do literally whatever I want to them because they have zero moral worth at all I mean I understand you saying oh maybe you'd be maybe you'd like favor the well-being of other human beings or maybe it's their moral worth would be lowered in your estimation or something but to say that on these grounds just nothing just like a flat line in terms of your moral consideration I mean again like the comparison of like horse brain in a human or something to impaired human being I think are too far are fundamentally different things I think an impaired human being is an impaired human being it's not a dog or a cat or a pig right would you say that like a person with would you in your scale of moral consideration would you consider like a healthy dog to have more consideration than like a human with Down Syndrome well I'm I'm not advocating ethics based on sort of uh level of your intensive comprehension or something like that um because again I don't think sentience like a dog might be like more intelligent or something like that than a human being with a particular cognitive impairment but I don't think that they're therefore like more sentient you know what I mean um sure yeah I don't know if anything can be more or less sentient I just think there are probably different types of sentient experiences that may guess or are you yeah like I don't think it's like like the sentience like the conscious experiences of like a human and a dog and a bat and a bird like are all probably my guess would be is that they're all quite different but I mean I don't know I'm pretty agnostic towards them yeah I mean Thomas Nagel wrote a famous article called uh what is it like to be a bat essentially concluding that that there's there's just no way we could ever even hope to know what it's like to be about it's not it's not imagining yourself sort of in in a bat's shoes as it were but imagining yourself as a bat experience the world as a bat he's like it's just such an impenetrable area of uh experience that we we will just never know what it's like but it seems so radical to me as I'm sure it will seem to most of the people listening to say that there is absolutely no moral worth for these other animals which again if you were to reconstruct this evolutionary trajectory you would just have to along some like somewhere between Homo sapiens and like some apish ancestors so you just sort of have to randomly say like sorry buddy like imagine you're like God and you're deciding who gets into the Afterlife and you have this rule that human beings get to go to the afterlife they get compensated for their suffering all other animals do not sure you'll have this like chain of human beings and at some point you have to just say to this guy like sorry mate you're not coming in and he says but what is the difference between me and that person on the other side of the gate and you have to say nothing there is literally no difference between you and that person in terms of your abilities but look man I've got to draw the line somewhere and and rather than say okay I'm gonna let you in but we're going to slowly start like lowering the stat no no it's like off suddenly it's completely arbitrary as well as being probably completely unjust and unfair in that circumstance as well uh sure I mean you say unjust and unfair which is we're kind of begging the question I mean obviously if you assume that they're dressed or fair or unjust or unfair based on what we're granting extensions to but I mean like yeah obviously I think I think my answers are pretty obvious given we just came off of like an hour and a half conversation or whether or not I can ever say a thing is like objectively right or wrong so I mean um yeah I mean that's yeah yeah and we also concluded that you can't say that the Earth orbits the sun objectively speaking um true that yeah if you want to be at some foundational level I will be ultimately skeptic but I mean like if I can't even say like human murder is objectively right or wrong I don't think it's that surprising that I'm not going to enter an opinion on the similarities of animal Consciousness and human consciousness to see to check for like rights or wrongs there as well right do you still think it is wrong in some sense like for me to talk to another human being right even if it's just like subjective or whatever like you still think it's like wrong that I shouldn't do it that you would vote against me doing so if there was some like way that I could ask for your opinion as to whether I do it or not yeah probably and some utilitarian sense I probably say the same for an animal too right the type of human mind that would torture an animal is probably a very unhuman unhealthy human mind there's probably going to be some natural inclination there that like I think a normal healthy human mind likes puppies and likes kitties and a normal and a human mind that's willing to torture or be um accepting of like extreme like causing animals extreme pain would probably also inflict the same on humans as well right I mean not necessarily especially I mean maybe maybe somebody thought that but now they've listened to this conversation and they've heard what you say and they say oh I can just draw a completely distinctive difference between humans and and every single other animal so yeah I'm perfectly happy to go and you know torture dogs and vacuum seal cats in a bag but I'm never going to do that through humans because I only care about humans just like just like Stephen does well listen if the idea of torturing animals uh hurts you and bothers you so much by listening to me then you've probably become a vegan um I mean yeah like I mean I think that the thing that the most irritating conversations all have are with people that um seem to express a very emotionally strong uh reluctance to accept any sort of like animal killing for fun or whatever but then they all uh but then they seem to be willing to eat meat which I think I think that position is untenable um right but I mean um yeah I I think if listening to me like I would probably I don't think I would ever torture a cat or a dog that seems really [ __ ] up um so I mean why why not just because it makes me feel bad but like okay but earlier you said that the reason that you care about other human like suffering is because it makes you feel bad and that like your your moral sense of mistreating other humans is ultimately just based on how it makes you feel so now you're saying that the same is true of cats and dogs that you say that yeah actually no I do care about the morally I mean only insofar as did you know yeah my well-being yeah sure but the ultimate but it is like the same thing here right as what you were saying earlier about you yeah but the difference is that animals are fundamentally different and that the way that they plug into human experiences there's a lot of ways that we can gain utility out of them that don't involve like living alongside them and going to work with them every day and treating them like fellow humans right so like we can't we don't eat fellow humans but you can eat animals um we don't keep humans around as slaves for a variety of reasons but you kind of like a dog or a cat that's essentially like a slave to you for uh purposes of like entertainment and whatnot um so yeah I mean I mean if you make those situations the same often they are actually the same like you can imagine a a human being a cognitively impaired human being we often sort of give them like a carer they're not allowed to leave the house on their own and that the carer chooses when they eat when they sleep this kind of thing which is quite similar to sort of having a pet I mean you wouldn't describe it in these terms that would be quite grotesque but it's a similar kind of like the justification for saying actually we are going to restrict this person's freedom and we choose when they eat we choose what they do it like we we do actually do that in the human context as well for extreme levels of impairment I agree but we still treat them as as distinctly and markedly human right um for a variety of reasons I mean you can go down very dark paths about Eugenics or not treating mentally disabled people in a certain way but there's a obviously there's a whole other thing to go down but yeah I mean like I like we you said a moment ago you know if you're upset with torturing animals you should be vegan maybe that's maybe that's true um it's certainly true that factory farming should be opposed I mean somebody might say that like uh well I do care about animal suffering I don't like torturing animals but I don't think painlessly killing animals is wrong and I also am not convinced that like you know uh boycotting animal products is the way to solve the problem or whatever but I think you're right that if you are bothered with you know the torch of animals you should be like the least factory farming yeah is a bad thing right like factory farming is a bad thing and that's basically what I was or what I would hope that you would agree with um if if press hard enough that like it's like uh Lincoln said of slavery if this is not wrong then nothing is wrong like if there is this thing called sort of wrongness and Badness it seems that sort of this this horror show of exploitation mutilation gas chambering of animals must be wrong I I guess I'm I'm sort of surprised with with how how carefully we can have this really long discussion about ethics and and sort of so uh conscious of implications of different World Views and and talking with such sort of nuance and specificity to hear sort of so so be so blase about the suffering of animals like it it just doesn't matter at all and based on what is essentially an arbitrary like Line in the Sand between Homo sapiens and every single other human being that exists on the planet I I it just kind of I I'm quite astonished by it you know yeah I mean I guess what I said earlier I think there were like three reasons why I gave for my moral system I was like um I believe that humans working in concert with each other produce more happiness than when they work separately this doesn't apply to animals in the same way at all we don't work or live alongside like horses and lions and tigers and pigs and cows um for the protection of my own preferences um I have to live in a certain way with other humans this doesn't apply to animals at all obviously we can Farm them we can eat them they live in separate spaces they don't adhere to any of our things and then for universalization I would hope that almost every other humans can reciprocate said values to me animals aren't capable of doing this either they don't have even concepts of morals or ethical systems none of the reasons that I gave earlier for all the careful um for all the carefulness that I have when it comes to dealing with other groups of humans none of those things apply to animals um I also I have a really hard time applying a gradient scale to animals it seems weird to me um to say that like it's probably not okay to like torture an animal but if you want to like kill an animal you know prematurely eat it that is okay that seems like a weird like thing to say where it's like well I'll give it a little bit of moral consideration but not that much I don't know I guess maybe maybe there might be some world in the future it makes sense to Value some things more than others yeah but I mean we don't really need to eat animals at all to survive right like so what there's not also something I'm curious for you like when an animal kills and tortures another animal would you say that like a wrong has been committed there do you consider that wrong so when we see like groups of lions like catching and torturing and killing an animal is there is there like a wrong action committed there or no no it's it's bad but not wrong I mean like it's complicated in the fact that you might say so there's an interesting question as to whether we should sort of intervene in such cases because although the lion isn't uh isn't committing a wrong because it's not a moral agent in the way that human beings are uh we might still say well it's still bad they're still suffering and we could prevent it from happening I think the the problem with that is we we don't know the sort of wider effect this is going to have on the ecosystem like it might actually have adverse effects on the Predator prey uh numbers and these are sort of widespread starvation or overpopulation these kinds of problems sure but I mean even the existence of an ecosystem presupposes a whole bunch of suffering right yeah yeah yeah uh but but to answer your question like no I don't think there's like moral agency involved when the lion you know do you think that's part of gazelle would you agree with me that there should be a vegan imperative to genocide all cats on the planet uh I'm I'm not sure about that no because I feel like keeping up keeping a cat as a house pet is like a necessarily evil thing if you are vegan like I don't know how you could ever live with having an obligate carnivore as an animal that for recreation sorry I I thought you were just talking about like pet ownership yeah oh no no no no you're talking about the facts that they have to eat oh um yeah I mean I I don't know what I what I think about that I guess um because cats are obligate carnivores it it can't be a moral in the same way certainly for them to be eating those foods and potentially not for you to be procuring the food for them arguably if you're like breeding these cats into existence for the purposes of having a pet which is going to require you to buy animal products to feed them that would be wrong on a vegan worldview but most vegans think that uh you know breeding animals into existence for for pet ownership is wrong anyway and that you should favor sort of rescue animals or you know stray cats in which case but even for rescue animals I feel like the the moral choice then like if I were to put it in any other context imagine I could adopt little humans that only eat other humans the moral thing would probably be to adopt the human and then kill it immediately right so that you can reduce the suffering the necessary suffering you're causing by having other humans need to be eaten right that's funny because I was about to ask you the exact same thing expecting that you'd have the opposite intuition that if if like um I don't know if for some reason like I don't know like in a human context would we be willing to like euthanize a human being because their existence somehow causes necessarily the suffering and death of other human beings um I actually I I don't know what the answer that question would be but I I guess for a vegan at least for at least for like a utilitarian vegan the the answer would be the same in both cases and it sort of doesn't matter which you choose I guess as long as you're being consistent right maybe yeah I mean if one human being is causing the harm or destruction to other human beings I think those human beings would have a right to kill that human being right in what in any circumstance in which a human being is is causing Harmon like uh suffering to another human being I think well well it's going to depend on the scale of harm or suffering right like if somebody is like farting in a bus you probably don't have the right to kill that human because you have to smell their farts but uh yeah yeah but like if something like proportionally yeah you probably have some right to respond if somebody's causing like a destructive harm like potential death or whatever then you have a right if if they're infringing on those rights you have their rights are essentially revoked in that sense right if somebody's trying to kill you you can kill them Etc um but it's going to depend on the level of infringement yeah I mean I think there's there's a there's a sense in which if somebody is even innocently threatening your life you have a right to self-defense like if you know if somebody gets strapped to the front of a tank that's about to run me over and it's not my fault that they're there I think and the only way to stop them is like blowing up the tank I think I have a justification for doing so but as a third party Observer I'm not sure if that would still be the case I think if I were observing the situation where an innocent person is strapped onto a tank that's about to run over another human being uh the only way to stop it is to blow up the tank it's certainly not obvious to me that I have a right to blow up the tank in the way that I have a right to defend myself if I'm in the situation you know so so maybe the the fact that you're procuring the food for the obligate Carnival pet makes a difference here in a way that we wouldn't say it's wrong or bad for the cat to procure the food or even as a pet owner for you to allow the cat to go out and do that you sort of procuring the food might be might be different um yeah potentially yeah yeah maybe I don't have to think about that more I just like to tell vegans to kill their cards so yeah um I don't know I mean there's a there's a whole conversation that we can have about veganism generally but I I guess what I wanted to talk about was the ethical treatment of animals generally or your sort of ethical view of animals which is is quite separate from the vegan discussion because it'd like it's it's connected of course it informs it if you don't think animals have worth at all then you can do whatever you like to them but even if you think animals have worth you might not think that they have enough Worth to not be killed under any circumstances you might think that just factory farming is bad you might think that factory farming is still fine because although they suffer it's not that much or something like this I think that would be a bit weird to say but you could do that it's a separate discussion but just on this topic of like animal suffering it's been sort of interesting to to prod you a little bit I guess um yeah and I'll be interested to hear what our what our Collective listeners have to say about the matter probably gonna be really mad but I will say um the uh I think the worst people I think I'm the second worst people I think the worst people are people that seem to be Gravely concerned with animal suffering that have no problem eating meat products um I think you have to pick one side of the fence there uh I don't think that you can be concerned with uh like some animals and others I see people are very concerned about like Cecil the lion or concerned with cats and dogs but they seem to have no issue or are completely indifferent to things like factory farming and whatnot um yeah it's possible maybe in the future if I think a bit more I haven't really thought much about like a sliding scale of morality uh I mean intuitively it feels better I guess like sometimes if I'm in like a grocery store I might choose like a factory farm thing because the idea of like little chickens running around and hatching eggs feels better than like the [ __ ] Pita factories of the massive Farm chickens um so yeah that might be something I changed my mind in the future but um I mean you do you do have some moral concern for these animals then yeah you have to some human does like we share enough like outward features that but but again I would say like their orthotic experiments where you can hijack that system very easily um like for instance I could I could not me but like somebody could very easily sufficiently program a robot that could exhibit such emotions but we were very confident there's no um like experience going there I remember there was one of the is it the dog robot or it might be one for the I wish I could remember the lab that makes the huge walking robots that everybody's like okay Boston Dynamics yeah and there's a couple videos where you watch them like push the robot over and he's like trying to stand up and you actually you kind of feel a little bit bad you're like oh [ __ ] well when you talk to like that Chat gbt thing like you can kind of bully it in some ways like oh this actually feels like a little bit bad um the do you ever see the movie Blade Runner 2049 no I'm I'm I'm I'm pretty bad at that there's a part in that movie where like there's a robot that belongs to another robot and that robot gets killed and you're like oh man that feels really bad even though you know it's not only not only is it a robot but it's a robot that was made to help another robot it's like yeah so so in some ways like I listen to my intuitions and then in otherwise it's like okay yeah but my intuitions can also take me to kind of silly spots but like um yeah maybe maybe the maybe the gradient thing is something I'll I'll change my mind on in the future we'll see yeah maybe we can uh you know sit down and talk about it again I I'm hoping that people will be glad to see us together I know I've had a lot of requests to talk to you in various contexts uh pretty much as long as I've been doing doing YouTube I think uh since a time when you had less subscribers than I did so yeah well hey there's ever like a particular applied or any non-meta [ __ ] moral question that comes up yeah if you ever want to chop shop again or chat or whatever feel free to shoot me a message I'm glad we got to do the meta stuff because I know that you're a bit sort of allergic to it so I'm I'm a little bit managed to get a conversation on it yeah I'm too so yeah thanks I appreciate the conversation let's go in all right well Stephen benell thanks for coming on the podcast thanks for having me did you enjoy that conversation you must have done at least a little bit because you made it to the end well you can find more full episodes of the within reason podcast by clicking the link that just appeared on your screen or click just below it for clips from that podcast don't forget to subscribe and if you really like the content support us on patreon for Early Access as well as to really help this podcast to grow thank you for watching and I'll see you in the next one

Channel: Alex O'Connor

Views: 661,612

Keywords: Alex O'Connor, cosmic, skeptic, cosmicskeptic, atheism, within reason, podcast, within reason podcast, religion, debate, Alex J O'Connor

Id: 3VhHtPJhhRM

Length: 136min 13sec (8173 seconds)

Published: Mon May 22 2023