Making Sense with Sam Harris - #342 — Animal Minds & Moral Truths

Episode Date: November 27, 2023

Sam Harris speaks with Peter Singer about important problems in ethics. They discuss his career as a philosopher, the moral status of non-human animals, the ethics of moral hierarchies, speciesism, the scale of animal suffering, conscientious omnivores, animal experimentation, the tragic case of Sam Bankman-Fried, concerns about Effective Altruism, the problems with focusing on existential risk, the comparative nature of human suffering, the work of Derek Parfit, objective morality, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.  

Thank you. of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming Today I'm speaking with Peter Singer. Peter is often called the father of the modern animal welfare movement and was named one of the most influential people in the world by Time magazine. He is an Australian philosopher and a professor of bioethics at Princeton. He's contributed to more than 50 books in over 30 languages, and he's the founder of The Life You Can Save, a non-profit which you can find online

that recommends various effective charities. And his seminal book, Animal Liberation, has been revised and published under the title Animal Liberation Now, which is the main topic of discussion today. We talk about the moral status of non-human animals, the ethics of moral hierarchies, speciesism, the scale of animal suffering, animal experimentation, the tragic case of Sam Bankman Freed, some concerns about effective

altruism, the problems with focusing on existential risk, the comparative nature of human suffering, the important work of Derek Parfit, whether there are objective claims to make about right and wrong and good and evil, and other topics. I should say on the topic of effective altruism, both Peter and I continue to support it, just with various shadings and caveats. The crucial thing for me is that systematizing one's philanthropy seems like an objectively good idea. Deciding, for instance, to give 10% of one's pre-tax income away each year to the most effective charities. That seems like a good thing, and in my experience, it's a fairly revolutionary thing to do in one's life. As many of you know, I took that pledge through Will McCaskill's

organization, Giving What We Can, and I've since heard from Will that over 10% of the members who have taken that pledge have referenced this podcast in their explanation of why they decided to do that. And that represents over $300 million in pledged donations, which is amazing. And Will tells me that even on a conservative basis, which takes into account pledge attrition, as well as how much would have been given away anyway, and factors time discounting, that's worth at least $20 million in present value to top charities. So that's fantastic. Of course, this is the time of year where many people think about giving. So if you want some recommendations there, I suggest you check out Giving What We Can and Give Well. You can see

the charities we support at the Waking Up Foundation over at wakingup.com slash foundation. And you can also consult Peter Singer's organization, The Life You Can Save, which also recommends effective charities. And now I bring you Peter Singer. charities. And now I bring you Peter Singer. I am with Peter Singer. Peter, thanks for joining me again. It's my pleasure, Sam. So you have two books, two newish books. One is a revision of your classic Animal Liberation. Animal Liberation Now is the current title. And then you have a new book coming out, which I haven't read, The Buddhist and the Ethicist. And we can talk about, I want to talk about both of those, but let's jump into Animal Liberation Now because it's, remind me, the book first came out in 71? 1975. 75. Yeah, that's right. So it's not quite 50 years for the book.

It's 50 years since I first actually published something on this topic, which was an article called Animal Liberation in the New York Review of Books in April 1973. Right. Okay. Well, that has been, you tell me, you're often credited as being the real father of the animal rights movement. You detail in the book some of the history of our callousness toward animals and how we made some moral progress, however incremental. What was your experience as a philosopher writing a book of such compelling social importance. That's not the common experience of academic philosophers. So tell me what happened to your life when you wrote that book. Yes, well, it was very interesting because I really had no idea what it would do to my

philosophy career at that stage, which was really just beginning. And philosophy was just on the cusp of coming out of this ordinary language mode of philosophy, as it was sometimes called, or linguistic philosophy. And some of the leading philosophers in that area had expressed the idea that philosophy really has nothing to say about what is right or wrong, doesn't give advice and ethics. A.J. Ayer, who was a very prominent philosopher at the time, said, that's the business of the politician or the preacher. We should leave it to them. But what I was trying to do was to write something that would be both intelligible to

ordinary people, but still of philosophical interest. And I wasn't really sure whether that was possible, but I was so compelled by the need to write this book that in a way, if it had harmed my career in philosophy, well, I could see myself having had a career as an animal activist, I suppose. But fortunately, the reaction was actually very good from philosophers, at least a few of them. I don't know. The ones who wrote about it mostly welcomed it. There were a couple who ridiculed it, but most of them said, you know, yes, this is important and philosophy should get back on track. In the 1970s, as I say, it was on the cusp of change because there were other philosophers who wanted to discuss,

for example, the war in Vietnam, the right to civil disobedience, and of course, the civil rights movement, which had been unfolding in the United States for more than a decade prior to that point. And what was your experience? Subsequent to your publication of this book, you have been no stranger to controversy. I mean, unlike almost anyone else in your line of work, you're often noticed by the wider public in terms of how your arguments brush up against concerns about public policy and things like euthanasia. And we'll get into some of the reasons why, and we'll talk about the foundations of your ethics. But what has been the experience of being an academic philosopher whose work is so

often cited to resolve or to confound questions of public policy? Well, I've certainly enjoyed it. I've felt it was important, if you're writing in ethics, to contribute to some of the deeper ethical questions that underlie our decisions about life and death, for example, about what we eat, about what we do with our spare cash. Those are all important questions. And to some extent, they're novel questions in that they're being asked in a different world from the world of a century or two ago. So to me, it's been, in a way, the stimulus to work hard in ethics and philosophy that I can have an influence and that these are important questions. I'm not just writing for my fellow philosophers to read and ponder and write replies to. I'm also trying to change the world for the better. And that's a huge motivating factor.

Yeah. Well, I share that aspiration and I should say that your work has been very influential in my life, both directly and also as a result of the other people you have influenced who have in turn influenced me, people like Will McCaskill. So you're also credited with being in some ways the father of the effective altruism movement, which has suffered some PR wounds of late. We can talk about that. Sam Bankman-Fried was also on this podcast back in the day. So I'd love to get into all that. But let's talk about the revised book, Animal Liberation Now, and your central argument against what you describe as speciesism. Just kind of make the case here over the course of a few minutes. What is our current

prejudice as you see it? And what do you think would be ethically normative, and how do we get there? Right. Well, I think our current prejudice still is that members of our species, members of the species Homo sapien, have automatically and just in virtue of being a member of that species, have a higher moral status than any other beings. And that means that we are entitled to use other beings for our own ends, even when those ends are not absolute necessities, even when they're not saving our life. But for example, because we prefer a particular taste, a particular kind of food, that that entitles us to rear and then kill vast numbers of animals and not even to give them minimally decent lives, but to lock them in huge sheds by the thousands or even tens

of thousands in the case of chickens, just to produce their flesh more cheaply than we would be able to do if we gave them a life that is more normal for them in a flock of 30 or 40 hens or chickens maybe and running around outside. So that I think is a prejudice and I use the term speciesism which I didn invent, but I found in a leaflet published in the early 1970s by a man called Richard Ryder. And to me, when I saw that word, it was like a light bulb went on. Yes, there is something going on here that is parallel to racism or to sexism or some of the other isms that we reject. I say parallel, it's not exactly the same, obviously, but in all of these cases,

we have a group that is able to be dominant over others. So at least in, say, in the 18th century when the slave trade was at its height, that group was Europeans who had technology that Africans did not have and could capture or buy Africans, send them on a horrible voyage across the Atlantic in a ship, and sell them into slavery. And obviously, you know, they could do that because they had that technology,

and then they developed an ideology which justified it. The idea that Europeans are superior, maybe that, you maybe that we were even helping these Africans by Christianizing them and then saving their souls, or finding verses in the Bible that justify what we're doing. There were slaves referred to in the Old Testament. And similarly with men over women, there's also an ideology that it's natural for women to be subordinate to men. And so women were denied equality in terms of certainly in politics, they didn't have the right to vote. In some countries, they did not have the right to own property. If they were married,

their property automatically all belonged to their husbands. So when it comes to animals, we have the same attitude. We are dominant over them. We can do all kinds of things to them that they cannot really resist. And we justify that with, again, an ideology. And the ideology might, once again, be a religious one. It says in the book of Genesis that God gave us dominion over the animals, so they're ours to do as we please with. Or it might be that this is a natural arrangement in some way. We've always done this and therefore it must be okay. But again, I think it's unjustifiable to think that

species membership somehow makes a crucial moral difference. That, you know, just as being, we now recognize that being of one race or another or one sex or another does not give one a right to rule over the other. So I think we should recognize that being of the human species does not mean that whatever your interests are override the interests of another sentient being, that is another being who can feel pain, whose life could go well or badly, and whose pain humans should not be ignoring. We should be saying, yes, pain is pain. It matters just as much whether it's experienced by a human or a cow or a dog or a chimpanzee. What matters is how severe the pain is or how great the suffering is,

but not what species is this being who is suffering. Well, I think most people have a natural or culturally acquired intuition that there is a moral hierarchy here. I often think about this in terms of what I'm now going to dub as the windshield test. I mean, if you're driving home in a car and a bug splatters on the windshield, you may not feel much of anything about it. I mean, it's certainly not a moral emergency. And the absence of feeling there is based on an intuition, however, in Coet, that not much has really happened, all things considered. This is not a tragedy that

you have to spend the rest of your life trying to figure out how to find some emotional equanimity over because you don't attribute that much sentience or perhaps any sentience to bugs, right? So if I say it's a bee, and this is both positively and negatively valenced, right? So it's in terms of their capacity to suffer, if it exists at all, you must imagine it's minuscule compared to that of more complex animals and certainly compared to humans. And in terms of the type of happiness they might have enjoyed, but for the fact that they came into contact with your speeding car, the loss of opportunity for that enjoyment is also not a tragedy. But as you move up the hierarchy, you know, phylogenetically,

as you, you know, if you run over a squirrel or somebody's dog or, in the worst possible case, a person, what you recognize there with each step up is kind of the wider implications of suffering and deprivations of happiness and also the social context in which that may or may not be happening. So with a dog, you immediately think of the owner of the dog and the suffering of that person and the family, etc. And with a person, if you run over somebody's child, this is the sort of life-deranging catastrophe that you may never get over, given its implications. Now, part of your argument suggests that that moral hierarchy is not ethically defensible, or at least not fully defensible as given, or if we're going to defend

it by reference to capacities, capacities for suffering and capacities for happiness, we have to recognize that those capacities don't, in every individual case, track the boundaries between species. So just react to my intuitive sense of there being a moral hierarchy here and how one might justify it or not. Well, I think what you said is really compatible with what I said before. I said that pain is pain and it doesn't matter what the species is, what matters is how much they're being suffered. Now, what you're suggesting is that a bug that hits our windscreen may not be capable of suffering at all. And I agree.

We can't be certain that insects feel pain. And if it does suffer, then we assume that the suffering is in some way less than ours, that the capacities for suffering are far less. You know, the bug has far fewer, vastly fewer neurons than we have and may not suffer at all or may have a quite different kind of suffering that is less than ours. So I think that's what we hope is going on. And if we get up to, you said, do you hit a squirrel or a dog,

perhaps? I think if we do that and we stop the car, hopefully, and we see the animal is injured and not dead and presumably suffering from the injury, I hope we would be concerned about that. And if we think the injury is serious and probably this animal is not going to survive, I hope we do something about it, actually. this animal is not going to survive, I hope we do something about it, actually. Maybe people would be reluctant to do this, but I hope that we find a big piece of wood or a rock and we crush the squirrel's head so that the squirrel is not going to have a slow, drawn-out death. Because I don't think in the case of a squirrel or even a dog, really, it's the killing that is so significant because I don't think in the case of a squirrel or even a dog really, it's the killing that is so

significant because I don't think that they are beings who, like us, live as much over time, have a sense of their biographical life and have hopes about what they're going to do in the future in the way we do. So I think that if we're just talking about the fact that a being is killed, that if we're just talking about the fact that a being is killed, those cognitive differences are morally significant. But if we are talking about the pain that they're feeling, then I think they're less significant. They may, of course, as in the case of the bug and possibly in the case of the squirrel and the dog too, there may be lesser capacities for pain. But I think we're on pretty shaky ground if we assume that with other birds and mammals, that there is a lesser capacity for pain than we have. It might be a different capacity,

it might be different things that make them suffer. But I think most people who live with dogs would think that their dogs are certainly capable of suffering quite acutely in some circumstances. But one of the implications of your argument is that these distinctions cannot be made neatly at the species boundary. So for instance, if we had a, I think you used an example of an encephalic child, a child born without a cerebrum, just with a brainstem keeping the child alive, but there's zero hope of a fully human existence and probably no reason to attribute consciousness to that child. This is a human child, but not one destined to become a person, really. And our intuition is that still this child is, however compromised, is more important than any non-human animal by virtue of her humanness.

And your argument seems to cut across that. Because if suffering really is the point, if sentience is the point, and if we want to extend that by reference to various mental capacities, I mean, you just added this sense of, you know, biographical continuity in time and, you know, future expectations of the future. happiness, well then this child is not the locus of any of that and never will be, and therefore has to be morally less important than any fully intact dog or squirrel or chimpanzee. So these distinctions do kind of run roughshod over any kind of species boundary. Yes, that's correct. In a way, that's the other side of my view about species not counting. On the one hand, it means that non-human animals, at least those capable of suffering or enjoying their lives, matter more than we generally attribute the significance of their pain or suffering. And on the other hand, the idea of the equal value

of all life or of the lives of all members of the species Homo sapien is also criticized by the view that I take. Because as you correctly point out, if there is a child who, an anencephalic infant has only a brain stem, they don't have the rest of the brain, they're not brain dead because there is a functioning brain stem and that means they can breathe and the heart beats, but they will never be conscious. So I think that actually their life in itself has less significance or importance than the life of a dog or a cow or a pig, because those beings can experience things and can have good lives or bad lives from their perspective. Now, I say with the infant taken in itself, if the parents somehow want this child to

live and want it to be treated, well, that's another factor to consider. But the example I give in the book, which I think I use to illustrate how far we go in this speciesism, is one of a baby who was born with anencephaly, and the parents actually recognizing that this was a tragedy and understanding correctly that their child would never become a person, would never recognize her mother or smile at her mother, wanted something positive to come out of this. And so they asked if the babies could be an organ donor and if organs could be given to, for example, another baby who was born with a major heart defect, as occasionally happens. And when babies are born with heart defects, with what's sometimes called a hole in the heart, it's very hard to get organs for them because, of course, there are very few babies who

die or are injured, say, in a car accident and are brain dead and from whose hearts might then be removed. So there was some potential for something good to come out of this. But the hospital said they couldn't do it because that would be killing a human being. And the parents even went to court to try to get that overruled. But the judge said the same. You can't cut the heart out of a living human being, even if that human being has absolutely no potential to ever become a person, to ever walk around and enjoy their lives or experiencing anything. On the other hand, we do, of course, experiment on animals all the time, including removing their hearts and trying to do transplants of their organs, trying to overcome the rejection that typically follows if you take an organ from one species and transplant it into another. And we do this with a variety of animals, including baboons, it's been done with, and it has been done with a chimpanzee as well,

without recognizing that, well, this being is far more conscious, far more aware of the world, has far more of a life to live than the encephalic baby. has far more of a life to live than the encephalic baby. Yeah, well, this actually connects to some other useful fictions, which, I mean, so when you discuss this early in the book, you say that this notion that all humans are equally valuable is not a statement of fact. It's a prescription for how we should treat other human beings. And so this is a statement of political equality, and it is in some sense just a heuristic for fairness and justice and arranging a sane society under some quasi-Ralzian principle that's going to ensure the best outcomes for most of us most

of the time. But it's not strictly true, and it's not strictly true even in situations quite a bit divorced from what we're currently discussing. So you just imagine like a hostage situation where a U.S. president is one of the hostages. Well, no one imagines that that is going to be treated the same way as any other routine hostage situation. The U.S. president is going to be treated as more the President of the United States over any random person who may need their life saved on any given Thursday. So this notion that all human beings are equally valuable is not something that we can strictly factually defend, but I think there is a, it struck me in reading your book that there, one analogy came to mind, which, again, it's just a heuristic, but it may be ethically justifiable. One question, Peter, have you ever spent much time firing guns or working with firearms? I have not, no. This is a bit of an American obsession, I think, and I did not grow up in the United States. So then I'll just briefly educate you. So when you're working with firearms, there is a

dogma that one is wise to always observe, which is to treat a gun as though it is always loaded, right? And even if you're handing me a gun, you will check to see that it's loaded, and you'll check in a way that is quite redundant. I mean, it really is kind of an acquired obsessive-compulsive disorder. I mean, you'll look into the chamber, and you'll look to see that there's no magazine in it, and then you'll look into the chamber again, and then you'll look to see that there's no magazine in it, and you might even do that a third time before handing me the gun. And even if I have just watched you do that, I too will check to ensure that the gun isn't loaded. And even once it's been established that it's not loaded,

I will still treat it as though it is loaded, which is to say I won't randomly point it in your direction or in the direction of any living being that I wouldn't want to put at risk, right? So that kind of discipline is the only thing that ensures that as you spend more and more time around guns, the probability that you are going to get killed or injured by them inadvertently or kill and injure somebody else isn't going to increase intolerably over the months and years. But it is in fact true that if you have just handed me a gun, which I've watched you check to see whether or not it's loaded, and I've checked it once and I've checked it twice, it's not true that I actually believe the gun might still be loaded.

I know it's not loaded. I've seen you check it. I've checked it once. And now when I'm checking it again, I'm engaged in a kind of religious ritual, right? And yet, it is a truly wise one that has consequences in the real world. And to not observe this kind of redundancy has obviously negative consequences. And every negligent discharge of a firearm that results in the injury or death of some innocent person is always the result of a failure to practice this kind of obsessive attention to this sort of detail. So this analogy occurred to me in defense of something like speciesism with respect to people. And so the valuing of a life that we know is not actually valuable in the case of a human being is a kind of bulwark, an attitudinal bulwark against some of just the most obscene departures from normativity we know we've accomplished in our past. I mean, when you just look at the Nazi doctors or the Nazis prior to the Holocaust in full swing just deciding, okay, well, it's time to sterilize all of these mental

defectives. And now that we're sterilizing them, why don't we just start killing them en masse because these aren't lives worth living? I mean, there's a slide into evil which could be prevented if you just had this sort of blind heuristic, which is to value human life simply because it is human at every stage of its capacity, whatever its individual capacities. I just wanted to get your reaction to that. whatever its individual capacities. I just wanted to get your reaction to that. Yes, that argument was widely used in the debate about voluntary euthanasia when it first got started in the Netherlands in the 1980s

when doctors began assisting patients to die on their request. And the courts allowed them to do that, saying that they faced a conflict of duties because of the unbearable suffering of their patients. And many opponents said, this is going to lead to a slippery slope. We will end up killing off people who are regarded as useless or intellectually disabled or even politically undesirable. And that argument in the early 1980s perhaps seemed to have some weight. It was something of an unknown. We were not familiar with the idea of the legal or open performance of voluntary euthanasia

or medically assisted dying. Actually, Peter, let me just add one caveat to it because it never occurred to me as what I just put forward, it never occurred to me that it would be an argument against euthanasia in the case of there being real suffering that we are preventing, right? So it's, I fully take your point that excruciating suffering is something that we want to relieve, all things being equal, and if euthanasia is the only way to do it, well, then the door is open to that. It's more this argument that even in the case of a person who's no better than an animal, and in fact, quite obviously worse, right? You know,

the person in the lifeboat who is less intelligent than the most intelligent chimpanzee, less intelligent than the most intelligent chimpanzee, for whatever reason, it still might make sense to privilege their humanness over the chimp, given a triage situation. And looking strictly at capacities that cross the species boundary seems like perhaps a dangerous way to go. That's more the argument. Right, okay. perhaps a dangerous way to go. That's more the argument. Okay. So in that case, it's not the suffering of the being whose life we are ending that is relevant. But I do think we need to look, again, back at the other side of this, because we are then still preserving the idea that every member of the human species is in some way more important, or their lives are more sacrosanct or inviolable

than every member of any other species. So at a moral level, we're preserving this gulf between humans and non-human animals. Now, your argument suggests, well, we're doing this to prevent a kind of slippery slope that gets us to Nazi Holocaust or something like that. that gets us to Nazi holocaust or something like that. And obviously I don't want to take steps down that particular slope. But on the other hand, it also allows us to treat the non-humans in this way that I think is totally horrendous and is on such a vast scale that you don't want to say this really, but the scale of it is far greater

than anything that has happened to humans because there are only 8 billion humans on the planet. And each year at present, we are killing about 200 billion vertebrate animals, raising and killing for food, 200 billion vertebrate animals, and inflicting miserable lives on them. And I think that that's a huge cost that we need to think about as offsetting the risk. I would see it as a rather small risk, but I don't deny that. I'm not saying it's zero risk. That breaking down this barrier and suggesting that, for example, in the case of that encephalic baby, it would have been all right to remove her heart and give it to a baby who needed a new heart, that that kind of

treatment is going to lead to these really great evils that we have certainly seen in the past. And of course, that we still see in different ways, although certainly seen in the past, and of course that we still see in different ways, although not quite in the same way that the Nazis did it. Well, I want to talk about some of the suffering you detail in your book, but before I do, I kind of want to jump to an ethical punchline question. So all of this has to do with the cash value, the ethical cash value of everything we're going to talk about comes down to questions of suffering and whether the lives of certain animals are net negative based on how we raise them and how we treat them and how we kill them. And what if, and I think, you know,

and we'll get into some of the details, but I don't think many readers of your book would be tempted to defend most of the details you describe in your book around the use of animals in experiments and their treatment when raised for food on factory farms. I mean, the details really are appalling. But what about the more enlightened or most enlightened smaller organic farms that may or may not yet exist? pasture-raised cows or chickens, say, if we agreed that animals raised under those conditions, albeit raised for food and eventually killed, live net positive lives, which is to say it would be better to have been such an animal than to have not been at all. It's certainly better than to have been a wild animal that lives its entire life fleeing predators. And it's certainly quite unlike what is happening on our industrial-scale factory farms. If such idyllic or organic farms exist, and certainly some of them are currently advertised to exist, would eating those animals be not only ethically

permissible, but better than shunning all animal agriculture? I think that's a very good question, and quite a difficult question. I accept that there are a small number of farms that do treat animals well, that give them good lives. In the end, they kill them, but especially if they can kill them on the farm, which in the United States is only possible for small animals like chickens and ducks and rabbits, because otherwise you're not really allowed to kill them on the farm. You have to take them to a slaughterhouse. But if they have good lives and they die without suffering, I think there is a case for saying that we are not harming them by purchasing those products because on balance their life was a good thing. And if

nobody purchased those products, then clearly they would not have existed at all. Now that gets you into this quite difficult philosophical argument that was first raised by the Oxford philosopher Derek Parfit in his book, Reasons and Persons, about whether bringing more beings into existence, if they're going to lead good lives, is actually a good thing. And of course, here, there's also the question, does it in some way compensate for depriving an existing being of their life? But I'm prepared to say that the answer to that question, maybe yes, it is a good thing to bring beings into existence if they're going to live good lives. And if the

only way to do that is to, at some point in their life, kill them without suffering and sell their products, that might still be overall something that you can defend. So to that extent, although something that you can defend. So to that extent, although I'm a, well, I call myself a flexible vegan, I'm always vegetarian and I'm vegan when I'm shopping and buying for myself, but it's not always easy to stick to that when traveling or moving around. So although that's my preferred way of eating, I don't really reject people who, there's something that's called conscientious omnivores, who really search out these small places where they can be confident that the animals have had good lives. And I think it's difficult to find because you can't always believe the labels. I think you really need to visit the farm and talk to the people who run it

and make your own judgment about how genuine they are in terms of what they're doing for animals. But I'm not going to deny that some of them do exist. So many of my fellow animal rights activists would say, no, that's still a violation of the animal's rights. You're still using it as a means to your end. But as I say, to me, that's a difficult argument to make. And I'm certainly not going to say confidently that that argument is wrong and that that's why you should be a strict vegan or vegetarian. But I am just pointing out that that's fewer than 1% of the animal products raised in the United States or other affluent countries would meet that criterion, quite possibly a lot fewer

than 1%. So it's not going to sustain the kind of diet that most Americans or most people in affluent countries will be eating. And at the very least, we would need to drastically reduce our consumption of animal products in order to be able to only limit it to animals who've had good lives. Yeah. Well, you mentioned Parfit. It reminds me, I want to get to Parfit too. I think, you know, you see you're referencing the somewhat fraught discussion of population ethics and whether it is justifiable in the end

to just talk about the aggregate suffering and well-being and how to do the moral math there. But the math is, however we do it, it's at least implicit in more or less everything we say on this topic because, as you said yourself, just the sheer magnitude of animal suffering is what raises it to the current level of moral concern that you are giving it, right? I mean, the fact that you're giving numbers like 200 billion animals a year, the reason why that is more important than most other things or really all other things is because of the numbers, right? It's because of some sense that more is different, which is to say more suffering spread over billions is more important. And if we could reduce the number of animals treated in appalling ways,

well, then that would be making progress toward the good. And it's just, perhaps we even spoke about the repugnant conclusion and other paradoxes thrown up by Parfit's work in previous podcasts, but it is, in fact, difficult to do the math under certain rather novel framings of the sort that Parfit seemed to produce every minute of the day for decades. But I mean, it strikes me as morally uncontroversial that the misery and death of X number of people or animals is just, you know, all things being equal is not as bad as the misery and death of a thousand X number of the same people or animals. And that's, I think, you know, that's everyone's intuition. We'll certainly agree on that. Yes.

Yeah. Okay. We'll certainly agree on that, yes. in psychological science that we did and continue to do, it sounds like, these experiments that just seem not only pointless and unnecessary, but just sadistic and insane to the point where I don't know how these experimenters do this type of work, and I certainly don't know how they attract graduate students. What is the state of current practice now, and what sort of pressure has been put on the scientific community to stop these types of experiments? Feel free to describe what I'm talking about,

but I'm thinking in particular of the learned helplessness experiments that supposedly offer some models of depression or PTSD. And it was quite amazing to discover that Martin Seligman, who's often credited as the father of positive psychology, was among the people who has done these experiments and seemed to have endorsed them as important even up to the present. The details are actually jaw-dropping. So we don't need to be pointlessly gruesome here, but it's just amazing

what you describe in your book. Yes. I have to say I was really disturbed in writing that chapter. I was disturbed in writing the experimentation chapter in the original edition in 1975, but I had expected things to have improved more than they have. I'm not saying they haven't improved at all. They have, but there is still, as you say, a lot of quite horrendous things continuing. And I expected things that improved because one of the things that has happened

and was a result, I suppose, of pressure on scientists from the animal community, was the introduction of what are generically known as animal experimentation ethics committees, but in the United States are known as institutional animal care and use committees. These are committees that look at proposals for experiments from people in the institution that may be going forward for applications for funding or just to be done. And they are supposed to vet the experiments. And I'd been led by some people to think that they were doing an effective job. Steven Pinker, for example, wrote in Better Angels of Our Nature

that when he was a graduate student in psychology, he did what he says was one of the worst things I've ever done. And he himself describes it as torturing a rat to death. He didn't really mean to torture it to death, but he set up an experiment, left it overnight, and in the morning the rat was dead. And he concluded that it had effectively been tortured to death because it was getting electric shocks and had not learned to stop the shock in the way that he or his supervisor had expected the rat would learn to stop the shock. But he then says, well, that happened whatever the date was in the 1960s, I guess, when Stephen was a graduate student. But the difference now is like the difference between night and day. And unfortunately, it's not. Unfortunately, there is still a lot of

research that gets through these institutional animal care and use committees that really should not be done. That is clearly very painful and distressing to the animals and that is being done in the United States but also in many other countries. So the learned helplessness experiments that you talked about, that Martin Seligman and others were involved in, was an attempt to produce an animal model of depression. And the idea was that you train an animal to be able to escape an electric shock. So a dog, for example, would be put in a sort of cage enclosure that had two sides to it, and it had a wire floor on both sides, but you could electrify

the floor on one side, and the dog would then feel the shock and would rapidly jump onto the other side of this box where there was no electric shock, and it would learn to do that. But then at some point, you put up a barrier so the dog can't jump away from the electric shock. And as the experimenters themselves describe, after a large number of attempts to escape, and I think they used things like running around, urinating, defecating, yelping, the dog will eventually give up the attempt to escape and will simply lie on the electrified floor and passively accept the shock. And the idea was that this would be in some way a model for depression and that maybe we would learn to treat depression, which of course is a terrible

condition when humans have severe and untreatable depression, from doing this to dogs. But this went on for decades and we never learnt anything that enabled us to treat the severe cases of depression from this. And although it's now accepted by the experimenters themselves that this was not a good model of depression, in fact, and that even the label they'd given to it, learned helplessness, turned out to be wrong because it wasn't actually learned behaviour. It was something that was more biologically innate. But after they'd given up using that as a model for depression, somebody then had the bright idea of saying, well, maybe this is not a good model for depression, but how about post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD, which is a problem that we talk about a

lot now. So then they said, well, yeah, could we use it for that? And then they said, but maybe it's not traumatic enough, or maybe there's a theory that PTSD comes from early childhood abuse, and then that is reignited by a later traumatic event. So one of the experiments I described, done with rats, attempts to replicate this, attempts to say, okay, we'll give them some abuse when they're very young, and then we'll abuse them again when they get older. And they set up things where they do a whole variety of different forms of trauma to them.

So one is giving them inescapable electric shock. Another is dropping them into a Another is dropping them into a sheer-sided container of water where they have to swim to stay alive. And you have what's called the forced swimming test. You let them for 20 minutes where they can't get out of this container. They have to keep swimming and swimming. And probably they're fearful, of course, of getting tired and drowning. Then another one is you immobilize them. You put them in plastic cones where they can't move at all.

They're completely immobilized in all their limbs. And yeah, or you may deprive them of food. So again, a lot of pain and distress is being inflicted on animals. And is this really a model of human post-traumatic stress disorder? It seems very unlikely because it seems that we have a different kind of awareness of what's going on and we talk about it with other people. It's a social thing as well. We may feel that we were humiliated because we were abused and mistreated, which perhaps a rat does not feel or not feel in the same way.

So it is a kind of continuation of saying, well, we use animals in this way, what else can we think of that we will use and abuse? But very little of this translates to being useful for humans. You can't say it's zero, but there's an immense amount of pain and suffering inflicted on animals in the hope that it will do some good for humans, but it very rarely does. And of course it uses a lot of resources, it takes money, it takes scientific, talented scientists to work on this, and who knows if we use those resources and those talented people to more directly try and treat people with the disease, do research, clinical studies of humans with the condition, maybe we would have got better treatments for these conditions without abusing animals.

Well, also in the context of that discussion, you make the quite astute point really devastating for the whole enterprise, which is to say that if this work really is to translate into our understanding of human suffering, it will only translate because these animals are deeply analogous to humans in their suffering. And if they are deeply analogous to humans in their suffering, well, then that makes our mistreatment of them all the more odious, ethically speaking. ethically speaking. So insofar as this work could be useful, it approaches the ethical asymptote of just the monstrosity of treating other sentient beings in this way. And insofar as they're not at all analogous and the suffering is, in a Cartesian sense, really just an illusion, well then why are we doing the work in the first place? Exactly, yes, that's right. It's a dilemma that people who do this kind of work on animals in

psychology have to face. Either the animal is really like us in terms of its psychology and its mind, its mental states, in which case how can we possibly justify doing this? Or it's completely unlike us and then what are we going to learn from doing these things to the animals? So yeah, I don't think they can win that argument. Yeah, I think the most depressing studies you cite in the book, I've now forgotten whether these are more from the first edition or whether this kind of work has continued up to the present, perhaps you can tell me, but it's all the maternal deprivation stuff with monkeys and apes where, you know, they're given a, instead of, you know, access to their actual mother, they're given access to a, you know, a wire frame simulacrum of a mother. But, you know, every sadistic permutation of this seems to have been explored,

including mothers that, you know, pointlessly shock them or stab them or, you know, screech with loud sounds. Or if you just imagine an alien race coming to Earth and beginning to treat us this way, you know, the only theory of mind you could have about them is it's just pure evil, right? I mean, it's just like there is no greater evil than the adumbrations of those experiments that some brilliant grad student or his or her supervisor has designed. Does that work still continue? And if so, what is the possible justification for it? Well, that work went on for a very long time. Harry Harlow was the one who really started this series of experiments back in the 1950s. And then, yeah, I mean, he really did horrendous things, as you say, that

you have to suspect there was some kind of sadism behind this from the things he did and from the way he wrote about it, right? I mean, he used terms like he created a tunnel of terror, he calls it, to frighten these monkeys to see if he could see what, you know, pathology, mental pathology developed. And then he got these neurotic female monkeys and he wanted to see how they reacted with their own babies, but they wouldn't allow the males to mate with them. So then he constructed what he calls in his own paper, a rape rack, basically tying the females down so that the males could rape them, and then sees how they are, what sort of mothers they are with their babies.

And he describes how one of them takes its baby face down on the floor and rubs its face across the grid of the wire cage. So there's generations of suffering that he is causing. He trained his graduate students to continue to do this work. One of them was Stephen Suomi, who continued to get large grants from the National Institutes of Health in the United States supporting this research, until finally, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, PETA, as it's more commonly known, the animal group, aroused opposition to them. And I think they stopped in 2015, something like that. But so these experiments had gone on for 60 years, this vein of experiments.

As far as I know, they're not going on now. I certainly hope they're not going on now. But obviously, they went on far too long. And there are other things that may be almost as bad that are still continuing. Well, so now there's a line here that I don't know how to specify it, but my associations with PETA as an organization, albeit distant associations, I've never had any direct experience of the group, but from the kinds of protests I've heard them perform, it has seemed to be against all animal experimentation, no matter how seemingly

sane and necessary it is, right? So it's like, granted, the experimentation you describe in your book is something that I see no ethical justification for. But again, I believe I can imagine the judicious and careful use of non-human animals for the purpose of mitigating the most appalling forms of human suffering, and that there may not be any computer simulations that can come to the rescue here to make that kind of work no longer necessary, right? So I'm not sure what the best examples are at this point, but I imagine there are some. So can you speak to that issue of just the potential animal rights extremism here that would prevent us from figuring out how to cure our children's cancers or spinal cord injuries or

whatever it is. Right. So I think actually that PETA does tend to focus on the experiments which are not curing our children's cancers. And that's obviously good tactics if you want to change something. You don't want to tackle the hardest cases. You want to tackle the cases that will be more widely accepted by the public. But there's a lot of pressure, of course, as with any group or political group of activists or lobbyists, there's a lot of pressure to sort of stick to a party line and not allow much nuance in your position.

And I think that that's probably responsible for the fact that there certainly are organizations against animal experimentation, whether or not PETA is one of them, I'm not quite in a position to say. That would say we're against all animal experiments, even the ones that will cure the cancer of your children. So I'm not in that position. I do think that you have to accept that there can be potentially justifiable experiments. Now, always, of course, I think first you have to accept that there can be potentially justifiable experiments. Now, always, of course, I think first you should see, as in fact you suggested, is there some non-animal using way we can make progress on this issue? And you mentioned computer simulation. For some cases, it might be growing cells in vitro where there's no conscious being,

but just cells that are being worked with. There's a whole range of fields of developing alternatives to animal research. In fact, at the end of August, I attended a conference at Niagara Falls in which there were several hundred scientists from 40 different countries all exchanging notes on where they were making progress. But I certainly acknowledge that there are experiments going on now that we cannot replace with non-animal using methods and some of them will have benefits that are sufficient to say, yes, reluctantly at the moment we are justified in doing this with animals

while trying to minimize their suffering to the greatest extent possible. One example that I give in the book is research to alleviate the symptoms of Parkinson's disease, which many listeners will know somebody who has Parkinson's disease or may have it themselves in their early stages. And it is a terrible condition. And it affects millions of people worldwide. So if you could find, if you have something that really has good hopes of curing the disease, or in the case of the research that I mentioned in the book,

alleviating the symptoms of the disease, which is an important part, of course, it's a slow-acting disease. I think you could defend that if there were really no other way to find that treatment. So yeah, it makes life more complicated to recognize that. And then you have to start drawing lines. It's a lot easier if you just say, well, no harmful experiments can be done on animals at all. But the cost of that is that you have far smaller chances of actually obtaining public support. Because of course, the lobby that wants to continue to do animal experiments, which is not only the scientists, but also the big commercial companies like Charles River Laboratories that produce millions of animals for use in laboratories and make good profits from it. saying, your child or the rat. Here are these fanatics who want us to stop promising research to save your child from cancer, and they want to stop it because we're using rats. And clearly,

at this stage anyway, the public is going to say, oh, I'll choose my child, thank you very much, not the rat. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, well, this is one of those instances where the perfect and the pure can be the enemy of the good. And yeah, I would agree that it's important to be pragmatic as well as principled here. I have spoken about it before. I've certainly spoken to Will McCaskill many times on the podcast and Toby Ord at least once. This is a movement that I've never been officially an adherent of, though I've been very directly informed by it. Its representation online in the branded culture of effective altruists has always struck me as not perfectly passing the smell test. I mean, there's something quasi-cultic about it or dogmatic or something that always concerned me, and this is something I've spoken to Will about, at least. But generally speaking, it seemed like a major advance over the normal way of approaching philanthropy, which is just to let your sentimentality and good feels

be your guide and to really have no rational accounting of the good you're doing or the harm you may be causing apart from that. So it really has informed the way I give to causes very directly. And then here comes Sam Bankman-Fried, who was very clearly the poster boy for the ultimate instance of what effective altruists call earning to give, whose talents could be easily monetized and you recognize that it's far better than joining an organization like Doctors Without Borders or anything else where you're explicitly doing good in the world. It would be better to earn all the money you can earn and support those organizations because then you have the effect of hundreds or thousands or even tens of thousands of people doing that good. And in his case, he seemed to earn more money than almost anyone in human history, and he was earning it

explicitly for the purpose of doing all the good he could do. And quite unhappily, the cynicism with which this project was viewed by many people who take a dim view of effective altruism or even a dim view of altruism as well. I mean, just the Ayn Rand types in Silicon Valley who think it's all just virtue signaling and any pretensions to the contrary. It's just kind of human vanity and status signaling under some other guise. I'm not going to name names, but there are many people who view really any philanthropy along those lines. And he seemed to be the living confirmation of all of their prejudices. And because I don't have to go into details here, I think everyone will be familiar with just how fully it really became a Greek tragedy, at least when viewed from the point of view of Sam Bankman Freed's parents, I think, just how fully he soared in the estimation of everyone and then immolated.

What's been your experience as certainly one of the patriarchs of effective altruism in the advent of the Sam Bankman Freed catastrophe? Well, it has been a tragedy. I think that's a good way to describe it. It's a tragedy viewed from many different perspectives. You mentioned Sam's parents were professors of law and Stanford. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense Podcast, along with other subscriber-only content, including bonus episodes, NAMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app.

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