Do Animals Have a "Right to Life"?

hey guys it's cosmic skeptic and i really haven't been uploading quite as much as i'd have liked to it's actually been a bit crazier than i thought it would be but i wanted to at least check in and do something that i've been meaning to do for a little while now i asked you guys for questions for a q a style video a little while ago and i quickly realized that i'm not sure that video idea can really work with a channel like this because so many of the questions are themselves enough to talk about for an entire video so i decided to try and tackle as many as possible but i didn't get to finish them i certainly didn't even get halfway through the ones that i wanted to answer so i thought this would be a good opportunity to answer some more of those questions you may have seen a video i did recently about how i got over my fear of hell and that video was essentially a q a at least it started as such but i rambled on for so long about that topic and other topics that it essentially turned it into just a video topic itself um so i'm going to try and see how this goes i'm going to answer some of the questions but i might end up rambling um if i do then maybe that would just be the title of the video either way let's not waste any more time what do you think is the best argument for an animal's right to life i.e arguments against killing animals for meat rather than arguments for the humane treatment of animals this subject can be a bit of a sore point not just between vegans and non-vegans but also between different kinds of vegans and certainly between vegans and vegetarians or welfarists it's this idea that look what's really wrong here when we're arguing about veganism are we saying that it's just killing animals in general that's this horrible moral abomination that needs to be abolished or is it more to do with the way we treat them so that if we were to just increase their living conditions sufficiently we'd actually be okay with killing them for food now you might think that the answer is fairly obvious here you're a vegan therefore you can't be killing animals unnecessarily so any kind of welfarist approach that seeks to yeah increase their living standards but then ultimately still kills them isn't an ethical thing to do that's not going to be enough um i don't think it's quite as straightforward as that part of the problem is the way that the word vegan is defined is defined in so many different ways depending on the context for instance if food is described as vegan it will usually just mean food that doesn't contain any animal products but if a person is defined as vegan it's someone who doesn't eat those kinds of food but if someone is an ethical vegan then it's somebody who maybe seeks to minimize animal suffering but if someone's an environmental vegan then what you see the point there are like hundreds of different ways to define this term that's why i'm always fairly careful when i make videos about veganism and give talks on the subject to explain exactly what i mean i've always used a definition quite similar to the vegan societies that veganism ethical veganism as i see it is a minimization to the highest extent practicable of all forms of animal suffering now the vegan society includes the term exploitation i think this is potentially quite a vague and unhelpful term because it itself is a term that has myriad definitions so i'll stick with suffering now an interesting thing about the definition that i've given here a minimization of animal suffering is that as long as the animal doesn't suffer it would seem that whatever you're doing accords with this definition of veganism so there's some argument to be made that if you did have an animal who lived a perfectly good life uh potentially a net positive life so it's a good thing that they came into existence and then you killed them genuinely painlessly uh that not only is this something that you're kind of allowed to do to not be a vegan but according to this definition of veganism that would be a vegan thing to do because it wouldn't be causing any animal suffering now there are a few ways you might want to respond to this firstly of course it's not just the animal being killed in question many other animals are social creatures just like we are and so killing them has extrinsically bad effect it will uh harm other animals who are used to their presence so maybe that's one reason not to kill the animal but i think a potentially more helpful way to think about this is to substitute in a human being if you're ever having trouble overcoming some kind of vegan ethical dilemma it's often helpful to put human beings in the same position as the animals and see what your ethical intuitions tell you at least on first glance so for example if you're a utilitarian if you think that minimization of suffering is just generally the moral rule that we should all be following then someone can ask the same question about human beings you know it's the famous cabin in the woods experiment if you take someone who's got no friends and no family and you kill them genuinely painlessly in fact we can make it even more similar by saying they were bred into existence given a net positive life so a good life to live and then killed genuinely painlessly have you done something wrong now most people's ethical intuitions scream that of course there's something wrong with this although utilitarianism has traditionally been quite a difficult theory to uh to reconcile with this intuition that most of us share that this would be wrong because how can it be wrong if morality is just about minimizing suffering and this person's death doesn't cause any suffering so if you want to say that yeah you'd be fine with killing that person in the cabin in the words then hey you're being consistent so you've got that going for you but i think most people would want to listen to their intuitions to at least some extent and say well i'm convinced that it's wrong to kill a human being in that context even if it causes no suffering so maybe suffering isn't the only metric involved and in that case if you have an animal and you're killing it even if there's no suffering involved there might still be a problem with that i just think we need to be consistent and the questioner asks about the best argument for an animal's right to life um we're going to have to be very careful if we want to apply a concept like the right to life to non-human animals i'm not even sure that it can practically work the reason for that is that we might think that it's wrong to kill uh non-human animals so that we should minimize it as much as we can that it's generally a bad thing fine but if you have a right to something that implies a level of inviolability that that's what distinguishes a right from other kinds of moral prescriptions is that if you have a right to something you essentially have an inviolable claim over that thing and it doesn't matter what the other circumstances are this thing doesn't get violated that's what a right is so in a human context we have this thing called the right to life but already this is an incomplete way of formulating um this right because if we do have some kind of inviolable claim over something it's not as simple as life right because i have a right to life but if i intentionally threaten your life and the only way you can stop me is to kill me then presuming that i'm not justified in threatening your life um you're able to kill me right but if i have a right to life doesn't that mean i have an inviolable claim to my life that you can never violate no matter the circumstances well realistically then i have something like a right to life unless i'm threatening somebody else's life or something like this and there are lots of other problems that you can add on so there's this view within the philosophy of rights called specificationism which is the idea that rights like the right to life are actually just shorthand for essentially book length rights that say that might be something like the right to life except in this circumstance this circumstance this circumstance and as long as this is the case and as long as this is the case that we just express in the nice easier to write down phrase the right to life so here's the problem with trying to grant that kind of inviolability that right to life to non-human animals as things currently stand and this might not be the case in principle i'm not really sure i wouldn't want to say either way but certainly in practice it is currently impossible it's not possible to avoid killing animals in the production of food for human sustenance right now of course we can eat plants but do bear in mind that growing plants all plant-based agriculture involves animal death not just from pesticides and habitat destruction but also like the effect of transporting food the environmental costs all of this kind of stuff it involves a lot of animal deaths is what i'm trying to say now of course the vegan response to this is to say that yes growing plants kills some animals um but a lot more crops a lot more plants are used to feed livestock than to feed human beings so if we're trying to minimize the amount of animal suffering we're responsible for we can either grow some crops which does kill some animals and then eat those crops or grow even more crops killing even more animals to then feed those crops to livestock to then kill those animals to eat those animals and it's clear which is going to contribute least to animal suffering and death so here's the problem think of human rights like the right to life in a in a human context if the only way that i could get food in order to stop myself from starving was to go and kill another person legally or morally i don't think this can be justified there might be some ethical theories certainly like egoism uh almost certainly would say so but i think most people's at least their ethical intuitions would say that i don't get to go and murder somebody uh because it's the only way to feed me even if it means i starve that doesn't mean i have the right to go and take someone else's life why well potentially because they have this thing called the right to life they have a right that i can't violate even if it means that i'm going to starve to death let's say i need to like murder them to steal their food or something like that this isn't something we think is justified if we were to apply that right to life to non-human animals then now consider the animals that are killed in crop production we'd have to say the same kind of thing we'd have to say if the only way for me to eat is to kill all of these animals then i just can't eat because they have a right to life that cannot be violated they're not threatening me in any way or anything like this i'm going over to them and killing them in order to produce food to feed myself so if they have a right to life it means i can't do that what does that mean means humankind will staff because as i say as things currently stand we can definitely minimize animal death and suffering by eating plants but we can't eliminate it we can't get rid of animal death in even just plant-based agriculture so if they had this right to life in the same way that humans do we'd be in big trouble so you could just say that the non-human animal's right to life is a different kind of right to life to a human being maybe in a human context i'm allowed to kill you only if you're threatening me but in a non-human context i'm allowed to kill you just if it's necessary for me to survive or something like this but if you're going to do that then you're going to have to offer an analysis of rights that explains why one creature has this kind of right and one creature has this kind of right and i think it also muddies the term right to life and makes it vague and essentially something that changes depending on who it applies to the whole point of having this system of rights is that for instance in human rights the idea is that if you're a human you have this right that's it no questions asked simple as that if you start saying well you get this right and you don't get this right and you kind of get an adapted different kind of version of this right the whole functional purpose of rights is thrown out the window anyway so i don't really think it's probably a helpful thing to do to argue that animals have a right to life certainly not in the way that humans do i think it's better to say something like they have a right to avoid or to not have inflicted upon them unnecessary or want and suffering i think that's a much easier position to defend and would be consistent with our views regarding human beings but to say that animals have a right to life i'm not sure i can stand by that but if you really do want to cling on to this idea that non-humans have a right to life in the same way that humans do i think it's going to be a bit tricky but you've got two options maybe that i can think of one option is to treat human rights in exactly the same way so you might say that my neighbor has a right to life but one of the exceptions or one of the specified conditions of this is that if i'm starving i'm able to go over to them and murder them in order to take their food and feed myself that would be consistent with what we do to animals in crop production where we kill them in order to feed ourselves but i think that's a tricky position to hold that someone that my neighbour can have a right to life but one of the specifications of that right to life is that if i'm starving and the only way for me to eat would be to go and kill them that i'm able to do that so that's option one the other option of course would be to become a jain or or a fruitarian or whatever it is they call them the kind of people who just don't kill animals in any context in its most extreme formulations these are the kind of people who will stare at a tree and wait for the apple to fall off before eating it because they can't yank it off because that would be i don't know a violation to the tree or whatever it is they think um i wouldn't recommend this line of thought ladies and gentlemen because you will become malnourished being vegan and being a healthy vegan is perfectly possible but it can be quite tricky certainly depending on where you live trying to do it without being responsible for any animal death including animal death and crop production is completely unrealistic and you will end up being malnourished and ill and probably dead so i wouldn't recommend that one either i'd probably go with the first option do you ride goofy or regular on a skateboard goofy what book has been on your shelf that you just haven't gotten around to reading yet despite wanting to good question okay so i've just had a look behind me and there are two books that really jump out at me the first is amir srinivasan's the right to sex i particularly want to read this because amir srinivasan was at one point my tutor at oxford and she is just a phenomenally talented philosopher with a very clear way of explaining things this is quite a recent book that she's just put out which is one of the reasons i haven't read it yet uh but it's already being heralded as this new feminist classic and um a wonderful work on the philosophy of sex i wouldn't want to say too much about it because i haven't read it but it's on my shelf the second i've chosen just because it's been sat on my shelf for so long now and i still haven't read it and that's dermot mcculloch's history of christianity and the reason that i haven't read this particular book is because well favorite bad movie okay it's either gonna be street dreams the skateboarding classic starring paul rodriguez or possibly god's not dead um which might seem like an obvious one but i was really blown away by the realistic depiction of the secular university environment i certainly remember when i walked in to start studying philosophy and theology at university when the professor made us all sit down and write down that god is dead otherwise we're all going to fail actually i've changed my mind it's a fantastic film what are the changes you wish people would make in their daily lives i would say firstly try to read something every single day um it doesn't need to be a lot it doesn't even need to be a book it could be a newspaper it could be an article online something like that just something to keep you engaged you'd be surprised if you're not someone who reads regularly just by making that small change how much it can affect your vocabulary how much it can affect the clarity of your thinking and your ability to express ideas so certainly reading more i also wish people would stop attributing malice to people unwarrantedly right we see this all the time in online debate somebody might make an argument and instead of saying hey you're wrong and misguided or even just stupid but your you're intentionally deceiving your audience you're being a liar you're a fraud all of this kind of stuff it's just so unhelpful obviously if there's reason to think that that's the case then fine but a lot of the time it's thrown out without such reason but also just in daily life i mean if you're walking down the street and somebody bumps into you on your shoulder or if you're having a conversation with someone and somebody makes a really rude remark it's a natural first reaction to think you know screw that guy but just take a moment to think like am i sure that there was like malice behind this uh is there not possibly an explanation um maybe they didn't realize what they were saying maybe they don't know the context as to why what they said was so hurtful maybe the person who barged fast you just got a phone call that his wife's gone into labor or something unless you've actually got good reason to think that someone is acting out of malice i think it's a much easier and more comfortable way to live to make the assumption of no malice until proven otherwise rather than the other way around i think people should sleep more or at least sleep effectively i think that people vastly underestimate how important sleep is you know they don't even they don't even do that they don't even it's like they know how important sleep is but still neglect it now of course yeah i do this myself everybody does this to some extent um i also recognize that not everybody has a choice in this matter right like maybe you're working in a night shift maybe you're like a single mother sleep can be a pretty tricky thing to come by in these circumstances but if you are that kind of person and i'm that person a lot of the time uh who the reason why you're getting to sleep at two in the morning or something like this is because you're on social media or because you're checking your emails when realistically you could be doing it tomorrow this change is fairly small i want to say change it can have such a huge impact on your clarity on obviously your how awake you feel on your motivation on your mood on so many different things matthew walker wrote a book quite a popular book called why we sleep and he discusses the importance of sleep and the book just blew me away not only in teaching me just how important sleep is to basically every single mental function that we have as human beings um but also the way that he talks about the human psychology in terms of people just deciding to not sleep properly he asks us to imagine that there were this pill that you could get where if you take this pill you're going to have increased focus you're going to have increased happiness you're going to have lowered anxiety you're going to have lower tiredness levels you're going to have all of these wonderful incredible effects you're going to lose weight more effectively like so many different things right that pill would be the most popular pill on the market but his point is just that that pill already exists in the form of just getting proper sleep i'd really recommend reading that book but yes sleeping properly is is a huge change that i think people can make in their lives another daily life change that i rather obviously wish that people would make is to stop eating animals or at least to minimize their contribution to animal suffering to the highest extent practicable as in line with the definition of ethical veganism that i gave earlier i think that's fairly straightforward but it obviously needs to mention finally one more change that i wish i would see more people make in their daily lives regards to the fact that so many people as it currently stands seem far too relaxed about their internet security and one of the best things that you can do one of the best changes you can make in your daily life is to start using a vpn to protect that online security that's right i want to take a moment to thank the sponsor of today's video expressvpn expressvpn is a virtual private network which allows you using a simple app that runs on your computer or smartphone to protect your online security it's maybe something that you haven't really thought about much before but just like you wouldn't leave your front door unlocked when you have valuables in your home you shouldn't leave your valuable online information vulnerable for theft or for sale or for use by big tech companies if you're browsing on an unencrypted wi-fi network you run the risk of hackers on the same network stealing your data and even when you're on your own wi-fi internet service providers in my country are required by law to keep logs of the websites that i visit and if you're living in the united states then isps are able to sell your online data to advertisers and big tech resulting in for instance targeted advertising based on your online activity so that's the bad news the good news is that all of this can be avoided by using expressvpn expressvpn protects me against these kinds of vulnerabilities by rerouting my online activity through a separate secure server which masks my ip address and hides my location so that i can browse much more anonymously online and without the need to worry so much about the prying eyes of isps or of hackers and all of this takes place with the simple press of a button which activates the vpn and also allows you to choose wherever in the world you'd like your data to be rerouted which makes it seem as though that's where you're located so just saying if maybe you're someone who potentially likes to watch netflix shows that are only available in other countries then well you're welcome and the best part of all is that you can get three months of all of this completely for free by simply visiting expressvpn.com forward slash cosmic skeptic or by clicking the link in the description down below after all you just can't put a price on peace of mind and online security and with that said i just want to thank you as always for watching i've been alex o'connor or cosmic skeptic you can find me on social media right here uh don't forget to subscribe if you haven't already and click the little bell if you really like the videos and i'll see you in the next one [Music]

Channel: CosmicSkeptic

Views: 66,475

Rating: 4.8278756 out of 5

Keywords: Alex O'Connor, cosmic, skeptic, cosmicskeptic, atheism, vegan, veganism

Id: AuTw91TDcrE

Length: 21min 17sec (1277 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 30 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/zombiegojaejin]

I tend toward consequentialist ethics as well, but it's quite strange how strange Alex thinks a contingent right would be. In fact, we use this sort of concept all the fucking time, with nationality. How many U.S. citizens, right now, are outraged over a national minimum wage that is far below what they consider "a right to a living wage"... and yet most of the same people don't think people not lucky enough to have the citizenship should be allowed to come in and work whenever they want to?