Peter Singer Talks to Cosmic Skeptic About Utilitarianism | Podcast #6

this episode of the cosmic skeptic podcast is brought to you by you to support the podcast please visit patreon.com forward slash cosmic skeptic [Music] [Applause] [Music] so welcome back everybody to the cosmic skeptic podcast an opportunity to break away from the normal snappiest Allah videos and have more long-form conversations with interesting guests and joining me today in the studio is Peter singer who has held professorships at both the University of Princeton and Melbourne and specializes in practical ethics and it well known for his books including practical ethics the expanding circle at the life you can save and also probably most famously Animal Liberation written in 1975 which is thought by many to have kick-started the modern vegan movement and animal by animal rights movement so thanks for joining us today yes it's great to have you here and I think a lot of people gonna be excited because it's only fairly recently that I began to talk about animal ethics on my channel and people were kind of surprised by it and I I want to talk about why my audience should begin to see animal ethics seriously because a lot of people see it as a kind of I don't know if you found this as a kind of interesting philosophical debate like it's kind of brought up in a Q&A section and the philosophers on stage kind of laugh about it have a bit of a chat think it's interesting and then and then kind of push it to the side but do you find that people don't take it as seriously as they should because that that's something that I've tended to notice I think it's part of the the problem that in writing about animal ethics I wanted to push back against the idea that humans are the only thing that matters which admittedly was a view that I held for the first 23 24 years of my life which is quite a long time nowadays to think not really have thought about that issue but the the attitude that this can't be as important as issues about humans was around then and it's still around which just shows that I think the animal movement has not succeeded in getting people to see that view as a bias as in fact speciesism a prejudice against taking seriously the interests of beings who are not members of our species but it's it's very easy to understand where that bias comes from I think would you say that it's irrational to have that bias because to me it seems as though although it might be unfair or ethically unsound it's perfectly rational for somebody to care about the the interests of themselves and those who they see as as close to them more so than they do those who don't so I think to answer that we have to get into a discussion about the nature of rationality and reason in ethics let me before we quite go into that though let me put it this way there are certainly some people who think that reason in ethics is limited that essentially reason always starts from touch some desire or concern this was David Humes view and therefore that if as most people do you have most concerned about your own interests or about the interests of those you love and care about those are close to you then there's nothing more to be said against that being a rational thing to do but in writing Animal Liberation I wasn't really trying to challenge that view I was assuming that my readers would generally agree that it's not right to give more weight to the interests of someone because they're a member of your race or your sex so let's assume that you're a white male it's not right to say well I don't care about the interest of people in Africa because they're black or I don't care about the interests of women because they're not male so I was building on that and saying if you think that it's wrong to discriminate against to discount the interest of people on it rounds of race or sex why don't you think something similar about doing that on the grounds of species so it's kind of a matter of consistency rather than a matter of making a a moral principle because I suppose at the time you wrote Animal Liberation you didn't believe in an objective groundwork for ethics and so you weren't able to say this is wrong you're only able to say that this ethical position is inconsistent with other ethical positions that most people hold yes roll you know I could say that it was wrong in the way that non-cognitive again say the things are wrong could I say that it was objectively wrong could I say that it was irrational at the time I wrote Animal Liberation no I would not have been able to say that but you feel like you can now my meta ethical position has shifted within the last decade I would say so relatively recently in terms of the period of time when I first wrote Animal Liberation and it has shifted towards an objective view influenced by particularly by Derek Parfit I would say to some extent by Tom Nagel - taking the view that well reason isn't just limited to what we desire that there are things that you can argue are rationally self-evident and one of them I think is the idea that I find most clearly expressed in in Henry Sidgwick the nineteenth-century utilitarian philosopher when he says if I take the perspective of the universe then my interest don't really count for any more than the interest of anyone else who is capable of similar amounts of pleasure or pain or good or evil whatever it might be so it's as it's essentially saying you have to put yourself in this larger perspective said we didn't think that the universe really has a perspective but but we can in imagination take it and then you know I can look at other beings and I can say oh you know they can they feel pain as I do maybe some of them are more similar to me you're more similar to me than if I'm talking about a cow or a pig but insofar as beings can feel pain have interests their pains matter and their pains matter equally if the pain is just as great as mine or yours yeah that's a point to press because you're right that so I'm more similar to you than a cow but I'm also more similar to you than a woman is but the point that you press is that it's it's not about denying differences it's about saying that it's that those differences don't hold any moral moral weight and you've you've said before quite rightfully that in suffering and in the ability to feel pain and have preferences animals are our equals but I imagine you face quite a bit of backlash from that from people saying in response how can you possibly say that that we are of equal consideration to to animals and I think they kind of get they get mixed up people think that by suggesting that there should be an equal consideration it means kind of equal treatment but that's not really the case no that's not the case and the way I put the principle of equal consideration is equal consideration for similar interests so I don't claim that the interests of your interests or my interests are necessarily similar to those of a carer or Pig in fact obviously they're not and the same goes for your listeners or viewers they have an interest in abstract philosophical discussion and no cow or pig is capable of understanding that and therefore does not have an interest in that so clearly interested different but where we could roughly say as far as I can tell this cow or Pig is suffering a similar amount of pain to that that perhaps a a human infant might suffer if you did some particular thing to that infant then I would want to say and the pain that they're feeling therefore is just as bad and should be given just as much weight as the pain that the human is assured so let's talk about why we should give that pain weight at all I want to kind of dive into some of the metrical foundations for the practical ethics that we're talking about here because it's it's all very well and good talking about matters of consistency and saying well if we care about the pain of conscious creatures and we should extend that to animals but why should we care about pain so reading like the classical utilitarian position it requires taking this view of the universe and saying that everybody counts for one and and and and no one to count for more than one but the the rationale for it the sanction seems to be as as Mill said the only thing that we can uses evidence to suggest that something should be desirable as that we desire it and the only thing we really desire is our own pleasure we don't have that same kind of desire for someone else's pleasure except as a as a contingency for the pleasure that we'll derive from knowing that they're doing well so do you think that the care that we should have for other people's pleasures and pains is just intrinsic that we should just care about them or that we should care about them in the sense that they will affect our own pleasures and pains my view is the former and I don't think Mills argument about from desiring to desirable is a good argument and if you want to look at the better philosophical version of utilitarianism go to Henry Sidgwick rather than to Mills utilitarianism I mean I think you know I'm not putting mill down he's a great philosopher and I think he's on Liberty is a excellent book that still should speak to us today but his utilitarianism was a pretty hastily written essay for a magazine and whereas Sidgwick methods of ethics was something he revised the Edition we read is the seventh he was a careful academic and he wrote much more carefully so so Cedric's view was that when we reflect on things that are intrinsically good we can intrinsically we can see that that pleasure is something that is intrinsically good that pain is something that is intrinsically bad for Sedgwick this is self-evident in the sense that when you reflect on it that you don't need to have further steps you think about the nature of pleasure you think about the nature of pain you may well think about of course your own experiences of it and you can see that that pleasure is good that pain is bad and in fact on Sedgewick's view desirable consciousness is is the only thing that is good so nothing outside consciousness is good nothing outside consciousness is bad undesirable consciousness that can try a new consciousness that we would try to avoid minimize get out of is something that's bad and just thinking about the nature of that is enough to see that that is good he does go through various moves to consider other candidates like virtue for example but he argues that they are instrumentally good rather than yeah intrinsically good yeah but I mean surely what we're talking about there when we recognize just that something is is good and that's just a matter of our kind of faculties working at their base level that something just appears to be good and so we can trust that faculty surely what we're really talking about is something being good good for us like the reason we think pleasure is is good it's because our experience of pleasure is a good thing I think that's not quite the same thing as saying that somebody else's pleasure is a good thing or saying that pleasure in general is a good thing I mean I haven't had experience of pleasure in general and I haven't had experience of someone else's pleasure and so I don't think I can say in the same way but yeah I think that's that's pleasure that's good just as a matter of my faculties working at that based reasoning I think the only thing I can really apply that to is is my own experience which would imply that the only thing I can say that is good is my own pleasure no I think I know a lot of people say something like that but I think that really fails to distinguish between what I care about what I desire what I want and which may well be I mean it's not for you and I hope it's not for everybody but certainly yeah many people would say the only thing I care about is my own pleasure or you know that's what really matters to me or if matters a lot more than the pleasure of others but that's just that's different from saying this is what I can recognize as something that is intrinsically good and in that you know yes you are limited to expect ly experience in your own pleasure but we have good evidence that other beings experience pleasure evidence from their similar behavior to ours also now our anatomical and physiological evidence based on their nervous systems so really what you're experiencing is pleasure as experienced by a conscious being relevantly like you and i think when you think about that you do judge the pleasure to be good you don't judge my pleasure to be good right you judge the pleasure to be good and then because you judge it to be good you want it for yourself but but as a matter of exercise you can say well I recognize this pleasure that I'm experiencing to be good and as far as I know the pleasure that you someone else experiencing is similar so I recognize that that's good too it's it's then a further question as to whether I will care about it whether I will do something about it what kind of priority your pleasure will be but I think recognizing that it's something that's intrinsically good is a distinct Act but can we be sure that it's that way around that it's that we recognize something's good and therefore we want it for ourselves rather than us wanting it for ourselves and therefore thinking it's good I mean there seems to be good evolutionary reasons that we would develop a system of desires and wants that are based upon what what brings us our own pleasure and and a system like you discussing the expanding circle it makes sense to care about other people for essentially self-interested purposes and that wouldn't be out of sync with the idea that our care for other people's pleasures can be rooted in our own you seem very you seem in quite fervent opposition to the idea that ethics can be grounded in egoism in in pure egoism let's call it in the idea that it's all based on my own pleasure and there's really no consideration for other people's pleasures outside of outside of my own pleasure but I don't know if it's as heinous as perhaps you're kind of implying that it is because if we have evolved as a social creature then it would make sense for us to care very very much about as much as we do about the well-being of other creatures and it would make it would explain rationally why we don't feel the same way about non-human animals but it wouldn't it would pose a problem in that sense when we start talking about animals but if we're talking about human morality I don't think it would it would pose that problem I don't think that by saying that ethics is grounded in my own well-being nothing else that I wouldn't be able to have just as much care for my fellow creature as you would I don't see why if you were to take that view your concern would be justified in extending beyond a relatively small group of people whom you know and interact with and who can return favors that you do for them and possibly you know on evolutionary grounds obviously people who are genetically related to you you could you could talk about as well but it wouldn't give you any reason for let's say paying for some bed nets that will protect children in Malawi from getting malaria well bearing in mind that we're now talking not about what we should be desiring what we do desire like we're talking about the psychology of human beings what reason we would have to desire something I think it makes sense that because when our evolutionary when our moral faculties developed in our evolutionary history we were living in small enough groups that it wouldn't it would just make sense to develop a sense of empathy that extends as far as human interaction goes and so now although purely rationally it might make no sense on the hedonistic worldview to to to give to charity the fact that I have this this capacity for empathy and the fact that when I see a human being regardless of where they are on the planet I can't help but feel that empathy means that by donating that money or helping that person I'm appeasing my own faculty for pleasure even if that's totally irrational I do think there is a good evolutionary explanation if not a moral reason but a good motive a reason why I would have that desire even if I only care about my pleasure to care about that person because as a social creature I can't help but feel that empathy and the only way to appease my pain there the only way to to remove that pain of empathy for someone else being being harmed is to help them well I thought we were talking about what we have reasons for doing rather than about the psychology of human desire because I think they're they're different things I think we may well have reasons for doing things that we have no desire for doing that's that's unfortunate but I think the way the world is we we certainly have evolved and evolutionary history has given us a set of desires as you said may you have given us empathy and concern for others primarily focused on those who were close to possibly can be extended outwards you know we can talk about how much and so on that's that's a question but we're also beings and again this is a capacity that's evolved who are capable of reasoning and on my view and I defend this in the expanding circle our capacity for a reason can take us to places that are not necessarily serving the evolutionary function of enhancing our survival and reproductive capacities it's it's you know thinking think about in terms of mathematics right so we have a capacity for mathematics why do we have a capacity for mathematics well it was useful no doubt in various situations paradigm case you see three Tigers go into the thicket you see two Tigers come out you understand that it's not a good idea to go into the thicket so from that maybe have a simple beginning we develop more mathematical skills and eventually we have people as we do here in Oxford in departments of mathematics doing pure mathematics at a very high level which is very remote from any kind of evolutionary imperative that would have given rise to those capacities but they're following a reasoning process and the reasoning process itself did begin because of those evolutionary advantages now I think that it's possible that something similar has happened with ethics yes that is we've developed a capacity to reason and that capacity isn't just limited to the things that have an evolutionary advantage for us but it enables us to see that we are on this planet with other creatures that these are the creatures though they complete strangers to us although they have no possibility that they'll ever be able to reciprocate any favors we do to them nevertheless they're like us they suffer like us and reason enables to see that if my pain is a bad thing for me then their pain is a bad thing for them and that leads me to see that it's a bad thing . but is that it's not if that's the important point because i think most people would be able to agree with you and get on board with the practical point that if my path if my pain is bad if your pain is bad then non-human animals pain is bad let's say but we're talking about whether or not it actually is is bad and i think that the analogy you give with mathematics can can apply here as a pure egoist which i'll continue to defend i think that i can say that evolutionarily i can explain the the development of my moral faculties through the hedonistic principle either by spreading my genes or through kind of reciprocal altruism and that's how it came about but now i have a moral faculty that I can apply reason to and extend it to things that are far detached from that evolutionary origins such as caring about non-human animals but the actual motive the the basis for that would still just be a subjective preference for my own pleasure that's that's evolved naturally and I think that can that can offer a way to compel people to act morally and act in accordance with with the moral principles that we're talking about without having to say that you have to accept a metaphysical claim that morality exists and morality can be talked about in terms of truth claims well the motive might be that I wasn't really talking about motives I was really talking about our capacity to understand what's right the right thing to do or the wrong thing to do I'm saying I think that comes from the motive okay so I we disagree about that yeah I think that it's it's possible that some people get to it through looking at that motive in the way that you've described I'm not going to say that that's impossible but I would want to claim that even if you were somewhat shortchanged in that empathy Department if you are capable of reasoning you would be able to get to this through the rational pathway that I've described as well and what would that rational pathway look like for a person who doesn't have that empathetic quality they just don't care we talk about moral principles being self-evident what does it mean for something to be self-evident in a in the manner you're describing I think what it means for it to be self-evident is that when presented to rational beings who are thinking calmly and clearly they will agree with it so another example of a self-evident fact would be well there are self-evident facts that we may think of as truths that we would agree with that something can't be red and green all over at the same time so you're not some interpretation of mathematics there's some mathematical truth I see you're not talking about something like the idea that our that our sight that we can trust off our faculties for sight is just self evident you were talking about things like the laws of logic which just seems to be just self-evidently true as a matter of logical principle and you think morality falls within that category so I think it's possible that the most basic axioms of morality fall within that within that category then of course working out more specific implications of them so we could kind of list P and not P cannot be true and underneath that you can put pleasure is good and they're kind of in in the same category of kind of certainty just just self evidence e they're not quite in the same category of certainty but they're reached by the same process if if something is self-evident that seems to imply that we can be certain about it and how so how can there be different levels of certainty if they're both self-evident they're both just true no I don't I don't think that so I don't think that all sovereign throughs are necessarily equally certain I think there are some which may be everybody is going to agree with immediately and there may be some which require more reflection and the sense of saying there's self-evident there is simply saying there aren't intermediate steps it's through reflection on the nature of pleasure that we conclude that it's good and there's no further chain of argument that I can put in between the experience of what pleasure is the reflection of that reflection on that and the conclusion that it's good yeah now I'm about to ask you a question that given you a philosophical history you might say is a nonsense question but some people don't see it that way when you say we can reflect on the nature of pleasure and see that it's good what does that adjective actually mean well if we're prepared to talk about values it means that the universe is a better place if it has that in it and I would say if it has more of it in it better for better and what like better for you know better . i don't want to say that all values are only values for someone i want to say that we can we can imagine different universes some with lots of pleasurable experiences in them and let's say just make it simple no painful experiences and others with lots of painful experiences and no pleasurable ones now it's true of course that it is better for the sentient beings if we imagine they're the same sentient beings and those two universes it's better to be in the one with pleasure in it but I also think we could say it's a good it's a good thing that this is the universe that exists rather than that possible us so if I'm somebody who can live in this possible world where I have a moderate amount of pleasure I'm having a good time but I imagine another possible world where the overall pleasure is higher but my position in it would be would be lower I wouldn't be experiencing as much pain to me rationally it would seem that I would have to say it would be a worse place for me to live there would be a worse place for you to live but it would be a better universe all the same but you couldn't say it'll be a better place to live well and when we're talking to X surely we need to be talking about to make the world a better place to live you could say it's it's a better place clearly you could say it's a better place for the average being living in that world but why should why should we get it that's the thing like why should I care about the average being if when I'm put in that world it's gonna be worse off for me I'm not going to enjoy it I'm not gonna have a good time well I'm not sure why you keep pushing in the idea that you're not prepared to trade off your own your own interests for the sake of any other value that everything has to come back to a kind of egoism and I find that a implausible position I do you think I don't know whether you're talking about it in terms of really what's a value or what's what we ought to do or whether you're talking about it in terms of psychological motivation I think they're different I don't really think it's the right position in either terms but I can see that it's somewhat easier to defend on the psychological plane than it is on the right plane of reasoning I think the place it comes from is do you think that there can be an action committed that is that is that has no personal benefit yes and I'm talking is in doing something which which not just is it's kind of worth a personal benefit it brings you but that brings you none whatsoever I certainly think it's possible to do that yes could you give an example perhaps well I know several people who've donated a kidney to a complete stranger because they accepted that they can live quite adequately with one kidney whereas there are people on waiting lists for two getting a kidney who have very poor quality of life on dialysis who may die before they ever get to the point of having a kidney and they didn't derive any pleasure from the knowledge that it helped someone in that manner I certainly don't think pleasure that they were helping anyone was the motivation for doing what they did I think the motivation was that they could make a bigger difference to someone else's life than it would cost them but that's what I mean like that the the if the motivation there is the fact that they could do something for someone else well that that's a pleasurable experience well is it I mean why are you writing this into it right if you you seem to be denying that somebody just for the fact that that he or she was doing a greater benefit for another person well I certainly don't don't think you don't think you can I think that you kind of have to act in accordance with your with your pleasures and preferences preferences I'm not necessarily gonna die and I mean the people that they might have preferred to benefit others than to benefit themselves so I see I see where where where there might be a divergence here because I know that you used to call yourself a preference utilitarian and now you call yourself a hedonistic Rotarian do you still see those as different things yes because you see a difference between somebody's preference and somebody's pleasures you can prefer things that do not increase your own pleasures definitely now in practical ethics you give an example in the introductory chapter of a poet who who decides to live a life of diminished pleasure in order that she will write better poetry right because the the preference is to write good poetry even if that's at the extent at the expense of the the pleasure but surely the immediate response to that is to say well the reason someone wants to be a poet is because of the pleasure they derive from being a poet and so diminishing one type of pleasure or one means of pleasure to to increase your ability to write good poetry well the pleasure you receive from writing that poetry the pleasure you receive and the knowledge that your that you're living the life that you want to live must outweigh so is leisure they do all tack revising let me ask you this is is pleasure a state of consciousness for you yes yeah yeah well people do things that are not going to affect their states of consciousness for example they make disposition for their assets after they die that they're not going to be around to witness that disposition and you know that's there may be many other ways Derek Parfit has this example of meeting a stranger on a train talking to that person getting to like them and then discovering that they are having a serious operation for a disease and then the person gets off the train but you know didn't exchange any contact details you'll never see this person again but Pafford says you can have a preference that the person's operation will go well yeah but it'll never affect your consciousness you'll never know whether that person's operation did go well or not but it's it's already affecting your conscience consciousness so when you when you leave inheritance for people after you die or leave requests for the way you want your body to be treated or something like that the reason why you would do that I mean like in terms of the defense that you could give for the psychological hedonistic motivation is that you derive pleasure now when being alive from the knowledge that when you are dead other people will benefit from that you can I I accepted you can offer that explanation I don't think it's very plausible in terms of the amount of effort that people often put into trying to arrange things for after they die or you know another case might be trying to complete some book that they're writing before they die where perhaps it makes life much more difficult for them and they're not going to be around very long before they die anyway it doesn't seem like a good trade-off yeah they don't have to be right about it that's the difference between that's like an epistemological point they could they could be wrong I mean they they could they could decide to do something thing they could decide to make a sacrifice and get it totally wrong and actually have completely diminished their pleasure but they could but they thought that it was going to increase yeah you could offer that explanation but I don't really see why it's necessary to do so and I don't find it plausible to do so I mean there's an anecdote about Hobbs that goes along the lines that you're talking about Hobbs was walking through London with a companion and beggar came and asked for money and Hobbs reached his pocket and gave some coins and the companion sort of thought AHA I've refuted you now because you're an egoist but you've just given money to this bigger and and Hobbs said no I gave the money to the beggar because it made me happy to see the look of pleasure on the biggest face it's always possible to say that kind of thing but and you know maybe Hobbs was speaking the truth about himself but but to assume that everybody who does something like this he's doing it in some way to increase their pleasure it just seems to dilute the notion of what pleasure is to a point that we may not really be talking about the same thing we're just sort of every time someone has a preference for something we're putting a little subscript saying and therefore has gets pleasure out of it mm-hmm I think so when you talk about Hobbs I think it goes deeper than just well I liked the the smile that I got back from from the beggar I think it speaks to it to a to an important part of our human nature that like I say we've evolved to care deeply about other people and so it's not just some some triviality the the the pleasure that I receive from helping somebody else is not a trivial pleasure it's one of the deepest pleasures that I can have because it's so ingrained into the fiber of my being so that that means I can see why at first glance it appears totally totally trivial it appears like yeah okay so technically you derive some pleasure from doing this good act but that can't be the the main motivation all the time but I think it can be if we see it for what it really is which is which is so much more than just that baseline baseline pleasure yeah I think if you're if you're going to talk about the way in which we've evolved you're still going to have some problems because unfortunately from my perspective we don't have a very strong inclination to help strangers far away from us and in particular we don't have a strong inclination to help people who we can't even see as identifiable recipients and so there's this well-known phenomenon of the identifiable victim which we saw in the case of the boys in Thailand who were trapped in the cave right and there were these twelve boys and their coach you know knew who they were see their parents on television and so on and you know there was huge concern over those 12 or 13 including the coach perhaps it was people and enormous amounts of money were offered and spent in order to to rescue them and I'm happy that they were rescued but when people are asked to do something for people that they can't identify such as will you donate to provide bed nets for children in regions that get malaria and of course you can never identify whose life your donation is saved because you can't tell which of the children now sleeping under bed nets would have died had they not had a bed net and that response is unfortunately much weaker so you know there are there are lives we could save for much less than it costs to save the boys in Thailand by donating to the this and similar charities that we're not saving so on your view there'd be nothing further you could say about that because you're following the evolved preferences that we have and they clearly point towards helping identifiable victims rather than unidentifiable victims that's where that's where reason comes in so I can I can point I can explain the motivation that we would have for any kind of moral principles in general and what I'm saying is that the reason why I think we have ethical concern for people outside of ourselves is because of these evolutionary reasons that I that I've just explained from that like with the mathematician you can then say and once we have these principles let's now use reason to apply them consistently in which case you can do what you do so well which is to point out inconsistencies in people's thinking if you're going to save the child drowning in a puddle why won't you donate your money to charity that will save you even more people for less of a price well that's that's a that's a point of reason and somebody might be able to come to you and say well why should I care at all about this this whole ethical framework and the answer could be well here's an explanation of why you should care about that the child in the puddle and you you give a psychological evolutionary motivation for it here is why you do let's say here's why I know that if you really thought about it enough you would care that's not the same as saying that they should care but I can say that I know what kind of creature you are I know how you evolved I have I have enough knowledge of your psychological state to understand that what you do care about as a matter of fact is that child debt drowning in that puddle for these reasons and since you do care about that child let's take the rationale for that and see if it should also apply elsewhere and then you can you can draw out the the practical implications of applying it consistently if you see what I'm saying but that doesn't diminish the the metal earth achill point that it's all based upon your own pleasure okay good I think we're making progress but I think it does actually cut against what you were saying earlier in terms of the idea that you're taking pleasure from this because you've acknowledged that we have certain desires that we simply have his desires let's say to help that drowning child in the in the puddle or the shallow pond and you acknowledge that we don't have similar desires to help the non identifiable victim potential victim of malaria and you've said that that's where we can use reason to say you care about this and therefore to be consistent you should care about that which is fine I totally agree with that but but now looking at that person who has been persuaded by your argument about using reason I don't see why you're saying and this person is still doing what gives them pleasure because it would seem to me that if that was what they were doing they would be much more likely still to look around for more children in ponds to rescue because that's really as you've acknowledged what gives them pleasure the other thing is yes and I'm being consistent but that's not the same thing do you think people derive a pretty significant pleasure or if you prefer to to frame it differently just say have a strong preference for having a kind of philosophical consistency do you think that there is a preference within people to have consistent moral principles that they're able to live by yeah I do think that I do think that and certainly I work with that it's you know this kind of a can be called cognitive dissonance if you like that I know that I think this and that it'll be consistent I should do that but I'm not doing that and that produces you know that can produce some sort of unease or discomfort so I think perhaps the you're trying to defend your position you you would say at that point what you're trying to do is to avoid that has some some negative experience perhaps the the the negative experience of knowledge that I'm not acting consistently but I'm still not still skeptical that you could really explain this reasoning process now in terms of acting for my own pleasure or anything of that sort I think we've got pretty far away from that is my my only problem is that I don't see how else you can do it because talking about I could just as easily say that I can see why someone would think that the moral principles are self-evident but I don't think it's plausible I don't find it convincing I don't see how you could psychologically account for that kind of thing it's just the same it's the same thing both ways I mean what can you give me more than just saying well it's it's self-evident can't can't you see that the pleasure is good I mean like sam harris says put your hand on a hot stove and you'll just know that the pain is bad i try and keep your hand on a hot stove that's his point it's like well okay but there's a big difference between saying that yes subjectively when i put my hand on a stove i a subjective feeling of pain like I don't like that pain I don't enjoy it which is always but by definition is a subjective preference there's a world of difference between that kind of recognition and the jump to an ontological point that pleasure as as a concept is good and I can't see why you're able to make that jump yeah I don't see it as that great a jump but it does work I guess it does require you to say it's possible for value to exist in an objective sense rather than just be the values of values for those beings I think that's that's where the kind of Objectivist meta ethic that I'm trying to defend does get difficult I agree because if somebody wants to consistently argue that all values of values for beings it's not easy to push beyond that one way to push beyond it I guess is where you're talking about again Pafford style problems about bringing beings into existence and that's that's the question about whether suppose we have a world with a billion happy beings in it whether it would be better to have a world with two billion equally happy beings in it and on on the view that there's objective value in happiness it's easy to answer that affirmatively on a view that says all value has to be value for someone it's not so clear or at least somebody says well if you didn't have the extra billion beings then they wouldn't exist they'd never be unhappy they'd never have missed out on anything yeah well I mean to give you a kind of classical almost cliche with utilitarian a utilitarian dilemma to elucidate your own view do you prefer the Society of a hundred people who all have a hundred points of pleasure or Society of a hundred thousand people who all have 99 points of pleasure well the average is slightly lower but this video okay well at least on that level I'm I'm a total Asst but obviously you can you can keep going making the world larger and dropping the level of pleasure and then you end up at the repugnant conclusion which is a little harder to swallow but do you just kind of bite the bullet with the repugnant conclusion you just kind of say like if if this ethical theory is sound and it leads to this thought experiment where we'd have to do something that intuitively is just totally immoral if that's what the ethical theory requires then we just have to accept that the because this this particular thought experiment is so contrived we never have to really worry about it and just say that if it did arise we just have to act in accordance with it yeah it's not only that we it's never going to happen and we don't have to worry about it in that sense but it's also can we really rely on our intuitions when applied to a situation that is so fantastic that our intuitions did not have of to cope with it so you know in terms of the repugnant conclusion which for our listeners perhaps you could just talk about specific conclusion we're talking alright okay so so you started off by comparing a hundred people and a level of hundred with a hundred thousand people at a level of 99 and probably most people would say be prepared to say yeah that small drop in pleasure is worth the fact that there are now so many more people but as I said you can just continue with that ad infinitum and eventually you'll get to a world where you have people at let's say 0.001 you know it has to be positive still for this to work but it can be life just barely worth living and yet there's so many people that all of those people at 0.001 adds up to more than 100,000 at 99 yeah and a lot of people will say now wait a minute now you've gone too far all right I'm prepared to have more people if the quality of life is still really good but now you're getting to some very dull barely worth living kind of life and we've lost what I'm not prepared to accept that that that's that's the repugnant conclusion to the argument now you know a lot of philosophers including powerful himself tried hard to work out ways in which you could accept a view that did not have that implication perfect never well I shouldn't have have never found one because there was a posthumously published paper in which he put forward some suggestions which I don't didn't find totally convincing I have to say you know some people try to set a floor sort of a baseline in other words and say well once life sinks below a certain level then there's no point in expanding in having more people living that level and that level is not the neutral level it's not the 0.001 but you know it's 20 or 30 or something on a scale between 0 and 100 so I should see a really on a scale between minus 100 and plus 100 yes sure what we're talking about so what do I do about that well as I say I think it's it's really hard to grasp these numbers and to think of these differences and to think what this life would be like so I do find it uncomfortable conclusion and on this one when you say do I just bite the bullet I would still like somebody to turn up with a coherent consistent theory that answers questions about when it's good to bring extra people into existence and when it's bad and if that concludes if that theory avoided the repugnant conclusion that would be a point in its favor yeah but there been a lot of really good philosophers working on this now for 40 or 50 years is the reason why it would be bet you say if something if there's a theory that encompasses a solution to the Republican conclusion that would count in its favor is that because of the intuition that we have the repugnant conclusion is so wrong because if we're talking about ethics being based on self-evidently true moral statements then we're not talking about intuition and if we have a moral theory based on what you describe is self-evidently true principles which then lead to a conclusion that we don't like surely it shouldn't count in favor or against the theory whether we intuitively like or dislike it if that's not what we're basing it on because that's what that's what I'm basing the moral theory on I'm able to say that because we're talking about our own kind of psychological preferences when we come to a conclusion that seems repugnant we can use that as reason to distrust it but I'm not sure you can do the same thing if you're not basing morality on that so you said as part of those remarks that you're relying on intuition but if I'm basing things on self evidence then I shouldn't be relying on intuition but I think there are different intuitions and Sidgwick who argued that there are self-evident axioms described this as philosophical intuition ISM that was the term took for it its philosophical intuition ism because it's different from common sense morality which relies on particular moral judgments so people who rely on intuitions to say it's wrong to lie or various other you know incest is wrong whatever else it might be that's what Sidgwick would have called the morality of common sense which is a kind of intuition ism there is specific intuitions particular judgments the kind of thing that Rawls also talks about when he talks about making decisions from a position of reflective equilibrium we find a kind of equilibrium between a whole variety of of intuitions I think that there are some things which are not far away from intuitions and and as I said we use that term which are things that we see as self-evident and the ones that I think are more reliable are the more general and abstract ones the ones that are more specific I think often are reactions that we have because they were advantageous to us to our ancestors in terms of survival and reproduction so that's why I mentioned incest as an example I think we have an intuition that incest is wrong and clearly that has a plausible evolutionary explanation that you will produce more abnormalities if people who are closely genetically related to have sex and because in an age of without contraception they were then going to reproduce but I think you can then ask whether that evolutionary explanation supports the intuition that incest is wrong or actually debunks it and I think in that particular case at least it debunks it it to banks it for modern circumstances where we do have reliable contraception and where we don't see other plausible harms on the case for that would be adult sibling incest so you know intuitively if you ask people and Jonathan Hite did this in a bit of research but if you ask people you know you describe a circumstance in which adult brothers and sisters spending a night together they decide for the fun of it to experiment and having sex they do that you know they're both on using contraceptives or the woman's on up on the pill and the man decides to use the country condom just to be safe so there's no chance of having a child and it doesn't you know harm their relationships they continue to be close they decide not to do it again so you ask people is that wrong a lot of people will say yes that's wrong and and when you ask them why they either say things that are contrary to the story like you know well they might have a baby who'd be abnormal or they just sort of fudged in some way or they're they're so vague things so I think that's our evolutionary evolved instinct speaking there and I don't think we should rely on that but you can't give a similar evolutionary explanation for the idea that the good of any one person in the universe is as important as the good of any other on a tangential tangential point there why does the contraceptive requirement or or the con yeah the contraceptive requirement of this moral case make a difference are we suggesting that it would be immoral for people for incest to take place where there's the possibility of a child because that child would be bought in an abnormal child seems to imply the idea that it's wrong to have children who are abnormal I think Jonathan had put that into the example to avoid evoking that reason for support for rejecting and I think a lot of people if he didn't would have said well exactly what you said they might have a child who would be abnormal and that would be bad wouldn't that be a bad reason anyway wouldn't the response be able to come just as the other the other attempted response they gave it's very easy to say well that's just that's a that's a bad response shouldn't you be able to say the same thing about well you'd have a disabled child well so what well firstly Hyde was trying to test responses to incest and these were not philosophers he wasn't trying to get into a philosophical discussion about those issues you trying to test this idea what she calls moral dumbfounding that we have these evolved intuitions and we can't really explain we can't really defend them when they're applied in situations where other reasons for thinking that those acts might be wrong don't apply right sure okay but it's a problem that that comes up a lot is sort of implied implied offenses that come with some of the moral theories we're talking about something that I've heard people criticize you for for instance is the analogies that you draw between the treatment of animals today and the treatment of black people or of women in the past and people say that isn't that drawing in a kind of implicit comparison between the two I think essentially that that is what you're doing in terms of drawing a comparison between the moral consideration of both but how do you respond to the critics who say that it's it's totally it's totally wrong to be suggesting that we can we can treat the suffering of animals in the same way that we treat so I'm certainly not suggesting that I never suggested that I think I'm pretty clear and when I write about that analogy that I'm referring to certain particular parallels that is that in all of these cases we have a dominant group an elite namely whites in the case of racism typically and males in the case of sexism that takes advantages of those who are outside that elite makes uses of them makes it turns them into slaves in one case you know turns them perhaps into practically slaves in the case of men and women in many societies and in the case of animals also turns them into slaves plowing the fields or something to ride but of course today the much more common and convenient use is to use them for food and in each of those cases not only do they do that because of the power that they have over the others but they develop an ideology the justice so the you know racism came with a whole ideology about the superiority of whites and in some cases supported by appeals to religion two verses in the Bible similarly with the case of men and women and identically in the case of humans and animals people justified this by saying yes and it says in Genesis that God has given man dominion over the animals so that's why we're entitled to do this so that's the parallel that I've been trying to draw I've never said that human sufferings are no different from animal sufferings I've never said that the differences between humans and animals no greater than the differences between a wife of blacks oh yes that would absolutely be absurd I hope nobody listening things that I wasn't implying that you'd made that comparison I meant that comparison that you mentioned between the ability to feel pain do you think that in terms of sensory pain alone so we're not talking about psychological pain which I know kind of comes along with it but in terms of just the fact the faculty for for feeling pain I know you right now Animal Liberation not only is it true that non-human animals might feel just as much pain as humans do but they might in fact feel more pain and also tagging on the idea that we were talking about a moment ago where a society in which more people are slightly less but we have we have a value on more people being in existence having having pleasurable experiences putting all this together I want to ask a difficult question that I've reflected on a lot and when I've been talking about this this is this is kind of a question which I've struggled to address that I've that I brought up to myself which is considering the different extent in terms of the number of sentient beings actually involved and how frequently and how badly they're being treated in terms of moral wrongness on this kind of more enlightened based on the the intrinsic value of pleasure of sentient beings in terms of moral wrongness what was more bad what is more bad between the modern animal agricultural industry and factory farming or the historical slave trade of human beings those are very difficult comparisons to make I think because I'm certainly prepared to recognize that Africans taken from their homes and their families and treated as slaves and then even when they got to the New World obviously families were broken up if they had children they might be taken away in enslaved and you know they have a different awareness of their situation and different possibilities so it's it's very hard to compare what they are suffering with what non-human animals suffer and as you say the numbers are vastly larger for non-human animals yeah that's the thing that I think makes a difference because I think I think you can easily say that because of the psychological trauma involved in the slave trade it was it was far worse for the individual because of the sheer number and the fact that it's likely to continue the sheer number there must be if we if we're going to use a principle and kind of look at it mathematically there must be this number of animal suffering that would outweigh a number of human beings suffering and with the sheer scale of the current agricultural industry if there is such a number surely we must have passed it by now I agree that in in principle there must be a number given as you know obviously there's some forms of slavery is it still exist but let's say we're talking about say in the European taking of Africans yes the slave trade to the new world and all of the terrible things that happened to slaves there so that's that's now finite it's over and I don't know what the number is but however many tens of millions perhaps but that's certainly small compared to the 74 billion animals that are currently raised at all any tiny each year it's not even close not even close true but I'm not prepared to say whether that number has already passed whether whether it's worse it's possible that it has I'm also not going to say it hasn't but I certainly think that yes in principle the amount of suffering that we inflict on animals could mean that our speciesism as such as an as a as an attitude and all the practices that flow from it are actually have actually done more harm caused more suffering and in that sense being worse than all of the terrible things yeah slavery did as well I think that's enough to answer the question because I think the the difficulty in that question lies in the intuition that many people have to just say that there is no number of animals that could suffer and die that would possibly outweigh something like slave trade because of the the sensitivities surrounding it that it seen it seems incredibly offensive to suggest that that could be the case but I think that morally if we're going to be mature about it we have to accept that and we're going to be principled about it and be consistent about it we have to admit that such a number would be reached but I'm interested again in in terms of speaking of the difficulty that people would have to actually accept these moral principles intuitively speaking another thought experiment would be something like if we were able to abolish the factory farming industry tomorrow but in order to do so and I know this isn't the Kay I'm not suggesting that this is what comes about through a vegan diet but just in a hypothetical situation in a possible universe where it does all human beings have to live mildly fatigued not not severely not such that they can't get out of bed but enough that they're noticeably tired every day and they're pretty uncomfortable about it the the pain of doing that would be nothing compared to the pain saved from the agricultural industry but could we really expect human beings to to accept that kind of arrangement to to diminish their well-being significantly but not so significantly that it outweighs the things that they're saving I feel like if you were to propose such situation in that possible world if you were to stand up in Parliament and say this is the law that we should we should bring in they probably laugh you out of the room and would they be would they be wrong in doing so well you may be right about what they would do but I do think they would be wrong to do so and the phrase that you used you know bring it up in Parliament and they laugh you out of the room is in fact exactly what happened when the first animal cruelty law was proposed in Britain in the early 19th century okay I did 10 or 12 or something like that when when when you know somebody proposed the law about beating beating kettles that you were driving to market or something and it was humanity dick Martin I think his name was he was known as humanity dick after that obviously and he was laughed out of the room and it took a decade or so I think before he brought it in so the fact that you're laughed out of Parliament doesn't mean that you're not right clearly and I think you're correct to say that people would not accept that we're not accepted now and possibly will never accept it but again that doesn't show that it wouldn't be the right thing to do should we expect it should should we expect human beings I mean I don't mean should we expect it as a matter of do we think they will but but morally speaking should we expect human beings to accept that kind of arrangement yes morally speaking speaking I think we should but as you rightly pointed out that's different from predicting that they ever will mmm what do you think it will I mean what is the best approach to get someone to understand that if they had to break their arm in order to in order to save the suffering of animals they have to they have to give up meat and all dairy products and they also have to break their arm in order to in order to get to this moral paradigm that we're talking about how can we possibly go about convincing somebody that that that would be worth it worth it for them yeah a B not but but that yeah I would want to convince them that was the right thing to do and then at least some of them perhaps because of what we were talking about earlier in terms of that desiring to be consistent and to do what they see is the right thing might then do it but yeah it's you know in general I hold quite a demanding ethic in not only with regard to animals but with regard to what we ought to do for people in extreme poverty and I recognize that the way people are at present they're they're very unlikely to fully comply with what I see is the right thing to do but if we and incrementally push them along to get closer to it perhaps one day not that I'll live to see it but perhaps one day people will start to think along more along the lines that I think they ought to do you think that the demandingness of an ethical theory can ever be a criticism of its ontology no I don't think so I know circumstances well not in not simply the fact that it's very demanding I think I think theories can be very demanding just because of that's the way the world is and they're demanding to us because as we've been saying all along we're creatures who have evolved from ancestors who acted in their own interests and in the interests of their offspring and we would not be here if they hadn't and we still have a lot of those same characteristics and that's why they're demanding to us but that's not a reason to show that it's not the right moral theory so in in the in the cliche hypothetical of some advanced civilization coming and discovering us and let's take you can imagine in thousands of examples like this but to take simple one whereby there mass-production of us for for meat to eat genuinely does as a matter of psychological states of their brain bring them more pleasure than we could ever experience in a lifetime including the balancing out of the pain experience of living in such a world could we be morally expected to just throw ourselves on the dinner plate because that's the right thing to do because again the expected not of prediction that were ever likely to do that nobody and I usually do that some people would say that because the demanding I mean I mean people would be able to accept like short okay according to the ethical theory that we're talking about actually the right thing to do there would be to say okay take me cut me up and eat me because I know that will maximize the pleasure but there's a sheer demandingness of that seems to seems to at least count against it in some small sense oh look I mean it you know because it is so demanding it's only something that philosophers are going to talk about and that's more or less the example that Bernie Williams puts up when he ends up saying in the article the human prejudice which I suppose is a kind of critique of used I've defended says the only question you ask then is is whose side are you on but I thought that was really really a letdown I mean that question whose side you're on obviously can be you know was our say in terms of people who didn't want to go and fight in the First World War you know what you you're not good British you're not fighting for king and country but in that war at least it would have been better if a lot of more people had said no I'm not just going to take sides because this is my country and you know Germans are taking sides because that's their country we could have saved an awful lot of unnecessary bloodshed if more of us had said it's not a case of whose side am I on it's a case of what we'll do the most good and I think you know therefore it's it's it's it's not right to simply say I we can resolve this moral dilemma by asking whose side are you on yeah because look I'm not saying that in a situation where the demandingness is is like you have to give up your life and your family in your home and everything you have to do you have to completely desolate yourself in order to live by this its moral standard I'm not saying that the demandingness of that would be enough to discredit doing so I'm just saying that that in some small sense it at least counts against it no maybe I'm not sure that I want to accept that but I suppose because but the problem is that if it does then we've got we've got a problem because now we're talking about we've at least we're now not talking about whether or not demandingness does affect a moral theory we're talking about how much it affects a mockery right yeah and that's why I'm writing to say that who does it all like this but you know obviously it would be nice if the moral views that came out to be the right ones were also ones that we could yea really expect people to do in the sense of you know most people would and we could then start to pick up the laggards and encourage them to till eventually we got to the point where everybody was doing that that would be nice I would be happy if the moral theories that I believed to be true well like that but we know at least many areas of life I think they're not yeah I just have to accept that but we can we can we can see these hypotheticals and and it's just because a moment ago when I asked you if you think demanding this can count against moral theories you said no like and but with this example I don't see any good reason to think that it that it that it doesn't well I'm not sure that I see a good reason to think that it does that either um I think probably I general principles I want to say the moaning this is not something that counts against I suppose one possible response would be to say that the level of psychological trauma involved in somebody actually doing this thing or the level of commitment it would require would be psychologically impossible and since all it implies can because you can't put yourself on a dinner plate like that you couldn't bring yourself to do it it would not be possible psychologically to put yourself in that position or accept that system that because it's because of that impossibility you therefore can't you can't morally obliged people to do something that they physically can't do that that's one way of I suppose yes and then we have to discuss whether the Audion plies can principle is is met in the sense of you know can't by what you described a psychological impossibility yeah and exactly what that means it's doesn't there's a sense in which it's not really impossible to throw yourself on the dinner plate and maybe you know one person in a million would do that thereby showing perhaps that it's in some sense it's possible for anyone to do it well as problematic because the only I see that as at the moment the only one I can see in terms of a good moral response to this problem of demanding assist is to make this point that actually it's psychologically impossible but if we're gonna speak technically then in in very basic moral moral decision-making procedures if people just aren't at the psychology to act morally and they just they just happen to be inclined to act immorally then technically speaking it's psychologically impossible for them to about it differently as well so so you you you run into a big kind of roadblock and free will comes into it and you you run to this thing where actually you can't make any ethical any ethical prescriptions because they're all psychologically impossible or they're all psychologically necessary so the only good response I can see against the demandingness criticism or all the criticism of the idea that the mining this doesn't count leads to leads to far more problems than the demandingness consideration would if we just accepted it yeah I think that's a good argument so I mean I would therefore conclude the perhaps demandingness does play a role in determining whether whether a moral theory is is how good at how good a moral theory is because the only other alternative to me would be to say that we can't make ethical prescriptions oh I didn't think that was where your argument was leading him maybe I missed something about I think I think that I think I must be where it takes us so I thought rather it was going the opposite way that once we start saying all implies can and this is psychologically impossible for you to do that then we're going to end up with a lot of whole lot of actions that we you know that people don't in fact do being ones that they couldn't do and therefore that's not of being justified in saying that they ought to do it in the first place hmm and if that's the case then I think we should just reject the connection between demandingness and the plausibility of the theory just then we don't get into that particular trouble sure because if you do reject but but but surely if you saying we should reject that that connection between divining this and fleurs ability but my point was that the only way we can reject demandingness and plausibility of the theory is is as far as I can see through this argument of psychological impossibility it seems the oh I don't think that's right no I think we can reject it just by saying that how likely it is that people will ever comply with a moral theory is independent from the truth of the moral theory hmm and the the moral theory is is true regardless of whether anybody will over act on it yeah I think I think I think that's fair and do you think it will be do you think it will be long before we reach a system a situation where Animal Ethics is taken as seriously because right now I think we can both be an agreement that ontologically speaking the there are there are essentially true things to be known about the immorality of the meat industry for instance but and and like we say that holds regardless of how many people actually agree with it do you think do you think we're getting there since 1975 I mean I know that looking at it in isolation looking at where we are in terms of the way we're treating animals now right now seems absolutely hopeless it seems like we're so far off that it's almost like it's almost not worth even trying because it's just so unthinkably so unthinkably wrong and so unthinkably difficult to change but then i also look at the progress that's been made since the 70s and I'm kind of unconvicted here I don't know where you're kind of level of optimism lies so I'm somewhat optimistic about us making progress on the level of ideas and attitudes particularly in don't quite know how to describe them now what you might have called Western nations or so the nations of Europe and North America and Australia and New Zealand and a number of other countries and I'll explain why in a moment I think this progress in terms of the treatment of animals unfortunately because of the increasing prosperity of Asia in particular China the number of animals in factory farms there is is much greater than it was when I wrote Animal Liberation in 1975 so in that sense you could say we've gone backwards in that there's more there's more human inflicted suffering going on on in animals now than there was in 1975 right but but in terms of the progress in in you know a number of countries I think it's it's quite impressive and you know just just to give you an example I gave a talk at Durham last night and I stayed overnight and I walked into the I was staying in the castle which is also a residential college at the University and so I walked into the you know kitchen west where students eat for breakfast and I was offered vegetarian sausages as part of the breakfast when I went one to put something on my muesli there was soy milk standing there you know in 1975 nobody would have thought of either of those things if there was any kind of choice as I described in the preface of Animal Liberation that episode that got me to thinking about animals was when I walked into Baylor College in Oxford and I was with somebody who had only just met and there was spaghetti with a sort of meat brown sauce on top was the was the only hot dish available but there was a salad so my friend rich ocation said is there meat in that spaghetti sauce and when he was told that there was he took the salad and that led me to asking him why he was doing that and that really led me to thinking about animals into writing animal liberation but that was the only choice he got you know there was no you know vegetarian hot dish offered even even for lunch or dinner let alone for breakfast so so there's a sense in which these things are much more accepted and they're accepted because there are at least you know particularly around universities but not only a lot of people who are aware of issues with eating meat many of them animal related issues many of them now of course also climate related issues yes and as part of that progress I think there have been a number of specific legislative improvements so not again not everywhere but if you look at the European Union which is a reasonably large and diverse entity throughout the European Union it's illegal to keep hens in the kinds of cages laying hens I'm talking about that they were that I described in the first edition of animal liberation cages have to be significantly larger they have to have nesting boxes for the hens to lay their eggs in rather than just on bare wire it's similarly prohibited to keep veal calves in crates that they can't even turn around in leather so narrow they can only take maybe half a step forward or backwards and otherwise can't walk at all similarly for the sows the mothers of the pigs who were sent to market they were also standardly kept in those stalls that's also illegal across the entire European market and in some jurisdictions outside Europe as well so I think those things are significant progress and they're particularly progress in terms of signs of people's attitudes to animals having moved in a positive direction not nearly far enough of course as we've been saying and unfortunately not worldwide but it's it's a reason for not just despairing about the whole but I mean is that something - is that something to celebrate or is it something to say it's about down time what's next it is about damn time and you know but I think you do need to have some celebrations actually you know you were talking a lot about psychology and what we can expect from people sure I think that if people in the animal movement focus only on the continuing atrocities that we inflict on animals they will feel that it's all hopeless and go away and not do something like it's important to think of the positives as well I see but to give I mean to give listen as a point of reference I remember when it was it was legalized for women to drive in Saudi Arabia and it was celebrated all over Twitter people people were so happy about it I remember thinking what are you will talking about why are we celebrating this that's it that's absurd again it's not it's not something it's not morally virtuous to do this it's a moral obligation and so it's not well done for having done this it's like you're awful for not having done it so far if you see what I'm saying it's like kind of looking at it in the wrong framework and I look at a lot of the things that are happening now like I wonder and perhaps I am more sympathetic then to the kind of abolitionist approach rather than the rather than this kind of progressional approach but I look at things like when people do meatless Monday or something I'm interested see what do you think about this because to me it's like the equivalent of saying well you know I let my slaves run free on a weekend it's like well that's not good that's not good enough if you recognize that it's bad enough to stop doing it on Monday and why are you still doing it on Tuesday so that's the way I view how do you feel when people have these kind of these approaches where it's like will will cut down a little bit it that seems to recognize that there seems to imply a recognition of the immorality of it and yet why is that not enough to make them stop altogether now you're looking at it from the point of view attitude should we have to the people who understand fully the nature of the problem and are still eating meat on Tuesday and congratulating themselves for having meatless Mondays that's one perspective and I don't really disagree with you about that but another perspective is to say if we could get everybody in the UK let's say are having meatless Mondays that would be the same as getting 1/7 of the population of the UK to become vegetarian and we're more likely to succeed in getting everybody in the UK or most people in the UK to give up meat one day a week than we are to get the equivalent number to give up meat all the time so from the point of view of reducing animal suffering and reducing our contribution to climate change let's do the tactic that is more likely to have those beneficial effects so from the campaigners point of view I think it makes sense to campaign from for meatless Mondays I just I don't know if I could do it because it would seem to betray my moral principle it would seem to imply that I'm not taking it seriously if I'm willing to kind of if I'm willing to fall tries if I'm willing to make what are essentially what's the word compromise compromises you're essentially compromising on your ethical principle and this is something I see to be is the most important moral emergency of our of our era how can I be expected to compromise on something as important as that I mean we're talking about unthinkable levels of suffering happening every single time every single day every single minute but in the in the course of this conversation an unthinkable level of suffering has gone on for no other reason than the fact that people just just like the taste of meat that's not I can't see myself kind of saying well that may be true but maybe we should just kind of like loosen our approach and say that it's better to do something and nothing is like no like this needs to end now with no moral exception as a matter of a moral principle and I feel like if I can't express that in in the form of activism then I'm betraying myself ok then I would say to you don't go down that path continue to act for animals in a way that you feel is not betraying yourself and is consistent with with what you believe but if there are other people who are more pragmatic by temperament in terms of what they do and feel that they're not portraying themselves because they are reducing animal suffering don't don't don't oppose them let them get on with with what they're comfortable doing because we should recognize that it is having good consequences you think I'd be doing more harm than good to be an activist with that approach with the abolitionist approach not if you don't attack the other groups I think the the abolitionists who perhaps have done more harm than good are those who have actually spent a lot of time and energy in trying to thwart the incrementalist sure and that's really really such a waste I think I really have be used in a good direction I remember reading I don't know where you said that's or even if you said this because I read somebody had said that you had said it maybe you didn't this is a good opportunity to check but they said something like you were once asked if you if you order a meal at a restaurant and it and it comes with with cheese on top or something and you've got the choice between sending it back and saying you know give them give me what I asked for or just kind of shrugging your shoulders and eating it it might be best to just shrug your shoulders and eat it because in front of your friends you don't want to make it seem like a difficult thing to do you don't want it to seem like you're you have to be that guy that you want it to be more appealing and easy for them to jump on this bandwagon but the other that the reason to do the opposite and send it back is to say that if you do just say whatever and eat it with the cheese then then people will look at you and say oh well he's not taking his moral principle seriously so why should i I mean which approach do you - and is that something that you've said yeah probably is something that I've said yes and that that is consistent with the kinds of things that I think about so you would you would just eat the cheese in that case yes it's come anyway we assume that if I send it back it's just gonna be thrown out it's not gonna do any good and let's also assume that I I know that I'm with friends who understand me reasonably well and they know that I didn't order the cheese yeah they wouldn't or ordered it but in these circumstances I would eat it yeah okay so that's circumstantial let me give you another fact I can give you an actual example that I suffer pretty badly from hay fever and this morning I went to get some havior tablets and I couldn't I couldn't none of them or vegan essentially now if I say to my friends who suffer awfully from hay fever who are just just horribly snotty just just awful eyes itchy everywhere and I say no no you you can't get your cetera cien hydrochloride to make that go away because it contains animal products or should I just say no no it's fine just just do it just just just get it because as long as you're kind of trying your best if we kind of have this cultural philosophical revolution in terms of food then the rest of the industries will follow along so it doesn't matter too much and and you don't want them to think like it's too hard to do because if I say to them no you can't have your hay fever tablets then they're probably not gonna want to go vegan so what about a situation like that where it's not like an accidental thing they have to actively go and buy that product but if I tell them they can't then it's going to be much harder to make them go vegan what should i what counsel should I give my friend in that situation well for me I think you can trade off the benefits to them which in this case seemed to be very great with against the relatively well very small contribution that you're making two additional animal suffering to the profits of the animal industry in this case you know this is my utilitarianism operating here clearly that I think and I when I talk about it this in in Animal Liberation and elsewhere I think really what I'm writing right is I'm addressing people in terms of what they eat who can walk into a supermarket find a wide array of food which is both vegan and non vegan and nourish themselves adequately from the vegan selection and then they ought to take the vegan selection so that's and then people will say you know ok but what about if you're living in Alaska I knew it you've always traditionally gone you know fishing and for lots of the season you wouldn't really be able to nourish you well well yeah that just seems to me a completely different situation and nothing about my views would imply that we ought to go up there until they knew it people that they shouldn't be eating fish but they're so they're okay to be doing so if they're yeah so if that's the way that they live and they don't want to move to the city which you know would disrupt their lifestyle and all the rest of it I'm I don't think it's it's I'm not gonna go and tell them that they should stop I mean I could just as easily say like my lifestyle is one where I like to eat Mead I like to shop at certain stores I like to go to KFC like who are you to tell me that I need to completely uproot my entire diet go to a different shop maybe spend more money have to have to learn about nutrition have to kind of take a course make sure I'm getting everything right check all the labels all this kind of stuff is it's so so inconvenient but that inconvenient compared to uprooting your lifestyle but but then uprooting your lifestyle in the way that in a new it would have to is nothing compared to the suffering that the animals are going through still I think you know maybe in some future world when sort of people are people in Europe or North America or wherever are not causing more suffering to animals than traditional hunter-gatherers are doing then we might think about having that discussion with them but yeah I just find a utilitarian principle it's difficult to suggest that the pain that somebody would have to go through in uprooting their life and moving to the city is in any way worse than the pain that the animals who they're currently eating our experience I'm not saying it's worse but I'm saying that I'm saying that there are cases there are so many people who are inflicting more suffering on animals with much less cause for doing so that that's where we ought to be focusing our concerns but then so my answer to that would be that it's still wrong for those people to eat meat but maybe we be focusing our concerns Harrogate I agree with you on that like we should really be focusing on the more important issues but they're still they're still wrong or they're still they're still doing what it would is was morally incorrect yeah sure okay well that's that's fantastic then I think given the the breadth of the disagreement that we've had throughout the conversation a point where we can agree might be a good place to end so it's been a pleasure and a privilege to have you here and it's it's gonna be great I might see you I know you're speaking at the Oxford Union tomorrow debating the motion this house believes it's immoral to be a billionaire is that right that's correct which and I'm opposing your your aversion to some people who've read feminine fluency morality might be surprised about yeah see I I kind of when I saw you on the list I thought that makes sense I could see why do that and I remember when I told friends I said we should go to the Union Peter Singh is coming to debate this motion and they will kind of just go it in proposition right and and they're amazed it amazed to find not but I imagine that because they film all the events so I'm not sure when this episode is going out but there's a chance that that footage might already be online by the time people listening to this so it's something making they can go and listen to but I think that would be an interesting one good I have they will listen and I'll try to be there but yes thank you thank you for being here it's been a great conversation I'll remind my listeners that if you enjoy this this podcast you it really helps to give us a rating on on iTunes it helps us with the algorithm puts us on the front page better statistics can reach out to two wonderful guests as we've been able to do so so far so thank you all for listening thank you for staying with us with that said I've been Alex O'Connor as always and in today I've been in conversation with Professor Peter Singer [Music] [Applause] [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Alex O'Connor

Views: 161,789

Keywords: Alex O'Connor, cosmic, skeptic, cosmicskeptic, atheism, Peter Singer, podcast, utilitarianism, animals, vegan, vegetarian, animal liberation, ethics, morality, pleasure, hedonism

Id: tSEfiPm_YRE

Length: 90min 56sec (5456 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 22 2019