The One You Feed - Peter Singer

Episode Date: May 17, 2017

Please Support The Show With a Donation   This week we talk to Peter Singer Peter Albert David Singer, is an Australian moral philosopher. He is the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University and a Laureate Professor at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the University of Melbourne. He specializes in applied ethics and approaches ethical issues from a secular, utilitarian perspective. He is known in particular for his book Animal Liberation, in which he argues in favor of vegetarianism, and his essay Famine, Affluence, and Morality, in which he argues in favor of donating to help the global poor. For most of his career, he was a preference utilitarian, but he announced in The Point of View of the Universe that he had become a hedonistic utilitarian. On two occasions, Singer served as chair of the philosophy department at Monash University, where he founded its Centre for Human Bioethics. In 1996 he stood unsuccessfully as a Greens candidate for the Australian Senate. In 2004 Singer was recognized as the Australian Humanist of the Year by the Council of Australian Humanist Societies, and in 2006 he was voted one of Australia's ten most influential public intellectuals. Singer is a cofounder of Animals Australia and the founder of The Life You Can Save. In This Interview, Peter Singer and I Discuss... His book, Ethics and the Real World: 82 Brief Essays on Things That Matter How he's widely considered the most famous living philosopher Utilitarian philosophy The importance of preventing unnecessary suffering How the world is better today than it's ever been The reasons why we don't donate to help save children across the world Where to find highly vetted charity organizations to donate to How we've evolved to respond to help the person right in front of us but not yet to respond to someone who needs help on the other side of the world The science of measuring happiness Which is a better, more important question: asking people if they're satisfied with their lives or enjoying their lives moment to moment Reducing unavoidable suffering vs. making people happier The link between happiness and money at various levels of society The importance of living in accordance with your values The importance of believing that your life has some purpose Personal identity or the idea of self The public good as a value and then individual liberty as another value Physician-assisted suicide His views on animal rights The value of starting new things later in life and taking on things you may not be great at     Please Support The Show with a Donation   It also often features different animals, mainly two dogs.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I think that what we ought to be doing is what will have the best consequences for all of those affected by our actions. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, or you are what you think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do.

We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden.

And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast.

Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Peter Singer, the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics in the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. Since 2005, he has combined this position with that of Laureate Professor at the University of Melbourne. Peter is co-founder of The Life

That You Can Save and continues to actively work with the team and serve on its board of directors. The Life You Can Save, based on his book of the same name, is a non-profit devoted to spreading ideas about why we should be doing much more to improve the lives of people living in extreme poverty. His new book is Ethics in the Real World, 82 Brief Essays on Things That Matter. If you value the content we put out each week, then we need your help. As the show has grown, so have our expenses and time commitment. Go to OneYouFeed.net slash support and make a monthly donation. Our goal is to get to 5% of our listeners supporting the show.

Please be part of the 5% that make a contribution and allow us to keep putting out these interviews and ideas. We really need your help to make the show sustainable and long-lasting. Again, that's oneueed.net slash support. Thank you in advance for your help. And here's the interview with Peter Singer. Hi, Peter. Welcome to the show. Hi. It's good to be with you.

I appreciate you coming on. I'm excited to talk with you. It's good to be with you. I appreciate you coming on. I'm excited to talk with you. You are widely considered by a lot of people to be perhaps the most famous living philosopher, and you are also somebody who seems to stir up controversy nearly everywhere you go. So I'm looking forward to not having a controversial conversation, but really exploring your views and how they lead to living a good life. Okay.

That's a really important question to talk about. So we'll start, though, like we usually do with the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops, and he thinks about it for a second and looks up at his grandfather, and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in

your life and in the work that you do? What the parable means to me is that whether you're a good person and whether you enjoy your life and find it rewarding or whether you're not such a good person and perhaps you're eaten up by jealousy or envy or even hatred, depends a lot on how you cultivate your own personality and your own mind and your own acts through your life. That it's not just something that happens to you. It's not just that somebody was born mean and nasty and twisted, but it is to a large extent the way you look at the world and the way you try to cultivate the better sentiments in yourself. And when I say better, I mean, not only better for others, but also typically better for you.

So you are known as a utilitarian philosopher. Could you explain what that means? A utilitarian is somebody who thinks that the right thing to do is the act that will have the best possible consequences of all the options open to you, best possible consequences in the long run and for everyone or indeed every sentient being affected by your actions. And by best consequences, typically utilitarians mean best consequences for the well-being of all of those affected, which in the eyes of many utilitarians means for their happiness and the reduction of suffering. There are different views of exactly what well-being consists in among utilitarians, but broadly you could think of it as

best consequences in terms of promoting happiness and reducing misery. Yeah, you've said that the unifying theme of all your work is preventing unnecessary suffering. Maybe not quite of all of my work, but of a great deal of it, and particularly the practical and applied ethics. I've looked at areas where there seems to be suffering going on that ought not to be too difficult to prevent. So, you know, there are some instances of suffering, maybe that it's very hard to do things about to prevent it. But there are other cases where it just seems we could change social arrangements relatively easily, than I would say it is. You say, too often we assume that ethics is about obeying the rules that begin with, you must not. If that were all there were to living ethically, then as long as we were not violating one of those rules, whatever we are doing would be ethical. That view of ethics, however, is incomplete. It fails to consider the good we can do to others less fortunate than ourselves.

And also saying that not aiding in certain cases is the same as harming. Yes, that's right. And those obviously go together. I think that in a different era, perhaps, it was most important to think about not harming others, because we were living in smaller societies. We had little knowledge of other societies further from us. We had little ability to help people in those other societies. And so the idea of not harming others, meaning not harming others in your society, was perhaps the most important thing that you could emphasize. And it's still important, certainly.

But given the world we live in today, where we have some people, and you and I and probably most of your listeners are among them, who are extremely fortunate to be really at a level of affluence and comfort that has not existed throughout most of human history or prehistory. That is something fairly new in the world. And on the other hand, there are also a lot of people, at least 700 million people, who are living in what the World Bank defines as extreme poverty.

People who cannot be sure that they're going to have enough food to eat all year round, who cannot get even minimal health care, may not be able to send their children to school. And we can make a big difference to their lives. So that's why I think for people now in our situation, just saying I'm not going to harm others is not enough. We ought to be doing things to make the world better and to help others too. And how do people draw that line, right? Because on one hand, you could say, all right, you know what, I need to help

others, and I'm going to give everything away except living as a pauper. And then there's the flip side, which is I've got, you know, a million dollars, and I'm not sending any of it to someone, right? Those are two extremes. How, for normal people, do you think about finding a ground that seems moral but also reasonable? It's very hard to draw lines in those situations because people do have different commitments and different responsibilities. So I have varied, if you look at my writings over the 40 years or so I've been interested in this issue, There's variations. At one stage, I suggested the traditional tithe that people should give 10% of their income if they are middle class or above and living in an affluent country. 10% of your income seems a reasonable thing that most people can do. But of course, some people could give much more than that. And perhaps for other people, 10% is still pushing it a little

bit so on the website that I've set up the life you can save org there is now a kind of sliding and progressive scale a bit like tax scales so that the it's not a flat percentage the more you earn the higher the percentage and for people not earning so much it starts off very low, starts off around 1%. And I think it's good for people to get started, even if they don't have a lot of money, because hopefully later on they will do better. And anyway, getting in the habit of giving something, this is maybe about the wolf you feed, getting in the habit of giving something and helping others makes you feel good about that.

And then maybe when you do have a little bit more, you realize, you know, well, look, I could actually do more than this. And I'd like to do more than this because this is an important part of my life. This is an important part of who I am, that when I have abundance, I share some of it with others. We talked about living a good life. You've referenced well-being. You've referenced happiness. What is the role of morality in our own lives? What role does morality play in us experiencing those things that we just talked about? Because we tend to think of morality as here's how I should act towards others, and I'm inverting that into the sort of selfish, right, like what's in it for me? But I am just curious how you'd answer that question. I don't mind people thinking what's in it for me. If what they're thinking about is what's in it for me in terms of helping others. And then they realize, well, maybe there is something in it for me. Maybe it actually helps me to feel more satisfied with my life, to feel more fulfilled, to feel

that I have a purpose beyond just accumulating more consumer goods and generating more trash in the world. So I think there is quite a lot in it for people. And there are some moralists who think that unless you're miserable and in sackcloth and ashes, then what you're doing can't be morally good. But I don't think that that's right. I think that I like people who are happy and enjoy the fact that they're helping others. That seems to me to be quite an important thing to be doing. Is there any morality to how happy we are? Is striving for our own happiness in your mind a moral thing to do? Other things being equal, yes it is. Because as I said,

I think that what we ought to be doing is what will have the best consequences for all of those affected by our actions. And we are one of those affected by our actions. So doing what will have the best consequences for me, if it doesn't harm anyone else, and preferably of course if it also helps someone else, is in itself a good thing. I can't. I'm not the kind of person who thinks I mustn't give any weight to my own happiness. What I do think is I shouldn't give more weight to my own happiness, if possible. This may be a little too saintly, but if possible, I should try not giving more weight to my own happiness than I give to the happiness of others.

One of the things that you wrote recently was that the belief that we are progressing morally has become difficult to defend. However, I think I'm one of those people that does think we're progressing morally and as a civilization. How would you argue that point that indeed we are? I would invite people to look at the progress that we've made in a lot of important areas. I mentioned that there are 700 million people living in extreme poverty, as the World Bank defines it. That figure is a significant drop over previous decades, and particularly if you take it as a percentage of the world's growing population, it's quite a remarkable drop.

In fact, it means that the number of people living in extreme poverty today is fewer than 10% of the world's population. That's probably the first time ever since our species evolved and separated from other primates. It's probably the first time ever that fewer than 10% of human beings are in a situation where they are not reasonably secure about having enough to eat, not just today, but over a longer future. And, of course, things like health care and education and so on were not even issues for most of our evolutionary history. But certainly if we talk about more recent centuries, again, it would be the first time that 90% of human beings are able to have access to some education for their children or some health care. Rates of literacy have been increasing as well. So I think there are signs that the world is getting to be a better place. One other thing that I should perhaps mention is that the chances of any individual human being alive today meeting a violent death at the hands of other human beings, those chances are smaller than they have ever been. And a lot of people might question that because, you know, we read every day about terrorism, don't we?

But, of course, terrorism is responsible for a tiny proportion of deaths. And even if we increase that and talk about, say, gun violence generally, which certainly in the United States is a much larger proportion of deaths or road accidents, it's still much less than the general murder rate was if you go back a couple of hundred years. So I think there are ways in which we become a more peaceful and a better society. It seems that way to me too. And when I look at things like torture or slavery or gay rights, not that there's not still battles to be fought on those fronts, but it really does seem like by and large, most people would say, hey, torture is a bad thing. Or, you know, it just seems like we're making progress on those fronts where there's more people starting to say, wait a minute, like that isn't the right way to behave. Do you think that is a one directional thing, or it could very easily reverse? I think it's a long term development. So I don't think you could easily reverse, which is not to say that it can't reverse in some particular times and places, and obviously it has.

So I think, for example, the movement that you're referring to in relation to torture and cruel punishments, that goes back to the 18th century, at least. That goes back to that 18th century enlightenment in Europe, which started to object to some of these things that were previous to that pretty routine, pretty standard. But if you look at the history of the world since the 18th century, you would say, oh, yes. But then, you know, what about what happened in the Nazi concentration camps or in the Gulag or other places like that? Dreadful things happen. there's no doubt about it. But again, you know, they were exposed and condemned, and generally speaking, at least certainly in the German case, people involved were punished.

And I think that was a kind of an aberration, and it may occur again in particular places, no doubt it has and will. But taking the world as a whole, I think it's much less widespread than it used to be. And my expectation is that it will continue to be much less widespread. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast,

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And your donation makes it possible for all the other people out there listening who are not donating and the ones who are going to listen in the future to have this show available to them. I get notes all the time from people about how the show might be saving their lives or very dramatic things like that. So your donation really does matter and we really appreciate it. So when you feed.net slash support, win a free book and do some good in the world. Thanks. And now back to the interview with Peter Singer. Certainly one of the things that you're most known for is trying to reduce extreme poverty, trying to save lives in developing countries. And you've come up with a illustration that sort of shows why maybe the way we think about people on the other side of the world is wrong. And you say, if I'm walking past a shallow pond and I see a child drowning in it,

I ought to wade in and pull the child out. This will mean getting my clothes muddy, but this is insignificant, while the death of the child would presumably be a very bad thing. And you equate that to the fact that today there are children dying that we could be saving and that we are not, and that those are equivalent. Why do you think that we don't react in the same way? Because I think most of us would pull that child out of the pond, and yet, by and large, most of us do not do very much to help people on the other side of the world. That's right. And the idea of the parable, if you want to call it that, of the child drowning in the

pond, is that, yeah, most of us would pull that child out and therefore to raise the question, and why wouldn't we save a child who is drowning or perhaps more likely going to die from malaria because the child is in a malaria-prone region and the child's family does not have a bed net to protect the child from mosquitoes. Why wouldn't we contribute to an organization that's protecting children from malaria? That's one of many demonstrable ways in which we can save the lives of children. So I think there are psychological explanations for why we would pull a child in front of us out in the pond. We've got an identifiable individual in front of us in the case of the appeal to donate to the Against Malaria Foundation,

which is one of those effective organizations that is providing bed nets. We don't know which child we're going to save. It's more anonymous. It's more like a statistic. So I think that that's a significant factor in terms of why people are not giving to those more distant cases. Some people also may have doubts about whether the money will actually do what it's supposed to do. Every now and again, some story gets in the media about a charity that turned out to be a scam or wasn't doing what it should. That's why it's really important to know the charities you're donating to. And that's one of the things that the lifeyoucansave.org was set up to do. That is to be able to recommend

charities that have been thoroughly researched and shown to be highly effective in terms of the work that they were doing and highly cost effective as well. So those are some of the reasons why we don't, and I think they're good reasons, but you argue that that isn't, maybe this isn't the way you'd say it, but those aren't good excuses. Yeah, that's right. They're psychological factors, but when we stop and think about, is that a morally relevant, a morally important thing, a difference between the thing, then I think most of us can say, no. Even if we don't know the child, we can't identify the child, it's still a real child.

Every child is a specific individual, and it's just as much a real child as the one in front of us. So, yeah, I don't think that's morally relevant. As I said, the idea that charities may be scams is often an excuse because the people who say that don't then go online and do the relatively simple amount of research that they could, which would enable them to see which charities were definitely not scams. You've also said that some of it might be evolutionary because we evolved in small face-to-face societies. So we evolved to respond to the child that's right in front of us, but we're not at the place where we really understand how to think about children on the other side of the world. That's not hardwired into us in the same way. Yes, that's right. You

know, we have evolved as social primates living in small societies, perhaps 150, 200 individuals. That's what most evolutionary theorists think about most of human existence. So we have those reactions. We have the reactions to respond to somebody in front of us. We don't obviously have the reaction to respond to someone we can't see or we can only see on our TV screens because in terms of our evolutionary history, they've only existed for a microse, and evolution takes longer to work than that. One of the things that was in your recent book of various essays was about this movement in certain nations or across the world to measure happiness or to measure well-being. What are the things that we're using to measure those things, and do you think that they are the right way to look at it? So I think we're starting to get better. You know, the science of measuring happiness is a

relatively new one. And it's more complicated than the science of measuring gross domestic product or some of those economic measures that have been used to show progress. But I do think that we're getting better at understanding what's going on. I mean, most of it is done by asking people questions. And it turns out that it makes a difference how you ask the question, of course. If you ask people, how satisfied are you with your life, you get somewhat different set of answers than if you ask people questions relating to how happy are you right now? How are you feeling? What's your mood?

Those sorts of questions. You get a different sort of answer. And that's interesting and, of course, needs interpretation. What should we be more concerned about, whether people are satisfied with their life or whether people are enjoying their lives basically on a moment for moment sort of basis um and i think that there's some evidence that asking people how satisfied they are with their life though it sounds like a good question um may take into account uh some adjustment that they've already made to difficult circumstances so that people who seem

to be having very tough lives may still say they're satisfied with their life because maybe they've just adjusted their expectations downwards. So perhaps really asking people how much they're enjoying their lives is giving us a better answer because it gets them to focus more on their mood and their present than some sort of evaluation of their life. That raises interesting questions around some of the science that shows that maybe as people, we tend to have sort of a pre-wired happiness level, like that you might be wired to be happier than I am based on, you know, just the way our brains work, the way the neurochemicals work.

And that's why I think, obviously, the definition of happiness gets so much scrutiny, because it's so very hard to say, like, what's the measure of a good life? Yes, that is hard. But on the other hand, I think when people are suffering, that is much more related to their circumstances. I mean, again, people may be more depressed, there may be some sort of hardwired, more depressed sort of personality. But for a lot of people who are not in that category, external circumstances can cause them to suffer. Just something like, you know, you start getting a severe toothache. Imagine in the age before dentistry or people who still today have no access to dentistry. You can imagine how much of a negative impact that has on how happy they are at that moment.

So that's why you said early on in this discussion that I focused on reducing avoidable suffering. And although I do think it's interesting to think about increasing happiness above the sort of neutral level as well, I do think that it's probably, at least at this stage of our knowledge, better to focus on reducing avoidable suffering. That's something we can know more about and we can probably do more effectively than we can to make people who are not suffering more positively happy than they are. As I was reading your article and it was talking about the ways that we measure happiness for these things, I was struck by a couple of things. One is there tends to be a thing, particularly in, you know, what I'll call like the self-development movement or whatever that says, you know, well, happiness isn't really tied to money. And that was very clearly in some

of the things that predict happiness and well-being, not a true statement, right? And then secondly, there were things beyond the conditions of people's lives. So beyond the, you know, the economic and financial conditions of their lives that also did contribute to happiness. I'm just curious your thoughts on that. Yeah, I think we need to be a little more specific about the link between happiness and money. It's certainly true that when people have very little, then adding to their wealth or income does make them happier. But once you get to a certain level, which roughly, say, in United States income terms would be perhaps $70,000 a year, then adding more to their income

makes only a modest difference to their happiness. It doesn't make zero difference, particularly that question of how satisfied they are with their life. That does continue to go up, though much more slowly. But in terms of their mood and how much they're enjoying their life, it actually seems to make no difference or a negligible difference. So you need to be able to have a level of comfort. But once you get to that level, and a of americans are beyond that level then putting all your effort and energy into acquiring more money uh at least for its own sake you know not to give away but just to just have for yourself

is probably not going to really be the most effective strategy for making you making you feel happier and then what are some of the other things when they're measuring happiness that show up as important beyond your economic condition? So having a good circle of family or friends or both is really important. That shows up all the time, that feeling that you have close family and friends that you can talk to and spend time with is a really major contributor to happiness for most people. But another thing that's really important, and it gets back to what we've been talking about, is having values that you feel you're living in accordance with and feeling that your life is in some way meaningful or purposeful. I think that makes a difference. And it's interesting that it makes

a difference to people's health, that when people feel that they have some purpose in life, they tend to live longer and have better health into old age, which is one of the reasons when people who work very hard for a company and then suddenly retire are at high risk of having heart attacks and keeling over. So I think that the values are relevant here to how happy and satisfied you're going to feel with your life. Excellent. Recently, you wrote an article, or perhaps it was a eulogy for a philosopher, Derek Parfit. Did I say that correctly? Correct. Yes, absolutely. And you talked about him writing about a lot of different things. But the one I'm interested in

talking about is personal identity. In this article, you said, whereas we commonly take the distinction between ourself and others as an all-or-nothing matter, Parfit argued that our identity changes over time as the psychological connections between our earlier and later selves alter. Can you talk with me a little bit about this personal identity or the idea of the self? Yes, and it is sort of philosophically controversial, and I greatly admire Parfit as a great philosopher, I think a very clear thinker and somebody who thought more deeply about some of these philosophical problems than most people do. I'm not sure whether I totally agree with his view on personal identity. So if I think about myself now, I've just turned 70, and I can think back some of my really early childhood memories, I can identify with that boy. And I can think, yes, that was me in some sense. So there is this sort of psychological continuity just because of the fact that I have preserved

these memories all of my life. But at the same time, that boy was a very different person who had different values and could have ended up quite differently. It was in no way preordained that I was going to end up as a philosopher. I originally planned to become a lawyer. My interest in ethics has certainly developed and grown a great deal. So there's a sense in which I have evolved and that child is not exactly me. And you could also think about this in a forward-looking way, particularly if you're a younger person than I was, right? You can say, okay, so now I'm, let's say I'm 20 and I have lots of ideas about how I want to change the world and live differently

and do things differently to the way my parents did. But suppose somebody says, well, yes, but probably you're going to get more conservative as you grow older. Many people do. And by the time you're 50 or 60, you're not going to have those values anymore. Well, the 20-year-old might then say, okay, but then I don't really identify with that person, even if, you know, biologically that is the same me. And even if I have some memories of my radical self at 20, I don't really identify with that person. And in a way, perhaps, I don't care that much whether that person gets what he or she wants another 30 or 40 years down the track. Or at least I care just as much about other people's well-being as I care about me in 30 or 40 years. So it's this idea of the constantly changing and developing self

that Parfit has argued about, that it's sort of something that's relative to the extent to which I have the same views and I have the extent to which I have the same views and I have the same thoughts and I have the same personality that I did. And some people have seen parallels between what Parfit says about the self and the Buddhist doctrine of the impermanence of the self, which also talks about change and the idea that the self is not really a single constant I. And Buddhism also can use that in a way of encouraging people to be more concerned about others, to extend their compassion to others, because the difference between I and you or I and they becomes less sharp if there's also a

difference between I today and I in 20 years. Yeah, it's a topic I'm fairly fascinated with, and a topic that we have had Buddhist teachers on and other non-dual teachers where we've explored it from that perspective. But I also like exploring it from all different angles. And it's one of those things that on one hand is very obvious, like there is a self, here I am, and yet it's not as solid maybe as we think. And there does seem to be some benefit to being less attached.

I guess maybe that just is in general. The less I'm attached to my own wants and have those running the show, the better off I am in general. Yes, I think that's right. And I think that's consistent both with Parfitt's views and with Buddhist teachings about thinking, trying to get your mind into a different place where you're not so fully attached to yourself and you can think about others. And many people do say that it makes them happier. There's an interesting book by Mathieu Ricard, the Buddhist monk of French origin, called Altruism. He's also written about happiness, in which he talks about the way in which being less attached to yourself and meditating and training your mind to think about others and to really feel what others are feeling has made his life both more rewarding and more fulfilling and

happier. And I think that's how most people end up on, we'll just call it a spiritual path, is some sense of dissatisfaction and this desire to feel differently. And then, ideally, lots of other good things can kind of tie along with that. But it seems to come from that very basic, like, I don't like how I feel. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor.

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It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I wanted to explore the idea with you of the public good as a value, and then individual liberty as another value and how you see those things interacting and how your thought process comes to balancing those things out. Obviously, as a utilitarian, I'm very concerned about the public good. I think it's important that we should try to maximize good generally and therefore social policies that will improve the good of the public as a whole are important. And that's one of the reasons I support, for example, social policies about universal health care. I think it's deplorable what is happening right now to health care in the United States, which, you know, even with Obamacare was lagging behind every other developed industrialized country in the world in terms of the universality of its provision of that public good of health for everyone. But at the same time, I think that there are other ways in which sometimes legislatures and governments overreach

and deny individual liberty where there is no public good resulting from that. Often they do it on what you might say are moral grounds that are not based on consequences or well-being. So the classic example of this is, I think, prohibition on physician assistance in dying or voluntary euthanasia, if you want to call it that, which seems to me pretty clear that if somebody is terminally ill or incurably ill and they judge themselves that their condition is so bad that they don't want to go on living, however much longer they could go on living, then provided we've taken various safeguards to ensure that they've thought about this carefully and that is a firm decision that they've reached, not just a temporary whim,

I don't think that there's any loss in allowing them to act on that decision. And of course, if they're capable of killing themselves, then it's not an offence for them to do so. But if they're not capable of killing themselves, they're not capable of killing themselves, then it's not an offense for them to do so. But if they're not capable of killing themselves, they're not capable of killing themselves in a way that they consider acceptable, then in some jurisdictions, the law prohibits that. No longer in California or Oregon or the state of Washington in the United States or Vermont, but it still does in most of the United States. And I see that as simply imposing harms on people who in those circumstances would prefer not to live out that last period of their life. And I can't see any public good in that. And, you know, in fact, there's a public negative in terms of probably the public is going to pay more, whether it's through higher

insurance premiums or through Medicare is going to pay more for their medical treatment. I don't think it's true that other people who don't want to die are going to be pressured into dying. There's no evidence of that in many jurisdictions that have not done this for many years. So it seems to me to be a both pure individual liberty that ought to be, uh, recognized, uh, and, uh, a public good as well. Is the U.S. an out is in Asia for the longest are the Netherlands Belgium Luxembourg They've had it for quite a long time Switzerland as well as had physician assistance in dying And then as I said that northwest corner of the United States and now extending all the way down

The west coast of the United States and across to Vermont And very recently, I think Washington, D.C. also legislated for this. Australia does not have it at present. It had it briefly in one territory, but it got overruled. But there's likely to be a move where I'm speaking to you from now in the state of Victoria, where Melbourne is the major city. The government has said that it will introduce legislation by the end of the year. So I think this is something that is moving forward and is probably moving forward in many jurisdictions as well, certainly being talked about elsewhere in the world. It could, of course, if Trump appoints Gorsuch to the Supreme

Court and perhaps other justices as well, it may start to move backwards in the United States because Gorsuch has said, has written that he doesn't think that it ought to be permitted. He thinks it's actually not just that further states should not legislate for it or that it's not a constitutional right, but actually that the constitution, he thinks, prohibits states legislating for physician assistance in dying, which is a pretty extreme view. Very few other legal minds have defended that doctrine. You are one of the leaders of the animal rights movement early on. And I think you've said that we've made some progress on factory farming. I've been a vegetarian for three years now.

factory farming. I've been a vegetarian for three years now. And, you know, I try to be a vegan, but I fail more often than I succeed. Where do you think the animal liberation movement is today? And what are the steps forward, do you think? I think the movement is obviously a lot stronger today than when I first started thinking about this when it didn't really exist. I mean, there was a kind of an anti-cruelty movement focused mostly on dogs and cats and perhaps horses, but there was really almost nothing talking about factory farming, which is where the vast majority of the suffering of non-human, that we inflict on non-human animals, occurs, I believe. So that movement has built up strongly over the

last 40 years. It's achieved significant changes in some jurisdictions. This is an area where Europe is definitely ahead of the rest of the world. The entire European Union has banned those small wire cages for egg-laying hens. It's banned individual crates for breeding sows and for veal calves as well. Those things seem to be on the way out in the United States. They've been banned in California as a result of a referendum they had in 2008, and also in Massachusetts as a result of a voters' initiative that they had just in last November. So I think they seem to be on the way out, but they still exist on a large scale.

The most exciting development for animals at the moment, though, is the idea of more plant-based foods that will be closer to meat in texture and taste and that hopefully will persuade more people who currently eat meat to move to the plant-based foods that would be so much better in terms of reducing animal suffering but also so much better in terms of reduced environmental impact reduced fewer greenhouse gases less pollution and so on by not eating animals that seems to be sort of a, you get to kill two birds with one stone, right? You get to... That's the wrong metaphor to use, but yes, we do get to do a

couple of good things at once. Yeah, you avoid the climate change and the suffering of animals. But yes, you're right. That was a poor metaphor choice. One of your other essays recently talked about surfing. And I'm curious curious that just seemed to be something a little uh you know a little lighter a little out of character but i'm just interested in what it means to you what surfing gave to you that you thought was important enough to write about yeah well in terms of being out of character i don't sort of sit and think or think and sit and write all the time i don't think that that is a healthy existence and I don't think it would be a good one for me. So when I am not doing that,

I do like to do things that are physically active. I think I enjoy that. It makes me feel better, makes my body a little bit fitter, I suppose. So I suppose the two major things I do are hiking and surfing. So I think that is part of me um surfing is something that i didn't take up early enough in life unfortunately to get really good at but um uh i'm been doing it

for uh about i don't know the last dozen years or so um and uh i really like it i mean it's sport where you don't need any kinds of motors or anything like that to, um, to get you going very much. You just carry a board out of the water and paddle it out in the water. And then you use the power of the wave to get you moving forward. Uh, so I like that. I like the, I like the beauty of the sea and the waves and being out there, it's very peaceful. And yet it can be quite physically demanding.

Paddling the board against a heavy set of waves is not easy. Paddling it fast enough to pick up some of the waves takes some effort. So it's good physical exercise and, and you're developing a skill, you know, I mean, you can, you're developing a skill in getting up, controlling the board, staying on the wave, tackling different waves. Uh, every wave is a little bit different. So I, yeah, it's something I, I really enjoy as a complete break from what I might be doing otherwise. Yeah. I didn't mean that surfing was out of character. I more meant it from, from your writing.

It seemed to be a little bit, it stood out from some of the other things in the book. Okay, sure. It's not trying to argue for something. It's trying to describe something that I find important in my life, but obviously won't be for everyone. And one of the things I think that you drew out in the book was how it's okay to do things later in life, and it's okay to do things that we're not going to be great at yeah absolutely do things just for the pleasure of it and i think so many of us get hung up on that yes that's true um you don't have to be really good at everything to enjoy it uh you don't have to get the best wave of you know that's out there sometimes you know there's a surfing

etiquette about well if somebody is already on a wave, you leave that wave to that person. But that's okay. You know, I don't mind. And the other thing I mentioned in that piece I write is that at least the way I do surfing, it's completely non-competitive. You know, I mean, maybe I'm trying to improve myself, but there are some sports where there isn't much point unless they're competitive. You know, you can't really play tennis against yourself. I guess you can hit a ball against the wall or something like that. But it gets kind of, yeah. Yeah, it gets a bit dull.

But this is something that is non-competitive and yet is clearly a sport, is clearly a physical recreation. You're out there. So I like that aspect of it as well. Excellent. Well, Peter, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show. I've really enjoyed the conversation and I really enjoyed getting to spend some time with you.

Okay. It was good to talk to you. All right. Take care. Bye. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a donation to the One You Feed podcast. Head over to oneyoufeed.net slash support.