Veganism Reconsidered | Earthling Ed and CosmicSkeptic

my views are that the levels of sentient animals have somewhat determines the rights that they should have the moral argument i think only has credibility when you have hunters who are specifically looking for weak animals or ill animals or very old animals i wouldn't say those people are vegan but what i would say is they're morally justified in not being vegan 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] [Music] so welcome back to the cosmic skeptic podcast everybody i'm alex o'connor your host and i'm joined today by the wonderful the illustrious the the prolific earthling ed alex real name ed winters and recent author of this is vegan propaganda and other lies that the meat industry tells you ed welcome back thank you for having me first i think repeat guest on a podcast i haven't done that many episodes but it's been quite a while since we last spoke we spoke i think in 2019 and that was just after i gave up animal products and so i was kind of new to the whole thing and it was a bit of an inquiry into the vegan position i like to think i've learned a thing or two since then about this movement i think you definitely have but it's also raised quite a lot of questions um about the specificities of veganism and kind of particular questions about how we should go about advocating or living out a vegan lifestyle yeah but i think uh because of the fact that there will be people watching who haven't seen our first podcast and maybe are unfamiliar with your work i think it'll be a good place to start to talk about veganism generally you're not going to do the story of how you became vegan because you've done that 100 000 times already but what i do want to talk about is in your view to be clear with our terms what veganism is what it is that you're actually advocating people do um i guess like a definitional starting point so yeah welcome back and i guess the first question is what is veganism yeah i mean it's it's a simple question but also a relatively complex question i suppose in terms of the context of how we live veganism the i guess the formal definition um is to live in a way that excludes as far as as possible and practicable the exploitation and use of of of animals not human animals and so i suppose in tangible terms that means eliminating some of the primary aspects of uh you know for which we explain animals so meat dairy eggs of course clothing like leather wool down fur and then obviously avoiding cosmetics tests on animals and those are kind of like the broader more obvious ones but the definition i supposed to use that word specificity which is a bit of a mouthful right and that's part of the interesting i guess nuance of this conversation and i know that maybe you had a couple of questions that we were going to dive into kind of more catered around that but i think that there is this nuance which exists and to kind of go off on a really random tangent straight off the bat a lot of things that people always say to me you know they'll say similar things and one of the things that i always hear from people is you know i suppose like why do we have to be vegan like what is this reason to be vegan now and it comes down to that notion of choice and so this notion of reducing as far as as possible and practicable i suppose comes down to the fact that we have an option which we haven't necessarily had in the past where we can be vegan now in a way that we weren't able to be 100 years ago certainly not a thousand years ago let's say so that's where it becomes i guess a prevalent moral issue of our time because it is now possible and is now practicable in a way that hasn't been before yes um i think the operative word in the definition of veganism that the vegan society uses and that you've alluded to there is practicable or possible as you put it also there and one of the questions that i find most difficult to answer when talking to people about veganism is what the bounds of practicability are because there's an interpretation which essentially says when you think of our hunter-gatherer ancestors or you think of people living in places on the planet right now where it's genuinely impossible to get vegetables and we think well because it's not practical for them to be vegan or at least it's not practical for them to to remove animal products from their diet it would be unfair to say everyone should be vegan and to be vegan is to include something that some people can't do right yeah but of course there are situations in the world today where people might describe themselves as being in a position of it being quite impractical for them to go vegan but they're not talking about needing to rely on hunter hunting and gathering so imagine for example look if i was giving a speaking tour and maybe i'm even giving a speaking tour about veganism yeah and so i spend a lot of my days on the train traveling and a lot of the time the only place i'm able to get some food is at the train station or from a corner shop and sure because i'm traveling for so long it transpires that if i were to eat entirely vegan food the whole time i was on that tour i wouldn't be able to sustain my nutritional requirements maybe even if i was taking a multi-vet even if i brought some huel along with me you know a situation like that it doesn't seem like the kind of crazy extreme uh type of situation that we'd usually say somebody's justified in eating a pig or a cow but it does seem like it's perhaps worthy of a label of impractical or impracticable i don't know what you think about a situation like that well i mean it i've been in situations obviously there's degrees now i've been in situations where i've done speeches or have been to areas where there is limited to no vegan food available and you really are kind of scraping the barrel to find something but by and large it's always workable and i've nev i've never felt that i needed to to not eat something that was plant-based in those moments now i think we have to look at there is you know there are these degrees where we have and so often people say to me look you know it is unrealistic to expect everyone to go vegan and i think it's absolutely fine to admit that that's true in fact it's important because the last thing we want to see him is is dogmatic or ideologically naive and you know i i would say that for a significant number of people in the world there isn't the options that we have and you could maybe even make the argument that i mean i don't know i don't know if i could say majority but there's definitely a significant number of people where it's not possible and i think what the roadblock we run into sometimes is people can be disingenuous and they can apply that that knowledge of it not being possible for everyone and then apply it to themselves as a way of trying to detract from their own personal responsibility and so what i mean by that is it would be easy in a situation where it's difficult to then say well not everyone has to be or it's not always going to be possible so therefore i'm not going to push myself as much as i could in this moment and i think the situation you're describing is one where it might be inconvenient but probably doesn't um make it justifiable to buy something else from potentially you could have prepared a bit more earlier in advance or or stocked up somewhere where you knew there was an option available yeah i guess you could say that if there is uh an injustice somewhere in here it's in the fact that you didn't prepare properly embark on the speaking tour um i wonder like if somebody were looking for advice in a specific situation as to what the kinds of things they're looking for in order to judge whether something is actually practical or not i mean imagine if you were on you're on holiday in rome and you don't really know the area very well and you you're off to see the vatican in like an hour's time or something and you've got your booking yeah and you're looking for someone to eat because you're very hungry and you find a place but because you're in rome everyone's doing fresh fresh pasta and it's all put egg in it right yeah so you sit down and everything has egg now in theory you could stand up look around like just just walk and walk and walk until you find somewhere that will serve you food that doesn't have any animal products in it you're probably there if you do that going to miss the booking you're not going to get to go to the vatican it's going to mess you up quite a lot you're going to have to walk around quite a lot it's going to inconvenience all of your friends this kind of stuff yeah and sure maybe you should have planned better but in this case you didn't sure so a person decides you know what i'm just going to eat the egg pasta do you think that they've committed an injustice in that situation yes you could just not eat for a couple of hours you know none of us in a situation where the skipping of one meal is going to have a huge detrimental impact on our health unless of course we have diabetes or some sort of um medical condition that means that we need to you know constantly eat or make sure that we have regulated blood sugar so for the for the average person i would say no but for the for the diabetic for they would be prepared because they don't expect to be in a situation such as this i suppose that's true but like i guess in the in the abstract here yeah that would be justifiable if perhaps the reason well even if they did not plan even if it was like their fault that they hadn't planned they're still in a situation where there's a medical requirement to eat this food and i think that would count as the kind of thing probably i mean a medical requirement yeah when it when it comes down to an issue of health it you know becomes it becomes different let's you know let's say you're taking a medication you have to take a medication that medication has been tested on animals so you know you could justify taking that medication because it's a matter of health and so if you're in a situation you need um you know you whatever happens is happening with your blood sugar needs something to to eat and you know the only option you have is that egg pasta is in front of you otherwise you're going to pass out and potentially harm yourself then you could find a justifiable reasoning in there to eat the egg pasta but for the everyday person who doesn't need to eat you know at these regimented times and who could skip a meal or or be an inconvenience and run off or even the worst thing in the world missed the booking for the vatican you know i think that's a a punishment that is you know is a worthwhile punishment based on the fact that it's your own i suppose disregard that has put you in this situation to begin with um i mean there are a few things to iron out there i mean there's the consideration that buying that particular piece of pasta isn't going to contribute largely but i think we're both on the same page as why that would still potentially be wrong yeah um i wonder like not to sound a bit kind of facetious but i mean we you talk about health yeah and i think a common vegan talking point is when somebody says it's unhealthy to be vegan the answer is to say no it's not it is healthy to be vegan yeah and that's why you have an obligation to do so the corollary seems to be that if it were unhealthy we'd have an obligation or not an obligation a permissibility to eat animal products the issue i have with this is that health seems like quite an ill-defined term because of course we can think about somebody being a diabetic we can think about somebody starving we can think about these kinds of things but i don't know i mean if if like if by going vegan you became three foot shorter you know something like that maybe you're a basketball player maybe this is something that's very important to you is that the kind of like health requirement that could be taken into consideration it's a great question isn't it i think about this often and i try and work out if let's say the the reality was reversed and let's say that being vegan increased your risk of getting colon cancer or being vegan increased your risk of having a stroke or you know having diabetes how much of an increase would it need to be to make it justifiable to not be vegan you know 10 increase 20 i i have no idea let's say that being vegan cut five years off your average lifespan would that make it something that you you wouldn't need to do now i mean it's easy to sit in the position we're in because that's not not a risk so it's easy for me to kind of theorize that no that would still not make it morally justified to to factory families animals and cause all of this suffering but in that situation where this where the reality was reversed who knows what we would say i actually don't know but i think it's interesting because there has to be some health repercussions that would be acceptable you know some health repercussions that would make it uh still immoral to consume animal products but the opposite is true as well there must be a limit to what is permissible from a health perspective before it becomes justified to do what we do and i'm not sure where that line is yeah what do you think well i don't know it's actually it's one of the reasons why i wanted to raise it with you because of course in practice if somebody's asking you for advice you can say well look let's look at your situation and let's just see what our intuitions scream at us but when you're talking in the abstract when you're talking just making a philosophical case for veganism and somebody asks well look in principle what does this word practicability mean because i make quite a uh i put quite a lot of emphasis on the fact that veganism involves this essence of practicability and actually i wonder if you agree with me on this so because the definition of veganism that i use is a minimization of and you know maybe it's suffering maybe it's exploitation that varies too but to the highest extent practicable if you have somebody like who's living in northern canada and they genuinely it's too expensive for them to import vegetables and so it is actually impracticable or maybe they're the diabetic in the situation that we spoke about and so this person eats animals but they're eating as little as they practically can is that person a vegan well the way i see it is i i think it's important that we have veganism as a as a clear definition i think when we lose the definition of veganism or it becomes it is it starts to lose its meaning and so i guess what i mean by that is i wouldn't say those people are vegan but what i would say is they're morally justified in not being vegan so i think that there's a difference so i think that we should keep veganism as being what it means but then at the same time understand that you can be a moral person and not be vegan in these situations which we're maybe alluding to right now is there not a potential contradiction lurking here in that if we if we define veganism as a minimization to the highest extent practicable of animal suffering and death and then you meet somebody who is eating animals but they are minimizing animal suffering and death to the highest extent practicable and you say well i don't want to call them a vegan but if that isn't that the definition of veganism that we're working with because i agree with you that it can be a bit un unhelpful sometimes a bit unclear to say that yes an inuit living in northern canada eating animals that they hunt is a vegan yeah but i think if we don't do something like that it might come at the cost of our consistency in the definition well potentially so and i think you do raise a a valid point which is that both through both our definitions you could argue that none of us are vegan or you know more than just you know more people are vegan than maybe it seems obvious through through kind of like this situation you're describing now and i think there probably is the argument that there is some inconsistency there but at the same time i think that we do run the risk of losing this meaning of what being vegan means and i would argue that probably the inuit living in in north america or the north northern parts of america probably doesn't really care too much about this this term vegan and it's not something that they particularly uh are interested in having as part of their identity yes and so i feel like maybe we run the risk of diluting it for a reason that's not even even even that important yeah it's essentially a terminological dispute right i mean this is something that happens a lot in the discussion around religion and atheism there's this huge debate about whether an atheist to someone who believes there is no god or if an atheist is someone who doesn't believe that there is a god and people they lose friends over this kind of stuff but essentially it's just a definition i think what we're interested in is correct or justifiable action rather than calling yourself the the most appropriate thing but yeah so you talked about this idea of like well maybe none of us are vegan by a particular definition or maybe like we need to define veganism at least if a person is vegan let's say what that means is that that person doesn't eat animal products yeah something like this right but there's a there's a question which i briefly mentioned to you um uh at one point before i think i've messaged you about it and i wonder if you have any thoughts on this and that is the question of eating non-essential vegan food because as anybody who's kind of had a bit of familiarity with the vegan discussion will will be aware um animals are killed in crop production right like vegans are responsible for killing animals too sure and when somebody brings this up there's a problem you have a whole video on this the the big question that vegans can't answer something like this the answer is to say well look i mean far less crops are used to feed a human being than it used to feed livestock and so if we eat the crops directly then we kill less animals in in crop production but if animals die in plant-based agriculture to produce things like vegan chocolate vegan cakes that is non-essential vegan food then by eating those products we are buying food that directly contributes towards the death and suffering of animals that we don't need to be doing so it seems to me like there we are contributing unnecessarily to the suffering and death of animals which doesn't seem like a very vegan thing to do yeah well it's an overconsumption issue isn't it and i think that whether it's foods uh clothing whatever it might whatever it may be we have an issue broadly speaking in society where we consume too much of most things right and so when it comes to this idea of you know what is not essential i guess firstly it's quite hard to determine what is essential now we could take essential as just meaning you know two and a half thousand calories a day uh making sure you hit your nutrient allowance and then you could make the argument well if i've hit my nutrient allowance or my nutrient you know goals with 2 000 calories well i've got 500 calories spare having a piece of chocolate cake or whatever it may be could be classified as essential because i need those extra calories so right i don't think it's it seemed maybe that the line you were drawing was between like healthy and unhealthy and you're using like unhealthy as being non-essential but unhealthy doesn't have to be non-essential a lot of people rely on healthy foods to meet their caloric intake so i think it's just more about an over consumption issue and we shouldn't be consuming above and beyond what we what we need because then we have health problems as well and that obviously brings about a huge problem to society and to individual health so i think it's just more about being responsible and not over consuming what we should be consuming anyway and that would somewhat alleviate that problem i think that makes sense we could potentially draw out a more specific answer by looking at a at a problem case like we have a situation in which a person has a choice through for whatever reason to to either eat and if one product doesn't do it let's say they have to do it every day for the whole week or something they're eating vegan food and they know that a certain number of animals are being killed in crop production in order to produce that food right and it's probably like a few it's not just like one right but they do have the opportunity because of where they live to maybe go hunting or maybe you know they have a neighbor who has chickens in their in their back guard and this kind of thing and so still things that we see as morally problematic if we don't need to do them but faced with the choice between eating killing that one animal and eating the animal and eating the vegan alternative which is killing more animals in crop production i don't think this is always the case of course because in like factory farming far more crops are used yeah but if a person were in a situation where they they eat a bit of chicken or a bit of steak or a bit of elk whatever yeah and it kills less animals than eating a vegan alternative that kills more animals in crop production what's the correct thing to do and i guess separately what's the vegan thing to do and are they the same thing well i mean to kind of just go briefly back back to the original question we were discussing i think that the benefit of you know supporting plant-based agriculture now is where demanding that plant-based agriculture become more efficient become more ethical you know we look at things like vertical farming or kind of more regenerative systems of plant-based agriculture that are focused you know less on efficiency of production but more on sustainability and um morality of production i think that those advancements will be driven from this demand for these for these plant-based foods and i think that the risk we have is by i guess normalizing the consumption of animal products we are less likely to pursue a more preferable system of plant-based production there was a paper actually on crop deaths and joe rogan cited in that video you referenced of mine i speak about this paper and the paper basically starts by saying that they estimate about 7.2 billion animals are killed in in crop production annually but the conclusion of the paper is that actually in the future it should be possible to produce plants without killing any animals through things like vertical farming systems and so i think what we should be doing is is supporting plant-based agriculture with an eye to the future wherein that future which we can create would be a future that is focused on reducing crop deaths as well because hopefully as we move more into a vegan society we will look to produce plants in a way that is more in harmony with the you know the morality and beliefs around veganism but i don't dodge your question to come back to the question that you're alluding to let's say with with uh backyard eggs for example you know there is probably a situation where you can justify consuming backyard eggs and not have too much of a moral uh problem with that but with this specific thing we're talking about those those hens will be fed something and they'll be fed chicken feed which is of course something that's grown and harvested and the same problems exist but with the hunting one i think what's interesting there is i suppose there's a couple of ways of looking at it the first is when we talk about food systems i suppose the word system you know heavily implies a form of production that can feed the masses you know hunting obviously can't so if we if we separate hunting into kind of individual um i guess damage but and societal harm as well from a societal perspective the notion of hunting being a food system obviously doesn't work you know we can't feed everyone with a with a system of hunting because if you want to do canned hunting which is where they you know breed animals in these kind of contained zones that doesn't work because you're still feeding them something but even with kind of truly wild animals um let's look at the us there's 30 million deer 360 million people thereabouts so you can't feed everyone with a hunting system and actually the ecological damage of doing so would be catastrophic so that doesn't work so we still should be preferring a plant-based food system or you know kind of you know lending more credibility i suppose in validity to a plant-based food system but i suppose from an individual perspective what becomes interesting to me is the hunting argument or i guess the moral aspect of the hunting argument often comes down to things like um you know what we're talking about now with crop production deaths but also i suppose the idea that there is too many deer or too many of moose or elk and it's actually morally preferable to hunt them because it reduces the risk of starvation and reduces the risk of dying from horrible disease which obviously happens to wild animals i guess the main problem with that is hunters are killing animals in in their prime you know in nature there is kind of like a system of checks and balances where um the weaker the older animals the ones who were taken by the the predators because they don't have the the legs to be able to run as fast as they used to be able to you know have the stamina to be able to evade danger and so i think you you know it the moral argument i think only has credibility when you have hunters who are specifically looking for weak animals or ill animals or very old animals and and looking to kind of like i suppose hunt in that way but that's not the situation we have you know these are very healthy animals the big stags are the big antlers and so actually that is robbing an animal of a life which you know from a natural perspective would be much longer than it would have been if they had been hunted so i think that's potentially when the moral aspects of hunting becomes slightly tenuous is the argumentation that's used i don't think actually plays out in the actions they partake in um it's like a reverse natural selection instead of uh the survival of the fittest yeah it's the exact opposite survival of the weakest because hunters are picking off the strong and well suited it's quite disastrous to the ecosystem i mean what's fascinating is they've seen in certain species of wild animals that genetic traits have gone in the opposite direction of what you'd expect so um their horns have become smaller because it's scene is less desirable so evolution has taken over in a different way where it's trying to stop these animals from looking or being as desirable as as they would have been you know if evolution had continued in the path linear pathway and it's interesting when uh one of the when you consider the element of people liking to claim that this stuff is natural it's like well in many ways it's not just unnatural it's it's exactly unnatural it's the exact opposite yeah what a process of natural selection would be doing um not of course that nature would be a good thing to appeal to when trying to judge our ethical conduct anyway um i guess i'm interested in seeing what your what your principled position is here just to kind of round up this particular problem which is i guess is it always the case that the action you take that results in the least amount of animal suffering and or death is the vegan action or are there situations in which you could potentially at least in principle be responsible for more animal death and suffering but be vegan this is this is i guess the the problem i guess it's kind of an objection to this idea of defining people as vegan only if they don't eat animal products is that if there happened to arise a situation in which it genuinely were the case that by eating an egg eating a bit of chicken something like this it contributed to less animal suffering than eating some kind of vegan alternative did and you're right that maybe we should be eating in such a way as to vote for the future that we want right but in the situation that that person is in right there in that particular decision is is it the case that a person can kind of kill more animals and say it's the more vegan thing to do because for me that that just seems a little strange it seems counterintuitive right i'm hesitant to make a declaration one way or the other i'm hesitant to make the declaration in saying that that is not true because i think it can be dangerous to have um definitive opinions on something when it's it's hard to be able to categorically say why that would be the case if you know what i mean now i i guess theoretically if it was that let's say harming this one chicken meant that ten you know fewer chickens were killed overall i you know i guess a kind of utilitarian perspective would say that that was the preferable thing to do but i guess i'm not sure if where that situation necessarily exists even with the case of hunting you know you you kill one elk hunters will make the claim well you know that that elk feeds me for a year and that may well be true but it's also not the only food you're consuming yes so i guess theoretically if you you know if being a carnivore was this healthy amazing thing to do and killing one elk fed you for an entire year well maybe there's there's some argument there but that's just not the reality that we live in so i don't think i can't think of a tangible example which necessarily subscribes to what you were asking yes do you have any um i don't have any that i would confidently say yeah i i know that this results in less suffering i think the reason why it's useful to to talk about it is because a lot of the time people make an argument that there's some particular form of vegan action that actually kills more animals you know eating plants kills more animals this kind of thing and there are there are two discussions to to have about that the first is to say like yes it does or no it doesn't the second is to say well if it does or if it doesn't does that matter in terms of what our practice should be it seems to me that like i would agree with you than the vast majority of cases at least yeah um it is actually the case that being a vegan is going to harm less animals that's kind of our thing sure yeah but i would quite trivially in my view accept the conditional that if a particular action results in less animal suffering and death that is just going to be the the right course to take um and so i i agree with you that i it seems like you're implying that maybe you agree with me there that conditionally it would be the case if it caused more animal suffering that that would be the the wrong thing to do but because that never materializes it kind of doesn't matter well i think it would be i think it would be strange to say that the reason we're vegan is to reduce animal suffering but then take the approach that abiding by i suppose a definition or a concept of what being a vegan means more generically i don't think that that should be more important than actually abiding by the philosophy of reducing suffering right you know if i because then we're we're using veganism as an identity and we're we're saying that the identity is more you know important than the actual philosophy behind it so i think theoretically yes that there is an argument that could be made there which it feels weird to say but you know we do live in an imperfect world and so even with most moral discussions there are nuances and situations that don't neatly fit into where we'd like them to fit so i guess theoretically what you're saying is probably true but of course in real terms we would agree that the vast majority of of cases at least the ones that we partake in every single day the choices that we have it's relatively clear cut what does cause or reduce um suffering the most i think one thing i think is interesting actually and one thing i think we need more transparency over with with food in general is is the production of food and i guess what i mean by that is there are obviously some foods plant foods that are going to cause more suffering than others you know take iceberg lettuce for example an iceberg lettuce has next to no calories nutritionally is rubbish so what's the benefit of eating iceberg lettuce because if animals are dying in the production of iceberg lettuce but it also offers us as humans basically nothing even from a flavor perspective i mean what even you know it doesn't offer anything morally why would we produce that so really i suppose what would be interesting is looking at the caloric and nutritional density of foods and then making decisions around that you know opting to consume things like brown rice for example or you know kale because they're very nutritionally dense foods over foods that are less nutritionally dense because that way we can get more but also reduce suffering overall so i guess i guess what i'm saying is that we should probably look towards in the future the different plant foods and the scale of suffering they cause you know for example foods grown on trees require less fertilizers of course you know you don't have animals being harmed during the harvesting because you're just plucking avocados or apples or oranges from trees so morally speaking that is probably preferable to a food that's grown in the ground and is churned up using a combine harvester so i think that there is an interesting discussion there about you know how we should segregate plant foods and the morality of certain plant foods because it seems fairly obvious to me that they're not all equal when it comes to you know the morality of the consumption that's interesting it's i can imagine in a world where there were no animal agriculture directly but animals were still killed in crop production maybe the equivalent of us would be people who are trying to raise awareness for this thing that they might call veganism which is you know the the exclusion of animal suffering so only eat those foods that don't cause animal death they'd be advocating the same thing as we are right now but instead of you know don't force a pig into a gas chamber it's like don't use a combine harvester that's right there's kind of like a a second order discussion about reducing animal suffering in um in even plant-based agriculture and i do want to talk about the the methods involved because one of the things that i think your book is most useful for especially for someone like me is that you have a chapter the third chapter quite a chunky one in which you basically just describe quite dispassionately you just explain what's actually happening to animals and factory farms and it's like you don't even really need to make an argument as to why we should end it it's kind of um self-evident to anyone who reads it i don't want to talk about that but just beforehand you've mentioned reducing suffering a few times now and i wonder is that is that the vague principle that you're trying to trying to uh live by here reducing suffering i guess the main debate that i'm trying to poke at here is between the the consequentialists who think that we should reduce suffering and the deontologists who think that people have rights and animals have rights that are inviolable even if it's going to cause less suffering they have a right to something that you can't violate i wonder what you're more kind of in line with but the problem i have i suppose with with that idea is both seem inherently flawed you know there seems to be fairly obvious logical inconsistencies with with both i mean obviously if you had to choose between killing 10 people and killing one person killing one person would be morally preferable but at the same time if the objective is to reduce suffering how far do you take that you know i suppose i suppose i i use the words i use the phrasing reduce suffering and i guess that is probably the principle i align with more i don't think that there is anything categorically or always well there are there are some things but i think by and large most moral issues there are situations where they could become justified so i don't think it's it's very easy to say that everything is always categorically wrong yeah because there's probably always some hypothetical that you can think of where the action would be justified so i think reducing suffering is probably the principle i live more in alignment with but the question always is how far do you take that because you know if we wanted to reduce suffering the most then non-existence would would be the furthest reduction of suffering possible but i i don't i don't advocate for eugenics you know i don't advocate for you know the the elimination of life because the elimination of life would be the elimination of suffering but that seems to be the the logical conclusion to this pursuit of reducing suffering as much as is possible yeah interesting i mean a lot of people for that reason think that veganism of a kind certainly consequentialist veganism would entail for instance antenatalism right yes yes it's immoral to have children because of the the suffering that you're inflicting upon these beings and the way to minimize suffering in the most let's say reliable way would be to stop having children i'm sure people would be interested in your views on that but that's not as you say that's not something you advocate for i think it'd be almost unfair to uh to press you on that right now but i think uh it would be interesting to see if you you're thinking let's say consistently in terms of which moral principle you use with humans and animals so a common consequentialist problem is is to say as you say if you have to kill one person or kill five people on the famous trolley tracks you probably want to kill the uh the one instead of the five yeah and yet you can't harvest one person's organs in order to save the five right and so this is this is fairly well trodden material yet in an animal context i wonder if you'd think the same so if you have to kill one pig or five pigs we'd probably want to kill one pig but if you had the opportunity to harvest one pig's organs in order to save five other pigs do you think there's a difference here and that that might actually be okay or would you say similarly like the human case no that pig has a right to not be to be violated in that way and so we'll let the five die it's a really good question i guess i suppose of a human term you would say it's not morally justified to find a homeless person who has no family no social connections and harvest their organs to save five other humans who have you know big families and you know have all of these you know wonderful connections in life you would still say that was wrong right well at least i believe that to be the case so i guess it comes down to that notion of intrinsic worth doesn't it in intrinsic rights and value yeah so this is where i've seen we seem to align more with the rights position at least in the human context and this is why so i made a video not long ago in which uh i ruffled a few feathers if you'll pardon the dying metaphor um because i said that i'm not sure i can commit myself to the view that animals non-human animals have a right to life at least in the same way that humans do and i guess the reason for that is i thought well why is it that we would think it's wrong to kill the homeless person with no friends and family um well maybe it's because they just have an inviolable claim not to be killed unnecessarily or something like that you know and you make exceptions for self-defense and this kind of stuff so unnecessarily killing them they just have a right not to have that done even if it doesn't have an effect on suffering you just have a right to this and so i can't kill the homes person but equally if the only way for me to feed myself were to kill another human being to either steal their food or eat their flesh or something if that were the only way that i was able to feed myself i think this right to life idea says that i can't do that to a human i can't i can't go and kill a human to steal food from their pantry so that i can feed myself even if i need to in order to survive like because they have a right the issue is that if we say that animals have a similar right to life then well if i can't kill a human being to feed myself even when it's necessary to do so why do i have the right to buy vegan food that involves animal death uh to feed myself because of course it's necessary for me to eat something but if the only way i can eat at least as things stand right now because you're right like it's a contingent problem one day this won't be an issue but today if an animal has a right to life we could say well we wish we lived in a world where that didn't need to be violated in order for me to eat but it stands that today you do need to violate that right potentially i might be wrong about that in order to feed yourself and it seems to me that if we were to attribute the same right to life to those non-humans we'd be in big trouble we'd have to starve ourselves and if we want to say that we can't kill the human to feed ourselves but we can kill the rodents to feed ourselves we're committed to either well we're committed to the view then that that these animals don't have a right to life in the way that humans do but i suppose the question is on what grounds would it be immoral to harm a human if you had to to survive because if humans have a right to life then that also applies to yourself so you're you're you are i suppose giving away your rights to honor the rights of someone else yeah there's a whole a whole like body of literature on the philosophy of rights and i think so for instance a distinction you might make is that the right to life is not a life to have your it's not a right to have your life preserved at all costs right it's not like you don't have the right you don't have a claim upon other people that they must do everything they can to keep you alive in all circumstances it's more like you have a right for them not to kill you so going and eating food is more like a kind of preservation thing it's like well the life that i'm kind of preserving here is is not i'm not stopping something from killing me i'm kind of keeping myself going whereas to go and kill somebody for food is is something that you do um there might be a difference there i'm not really sure i guess i'm i'm just interested in what your intuitions say because it seems to me you're right that like sometimes we want to appeal to suffering sometimes we want to appeal to right to life and it seems to me that underlying all of this is essentially intuition we just say well let's think of this particular situation let's see how we compare it to analogous situations and just see what our intuitions say and i just wonder what you think there do you think animals have like an inviolable right to life in the same way that humans do i don't know if if if humans have have that invaluable inviolable is that the word used yes i don't think i don't even know if we do let's say for example you know um on the table there is some food you and i are in a similar situation we both need that food i think we would be morally justified to kill each other to get our food i i don't think that we would have an obligation morally speaking to back off and say no you have the food now and i'll die right so i'm not sure if i even subscribe to the idea that humans have that and in a situation of um i guess necessity for one's own survival i think you could justify doing that yeah so i think that that's probably where that that probably makes it a little bit more consistent to have the view of animals that i do have i just don't think that there is anything like intrinsic rights for anyone i mean who who ordains that who grants that why why do we have that other than the fact that we are humans and so we believe ourselves to possess something that other animals don't have but sure that's just coming from a place of ego rather than anything more objective yes so this would be the the other prong of the forks because if you have this this issue that i said you you're basically committed to a view but you're not there there are kind of two options here you can either say okay non-humans don't have a right to life in humans too or you can say well i guess no one has an inviolable right then i mean for what it's worth that the i think that the two ways around this problem that rights theorists will take is some of them say what you seem to be implying which is that actually if there are such things as rights um sometimes they can be overridden sometimes they just can be violated ethically others will say no like the definition of a right is that it cannot be violated but they it's a view called specificationism where they say that the right to life is just a shorthand for what the actual right itself is like this kind of book length highly specified like exact conditions and stuff and it seems intuitive actually it's like when we when a when a case goes to to the court when you have two rights in conflict and the courts decide what they think is right and said a legal precedent like i guess they would interpret that as discovering the next kind of yeah little qualification in the rights but i think you're right that you're being consistent by just saying that humans don't have that right either um i think that's i think that's fine that the issue is with that that if you if you're saying that well no one actually has a right to life maybe the reason we talk about rights is because it's like a useful concept to act more morally to reduce more suffering this kind of thing the issue you then have is i mean you obviously have the rather large problem of why is it wrong to kill the homeless person with no friends but i guess more relevantly why is it wrong to kill the pig with no friends i guess but i guess i guess the way i feel about it is maybe i'm taking the the stance of i don't believe that there's any um god-given rights that we have that we don't have any rights just by the sim by the virtue of being a human or being a pig or being a cow but the fact that being a human being a pig being a cow means that we have certain characteristics and capacities and so the right to have a life with as far as possible practical the avoidance of exploitation and pain comes from the sentience that we possess so i guess the to go back to what you were saying about animals and you know if animals have the right to life therefore we would have to starve i guess my views are that the levels of sentient animals have somewhat determines the rights that they should have so for an ex for example if we take a chicken and a human a human in a situation we had to choose between one or the other would have more moral worth or more right to life because of their increased sentience but a chicken or a or an aphid or a chicken and an ant you know you would choose the chicken because the chicken has an increased sense of sentience and capacity to experience so i guess that's where i think that the moral wrong comes from is the capacities that we have as individuals human or non-human that grants us the the right to not have these things happen to us rather than anything that's kind of like intrinsically given to us right um i'm interested in this question of relative levels of sentience and how it affects our moral assessment of different animals because i actually have a quote from your book um which i which i noted down because i wanted to ask you about it where you said quote favoring one's own species in a situation where you had to choose between saving a member of your own species or a different one could of course be morally justified quite confidently and yeah um i was going to ask you about that and it seems like you've preempted that by answering that the reason why that's the case is because we have a higher level of sentience yes so it's not got something to do with the right to put oneself first or something like that it's just because we have a a higher capacity for feeling pain or something like this not just the sensation of pain but i guess the consequence of what that death would mean to others so you know if you or i were to die that the suffering that would presumably cause would be would extend further than just the individual experience we have of that death but have gone to our friends our family and other people within our in our lives and so i guess that the the suffering caused by the death of a human is presumably not just worse for the individual but also is is further reaching right than just that individual human um you know i guess let's say you have a situation where it's your own companion animal dog for example and a human you've never met who you never will meet who's on the other side of the world you know i i guess quite naturally we would want to save our our dog because we have a connection with the dog but from a moral perspective it would probably at least using the logic that i've adhered to to this point you would opt to save the human on the other side of the world you've never met because of these things i guess we're discussing now yeah are you ever um worried or suspicious of the fact that though we like to talk about chickens having less sentience or something like this um sometimes i i worry if we can be so confident about this i mean as peter singer observes in animal liberation which is the uh i should say the second best veganism currently available in different um he says well look we we accept that a hawk's eyesight is far more acute and intense than we're even capable of imagining why well because evolutionarily it makes sense for these creatures to be more sense dependent yeah dogs experience smell far more intensely and acutely than we are even capable of imagining because evolutionarily they have good reason to human beings evolved rationality reason and on an evolutionary picture the reason for that would be because it helps them to survive so we can avoid those things that harm us not just by touching it and going out but also by our reason to say well we know from memory we know that this kind of thing leads to this and we should avoid it that's why it's there yeah in other words because we have rationality evolutionarily we need to rely less on our on our crude sensory experience so if these other animals are actually more reliant upon their senses and less reliant on their rationality then maybe the very thing that we're trying to use to say they feel less pain which is that they have a lower intellectual capacity or something like that actually means that experientially just as a dog experiences smell more strongly than we do maybe they experience pain more strongly than we do i wonder what you think of that and the conditional of if that were the case if we somehow proved it would you therefore say that it's that a chicken has more moral worth than a human i've used this argument before about pain and i guess when i when i'm discussing this i don't necessarily mean that the capacity to feel pain is is potentially more prevalent in humans um i think there's a very reasonable and logical case that actually humans have the capacity to experience pain less than other animals because i think our cognition allows us to psychologically distance ourselves from the experience we can distract ourselves with thoughts we are understanding or we have an awareness that pain will end even if that means death we we know that it isn't an internal feeling you know have some sort of have some sort of end point and i guess an animal who maybe doesn't have an awareness of death or obviously doesn't know about painkillers or maybe um because of their cognition lives more in the moment is more kind of focused because evolutionary you know they're pre-animal and you know they have to be in the zone ready kind of you know hyper aware of what's around them there is probably the argument that they experience pain more because psychologically speaking there's an extra element of fear that comes with not knowing if it will end um the inability to distance oneself psychologically from the experience you're having could potentially mean that you're trapped in that sensation the way that you you and i as humans potentially have the luxury of avoiding it you know as severely yeah so actually i think there is a good case that non-human animals can experience pain more than we can or at least you know that the the isolated feeling of pain in a specific moment you know there's different types of pain emotional pain of such of course so i guess it's not so much about the pain but i guess it's more about the the sentience in in other ways um i suppose the ability to fear death the ability to have an awareness of what will be lost you know things that maybe we as humans have an increased ability to understand and rationalize those things create a life that is i don't want to use this phrasing but i guess this is where i'm going to kind of quote more worth living because the ability to gain something from it and the ability to experience you know is probably more prevalent in a human than within other animals and i i feel a bit i don't really like what i'm saying because it feels a little bit like i'm degrading non-human animals more than i would like to yeah and i'm i'm always very wary of placing humans on some sort of pedestal because i think for the most part it is somewhat unwarranted but i guess inadvertently by creating a hierarchy of sentience i'm i'm doing that as a natural as a natural thing um which leaves me feeling i suppose a little bit conflicted about but but again it comes down to what we were saying earlier about veganism and the reduction of suffering and is it more important to be philosophically right or at least not philosophically but at least logically right or ideologically motivated you know because ideologically it would be very simple for me to say no all animals are you know the same right to life as a human because ideologically that fits more in the philosophy of being vegan but maybe realistically there is of course somewhat more of a a worth of life hierarchy if you like yeah but maybe just to kind of finish the point maybe there isn't so much of a distinction between humans and cows and humans and whales of course the distinction more is between humans and insects and crop farming or humans and say plant life which of course you know plants are alive but are not sentient in any way that we recognize as being morally relevant so i guess the differentiation that hierarchy is less about where humans come to the animals we consume but more about where humans come to the animals we you know kill in the production of crops let's say yeah i guess the reason people would be interested in this question is because it it leads to a quite um strange conclusion potentially and there may be ways of avoiding this by appealing to higher and lower pleasures as jon stewart mill had them um the idea that there's just this kind of categorical difference in experience between like crude physical pain and like the experience of worrying about your taxes or fearing death or enjoying an opera um interestingly mill opens utilitarianism the essay by responding to the criticism because he'd previously advocated for utilitarianism and it was seen as just a pleasure pain balance and the criticism believed to come from thomas carlisle was that it was quote a pig philosophy because of the fact that if it's if it's all about pleasure and pain then a pig's pleasure is worth no more than a or no less than a human's pleasure and that's ridiculous and so mill responds to this by saying no no because um oh we have uh higher pleasures and lower pleasures and they only experience the lower pleasures and this kind of thing but interestingly like you know had he had a bit more prescience on this matter he might have been like well yeah that's not actually a criticism yes carl i found that quite quite interesting but i guess the conclusion i was talking about was that if it is the case that chickens potentially feel more pain experientially then if we want to conclude from that that they have sufficiently worse or more intense experiences than us to warrant um them being called worth more morally than us yeah then we really would be committed to a view of probably removing ourselves from the planet as quickly as possible and i think that's a it seems like that's an intuition you wish to avoid and i think you you're you're doing so by saying that there are kind of kinds of pleasures and pains that humans have access to that other animals simply do not i guess the question is the relative weight of those of those pleasures and why a so-called intellectual pleasure would be worth more than a physical um it seems arrogant doesn't it yes i think that and that's my problem with that view i think it's true well what do you think because you had i guess with your video about um right to life you've created a distinction between humans and non-humans so i guess where does your distinction stem from um well i'm i'm i'm not entirely sure actually and interestingly that that video was part of a q a so i wasn't making a video i mean the video was titled like i probably don't think animals have a right to life but it was it was a question somebody said something about they said like what's the best argument for animals having a right to life and i was like well i'm not really convinced that that is something we can defend but i'm not sure what i think about it either that's why i'm quite interested to speak to you and also why i think it'll be interesting to hear what our wonderful viewers and listeners think about this particular issue um i guess i think i am committed to the view that pleasure and pain if that is what grounds moral worth and the question for me as to whether there's kind of a meaningful use of the word moral worth that that is in any sense objective um but i think if we take the view that suffering is what matters then i think i would just be committed to the view that if other animals can suffer more they are worth more for that reason um i i i remember uh i had a debate once where i was asked if there was a if there was a super sensitive panda right here who who just experienced pain like far far more intensely than any human being does would that panda have more moral worth and with the view that i was defending at the time i think i quite easily just said well i guess yes i guess i would be committed to that um and people objected to that of course and it's maybe quite problematic and causes you to rethink things so maybe suffering isn't all that matters it's a complicated matter you know i don't really know it's hard isn't it because like the risk that i suppose we have i mean logically i suppose you're right if if we take the position that it is the reduction of suffering that's that's most important then of course those who have the capacity to experience suffering the most must be those who who have the most moral who deserve the most moral consideration and if that is the case let's say that we find out that chickens or of another species of animal has the capacity to suffer more and even i suppose from what i was saying just you know just a few moments ago was talking about potentially it is the case that animals non-human animals that is have the capacity to experience suffering and pain more then obviously that would make the infliction of suffering and pain on those individual animals worse than it would on on to humans let's say but that leads us down a tricky road of of um i suppose characterizing some atrocities has been worse than others you know based on i just i guess scale and then the infliction of suffering yeah it becomes it becomes a very tricky road to to kind of go down yeah i think the problem is that this stuff about suffering is by definition experiential yeah and you can never get into the head of even another human being let alone another animal i think it can be useful to think that there's an analogy here that i've that i'm thinking about in terms of difficulty like when we talk about a being experiencing more suffering or less suffering it's like okay is is high school physics easier or harder than phd level physics well of course phd level physics is harder but is high school physics harder for the high school student than phd level physics is for the phd student it seems like maybe no it seems like actually in terms of the experience that they're having both of them have exactly the same levels of stress and difficulty with the material right and so we can we can kick back and say like oh well this particular uh method of slaughter or treatment or this particular action or this particular pain it causes more pain it it hits harder it lights up more of the brain this kind of stuff it's like well maybe it's not as simple as that because what matters is how it's experienced because you could light up every single pain receptor in my brain but if experientially it didn't really do that much to me then it wouldn't really matter you know she's such a good point isn't it so i guess do you agree or disagree with the premise that sentience is what a sign's moral worth um basic foundation if there is such a thing as moral worth it will be commensurate with sentience i'm defining sentience here just as an ability to feel pleasure and pain sure um so of course the kind of stuff you're talking about where you say well it's not just about the suffering of the animal but also the suffering of other people and this kind of stuff and their fears and their worries i would just kind of package all of that in to this this definition of suffering and pleasure it's if there is something that ethics is about it seems to be that that's what it is um but i'm not sure i mean as my as my viewers know well i've i'm i'm pretty [Music] unclear about my meta ethical views i don't know what i think um i might even be committed to a non-cognitivist view that ethics is just an emotional expression and nothing more but i um i'm not i'm not sure that's why when i make a case for veganism really i'm just making a case of descriptive consistency i say to people like i don't care what my meta ethical worldview is you think that it's wrong to force a dog into a gas chamber you think it's okay to force a pig into a gas chamber we don't have a moral discussion there's no moral element to the discussion that we're having i just say well like is it actually inconsistent because if you think it's well it's okay to force the dog into the gas chamber because it's a or it's not okay to do that it's because it's a pet yeah then i say okay if someone had a pet pig would you would you be okay with that and they say that would still be fine there's just an inconsistency there's not like a moral problem that they're just being descriptively inconsistent right and so like i don't really know how i what my base moral intuitions are but that's why when i argue for veganism i don't really argue morally for it but descriptively aj ayo one of the early um [Music] advocates of the non-cognitivist emotivist view of ethics pointed out this kind of jumped off the page at me when i first read it that most moral debate is not moral debate if you if you if you watch a debate about um like gun laws right people will say well if we make guns illegal uh it pushes it into the black market and well more people die in swimming pools oh but you could just put a fence up oh uh like owning more guns actually reduces gun crime they're debating these kind of points but these are not moral claims these are just factual claims they're either like true or false they're they're just descriptive debate the actual moral principle is not even in the debate and i find the same thing with veganism when i'm talking to people you're talking about animals don't feel pain yeah yes they do um being in a gas chamber is an uncomfortable experience no it's not like this causes suffering no it doesn't more animals die in crop deaths no they don't like you're debating facts but we never actually really debate the ethics of it we just test other people's consistency so although this is interesting i don't think it changes much about like what we're actually doing most of the time so it's quite interesting it's true we're not really ethicists about this we're just shooting at consistency i think yeah i think you've summarized it so so nicely that it's true um the conversations i have with people we're always dealing with very surface level arguments you know it is it is just as you say more about people having to work through their inconsistencies you know i guess the question the question i always ask people you know when we talk about dogs and pigs i suppose the question is never why is it you know from an ethical moral perspective wrong to do this to a dog i mean sometimes i say why is it wrong to do it to a dog but it's always very surface level and i suppose you're absolutely right in saying that most of the reason or most of the ways that we discuss this topic is yeah it is really just about drawing out people's inconsistencies yeah right you just like assume a base level with somebody so you say well look i mean a pig is like a dog and they either say oh fair enough okay let's discuss that or they say like um no it's not or they say i don't care about dogs and if they do that then you just push it a bit a bit deeper you say okay well you care about humans and they go yeah i do it's like okay let's see the difference between humans and dogs right but if they said no i don't care about humans either why should i care about humans the way to respond to that at least in the context you're talking about is not to scream matter ethics of them but to go even deeper you say well you know you think that things have moral worth because of particular reasons and this kind of stuff right you're just debating essentially descriptive qualities is there a is there a a favorite conversation that you've had with either on the kind of change my mind tables or in another context on a podcast or something is there like a kind of go-to i'm also thinking maybe people are interested in hearing more of your conversations are there any in particular that you really enjoyed um i uploaded one quite recently with a lady at ut dallas she was called um she was called q i don't know what her name was that's where she the name she gave me and that that's one of my favorite ones that i've done it was great is that the is that the lady in the in the yellow that's correct yeah yeah i've seen that yeah cliff um yeah i thought that was that was quite good too did you enjoy that because you felt it was productive or because you felt like you won oh both i mean i don't think i don't like to use the word one but i felt you know a lot of the time the conversations end and you know we'll shake hands and it's very pleasant um and you know i i kind of see it as being you know relatively a relatively evenly matched conversation between two people of different beliefs and but with her i think just the way she she kind of got up at the end and walked off symbolized to me that i said something that got her you know like that she'd had to think about it and it made her uncomfortable so she she opted to storm off rather than work through that or or at least leave more politely so there was a sense of satisfaction that came from that but i also think it was a fascinating discussion because she seemed to believe she knew everything about these issues but without knowing anything more or less you know talking about halal slaughter but she couldn't tell me what actually it was a wonderful moment where she said you know um that's why halal slaughter is more ethical and you said what's halal slaughter and she just didn't know and it's it's quite it's quite strange that um because people do this all the time they say things with confidence um but when one question they realized they actually maybe don't know about the process and then and then you you told her and i think she was a bit taken aback but it's clear in that conversation she seemed to come in quite she very hard already like yeah she interrupted a conversation i was having and i was speaking to this very this very nice guy um and it was it was it was a very normal conversation i was having with him but she was stood really really close and i could see her getting more irate just out the corner of my eye and she literally came over and was like i'm sorry um i just want to interrupt you i need to go to class but i really want to sit down and debate you and i said to the guy i was like you know would would you mind just sparing 10 minutes because i knew that she was going to be passionate and so she came in instantly ready to go and i kind of like you know yeah this is going to be good because it's good for content you know from a selfish perspective but also i think when someone has that passionate opposing view it creates a great platform for people to be able to understand how they feel about these issues you know to really see themself in the arguments and i like that aspect of it as well what's the biggest or which vegan stereotype if any would you most like to see disappear from the minds of the average human being what a good question i mean that's a really good question a vegan stereotype i don't know i think there's you know there's stereotype that vegans are weak there's a serotype the vegans are pushy there's a stereotype that vegans are um are hippies there's all kinds of things like this i mean for me personally i think the one i wish to see disappear most the one that that's most annoying to me let's say is the preachy pushy uh persona because of course i don't think i'm any more preachy or pushy if anything i'm less so about veganism than many other people are about other ethical issues like i it's quite strange i see people say to me well look i don't agree with what you're saying but like you just got to stop being so preachy about it yeah and so the claim is although they don't put it in these words you're at least i'm not at least i'm not saying you're you're wrong you may be right but the method doesn't work the method rubs people up the wrong way it's not the way to get through to people and then five minutes later when it comes to fox hunting or another ethical issue across the board like they're the people posting the instagram stories and making the you know the fact sheets and stuff and telling everybody and their dog about it yeah um which it's not just kind of like hypocritical because that's that's annoying but it's also like a moment ago you told me that your problem wasn't that i was wrong yeah but that this method doesn't work it's ineffective but now you're using it so you're either using a method which you yourself think doesn't work or you were lying to me and this idea that somehow vegans are particularly pushy i think that's the stereotype that i would i would wish to see disappear most it's funny i often think that sometimes these stereotypes can work in our advantage though i mean i think that the the one i would most like to get rid of is the idea that we're unhealthy because i think they'll bring more people to veganism but i think with the one that you're describing obviously it's probably more negative than positive that that stereotype exists and it is undeniably so frustrating that every time we speak up about veganism every time we we talk to people instantly people have this this default position of thinking that we're being preachy and militant and extreme i think the reason i i am less against that one it's just because as soon as we kind of show people that we're not those things it immediately softens people up to the concept of being vegan so when in let's say we have a conversation with someone and they may think oh you're vegan you're going to be like this and then you're not what they think you're going to be you're instantly giving them a more favorable impression of veganism but and also you're showing them that they're kind of fallible you know that they can be wrong that they that their preconceptions of what something is isn't always what it actually is and so i think that works works quite well and when i have conversations with people when they leave that conversation i don't often judge the success of that conversation based on whether they're not whether or not they tell me they're going to be vegan because i'd be sorely disappointed most times if that was the the metric for success i was using but more about whether or not they feel more reasonable or feel that veganism is more reasonable and i think just by being not extreme or not preachy that instantly makes it seem more reasonable because we're showing that actually veganism isn't necessarily what they perceive it to be so it can work in our advantage sometimes i think yeah but not overall not overall positive though no no probably still best to do to do without it do you think there's a a legitimate legitimacy to this um idea of being pushy because you say that one of the useful elements of this stereotype is that you have an opportunity to prove them wrong but then you do not think sometimes it is permissible and sometimes even prudent to be a bit that's definitely pushy oh certainly um there are definitely times where we should be pushy um i think it's becoming more and more becoming more and more relevant to be pushy you know things are getting worse animal suffering is increasing factory farming is increasing globally you know clearly something needs to change and change quickly and we have to be pushing but i guess it's just more about what people perceive of this perceive us to be you know we can be there's a difference between being pushed i suppose and being vocal and i guess what they see or what people mean when they say pushy is they mean dogmatic or they mean an inability to listen an inability to understand so i think that we can be strong and and vocal advocates but also in a way that doesn't fulfill that stereotype of being pushy yeah i think there's also the the distinction between pushing the idea and pushing the person right and i think the first is is better um i think if if people want a defense of the idea of being a bit at least loud about it as you say we shouldn't be pushy in the sense of being dogmatic in the sense of not listening but in the sense of bringing it up in the sense of publishing a book on it and having it in the front window of basically every waterstones that i see in the country um is there some justice of justifiability in this i think a good answer to this actually on a previous podcast episode with uh with joey with joey karpstrom who i'm referring to um he said to me look if if you were an animal in a cage being mutilated disburded uh forcibly impregnated forced into a gas chamber how loud would you want people on the outside to be about it how often would you want them to bring it up with people and given that they're constantly uh in a place of opportunity to talk to the people who are paying for this to occur what would you like them to do and i think when you as as with so many cases of the vegan discussion if you're confused about like what what action to take or how to go about it or the legitimacy of a moral position just once again place yourself in the mindset of the victim involved and it can offer a lot of clarity i think and i think if you put your put your self in those shoes hooves then you'll find that actually maybe you would want people to be about as loud as we're being yeah probably more so but that's um that is that is why i think it's it's worth doing these podcasts and talking to people on the street and writing books like this is vegan propaganda and otherwise the meat industry tells you i think this is going to be a good place to wrap up we did i mean i wanted to talk about the the methods involved the slaughter methods in factory farming i think we probably don't have time to do that now um i also imagine that quite a lot of people listening to this will at least have some vague idea but i would if if people are interested because we talk in passing about this idea of animals suffering animals going through horrendous treatment animals being exploited and some people listening might have an idea in their head that that itself is illegitimate because these animals aren't actually being treated too badly as i said earlier but i'll say it again chapter three of this book especially if you're in the uk because this is brand new it's hot off the press and it's uh got a lot of information about uk farming this is it's a wonderful compendium of that information so if you if you want more information about the actual ways in which the animals are being treated because we're talking about the philosophy that undergirds what we should be doing but if you're interested in what the problem is in the first place then i think it's well worth reading the third chapter of this book and i will leave a link in the description and everything like that um and i do hope that people people pick it up um was this uh was this the first choice of the name of the book were there other contenders that you had no this was not the first choice um i had i had the working title of i could never go vegan um that's cool yeah which i quite liked um but then i'd done a post about seaspiricy actually and in it i had said something like you know is this vegan propaganda or is this you know or is there some veracity to this and uh someone someone at the publishing house penguin had said i like this phrasing vegan propaganda wouldn't it be great if we could could use that in some way and i was like would be good um and so we went back and forth quite a few times and and then came up with this this is vegan propaganda you know kind of subverting that criticism we get you know farmers always saying oh that's vegan propaganda i kind of want to invite people to come in and say look this is what has been labeled as propaganda come and decide for yourself you know see who's really spreading the propaganda here and make your own make your own mind up yeah and i hope people read it and do yeah but i think that's a wonderful place to end this podcast thank you so much for for coming back yet i know you're a very busy person especially with the publication of the book i think my my viewers will congratulate you as well on the success of the book it's it's been on the best seller list for quite a while at least at the time of recording and i think with good reason so i hope that people will go and go and pick it up um it's also worth mentioning that the two of us will be appearing together at the vegan camp out australia yeah uh in the end of this year in the summertime over there um so any of our australian listeners who are interested in that i'll leave a link to that in the description as well i think that would be quite a fun event that might be the first time we've done an event together i believe so because the campouts in the uk were normally you were last year weren't you that's right we're on each other's off yeah and uh of course yeah you're going to be speaking at the vegan camp out in the uk this year as well there's quite a quite a great lineup again um i'll leave a link to that in the description as well i'm not going to be speaking at that one myself but ed will be there um you'll be there i might be there we'll it remains to be seen i'll leave it as a mystery um i suppose i should probably say yes to sell more tickets to my my followers but we'll see we'll see at any rate it's going to be a wonderful event so the vegan campouts that are happening across the globe i'll leave a link to the information in the description and people should go and check that out as well um of course if you're not already following earthling ed then that's what you're going to want to type in whether it on whether it's on instagram or youtube um it's all going to be earthing out again i'll leave the links in the description and i hope that you will go and follow him i believe you also have a tick tock now if you're not mistaken i do i saw that that's correct i'm trying to use it more i i upload and then leave the platform as quickly as possible exactly what i do i i will remove it from my phone and then reinstall it upload a bunch of videos and run away it's a it's a pretty tragic platform but if you do happen to be on that that they'd shame on you then yes follow follow ed and myself i'm cosmic skeptic on on tick tock for anyone who isn't following me on there as well um you're still not on twitter are you no i'm not no and probably better better for it um but okay i'll leave any socials that you do have will be in the description and a link to the book and i hope everybody enjoys the book and enjoyed this conversation but with that said thanks again for coming on ed and i've been alex o'connor and this has been the cosmic skeptic podcast thank you for watching if you like the podcast and the other various bits of content that i put out please do consider becoming a supporter on patreon at patreon.com forward slash cosmic skeptic and a special thanks as always to my top tier patrons who really do keep this channel afloat thank you for even considering that but also a way to support the channel is to share the podcast and share the content with your friends and your family and indeed your enemies with that said i will see you all in the next [Music] you

Channel: Alex O'Connor

Views: 126,933

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

Id: PRk1Bws3d5g

Length: 76min 43sec (4603 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 20 2022