Modern Wisdom - #633 - Peter Singer - Are You An Evil Person For Eating Meat?

Episode Date: May 27, 2023

Peter Singer is a philosopher, creator of the ethical veganism movement, bioethicist, Princeton University professor, and author. Do animals possess the capacity to suffer? And if they do, does that mean there is a moral case to ensure that we reduce their suffering as much as possible? Thankfully, the ethical case for animal welfare is much more interesting and reasonable than protestors throwing pigs blood over your Canada Goose coat. Expect to learn just how much progress humans have made in improving animal welfare, which species actually have the greatest capacity for suffering, whether it's possible to do "ethical" meat farming, how to harmonise ecosystem preservation with hunting practices, Peter’s perspective on the current vegan movement & why it hasn’t gained global momentum, whether humans are ethically obliged to consume as few calories as possible, whether we need to be worried about AI agents' capacity to suffer and much more... Sponsors: Get 20% discount & free shipping on your Lawnmower 4.0 at https://manscaped.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and more from Athletic Greens at https://athleticgreens.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 20% discount on House Of Macadamias’ nuts at https://houseofmacadamias.com/modernwisdom (use code MW20) Extra Stuff: Buy Animal Liberation Now - https://amzn.to/3BTculn Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello everybody, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Peter Singer, he's a philosopher, creator of the Ethical Veganism Movement, a bioethicist, Princeton University professor, and an author. Do animals possess the capacity to suffer? And if they do, does that mean that there is a moral case to ensure that we reduce their suffering as much as possible? Thankfully, the ethical case for animal welfare is much more interesting and reasonable than protesters throwing pigs blood over your Canada goose coat would have you believe. Expect to learn just how much progress humans have made

in improving animal welfare, which species actually have the greatest capacity for suffering, whether it's possible to do ethical meat farming, how to harmonize ecosystem preservation with hunting practices, Peter's perspective on the current vegan movement and why it hasn't gained global momentum, whether humans are ethically obliged to consume as few calories as possible, whether we need to be worried about AI agents capacity to suffer,

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And if you do not like it, they will give you your money back. Head to athleticgreens.com slash modern wisdom to get a year's free supply of vitamin D, 5 free travel packs, free pots, shakers, and more. That's athleticgreens.com slash modern wisdom. And in final news, this episode is brought to you by House of Macadamias. I can tell you about how macadamias have got the lowest carb content of any popular nut and they've got more heart healthy monoinsaturated fats and they're the only nut rich in omega-7 fatty acids and all sorts of other stuff. But really they just taste good. They taste absolutely fantastic. Actually, the ready salted, straight up, normal, ready salted macadamia,

House of Macadamia's macadamia nuts are insane. They do salty versions, they do sweet and they do spicy versions, but just get the salted ones. They are outrageously tasty, and if you are somebody that you know is a nut lover, you absolutely have to try this. They are healthy for you, but that's kind of secondary to the fact that they taste phenomenal, and that is why guys like Tim Ferris and Joe Rogan and Brett Weinstein all endorse house of macadamias as well. and MW20, a checkout. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Peter Singer. It's nearly 50 years since you first published Animal Liberation. Why rerelease the book now? Well, partly because it is nearly 50 years and although I did revise it in 1990, that's

still 33 years. And the book isn't just you know timeless philosophy it has some of what I hope is timeless philosophy in it but it it's applied to the real world and the real world includes industrial animal production which is a vast industry that is terrible for animals to planet climate health everything but it's changed, of course, that industry. It's changed over the last 50 or 33 years. I also talk about the use of animals in laboratories, and I described experiments that were done the last time I revised the book,

so experiments for the 1980s, not very relevant if you want to know what's going on with animals in labs today. So those are two main reasons. Lots of people ask me about, well, you know, have we made progress for animals over the time since you wrote animal liberation? I wanted to answer that question. And I did want to talk about climate change and its relevance to our choice of what we eat because that obviously wasn't in the 1975 edition. I had no knowledge of climate change and it was barely in the 1990 edition either. What ways do you think we've made progress with regards to animal welfare and in which ways have we gone backward? We've made progress in restrictions on some of the worst forms of close confinement of animals in industrial animal production

that I focused on in the earlier book. So for example, laying hens, egg laying hens were in very small wire cages, where they couldn't even stretch their wings, even if they'd only been one hand per cage, they couldn't have stretched their wings fully, but there might be four or five hands in those cages. They have been prohibited in some places,

so they've been prohibited in the European Union. The United Kingdom has maintained those prohibitions after leaving the European Union. Some states of the United Kingdom has maintained those prohibitions after leaving the European Union. Some states of the United States where citizens can bring initiatives to the ballot and have a vote on them. California is the largest of those states have also restricted those cages and as well individual stalls for veal calves and saus, where again, they couldn't turn around. The stalls were so tight, they could hardly walk a step.

So there were some places where those things have been banned. Another big form of progress is that there are many more vegetarians and vegans. There were virtually no vegans in 1975, when the book was published. There are now, I think, supposed to be 1.3 million vegans in the United Kingdom and varying figures for the United States that some surveys go much higher than that in the US.

So there's a great awareness of animals and the idea that animals might have rights is no longer a metaphor ridicule as it was when the book first came out. So there's lots of ways in which we've gone ahead. The big way in which we've gone backwards is that there are more animals in industrial animal production now than ever before. And that's at least partly because of the rise of China. In fact, the China has become a lot more prosperous, which is great.

We don't want people to be in extreme poverty. But so hundreds of millions of Chinese now use the extra income that they have to buy more meat. And China has been building these enormous factory farms, like 26 story buildings, just full of thousands and thousands of pigs. 26 story buildings just full of thousands and thousands of pigs, obviously never getting to go outside just living their entire lives on the concrete floors of these buildings. And because of that, and expansion of other chicken production, fish factory farming, aquaculture is it's called to nicer word for what it really is. aquaculture as it's called to nicer word for what it really is. So there are far more animal suffering now from human abuse than they were in 1975. I suppose that the increase in human population just means that there is a greater requirement for food.

So even if you've had an increase in the proportion of people that are eating vegan of vegetarian, there is overall a significant more number of people who are eating full stop, and regardless what proportion of those may have slightly increased to eat non-animal products, a lot more will be eating animal products. Yes, I think that's exactly right. That is what's happened. In some countries, meat consumption is stable or even falling. It's fallen in Germany and in Sweden in recent years. But it's growing in those countries where meat consumption used to be low.

And so we are certainly getting more meat being produced. For the people who aren't familiar with the ideas in animal liberation, what's the key overview of your argument? What makes it different on novel or unique? Well, my argument is not based on the idea that we should love animals or have warm feelings to them. It's based on the idea that this is a major ethical issue, a major ethical wrong that we are doing to

those who are not members of our species. And I argue that the kind of wrong is analogous to the more familiar wrongs that we have done in the past and to some extent are still doing, such as racism and sexism. So in saying that I'm not comparing the experience of animals to those of blacks or women, but I am saying that what these phenomena have in common is that there is a dominant group. It might have been those of European descent who went to Africa to buy slaves or capture slaves and enslave them. It might be men who were able to take power from women and essentially to make women into their property. And in this case, of course, it's humans as a whole who do exactly that with animals. Animals legally are property everywhere in the world,

you know domestic animals. And we, although we may treat our companion animals reasonably well, with the animals that we are raising for food or using as tools for research in laboratories, they are just things for us to use. They are means to our ends and we don't give their interests consideration. And as long as it being can feel pain, that being has interests that we ought to be taking into account. And the fact that they're not members of our species doesn't in any way justify us disregarding those interests. Is the goal here to reduce suffering, then?

Primarily, the goal is to reduce suffering. Yes, it's not a matter of rights, particularly. It's not specifically talking about the wrongness of killing. It's focused much more on the fact that any being capable of feeling pain has interest, particularly interest in not suffering, and that's an interest that we violate on an absolutely vast scale. We're talking about hundreds of billions of animals that humans cause suffering to by the conditions in which they raise them each year. In your opinion, do some animals have a different capacity for suffering?

Yeah, so I think the capacity is for suffering very with the nature of the species. That's certainly true. And we don't have great ways of comparing the suffering. Essentially, I suppose we see it more closely in those non-human animals who either seem to be like us because they're closely related to us like chimpanzees and binobos and orangutans and so on or in those animals with whom we live like dogs and cats and some people can be very close to horses of course so there we recognize it quite well. We don't recognize it nearly so well in chickens and fish, for example,

but we do now have, and this is another important difference between 1975. We do now have a growing body of scientific research on the capacities of non-human animals to feel pain, which animals feel pain, what kinds of things cause them to suffer. So we know a lot more about that than we did before, but we certainly don't know everything, and if you move to a species very different from us like an octopus, although the behavior of the octopus shows intelligence and ability to solve problems,

it's not easy for us to know what an octopus is really feeling, but it does seem like it's a conscious being, it's likely to be feeling pain and likely to be able to suffer. If it's the case that different animals perhaps have different capacities for suffering, does this mean that there's a hierarchy with which we should care about the suffering of different animals? A human should be placed above that of a pig, should be placed above that of a vol, should be placed above that of a aphid? Well, I wouldn't put it quite like that. I think that there isn't a hierarchy in a sense that similar amounts of pain are similarly important, whether they're the pain of a human or any of the animals you just mentioned.

The question is, what do we regard as similar amounts of pain and how do we know? But I don't think that there's a kind of hierarchy of moral status. I think that there are just questions that we need to ask about what the different species feel, what do we know about the field. And some species may feel pain more acutely than we do. After all, we know that many species have much more acute sense of smell dogs do.

They may have more acute vision, raptors have incredibly sharp vision. So it's hard to say, you can't really say, well, humans just feel more pain than any other animal. That's unlikely. But yes, we could say, well, some animals don't have enough neurons, really, perhaps, to feel pain. So maybe some of the insects don't feel pain, but I'm more kind of like miniature robots, maybe. I don't know, but that's possible. Yeah, I understand. I think oysters, like bivolves and stuff like that, there's some, well, I guess skepticism around whether or not they can feel pretty much anything at all. Yes, I'm skeptical about oysters, because pain evolves

as a warning signal, a signal of danger. And beings that then have this capacity for pain can move away from that danger and escape it. But a noister doesn't move. A noister just sits on a rock basically, and so it's hard to see why a noister would have evolved a capacity for pain. Given that there's some cost to having those

capacities, you have to have some neural matter and that has to be fed and whatever kept going. So yeah, I don't have any objecting to reading oysters because I don't think they're sentient beings. That's a good example of an animal that I don't think can feel pain. What would you say to the people who believe that humans are the ones that are guiding this planet? Why should I care about the suffering of some non-human animal? I can care if another human suffers because they're a complex creature like me, but animals are being bred. They've always been bred for a very long time for our consumption. This is the way that it's always been. Why should we be bothered about the suffering of other animals?

Well, I don't think the fact that we are dominant is a reason for discounting their interests. That was also true of Europeans, for example, with their more advanced technology, their guns, so on that, but we don't feel that justified them in dominating other animals. As for the fact that it's always been like this, that's a very common conservative argument. But you could also, a man could certainly have always said that,

well, men have been the leaders of societies. Women have needed men's permission to do things to who they marry, to have any possessions even in the 19th century in England. A married woman did not own any property, whatever property she brought into the marriage on the day they were married, belonged to her husband. So, you know, one could have said, well, it's been like this for a very long time, but we certainly don't think that that justifies that arrangement.

Yeah, the marital naturalistic fallacy perhaps. Right, yes, I think that's what it is. What is the typical life like of an animal that will arrive on somebody's plate in 2023? What are some of the numbers that are involved in some of the experiences? Well, the animals who we raise in the largest numbers are fish, and I'm not now talking about those fish who are captured wild from the oceans. I'm talking about fish we raise in commercial fish, I wouldn't really call them farms, commercial fish production. And a recent estimate of that is 124 billion fish raised every year.

And they are very closely confined. They are in small ponds or nets. The, some of them like salmon have an instinct to swim across the oceans. And they don't have any kind of humane slaughter. The other thing that's worth noting, particularly, you know, supposedly by a salmon, um, farm salmon as most salmon are nowadays, um, you're not responsible just for the life and death of that salmon. That salmon had to be fed and the salmon is carnivorous. So trawlers had to go in in the ocean and catch fish to be

ground up low value fish to be ground up into pellets to be fed to that salmon. And an estimate that I've seen says that every salmon by the time they're ready to be killed in salt has consumed 147 other fish in total. So you're responsible for close to 150 fish being killed by the one salmon that you buy. In next in terms of numbers is chicken and something like 70 billion chicken are raised worldwide each year. These chicken are sold very young. They've been bred to grow extremely fast.

So they reach the weight that the chicken you buy in the supermarket in something like six weeks So really their babies, but there's a problem with the fact that they are bred to grow so fast Or several problems they suffer from bone deformities because they put on weight They're incredibly obese and their bones are still immature And one of the problems is that their legs may collapse under them. So the industry accepts something like 5% mortality in these young birds. One in 20 will die. And those deaths may be caused by the fact that their legs have collapsed under them. They can no longer walk to food or water. Nobody is going to pay them individual attention. It's just not worth the cost.

They're too cheap. There's 20,000 birds in a single shed. Somebody might walk through the shed and pick up the corpses after they've died, but they won't get any individual help if their legs do collapse under them. And even those whose legs managed to keep them standing until they're ready, that six weeks they're ready to be rounded up for slaughter. Experts who've looked at this have said that they are in pain for the last two weeks because their body weight, it hurts them just to stand. But they can't really sit down either because they're living on a kind of a litter that is full of their droppings,

of these 20,000 birds and maybe previous batches of birds. Their droppings are just left on the floor of the shed. And bird droppings are strongly alkaline. So when they mix with air and with moisture, they form a caustic solution. So if they were to spend long time sitting on this litter, they would actually get caustic burns on their thighs. So they can't really do that either. One observer, Vettanarian, said, it's like somebody without writers who's forced to stand all day, all for the last 20% of their life.

So I think that's really, again, a way of bringing up animals that does, takes no account of their well-being, their suffering. If it did, we wouldn't breed birds that are so unsuited to the kind of thing that they are except for the fact that they put on weight quickly and you can make more money out of a faster growing bird than a slower growing bird. What comes next, which animals after the chickens? Well, I think pigs would be the next in terms of quantity. And that's particularly so in China, China is now the world's largest producer of pigs. Although countries like the United States have a lot of pigs as well.

But pigs are also almost all kept indoors nowadays. They're also bred to grow very fast. They're closely confined in pens. The pigs that, who's meat, pork or ham or bacon, you're actually by, will have been kept in small groups but always indoors and with little room to move around. The worst situation is their mothers, the breeding sars whose role is just to produce litter after litter of piglets and they are still quite commonly kept in individual crates or stalls, just metal bars, two narrow for them to turn around.

And they've got no straw to bed down in. They're either on concrete floors or on metal slats because that's the easiest and cheapest radar hose off the manure. So they have nothing to do. These are pigs of very intelligent animals and comparable to do. These are pigs are very intelligent animals and Comparable to dogs and yet they just locked up all day. They have nothing to do except they do get fed and then

Maybe they consume their their food for half an hour or so and that's it And if anybody kept a dog like that in in conditions where a dog couldn't run around or even turn around. Everybody would say that's cruel or to be prosecuted. But because these are pigs, because they come under commercial farming laws, which typically allow these practices not, as I said, not in the European Union, not in the United Kingdom, not in California, but in the States of the United States, where most of the pigs are reared, states like Iowa or Nebraska or North Carolina. There's no such laws preventing them being kept in this way. And in China, there's no real animal welfare laws for farmed animals at all.

There are some laws relating to how they can be slaughtered, but there's nothing, no national laws about how they can be reared. So I've seen photos of just vast sheds with rows and rows of these sails standing in those stalls. Again, just to reiterate here, your position isn't that we should be cuddly towards animals because they're cute and they're nice and they're supposed to be walking around on a farm yard. It's that there is an associated amount of suffering that goes along with this. And there is no reason that we as humans shouldn't care about the suffering of other animals that are on this planet.

Especially, I would imagine animals that we have brought into this world ourselves. we have brought into this world ourselves. Right, we're fully responsible clearly for their welfare. We do that very deliberately, bring them into the world and then put them in these conditions. And that is really what I'm objecting to. I'll also add that this is not an efficient way of feeding people. Some people will say, well, the world's population is growing.

You know, we need to feed them. We've got to do this. But the truth is just to reverse, this is a waste of food. Because when you take animals off the fields where they might get at least some of the food by themselves, then you have to feed them. And to feed them, I've already mentioned with the fish, you have to go out and catch fish and grind them up for the carnivorous fish we farm anyway. And for the chickens and pigs, we have to grow grains or grow soybeans, which we could eat ourselves and feed them to the animals.

And in the process, the animal wastes most of the food value because the animal has to keep their body warm, you burn up calories to just keep your body warm and even if they are very confined and can't really move around, they still waste. It varies a bit according to the species but if we're talking about feeding grains to cattle, they waste at least 90% of the food value. If we're talking about pigs, they probably waste something like 60 to 70% of the food value. If we're talking about chickens, because they grow so fast, they're a little more efficient. They've perhaps wasted two thirds of the food value. We get one third back. So yeah, it's not a good way of feeding the world. It's not a good way of preserving the planet. What about the role of milk or eggs or cheese? Right, yes. Well, the egg-lying

hands, again, in those places I mentioned the European Union and some of a few states of the United States, they can't be kept in the wire cages that otherwise say the majority of US hens are kept in. These very narrow wire cages where they can't stretch their wings. But even where they're not kept in cages, they can still be very crowded. I think you could say that in genuinely free range egg production where the hens are actually allowed free to roam outside and have grass that they can use and they can pick it in insects in the grass or look for worms or something like that. No, yes, you can do that and you can produce eggs.

They're more expensive, but you can produce eggs that way. But the overwhelming majority of eggs come from hands who never go outside. And as I say, in many countries, the majority are still in cages. With dairy, there was again, been a big move to intensify dairy to produce, have large diaries, the traditional dairy farm, maybe had 50 cars, maybe 100, 200 cows would have been a decent sized dairy farm and they were able to go out each day on grass and grays and that's not too bad a life in itself but the larger farms with a thousand or more cows, they essentially keep them in in stalls and they bring food to them.

But the other big problem with with dairy products which many people don't really think of is that the dairy cars have to be made pregnant at regular intervals to keep producing milk. So roughly every year the cow will give birth to a calf and the cow will give birth to a calf and The calf is taken away from the cow within hours of birth because otherwise the calf will drink the milk that the producers want to sell so The separation of the cow and and her calf is a painful process for both of them There's a very strong bond between cows and their cows. And you know, dairy farmers have acknowledged that sometimes when they take in the calf away and then the cow calls for that calf for hours and hours and sometimes even when the cow comes, if

the calf was taken away at a particular spot and the cow is taken past that spot, the cow will stop and will call for a calf. She remembers the calf being taken away. And the fate of the calf isn't good either. If the calf is female, she may be raised as a dairy cow herself. But if the calf is male, she's likely to go, so he is likely to go into the real industry or possibly be raised for hamburger, but dairy cows aren't really very good for meat production, they're not bread for that.

I imagine that male chicks are similarly useless. The male chicks are the laying breeds, egg laying breeds, yes, and they are generally just thrown into a kind of a grinder, which grinds them up immediately after they're hatched. And their sex is selected. The females are put on one side and the males get ground up. There are some moves in Europe to develop technologies that either enable you to sex the egg and therefore destroy the egg before the chicken is hatched, or even enable it make it possible that the hen will only lay eggs of females.

And that would solve the problem of the male chicks. And I think Germany and France are trying to legislate at least for the sexing in the egg rather than the chick to prevent the suffering of these millions of male chicks that get grand up, but in the United States that isn't being done yet and here where I'm in Australia, it's not being done either. I imagine that one of the most common objections after you put forward a case like that,, by the sounds of things, the life of these animals isn't tremendously enjoyable. I don't think that anyone, even the most ardent meat eater, would say, yeah, I'm really proud of being part of a system that causes animals to go through that kind of situation.

But there are ways that we can do this. We can look at regenerative farming. We can ensure that chickens not only have a free range but have a natural range, they've got tons of hectares that they can go over, is there a problem with eating an egg, if it's being created by a chicken that's had a fantastic life, it's been looked after, it's been cared for, protected from foxes, the same thing goes for, I'm sure there is a way that you can get milk from a cow that doesn't involve the emotional turmoil that they go through. that doesn't involve the emotional turmoil that they go through. In your opinion, are there any ways that you can do ethical animal farming? There are ways that I think can be regarded as ethical.

You can have a debate about whether they are ethical, ethical enough to eat those products. But I think the debate is an ongoing one and a reasonable one. So while I'm not going to say I endorse those forms of annual production, I am going to say I don't have a conclusive objection to saying that they're wrong or that they shouldn't be done. So for people who want to continue to eat animal products, if they conscientiously search out those products. I'm prepared to say, yes, they're trying to live

an ethical life and that's a reasonable attempt to do so. They'll probably be able to succeed with free range eggs, depending a little bit where they're living, but there are free range eggs being sold in most countries, labeled as such. You may need to check up on how many hens there are per hectare or acre, but it's possible. Don't kid yourselves that the hens will have a long life because once they stop laying, which is well

before they would normally die, they will be killed. I don't think many commercial producers will keep feeding hens who lay no eggs. The male chicks may still get killed. That's another issue. And, but with the dairy products, it's really, really hard to find dairy producers who leave their cows with the cows. In animal liberation now,

I think I mentioned three of them, one in England, one in Germany, and one here in Australia. The dairy products are a lot more expensive. But yeah, if people can do that, then okay. Still question, if the cows are producing male calves, what are you going to do with them? Are you going to keep them? But at least the Australian producer that I've had some contact with uses sperm selection. They use artificial insemination for producing the calves and they select the

sperm and they get very, very few male calves. So that's one way of dealing with that. I think their milk is about three times as expensive as milk from standard commercial producers. So you have to be prepared to pay for it, but if you really want to continue to eat animal products and you want to have an ethical relationship with animals, I guess that's one way of doing it. Think about how much more tasty all guess that's one way of doing it. Think about how much more tasty all of that morality is going to be though.

That's really gonna add on to the flavor profile. Yeah, and I think people will appreciate it more. That's true, you know, I'm old enough to remember when I was a child, when chicken was a treat because it was expensive. And, you know, in my my family you got it on your birthday and you know it did it did seem something special then I don't think many people think that chicken is a special treat now but maybe if you only eat animal products from really animals who have

really good lives and they killed with that pain and suffering. You were these animal products quite rarely and you would think of them as a special treat and you would enjoy them more perhaps. One of the progressions that I've seen from some of the more militant corners of the veganism movement is saying that owning any type of pet would be something which is unethical as well. I think a lot of people struggle to understand how owning a dog that most people see not only is just something that they care about, but literally a part of the family. These people treat them as if they're essentially a surrogate child. In fact, some people decide not to have children in place of a ton of dogs or cats, what is your position on the owning of pets?

I don't discourage people having, I prefer to think of them as companion animals, but I don't discourage people from living with companion animals. I don't like, you know, you said owning them, well, that is the legal situation, of course, now. I'd rather think of them as, as you them as as members of the family and companions. I don't think you would be able to own them. In the same way that you don't own your son or daughter. Exactly. Yes, that's right. But I do

think that many people with companion animals do give them good and rewarding lives, obviously not everybody, but many do. And it's also, I think, important for our understanding of non-human animals. I already mentioned earlier that people who live with dogs or cats have a sense that, you know, what they like, that they're complex beings, that they not only feel pain if you tread on their paws, but they have emotional suffering when they're bored, when you leave them alone at home, at least dogs are. And they welcome you when you come home and they love to go for a run. There's a lot of things that we learn about animals

through being close to a dog or a cat or a horse. And that has led many people onto appreciating that the way they're treating or the way they're complicit in the treatment of pigs and cows and chickens is wrong. One of the leading animal advocate and strategist of the animal movement in the United States in the last quarter of the 20th century was a man called Henry Spirrow who was a close friend of mine.

And he was somebody, he was always like for progressive causes, he marched for civil rights in the American South. He was a merchant seamen and joined a reformist union to try to improve conditions for workers after the Cuban revolution. He went there to see it himself, what was happening. But he had no thoughts about animals until a friend of his was going overseas said, hey look after my cat. I've got no one else to look after my cat. He's a cat. And the cat basically charmed him, as he says. And suddenly he had this epiphany that here he was patting one animal and sticking a knife and fork into another. And was that something wrong with that? And he happened

to come across my animal liberation at the same time. And that combination started him off my animal liberation at the same time, and that combination started him off on a career that really improved lives for many animals. Have you considered the suffering of wild animals and whether it's our duty to somehow step in and ameliorate that? I have considered that. I would say I was prompted to consider it by some other philosophers who started thinking about that issue. I didn't really think much about it

in the early versions of the book, but I have a few pages about it in animal liberation now. I certainly think that we should consider the interest of wild animals and they're relatively simple things that we can do. The largest number of wild animals we harm is again fish and we harm them by hauling them out of the ocean and letting them die in cruel conditions because they will suffocate in nets for example or die slowly. So and we're overfishing the oceans. So avoiding

wild caught fish is good for wild animals and good for the sustainability of the oceans. So avoiding wild caught fish is good for wild animals and good for the sustainability of the oceans. And I think also things like trying to install a glass that birds won't fly into, that's another major killer of animals. And I think, you know, if you do have a cat, keeping your cat indoors at least at night, if not all the time, depending on where you live, is important for wild animals. Because, although many cat lovers deny it, there's very strong evidence that pretty much any cat left outside, especially at night, becomes a predator and kills small animals, small birds, small rodents. So keeping your cat indoors at night is a good way of reducing the suffering of wild animals.

If that's the case and you lived in an area, let's say that was overrun with wild pigs. There are some places in America that have this problem and some people get in big helicopters with 50 cal machine guns on the side of them and just chew through reams and reams and reams of animals. How do you balance the ethical decision there? If these animals were left, they would destroy an ecosystem, which downstream from that has a ton of other animals that live in it, the only interjection that we can make is to kill them, but by doing that, you're killing an animal in a pretty inhumane way

on the side of a gunship loaded with a belt fed machine gun. Yeah, we have similar problems with wild animals in Australia too. Look, I respect the environmental values that we want to preserve. And it's our fault for having introduced these non-native species and they've escaped or they've sometimes been deliberately released to breed and we've created this havoc. It's obviously not the fault of the pigs, but I agree with those who think that there are at least some situations where we can't just let it go. I would like to see

more humane ways of dealing with the problem than the helicopter gunships that you mentioned. gunships that you mentioned. So ideally we would put some research into developing a bait that will sterilize the animals and therefore that would deal with the problem more humanely over the long term. Interesting. So, yeah, I mean, in a very small scale that can be done. There's a couple of islands off the Del Marva Peninsula in Maryland, Chinkertique and Hasateek, I think they called, where there was a problem with feral horses, feral ponies, and people care more about horses than they do about pigs. So when people said we need to shoot all these

ponies, people said no, you can't do that. And then they did find ways of sterilizing them. But, you know, on a large scale, over large territory, you probably can't do that very easily at the moment. But, yeah, you might be able to develop a bait that the pigs would take, that the native animals would not take, and that would sterilize them. Yeah, it's a fascinating decision criteria there. So I got introduced to your position, probably about four or five years ago from a friend, and I am a meat teacher, I still am now, but it's been by far for me the most compelling consideration around my consumption of animals.

Where is it being sourced from? How do I feel about eating it? Even little things, I know that as a utilitarian, this probably doesn't count. But having a little bit more reverence for the food that you eat and for where it's come from, it's been something that was changed upon understanding a more moral and ethical framework as opposed to a screechy person who was shouting about how terrible you are and then some placard that gets waived in your face, it seemed like a much more scalable way of thinking about animal welfare, given the fact that the net outcome that you're looking for is to just reduce animal suffering, and you've been talking about this for nearly

50 years and now revisiting it again, what do you think about the modern iteration of the veganism movement and it's sort of many hydroheaded version of how it's progressed. What have you observed that's been interesting being on the front lines of this for so long? Yeah, there are a lot of different tactics used and it's hard to know which tactics are the most effective. That's a difficult problem in social science research to work out what influences people. I'm perfectly clear that really violent actions just put people off and give the whole movement a bad name. And I'm glad that they seem to have ceased. There was a

period in the 80s when some activists were using violence in relatively little. I mean, there was a lot of publicity about it. The number of people who were hurt by it was, you could count on the fingers of your hand, I think. But still, it was not a good thing to be doing for an ethical movement. And the sort of in your face thing, I guess, yes, people find it offensive. We don't know whether it gets them to think

in the end or not. But I've been impressed by the recent use of what's called open rescue techniques, where people have gone into factory farms and videoed what's going on there. And if they've seen particularly ill animals, or particularly maltreated animals that look like they're not going to survive very long anyway. They've rescued them, they've taken them out, they've taken them through a vet. If the vet says no, this animal isn't going to live, then they put them down. But otherwise, they treat them to try to help them.

And then they show the video footage and they show the individual animals because then people can focus on individuals. And it's interesting that there's been a move to prosecute these people because after all, they are taking property, pigs, pigs or chickens, whatever they are, they're property. And there've been a couple of recent cases where the prosecution has badly backfired. So two rescuers took pigs from a farm in Utah, and they were put on trial on felony charges.

I think they could have spent five years in prison. And they didn't deny that they'd taken the pigs but the jury and this is, you know, Utah's a fairly conservative state and they were in a rural part of the state. You'd expect to be more conservative, more farm-friendly, but the jury refused to convict them and then there was a second case in California after that too. So it's a way of getting the randomly selected members of the public on the jury to express their view of what's going on in these places, and it's clear that they don't like it. In your opinion, is it moral to convince people to become vegan through an immoral method?

So something like lying to them or emotional coercion or something like that? No, I don't think it is, and I think it's likely to backfire because, you know, there will be people who will expose what's going on. And let's say that it didn't in this situation. Let's say it didn't backfire. Let's say that the outcome was that nobody got rumbled. But on root to doing it, it was an immoral means to a moral end in your view. Well, as a utilitarian, I do think that it's sometimes justified to do things that would not be right in themselves, but when they lead to importantly good ends, can be justified. So if you're talking hypothetically, I think that could be justified.

If you're talking about, would I advise a vegan activist to use those methods? The answer is no, because we can't specify that it is only going to have the good consequences and not have the bad consequences. Yeah, it's an interesting consideration and one that I've spoken to a bunch of different friends about. You mentioned before, we discussed this kind of spectrum, I suppose, between factory farming and regenerative farming and living at home with a chicken that lives in the backyard or whatever. It seems to me that factory farming is the thin end of the wedge that, again, most people that hear the stories about the kind of experiences that you've just described from animals,

very few of them are going to be ardent, proud, flag waving supporters of it. It does seem like that gets spread out to cover absolutely everything, that it's not just the factory farming, it's also the regenerative farming. And lots of people, I think, are changing their eating habits because of a fear of environmental impact, as well as just what's happening to animals and emotive imagery and stuff like that. In your opinion, do you think it's a almost a failing of moral philosophy to have sufficient impact that you need to rely on concerned about climate change and so on and so forth? Should it be the case

that we are able to motivate humans morally without having to layer on top multiple different arguments? It should be the case that the argument against inflicting suffering on animals is sufficient to persuade people. Yes, ideally that would be the case. When I wrote and released the first version of animal liberation in 1975, I thought that this argument was so obvious and compelling that it would have that effect. That was a bit naive. But ideally it would, if we were more rational, if we were more moved by ethics, more ethical, I'm sure it would. But in saying that, I think the arguments about not eating meat

because of climate change are also ethical arguments. They're not appealing to self-interest really, because from self-interest point of view, what I would like is to keep doing what I enjoy doing, and hope that everyone else will stop doing these things that will have bad effects. Tragedy of the comments, yeah. Yeah, if the tragedy of the comments exactly.

So to avoid the tragedy of the comments, you either need government regulation or you need individual ethical action. We don't have government regulation that's taking the right stand on industrial animal production yet. So we need ethical action. Why do you think it is the case that the argument you put forward 50 years ago that you thought, as soon as everybody hears this, evidently they're going to change their ways. This is going to be the beginning of a kind of diet virus that's going to cause everybody to become ethical. Why hasn't that convinced more people?

I think it's just that eating habits go very deep and are hard to change. I mean, the contrast here would be with some other ethical change, like the dramatic improvement in attitudes towards the dramatic improvement in attitudes towards gayes and bisexual people and lesbians and so on, which I don't think many people say in the year 2000, I don't think many people thought that within the next 20 years a lot of countries would accept not only that we shouldn't prosecute shouldn't prosecute guys for their sexual acts, but that we should allow them to marry in exactly the same way as we allow heterosexuals to marry. That was a dramatic change, but there's less at stake for, you know, most people don't have very much at stake. They have an attitude, but they don't feel I'm going to have to change my lives, my life. It's not saying that you need to be gay.

It's saying that you need to allow it. Right, it's not saying you need to marry someone of your same sex. If people tried that, they would not get very far. But the animal movement of the case that I was putting forward was saying you need to change what you eat. And that's much more difficult. For a whole lot of reasons, I mean, maybe there may be some sort of, we evolved to have a taste for meat because that's a very dense nutrient that was available to our ancestors and those that

ate it did better than those that didn't. But because that's not the case anymore today, it's more of a health risk. Or it may be that it's embedded in our culture and we think, oh, but if I stopped eating meat, I wouldn't have the traditional Thanksgiving turkey or whatever other, you know, wouldn't slaughter the sheep for the feast of the eye. So meat is culturally embedded in ways that make it harder to change. And there's also that sense of a lot of people say, well, you know, their family eats meat, what are they going to do when they go and eat with them? Are they going to tell their friends that they should stop eating meat?

Isn't that being a bit self-righteous? It's, you know, we're fairly conformist in that. There are some people who are prepared to say, no, I'm going to break with that tradition and be a non-conformist, but I think there are a lot of people who don't want to be among the leaders of the change and would rather follow than lead. Given that vegetables and vegan products, no matter how correctly they're sourced, are also associated with an increase in death and suffering of animals, stuff that happens just during harvesting and so on and so forth.

It's inevitable that that's going to end up happening. Does this not mean that there is a moral obligation for every human to try and limit their calorie consumption to as little as possible. I shouldn't eat one calorie more than I should. I should also eat a vegan diet, but that vegan diet shouldn't be a single calorie over because as soon as I do, that is unnecessarily impacting animal life upstream.

I think if you really start worrying about every calorie, you're gonna go crazy and you're not gonna be very effective in doing anything else. So I think that's, you know, that's some sort of saintly ideal, if you like. And it's similar to arguments that I put forward in relation to global poverty. Again, you know, a long time ago when I was, perhaps a little too much of a demanding ethicist that we should give away all of our assets until we reach the point of marginal utility and until we reach the point at which sharing something more giving something more to a person in extreme poverty would lower us to the

same level of poverty or suffering as the person we were helping. That's also I think, I think, not a realistic ethic to put forward, and as a consequentialist, I want to put forward ethical views that will achieve the maximum benefits. So I no longer make that argument in terms of how much we should give away. I suggest, instead, saying my book, The Life You Can Save, I suggest more reasonable percentages of incomes that scale up as you earn more. And similarly, I think in terms of trying to get people to move towards a vegan diet or at least a more conscientiously ethical diet that has concerned for what animals

are experiencing, I think saying you can eat a single calorie over what you need to maintain your body is not gonna work. For the people like me who aren't philosophy-pilled, talking about the blending of the position of a utilitarian with that of a consequentialist, I'm a right in thinking that a utilitarian would be looking to maximize the utility from whatever the choices or the framework is that's being put forward. But the consequentialist understands that there are real world restrictions

on that that need to be filtered through. So is it almost like a blending of the two positions? No, I don't think that's quite right. I think that utilitarians will also want to produce the best consequences. You know, utilitarianism is a version of consequentialism. Consequentialism is the genus. Utilitarianism is the species. And the difference between them is not their attitudes to what's realistic or what's not. It's their attitude to what are the consequences

that we want to maximize that we want to focus on. The utilitarian will say the consequences are well-being, the well-being of all of those capable of having a well-being, which means, in my view, all sentient creatures, and we want them to suffer as little pain as possible, to suffer as little, to experience as much pleasure, to be as happy as possible. That's the utilitarian view. The consequentialist will say, I agree that whether an action is right or wrong

depends on its consequences, but I don't think that well-being is the only consequence that matters. I think it's, for example, it's good that people should have greater knowledge whether they use that knowledge to enhance well-being or not. I think it's important that people should have greater knowledge whether they use that knowledge to enhance well-being or not. I think it's important that people should be free whether they use their freedom in ways that enhance well-being or not. And you know, then there's a whole list and that's

the thing about consequentialists in general once you move away from specifically utilitarian consequentialists. There are about 50 things that people have put on lists that they think of as intrinsically good and they want to maximize and everybody then takes their pick of about 50 things that people have put on lists that they think of as intrinsically good and they want to maximize, and everybody then takes their pick of these 50 things, as to which are the ones that I want to maximize, and why, and then you have to say, well, you're sure this is really good in itself, you're sure like with knowledge, you're sure knowledge isn't good because it can help us to improve well-being, you're sure that just having additional knowledge is good even if it has no further consequences. Those are the kinds of debates that then have to have.

Could you imagine a situation in which a human who was brought into the world of ethical veganism and was talking about this sort of stuff on the internet, let's say, or on any kind of platform, but was struggling to eat a sufficiently well-balanced diet that allowed them to maximize the impact that they could have on the world existed. So this person believes in the precepts of it

and is talking about it online and is doing it in a very compelling way and encouraging other people to consider their approach to what their approach to what their diet looks like to, but their individual challenges that they're facing with their own health mean that they then consider moving from a vegan to a meat-based diet. Now, whilst they're on this meat-based diet, they're going to continue talking to the world and encouraging as many people as possible, would it be an ethical position for that person

to hold to say, look, I'm going to do something personally, which I would see as an ethical or immoral in order to encourage and maximize the impact that I can have on the rest of the world? Yeah, I've actually had, that's not a hypothetical. I've had people come to me and say things somewhat similar to that. I think, you know, it took me a while to accept this because I've always felt great on vegetarian and vegan diets and others that I know have too. But there are some people who seem to have a different constitution and who don't do well, certainly not on an exclusively vegan diet. So if you are one of those people, but you see the point of the cause, yeah, I would say to preserve your health and to maintain the ability to be

an active force for good in the world, you should seek out those animal products that will be sufficient to maintain your health and vigor and will do the least harm to animals, to the climate and so on. So for example, we were talking earlier about free range eggs from Hens who are genuinely free range and have grass to range around on. I think that's that's an example of something that I would see as doing minimizing harm, providing some animal protein and maybe that's enough for some people. You know, if it's not then they need to look further but they always need to think about who is where can I get this product in a way where the animals are really cared for well

where the greenhouse gases are not great or offset So yeah, those are the sorts of questions and I appreciate that a small number of people may need to do that to keep active and vigorous loads of muscles, just. Ton. Well, generally, don't need muscle. 50 muscles a day. 50.

Oh, muscles. I see those muscles, right? So I'm talking about eating enough animal products to build up their muscles and, in fact, no, no. 20 of bodybuilders. 20 of bodybuilders. 50 of those.

You can do that. Yes, that would be a. Got a town. Got a town on the by valves. OK, so obviously one of the things that you've done nearly 50 years between both, between this version and the first version of this, the cultural climate has changed an awful lot during that time, the type of arguments that can be made that are accepted widely

or even accepted, not so widely, have changed a good bit. What was some of the elements that you had to remove from the book in order to make it more palatable for a 2023 audience? Well, a very glaring example of that was that in the first version of the book, I wanted to make the point at the beginning that this book was not written for animal lovers and that I didn't consider myself an animal lover and that was raising a major ethical issue. And to make that point, I used a parallel between this issue and or the way that I was approaching this issue and the way that whites in the 1950s and 60s who were supportive of the movement against racial segregation in the American South would go down to march with blacks in the South for, you know, I said, I quoted an epithet that was

often used by white racists, so against these, by white southern racists, against these northerners who came down to help them. And they used the N word to suggest that they loved the people that they were helping. And I had that in the first edition, I had that word in quotes. It was a quote and I said it was a racist who was saying this, there was no way at all in which I was endorsing the use of that word.

But now that word has become such a strong taboo that you can't even use it in quotes in that sense. And so that editor indicated that that had to go on. I accepted that view. Yeah, I think if, if, no matter how clean you want to, or how appropriately you want to try and represent the original material, you're never going to have to do that. There's a couple of other bits as well that I'd seen to do with men getting the ability of men to have equal abortion rights or the equal access to opportunity, something like that.

Yes, that's right. I was saying that, yes, I was saying that to say that animals have rights didn't mean that they had the right to vote or something like that, any more than to say that animals have rights didn't mean that they had the right to vote or something like that Any more than to say that there's a right to abortion means that men have equal abortion rights with women or something like that I can't remember the exact wording Yes, and of course now you can't refer to pregnant women you should refer to pregnant people Fraud's a conversation. I see that a little strange, I must say. Well, thinking about this situation, and this is what particularly fascinated me about

it, you're a man who is famous for his cold analytical approach, and you have had to remove some very powerful arguments that I've heard friends use. I've heard friends use that exact argument about the access to abortion and men's rights to abortion. You've had to remove some powerful arguments for the life of animals because of modern sensitivities. What do you think that says about our current ethical position in the modern world? Well, I think it says that perhaps we're too sensitive about some of these issues and we should be more prepared to face some of these realities. But I went along with the editors' suggestions on these issues because this book is about a particular

cause, a particular issue. I want to attract as wide support as I possibly can because of the urgency to stop what we're doing to say hundreds of billions of sentient creatures and damaging our climate. And I didn't want to get distracted by a small side issue where people would say, I know, I'm not going to buy that book, I'm not going to read that book. You've got to decide which wars you can fight. You can't fight all the wars at the same time. Yeah, I understand. So one other modern discussion that probably wasn't a consideration when you first wrote this book was AI. And over the last six months we've seen a huge resurgence in discussions about it.

It kind of really lulled, you know, Nick Bostrom's super intelligence was 2014, something like that, I think. And that really kind of kicked off this concern about paperclip maximizers and alignment problems and machine extrapolated volition. And then it went quiet for forever because it didn't seem like AI was making any progress. And then Chatsch EBT comes out and everything goes ballistic again. Have you considered the potential for AI agents

to suffer and our obligations to them? Yes, absolutely. I have thought about that. And in fact, with some others, I'm organizing a Princeton, a conference at Princeton University in October, which will include that topic as well as talking about the impact that AI is having on animals, which is significant because some industrial farms are now being basically run by AI rather than by individual

humans in the same way. Plus of course there's all these decisions that dilemmas about self-driving cars and do you program them to swerve to avoid the dog or only to swerve to avoid the child. So I have been involved in AI ethical questions and my answer to the question you asked about, could there be conscious AI, could AI be a sentient being? And if so, what would it be? I think the answer is in principle, AI could be sentient or conscious. I don't think we have got close to that yet. I think that chat GPT sort of fools us into thinking we're chatting with a sentient being, but when we understand what it's actually doing and how it's regurgitating

some of the material that it's fed on and how it adjusts, I think we realize that there's no reason to postulate any consciousness. But if that did happen and in principle it's possible to happen, then we would need to give that I.I. a moral status, at least like that of animals, and depending on its cognitive abilities, maybe it would be closer to that of most humans. Have you considered or thought of a way in which an AI agent would be able to convince you that it was having a felt sense of an experience because you can, I mean, five-year-old girls have got dolls that will cry if they're not picked up sufficiently frequently. Nobody is mistaking the doll for having the felt experience of being lonely.

But you know, you roll it all the way down and it seems to me, I haven't thought about this a lot, but it seems to me that it would be very difficult to separate out AI agent performing what emotions look like from conscious agent experiencing them. Basically, is every AI just a P zombie in disguise with circuit boards? So far. But yeah, the question of how are we going to know is really an interesting and important question because many years ago, Alan Turing said, if you can have a conversation with the robot and you don't know whether you're having a conversation with a robot or with a real person, then we should assume it's conscious. But that is the case with chat GPT.

I mean, you can't do the people into thinking that. So I don't, and yet, as I say, once you understand what it's actually doing, what it's programmed to do, I think you don't think it's conscious. Now, the problem is that these AIs are learning all the time, developing all the time, and I think we're going to get it into a situation where they're going to be producing other AI, right? That they're getting to be smart enough to design other systems. And then we won't really know how the other system works in the way that we might know about the ones so far.

And it'll be very difficult to tell whether it is conscious or not, because it's not simply a matter of saying, you know, looking at the algorithms there, because it's learning things and developing. So, yeah, I'm not really an expert in this field. I've talked to some people who have more expertise than me, and I've started to see the difficulty of this problem. I had Stuart Russell on the show 18 months ago and he wrote, human commas written everything. He wrote literally the textbook on AI.

It's in some ungodly number of languages. And he was saying, if you were, a lot of the time YouTube will be asked, open up the algorithm, show us what the algorithm's doing. Or tell us, tell us how the algorithm works and especially when you're looking at something like YouTube his Argument was the engineers at YouTube don't know what the YouTube algorithm is doing. It's got its own optimization

Function that it is aiming for it is trying to maximize time on site and click through and watch time. And they just set this bunch of parameters and then it's run away. And it is now reinforcing, okay, let's do this a little bit more. Let's change for that. Select for this kind of video. Once someone does this, then do this. And you realize that, yeah, I mean, if you've got recursive self-improving AI that are creating either improving themselves or creating further agents that are their own Progeny in one form or another. I mean you definitely don't know two degrees removed

But even just one degree removed what you've created after a sufficiently long amount of time learning is probably not really going to resemble What it was that you made it in the first place. So yeah getting in there and going, oh, well, you know, we'll just see where's the emotion algorithm? We didn't put the emotion algorithm in here. Therefore, it can't, you know, the sadness, the sadness code doesn't exist within this. I think it's a really, really, and I fundamentally, to me, that seems to be the most interesting and the most challenging question that's going to come up about this. So what point are we going to say that an AI agent claiming consciousness, sentience, the ability to suffer, et cetera, et cetera? Are we ever going to know?

Because the only reason really that you believe that I have the capacity to suffer, that if you poke me with a pin, that I'm not just saying, how performatively, because I know that that's what you would do. And there's everybody else on the planet is just some big robot that's been here to Truman show. Truman show Peter Singer's life for the last however many decades. The only reason is that we kind of have this faith, right, between us. And we believe that that's the case.

Very, very difficult with no proof. No one has ever been an AI agent that has a felt sense of this and we can't use our theory of mind to try and believe it. I think that's going to be the biggest challenge that we face. Yeah, I think that's a huge channel, and I agree, and I don't have an attitude. I think that's a huge channel, I agree, and I don't have an attitude. Come on, Peter. I don't know if anyone does, but I say that. AI, AI, Liberation, now. That's what I've come for.

Right. Well, look, Peter Singer, ladies and gentlemen, Peter, I really appreciate you. You have got a tour of some kind that you are doing that people can attend. Where is that? And when's it happening? I do have a speaking tour. Yes, I'm going to be speaking in Washington DC on May the 26th in Los Angeles on the 29th in San Francisco on the 30th of May and in New York City on June 1st and in London on June 4th. And you can find that if you Google an evening with Peter Singer and maybe put in Think Inc. Think and then I&C, which is the organization

that is organizing the tour, you'll get information and tickets and I would love to see you all there and get a chance to speak to you and to hear your questions. Peter, I really appreciate you. Thank you for today. Thanks very much. you