The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss - Peter Singer: From Animal Liberation to Effective Altruism

Episode Date: October 7, 2023

I have felt privileged to know the remarkable scholar Peter Singer as a friend and colleague for over a decade. We first met, I believe, in the context of atheism, but our discussions have ranged far more broadly, and his impact on my own thinking has been substantial. He and I engaged in a public dialogue in Arizona eight or nine years ago, and preparing for that discussion changed my views about world in many ways. Peter actually had an impact on my life even earlier than that, as when my daughter was very young. The late Katharine Thalberg, who ran the famous Explore Bookstore in Aspen where I often did book signings, and who, along with her spouse Bill Stirling, rang an unsuccessful campaign to ban furs in Aspen, saw how much my then seven year old loved her dogs, and she gave Lilli a copy of Singer’s 1975 book Animal Liberation, to read when she got older. I don’t know if Lilli ever did read it, but she became a vegetarian well before I did. Peter, perhaps more than anyone else alive, has effectively promoted the cause of animal welfare, coining the term “species-ism” to describe the fact that a proper ethics should include an equal consideration of welfare for not just all people, but all creatures. He has backed up his position with a comprehensive discussion of the disgusting manner in which animals are made to suffer in the context of industrial scale food preparation for humans. That includes not just cattle, pigs, and chickens, but also fish. Whether or not one continues to choose to eat meat, we should all at least be aware of what we are signing on for by doing so. This year Peter updated Animal Liberation so that it is called Animal Liberation Now, to record the developments that have taken place in the almost 50 years since the book first appeared. His arguments remain as dramatic and clear as they were then, and what I particularly enjoy about Peter is how he combines the philosopher’s tools of analytical logic, with a scientist’s tools of gathering of evidence. The end result is a compelling treatise, and I was thrilled that Peter agreed to sit down again for a comprehensive discussion of the ideas in his book.We took advantage of this opportunity to talk about Peter’s interest in Effective Altruism, about which he has also written extensively. This is the effort to do the most good in the world by empirically examining both what sorts of charities do the most good for the most people, and also exploring how much of one’s own resources one can readily part with in the process without substantially changing one’s lifestyle. Once again, his discussions may change the way you think, and act.I hope you enjoy our comprehensive dialogue, for which he generously contributed significant time, as much as I did. And I hope it provokes the same kind of personal reflections for you as it did for me. As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project Youtube channel as well.And a reminder that The Origins Project Foundation is programming two live events in Southern California museums. Oct 15th, at the Bowers Museum, I will be giving a presentation on my new book, and Oct 17th Brian Keating and I will be recording a joint podcast at the San Diego Air and Space Museum. Go to originsproject.org for more info and the opportunity to purchase tickets. Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

Hi, welcome to the Origins Podcast. I'm your host Lawrence Krause. Peter Singer is one of the foremost philosophers of our time, and I'm really happy he agreed to spend time with me in a fascinating dialogue for this week's podcast. I had the opportunity a number of years ago, six or seven years ago, to appear with Peter on stage, and that appearance changed the way I thought about the world. And so I was really happy to be able to have him back, specifically, on the publication, republication of his famous book, the 1975 book, Animal Liberation, has been rewritten substantially by Peter, and it's called Animal Liberation Now. And I want to spend time talking about that. Peter was one of the first people to make

popular the idea that animals other than human beings have rights, particularly the rights not to suffer. An equal consideration of interests, as he called it, should be applied to the entire animal kingdom if possible. And he lives, by the way, he speaks. He's a vegetarian and a vegan. And I remember his discussions of factory farming, of chickens and meat, even back then years ago, was enough to make me rethink the way I ate. It took me a while, but I'm happy to say that now I'm a vegetarian. And again, he talks about the, in the new book, and in our discussion, the fact that factory farming hasn't really changed. And even though I live surrounded by the sea, what I hadn't realized was it fishing of fish

actually also. Not only causes trauma for the fish in an obvious way, but maybe more than obvious when you think about factory farming a fish, but takes resources, for example, the fact that salmon has to be fed fish, farmed salmon have to be fed fish that could otherwise feed other people. And of course, now the question of climate change has become very important. So we talked about all of these things and more. I wanted to, as I do in Origins podcast, to talk about Peter's origins and what got him into philosophy in the first place. And he's a remarkable human being and it's a wonderful discussion. He's passionate about

these ideas and we'll confront some of the ideas you may have about animal rights, in fact, and animal sentience. And I hope you're thinking at least about the way you deal with the world. In addition, of course, to his work on animal liberation, he's written seminal books on effective altruism, on how to most effectively do good in the world. And again, he lives by that giving a significant fraction of his own salary to effective charitable causes.

And we talked about that discussion. I think listening to the discussion with Peter Singer may indeed change the way you think about the world for the better. If not, at least get you asking questions about the world, which is really one of the points of the Orson's podcast. So I really hope you to enjoy our discussion together. And of course, you can watch it ad free on our SEPTAC site, Critical Mass, or you can wait and watch it on YouTube

or listen to it on any of the standard podcast listening sites. And I hope I'll be able to see some of you a few weeks from now, or maybe a week from now by the time, this appears in Los Angeles, in Orange County for my lecture there at the Bowers Museum and two days later in San Diego. That's October 15th and October 17th. Go to the Originsproject.org website if you want to get tickets and there's VIP tickets for our reception beforehand for both. I'll be signing some books.

And in San Diego, I'll be having a discussion with Brian Keating for his podcast and my podcast. So if you live in the Southern California area or you feel like visiting at that time, I hope you'll come out then for our Origins events, all of which go to support the programming that we can do in the Origins Project. Thanks again. And with no further ado, Peter Singer. Well, Peter, thanks so much for joining me. It's been a while since we've been together.

I can't remember the last time may have been in Mexico, I think, but that I saw you. But it's always a pleasure to spend time with you and to learn from you. So thanks for spending the time today. Thank you. Thanks for inviting me on the show. It's a great chance to have the new version of the book, which I want to talk about in many ways, had an impact on my life, has come out. And it gave me a good chance to be able to read the new version. That's a great thing about doing the podcast.

I might have gotten it, but to read it in depth, it motivated me. It's like a book club. You have to read it, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly. Well, book clubs, you can sometimes finesse it, but I think if you're doing a podcast, at least in my opinion,

I have to actually know what it says. But, and I want to get to, I want to focus for the most part on the new version, which is remarkable. And, but I want to, we spent time on stage together once, along a very pleasant conversation we had in front of a few thousand people once,

in Phoenix. But I don't remember going into your origins as much as I do now. And since it's the Origins podcast, I really like to know what got people to where they are. And so I want to spend the first part of this conversation talking about that. I've looked at your bio and learned some things that I didn't know before, that your family come from Vienna. Is that right?

We're sort of refugees from Hitler. That's correct. Yes, my parents left as soon as they could after Hitler, over Austria. Well, they were a great astute to leave when they did, but not all of your family left in time. No, no. It's a fairly common story that the younger generation left because they saw that they had no future. You know, I don't think they were really contemplating that they would be murdered.

But economically, they had no future. Jews could not own businesses. My mother had just qualified at the University of Vienna as a doctor. Jewish doctors could only treat Jewish patients. but the problem was about a third of the population of Vienna was Jewish. Sorry, about a third of the population of Vienna were doctors, and only about 10% of the population was Jewish. So we're not going to have that many patients.

So they decided to leave, but their parents who were getting closer to the end of their careers, sort of procrastinated, I guess. They were eventually wanting to leave, but sadly they left it too late. Yeah, I didn't realize. I don't know when in your life, you did a bio of your maternal grandfather who died,

in the concentration camps? Yes, that's right. That was published, I think, 2003 or something like that, so about 20 years ago. I've been working on it for a few years, actually. It was like a part-time project while I was doing my more academic work to read his books, because he wrote a couple of books

and many articles and read a lot of letters, all in German, so I read it quite slowly. and then to write it up. Well, that's great. I mean, I'm impressed and admire that. I thought my next book would be, I started, I took a year off school 50 years ago to work on a history book. And I have all the, all the material.

And I told myself, this next book is going to be taking, I took the box out. But it's intimidating after a while. But it's nice to have a labor of love like that, like you to. And for you to learn, I mean, for like, like doing this podcast if you're going to write a book, it forces you to read all the things

you might not have read otherwise. That's right, and I got to know my grandfather, who of course I'd never known in flesh because he was murdered before I die before I was born. But I did get to know him and his thought to the greatest possible extent.

Now, you answered one question I was going to ask. When I read, I read about your father, but I didn't read anything about your mother. I was going to ask what you did. So your mother was a doctor. Does she practice as a doctor in Australia when you moved there? Was she moved there? She did, yes.

She had to pass the Australian medical exams. It seems pretty incredible now, but the University of Melbourne or Australia generally did not recognize a medical degree from the University of Vienna. She had to do the exams again in English, of course, but she did manage to pass and then she practiced for most of her life. So she was, your father was, had an imported coffee or something in tea.

So had he had an education at the university education as well or no? He was educated at a school of commerce, business school in Vienna, rather than at the main campus of the university. So that leads me to two questions, which I sometimes ask people. First of all, you're an academic and I've always wondered what causes people who come academics. I know in my case what did, but did your mother or father have a bigger influence on you in that regard? That's hard to say, really. I think it was kind of assumed that I would go to university.

I had a sister six years older than me, and she had gone to university. And so I think that was assumed, but certainly it was my mother's side of the family that was more academic. my grandfather, the one who I wrote about her father, had actually studied classics, Greek and Latin, and then taught them not at a university, but at Vienna's most academic high school. And so, you know, that was quite a high standard of teaching. And he also wrote articles, published articles related to his understanding.

of ancient Greek and Latin. So, okay, so there was the academic aspect. It was, as I've often said on this program, my mother wanted me to be a doctor. She was a Jewish mother and wanted to be a doctor, but there wasn't any pressure on you to become a doctor or anything like that. No, no.

But there's one other thing that I should mention, actually, because I don't want to just have a male bias here. And that is that my grandmother, my mother's mother, also went to the University of Vienna. She was the 37th woman to graduate from the University of Vienna. Wow. And only the third woman to graduate in maths and physics. She did math and physics.

Yeah, she did study that. And she actually had an invitation after she graduated to go to Berlin to work with Max Planck. But she turned it down because she wanted to marry my grandfather. So another case of a woman sacrificing her scientific career for a man. Not that he didn't have a career. She worked in as an association of banks and bankers doing mathematical work for them, I think, but didn't have the scientific career she could have managed. You never know.

She might have been happier. You never know. Quite possibly. But that leads me naturally to the next question. I was going to say with your mother as a doctor, and now with her mother as of math and physics, why didn't you become a scientist? I always wonder why people don't become scientists.

You know, we had to make a choice at high school at that time. Made a choice at about in the third last year of high school. So you specialize for your last two years of high school. Either you were going to do maths and sciences, or you were going to do basically humanities subject. And I'd done fine at maths and the sciences, but I really enjoyed the others more and I enjoyed writing. And maybe I got that a bit from my father because though my father was not educated in that way, he was really interested in history. We had quite a library of history books.

He was often talking about history. He also was quite gifted for languages, as well as, of course, German and English. you French quite well. So, you know, maybe there was a bit of that in me in some way as well. You know, you preview the questions that I'm going, that I'm going to ask next, you naturally lead to them, because I was going to ask about reading. That's the other thing I'm always interested in. When you started reading, who influenced your reading? And I guess it was your father in that case more. And when you were younger, you read history? Or did you read lot of fiction or did you read, what did you read? What got you interested in reading?

Well, I mean, depending how young I was, I read some bad boys fiction, I guess. Good. Which would now be considered horrendously racist. You know, tales of brave white men exploring Australia, for example. But then I did read quite a bit of history. At some point, I actually read more or less from cover to cover, Winston Churchill. six-volume history of the Second World War. So I did get quite absorbed in that.

Of course, the Second World War was fairly close at that stage, growing up in the 50s. And obviously, it had been crucial to my family and felt that strongly. So I read that. But I also read as a teenager, Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy, which was the first philosophy work that I read. And I enjoyed his clear style. And I enjoyed explanations.

of ideas that were quite new to me. So, yeah, they were. I was going to, well, we're going to ask, obviously, how you end up doing Flossy, but Churchill, so he deserved the award he won for that book, you think? Yeah, I thought he was an excellent writer. He was an excellent speaker.

It's, there are many Nobel Prizes or whatever that have gone for nonfiction books. So there's very few. And I admit, I haven't read it that. Now I think I maybe should turn to it, because I do love history. But you did study history. You studied law, they studied as an undergraduate.

Well, before, so in high school, you had to specialize. You chose the humanities aspect for the last three years. When did you read Bertrand Russell? Was you still in high school? Yes, I was still in high school. Okay. And I assume that piqued your interest in philosophy. That was out the initial philosopher that you read, that sort of not Aristotle or any of the others.

That's right. He was definitely the first philosopher I read. And yes, it did pick my interest, but so too did my older sister's boyfriend who had studied a bit of philosophy and talked to me about it. And so I think he was a decisive factor in my deciding to not only study law, which was going to be in my profession and which in Australia, as in Britain, you started immediately as an undergraduate, but also doing history for interest and then saying, okay, well, I can combine history and philosophy for the interest. side of things. Yeah, the new, the new, the new, the new, the new, the new, the new, the new, the new, the new, my extra my step-dard had never seen, and in England, too, I think it's, PPE, politics, philosophy, and economics, I think, yeah, yeah, I taught students in that in a couple of years when I taught at Oxford. Yeah, well, there's the, the, uh, so you added philosophy, but you plan to be a lawyer.

Is that what you'd plan? I did plan to be a lawyer. Um, I never imagined that I could make a living as a philosopher and I thought I do need to make a living. And it was only rather gradually that I let that slip. I mean, when I, I'd finished my, my BA and done well in that before I'd quite finish the law degree. And I was offered a graduate scholarship to go on and write a master's degree in philosophy. And so I went to the law faculty and said, can I postpone finishing my law degree. And I said, sure, yes, just come back when you've finished your MA. But then when I finished my MA, I got up at another scholarship to go to Oxford. So I postponed again. There's still time. Okay. But it's interesting that you were going to be a lawyer because again, my brother became a

lawyer. And for my parents, it was before that we become professionals. They didn't go to university. But there was no pressure to you to be a professional in that sense. It was just your view that, well, it's pretty hard to earn a living hanging a shingle up saying philosopher, you know, inquiries. Yeah, I had no idea about that, and I hadn't really thought of being an academic at that point. Now, this could be an error in one of your bios, and I think for you, which one, did you do a second BA at Oxford? No, I didn't think a Bachelor of Philosophy. It's strictly, I mean, it's weird, you know, but Oxford is weird in many ways. Yeah, yeah, yeah, almost. that it's actually, it is a postgraduate degree. You can't do it as an undergraduate, and yet it's

called a Bachelor of Philosophy. It's a two-year graduate degree, so it's a little shorter than doing a doctorate philosophy. It has some courses involved, which the Oxford doctorate had no courses. It was simply a thesis degree. And you did write a thesis, but the thesis was a shorter one than the Oxford Defil. So when I asked people, my philosophy department in Melbourne, what degree I should do, they recommended the B-Fill, because they said it's broader than doing the doctorate. And we'll still regard it as a qualification if you want to get a job and come back here. And they did, you know, so I did come back with only a B-fill, and of course the Masters and Bachelor's degree. And, you know, the fact that

I didn't have a doctorate was not a barrier to getting an academic job at that time. So you never got the doctor at Oxford. Okay, that's interesting. That's right. But the thesis you wrote, the one that I think he published his book was the thesis you wrote while in Australia, right? Why should I be moral or something like that? I wrote, why should I be moral in Australia? But I didn't really publish that as a book, although it's figured in other books.

I wrote a book called How Are We to Live, which is a lot of that theme. But that came out more than 20 years later. Much later. I know the book, yeah. Okay, so that's great. Yeah. The Oxford Philosophy thesis was published in a slightly expanded form. It's called Democracy and Disobedience.

Oh, that's right. Democracy. It was about whether there's a right to civil disobedience in a democracy. Oh, okay. Which becomes relevant in a way to animal liberation at some level, which we'll get to. Well, that's true. time I was thinking more of the Vietnam War. Yeah, sure, which is a, yeah, and, and, I was, I mean, how could one, well, I was going to say,

how could one not protest against Vietnam War? I guess a lot of people didn't. My friend, Noam Chomsky tells me most academics didn't, but he, but, were you active in, in, in the UK or in Australia, I guess it would have been. I was more active in Australia. As an undergraduate when doing my master's, I actually was the leader of a group. called Melbourne University Students Against Conscription, or campaign against conscription, I think it was. So that was after the draft was introduced in Australia, it was specifically campaigning against

that, and that was introduced in order to provide troops to serve alongside our American allies in Vietnam. I didn't realize there was conscription in Australia too. Oh, okay, in Vietnam. Yeah, and that obviously was a good political. political rallying point. I mean, I was against the war even without that, of course, but in terms of rallying people who didn't want to serve and whose parents didn't want their children to serve, that was a strong point. Okay, well, so civil disobedience, and then a very important meeting, which I've heard you talk about, actually mentioned it briefly in Animal Liberation, and I read more about it with a fellow student. I was very pleased to see that student is now

I don't if he still is, but became a professor at Cape Breton University, which is not too far away from where I live. And another reason for you to come visit. Well, that was actually the reason I visited Prince Edward Island the first time, as I mentioned, when we were talking before he started recording. I went to visit him and his wife, Mary, in Sydney, Cape Breton, with my wife and a very small child, to see them. again because we'd been really close at Oxford. And they were living there. And then we decided we would see a bit more of Canada. So we hired a car and drove from Cape Breton to Montreal, stopping at a few places on the way. And Prince Edward Island was one of them. Well, that's great. Well, I'm glad you've been there. I hope you'll, as I said before,

we began recording. I hope you'll come back. But he had a profound effect on you. So why do you review that briefly for the listeners. He had an extremely profound effect on me, and it was just an accidental meeting. He was a fellow graduate student at Oxford, and there were the class that we attended together, but the class had nothing to do with animals. But after the class, I'd asked a question at one particular session, and after the class, he asked me whether I've been satisfied with the answer that had been given. And we talked about that a little and the conversation started to get into deeper issues. And he said, why don't we have lunch?

Because the class finished just before lunch, you can come back to my college and we can continue the conversation. So he invited me to Bayel College for lunch. And we were offered a choice of two dishes. There was a hot dish, which was spaghetti and there was a salad, plate and the spaghetti had a kind of nondescript red brown sauce on top of it and Richard said can you tell me if there's meat in the sauce and when he was told there was he took the salad plate so I took them the spaghetti and we sat down

we ate our lunches and we finished the conversation that we'd been having about the class and then I asked him because it was really unusual in this is 1970 to meet somebody who had a problem with eating meat. And he didn't seem to be a Hindu or anything like that. So I said, basically, you know, why did you ask that question about the meat? Do you have a problem with eating meat? And I wasn't sure what to expect. I thought maybe he would think it was bad for his health.

There were some people around like that then, though not many. I thought maybe he's going to be a complete pacifist, you know, who says just killing is wrong. We'll stop by it. but instead he said something much simply. He said, I don't think it's right to treat animals in the way that animals are treated to be made into our food. And that surprised me because I thought that animals have good lives on farms. I thought they were all outside in the fields, grazing away happily.

Of course, then they get rounded up and trucked off to slaughter. They have one terrible day in their life. But, you know, is that so bad? but he said, no, that's not true anymore. Many animals are indoors now. They're very crowded or perhaps they're in feedlots. And, you know, whatever can be done to make it cheaper to produce their meat is done. So really, we're doing all sorts of bad things to give them pretty horrible lives.

And I was surprised by that. I wanted to learn more. He recommended the one book that I think existed then on that subject, a book by Ruth Harrison called Animal Machines. And I read that and I found that very convincing too. And so I joined Richard and a couple of other friends that he knew in Oxford, who were vegetarians. Wow.

Right then, and then it was, and right then you became a vegetarian and you remained that. You never became, you never had withdrawal symptoms or anything like that. No, I never had withdrawal symptoms. Yeah. I would say it was not instant. I should mention I was already married by then. So I obviously went home and told my wife about this conversation that I'd had. And she looked at the book by Ruth Harrison as well.

So it was a joint decision. It has to be. Yeah. I do know some families or one spouse is a vegetarian or the other isn't, but it's got to be hard. I honestly think I probably could not have done it at that stage because, you know, you were going to make yourself into a kind of crank in many people's eyes. And if my wife had thought that too and not supported me, it would have been too hard for me. I understand that.

Yeah, no, no, that's great that you both. Well, joint decision and we'll talk. Similar here. So, and we'll get to the, but your development of philosophy and your own philosophy, and I want to talk about the context of animal liberation comes from the idea. And I don't know if this verbiage is yours or the equal consideration of intubation. interests, which is a central sort of term and a central idea that really forms the basis of Venomal liberation and your views about that and many other things.

Do you want to explain that a little bit? Yes. And that is not, I didn't put those words together, the equal consideration of interest. I took them from an article written by a philosopher Stanley Ben, but he was not writing about animals. He was writing about what is the basis for equality among humans. And I don't think he was the only one to use that prize either. I'm not absolutely sure of that, but he wrote quite a prominent article. And this was a puzzle that philosophers were talking about at that time. So we say that all humans are equal. But what exactly do we mean by that? Because

it's obvious that humans differ in, you know, how tall they are, how strong they are, They differ in regard to sex. They differ in regard to abilities, you know, whatever it might be, academic abilities, musical abilities, sporting abilities. So what does it mean to say they're equal? And one of the answers that seemed to me to be a reasonably plausible answer to that was to say, well, they're all entitled to have their interests equally considered. So, you know, we have interests in living our lives well.

in having a good life and not suffering pain and misery. And there's no reason why those who are of our race or of our sex or any other of those groups that you might think, why their interests should count more than those of other races, sexes and different groups, nationalities. So fundamentally, humans are all entitled to have their interests given equal consideration. And I agree with that.

I still agree with that. But why does this stop at the boundary of our species? That was the question that Ben didn't ask. And when I looked at other philosophers who talked about equality and come up with other answers, similar ones, generally, they didn't ask that question either. Which is the basis of what you would call, you know, central to the book, again, the idea of speciesism.

The fact that people don't even ask that question, is the speciesist, I guess is the way to say it, is the assumption that one doesn't even have to ask the question. That's right. That's right. There is just that completely unspoken assumption. And whereas if somebody made it on the basis of race or sex, we would think that's outrageous. But why don't we think that about species? Well, maybe because we are in the same situation as the most blatant racists in a racist society. would have been when they didn't even question the idea that you don't have to give equality to blacks.

Exactly. And your point, and we'll get to it probably later, is that if one of the purposes of philosophy is to cause us to question things that we wouldn't normally question, that are accepted assumptions without thinking that if that's a purpose of philosophy, it's kind of disappointing that philosophers on the whole had not, had fallen into the trap of not even asking that question. Yes, it is disappointing. And of course, it does make us wonder about, you know, what is it that we're blind about today that we're not seen? Now, we're almost, you know, this is natural segue to getting to the details of the book.

But I do want to, I mean, the context of the book, too, and what you talk about, the other thing that at least I know you for, and I'm not a philosopher, although I've read a bunch of your books, well, is the basis of your philosophy, one would say is utilitarianism. Is that right? That's right. And you want to describe that again for people, sort of? Sure. So utilitarianism is an ethical view, which firstly says that actions are right or wrong in accordance with their consequences. So if their consequences on the whole are good,

all things considered, then the actions are right. And if the consequences are bad, all things considered, the actions are wrong. And that's a description of a general family of theories that we now call consequentialism. Yeah. Because reasons. And it's different from those theories that say, no, here's an absolute rule. You must never tell a lie no matter what the consequences of telling a lie, let's say. But utilitarianism is one form of consequentialism.

It's the form that says the consequences that matter are consequences for, well-being, essentially for happiness and avoidance of its opposite pain or suffering. So the consequence, if we want to judge actions as right or wrong by, have they maximized the surplus of happiness over misery, or if there is no such surplus, minimized the surplus of misery over happiness? Now, is that, well, I want to get to it, that when anyone starts talking about maximizing and minimizing,

it does bring up the idea of effective altruism. So we'll get there in a second, I guess. But that does mean, and you already alluded to this, that something which, of course, I happen to agree with, that this idea of absolute moral or absolute ethics doesn't make sense. Because in some cases, at some times and some places, the consequences of a behavior can be good, and at other times, the consequences of the same behavior

can be bad, which means that there's that behavior or that attitude or whatever you want to call it is not absolutely morally or ethically reprehensible, but it depends on the circumstances. Yeah, well, that's certainly my view and the utilitarian view, but there are some ethicists who've denied that, who've said, no, even, you know, there's this Latin saying, you know, do justice though the heavens fall, right, or the world perishes. Now, to me, that's, That's crazy. I mean, it's like saying, well, you know, it would be worth waging a nuclear war if otherwise somebody would unjustly benefit. That's crazy. Yeah, I'm obviously, I'm not sympathetic to. And as a scientist, I'm not sympathetic to it, which is surprises some people because, you know, physics, some people think of as absolute laws.

And it's absolutely not the case. One of the greatest, more important development in physics in the last 50 years, 60 years is a realization. there's no absolute truths in science. Science can prove what's absolutely false, but not what absolutely true. And even the laws of physics evolve. And there's no theory, even our best theories, it applies in every case in the universe. That's a surprise, I think, to a lot of people.

But it's, so, I mean, it meshes with, certainly my personal view of, you know, looking at history and anthropology and other things. Whenever you, if you, I remember when I was younger, it really hit me that some things I had just naturally taken for granted as being good, I could see in certain, I learned in certain times in history and in certain societies were not viewed that way at all. And it opened up my eyes to the notion that maybe, maybe, well, I think I'm, I'm not sophisticated enough to call myself a consequentialist perhaps utilitarian, but it's, I think,

the basis of my own view of the world. But I did read somewhere that the version of utilitarianism, you're associated with it's called hedonistic, which really broke, I never thought of you as a hedonist, but, but, but, well, I want to explain that. The popular sense of hedonist means that I'm,

you know, enjoying, I'm lying out in the sun with a glass of wine and, whatever. And so that's an egoistic hedonist, I suppose. Somebody is the only thing about their own pleasure. But utilitarians are universal hedonists.

That is, they're thinking about the pleasure of everyone. And in fact, and this is an interesting point that utilitarians actually have consistently talked about the pleasure and pain of non-human animals matters too. You know, you have to look for it, especially in Bentham, the founder of the English School of Utilitarians. There's only a few brief notes, but there is a very important footnote in one of his works that shows that he was very clearly aware of this. but didn't push it. He was too far ahead of his time. There were no laws in England at that stage

to actually prevent people being cruel to animals at all. Okay. Well, and then one moved, okay, and when one talks about Tao Trianism, I'd never heard of the term effective altruism until I learned it from you. Again, I think if I'm right in reading, I think in this book or some other book

that you got it from some students, from our it was actually yes um there was a group of students in oxford um in the about 2008 or 2009 someone who um had formed this group uh they had to some extent been inspired by one of my uh writings um and they thought that they should do more good um and they were particularly that stage focused on helping people in extreme poverty which is an issue i'd written about as well And they wanted a name for their group and they tossed around a dozen or so names. And eventually they decided to vote on them. And the name that came out on top was effective altruism.

So, yeah, that was a collective decision. I don't know whether one of them particularly proposed that or argued for it, but it was a collective decision. That's caught on. But you want to describe that sort of the, another difference, but it obviously stems from consequentialism, but you want to explain what one means by effective altruism? Yeah, sure.

So altruism is most people understand. It's like doing good for others. And most people think that that's a nice idea. But not very many people think about the importance of making your doing good for others as effective as you can. When people give to charity, for example, they often give very impulsively. They see a picture of a smiling child and they think, oh, that's a good charity. I'll donate to them or some friend giving to them.

But it makes a huge difference which charity you donate to. Let's just stay with the example of being altruistic by donating to a charity. It makes a huge difference. And I'm not talking about charities that are frauds. there's a very small number of them that, of course, a complete waste of money. But even among charities that you think of as good that are doing quite a good purpose,

there can be other charities that might do hundreds of times as much good with your donation. And people find that hard to believe. But so let me give you an example. A good charity that most people would accept as a good charity is one that trains guide dogs to help people who are blind, right? It's somebody who's blind can get

around better with the guide dog. Doesn't seem to, you know, the guide dog seems to enjoy the work in a sense. So it's a nice thing to do. But it's pretty expensive because it takes a lot of skilled training to train the guide dog and you have to then train the blind person to be with the dog. So roughly it costs you $40,000 US to train a guide dog. Now, what else could you do with that? Well, this is something I owed to Toby Ord, who was one of the pioneers of one of these students I was mentioning at Oxford in the early 2000s. He looked around for other things you could do, and he found that at that time anyway, there was an article that said that for $25, you could prevent someone becoming blind by treating trachoma, which is the major cause of preventable blindness. It's main cause of blindness in hot, dusty countries without a lot of hygiene. so think North Africa, for example.

And yet it's very easy to prevent. So, you know, think of the difference between, you know, helping one blind person and preventing someone becoming blind. It's obviously better to prevent someone becoming blind at all. And then think of the cost difference, right? $25 versus $40,000. Now it's pretty easy to see that there's actually more than a thousandfold good done in donating to the nonprofit that treats recovery.

than in the nonprofit that trains guide dogs. You know, well, perhaps, you know, perhaps the cost of that treating to cromas gone up now. Maybe the low-hanging fruit has been picked. Maybe it's $100, but, you know, it's still $100 compared to $40,000, but still 400 times as much. So, yeah, this group really, you know, went through that, worked that out and decided they needed to publicize it. And Toby Ord set up a group called Giving What We Can to Publican to Publican.

that and emphasize the importance of actually doing some research into what are the best ways to do good. And I think that's the biggest contribution that the effective altruism movement has made. It does popularize the idea of living to some extent altruistically. It doesn't say you have to be a saint. But yes, having altruism is part of one of, you know, part of your goals of life. But then it emphasised the importance of doing the research or now you can look up the research online. and finding the most effective ways to be an altruist. Well, yeah, and you promoted too in your books,

you wrote at least one or two books about... Yeah, I have a book called The Most Good You Can Do. The Most Good You Can Do, I remember that. And, well, first, before we get there, I mean, that research is useful to the extent people learn about it. So is there a place people can go? There must be a website you can give me.

There are a couple, and there's actually another book that I wrote called The Life You Can Save, which is specifically about global poverty. And that led to an organization being founded. A guy approached me and said, you know, this book ought to be turned into an organization. I'd put up a website about it, but that's about all I got to do.

And he said, I volunteered to do it. He was somebody who'd had a guy called Charlie Bressler. He had a career in men's retailing, been quite successful in a national men's clothing chain. and but decided that really didn't satisfy him. That wasn't really what he wanted to do with his life. So he took early retirement from that and volunteered to set up this organization, The Life You Can Save, which does some research of its own and aggregates other research.

And you can go to the Life You Can Save.org and you can find a curated list of 20 plus organizations helping people in extreme poverty that have been assessed for being highly effective in what they do. Well, that's great. I wanted to get that information out, and that's great. But you know, but you've done, there's, so it sounds like it sounds like something anyone, everyone could agree with and want to do. But you've gone further, and I do want to mention, you're suggesting something. And I think most people find a lot harder to do, although I understand that you do it, which is not just maximum good you can do. but the fact that the maximum good you can do involves a significant fraction of your own income

if you're living in, you know, relatively materially successful. It's not just, you know, doing the 1% or the 10%, but 40 or 50% or 60%, you know. And to motivate that, you, again, as far as I know you introduced this analogy of a drowning child, but maybe, maybe, why don't you give it here, I'll give you a chance. Yeah, right, yes. This was the article that influenced people, the students I mentioned in forming effective altruism movement. So I was trying to argue that people who are comfortably off ought to be doing something to help people in extreme poverty, particularly, you know, emphasizing that when people are in extreme poverty,

they die or their children particularly die disproportionately. And so to meet the sort of objection where people would say, well, I'm not responsible for the fact that these children in wherever they are and low-income countries are dying. That's nothing to do with me. So why do I have to help them? I ask people to imagine that they're walking across a park that has a shallow pond in it. And they see, to their surprise, that a small child seems to have fallen into the pond and is flandering around. looks like it's about to drown and there's nobody there looking after the child my parents no babysitter no lifeguard so what do you do right well you the first

thing you think is I'd better run and jump into the pond and pull the child out no danger to me because I know that this pond is quite shallow but your second not so nice thought is oh but I put on my best clothes today's because I'm going somewhere I need to impress people and I don't have time to get the and they're going to get ruined. And then stop and think at that point. Now, suppose that you decided you weren't going to ruin your clothes and you walked on. What would you think of that person?

And most people would, I hope, will say, and I'm sure you would, that would be a horrible thing to do. So once I've got you saying that would be a horrible thing to do, then you're accepting that to save a child's life, you ought to give up something, at least. You ought to, you know, be prepared to ruin those expensive shoes and save the child. And so then the question is, well, where does this stop, right? And now the drowning child example gets a little crazy,

but you imagine that there's more children. You have to keep saving them each time you walk past the pond or whatever. So it is hard to say where the limit is. and I don't really claim now to say that I know where the limit is or that I live up to an ideal limit. I think I would probably have to do a lot more sacrificing, a lot more giving than I do to really be at a limit where I could say, you know, there's nowhere further that I ought to go. But I think if you're comfortably off as I am, then you do need to give something quite substantial. I don't think it's enough to just give small token donations

because it's not really going to make your life into something just terrible. It's not going to make nearly as big a difference to your life as what you can donate is going to make to the lives of the people who will benefit from it, assuming, of course, as we've been saying, that you do give to an organization that will use your donation effectively. Yeah, no, and I know, and I know personally, I do know you do a lot. And that leads me the last question before we specifically get to animal liberation. And this is relevant, the last question I'll talk about later on, about what we can do.

But one of the things, when you think about, I mean, the drowning child analogy is one way of thinking about it. But you've, but you have talked or written about something very important, which is the evolutionary basis of altruism. and that understanding the evolutionary base of altruism, if you're trying to think how to get people to lead good lives or act altruistically or do more than they do, and it's always a challenge to try and figure out how to do it. And one way is to think about what led to altruism in the first place and how you can utilize the evolutionary basis of altruism

as a way to help convince people to act. I wonder if you want to talk about that. Is it basically a guide for using, understanding the evolutionary base of altruism as a guide for influencing public policy, for example? Something it makes, yeah, so anyway, I think I've seen enough. So, I mean, there's a lot to be said about evolution, altruism, and ethics. And first of maybe, let me say something about what I think is the wrong way to use evolution. And that's the way that was used by social Darwinists in the 20th century, I guess, particularly. When, you know, they read Darwin, they accepted and they said, okay, so therefore, you know, life is simply a struggle for survival,

and we must let the weak fall by the wayside, and we must champion the strong so that they survive. But there's that kind of moral lesson. Evolutionary theory is not teaching you a moral lesson. It's telling you how it is that we got here. And now we are here. And the question is, what ought we to do? Now, it's true that if you understand evolution, you might question whether altruism is possible at all,

because you might say, well, didn't evolution make us selfish in terms of firstly ensuring our own survival? survival. And secondly, as Richard Dawkins and others would teach us, extending that to our kin, those who carry the same genes as we do, so that that favors the survival of those genes. And that may be true, and that may be consistent with the forms of altruism that are widely shared. So altruism for your kin, particularly the closer children. altruism also for those you're in a close and reciprocal relationship with because that can benefit you so your friends basically as well as them and what we might call universal altruism

is rarer but that's but it does exist and it's interesting that it exists because for example you know people do help strangers people give blood donate blood which is going to go to strangers not really going to benefit them. And the effective altruism movement, basically, shows a lot of people act altruistically to strangers in a variety of ways. So a further question then was, how does that happen? And there are different answers that could be given. I've talked to Richard Dawkins about it. He says it's a kind of spandrel, you know, it's sort of like the peacock's tail in some way. It's something that just happens and gets selected for in a strange way. I don't find that entirely convincing.

My view is that it has to do with the fact that we also evolved to be able to reason. Again, clearly it benefited us to be able to reason and helped us to survive. But I see reason. I use the metaphor of a reason being like an escalator. So once you start reasoning, you can't necessarily just jump off at any point or you can try, but there's this cognitive dissonance. So once we reason, we understand that strangers are very like us, that they suffer like we do. And then we understand just what I was saying before that, well, you know, here am I spending a lot of money on something that I don't really need and that isn't going to make me, you know, transform my life in a wonderful way permanently.

And with that amount of money, I could make a much bigger difference to the lives of other people. And so that starts to say, well, you know, they do matter just as I matter. So why not do that? So my explanation, or I should say partial explanation, because I'm sure it's not the only factor, is that our ability to reason helps us to reach the ethical judgment that this is a good thing to do, that helping others, even if they're strangers, even if they're not our, you know, our friends, is an ethical thing to do. Excellent. Okay. Well, now and then, well, I was going to get to preference voting, but I think I've been, we've waited long enough to get to the heart of matter, which is not just, you know, how to help your friends and, and neighbors and other people, but how to help animals and to treat animals interests and as, as equal to our own in the sense that they have equal. We have to consider their interests equally.

So Animal Liberation was written in 1975. And I have to say, I'm going to try and be a devil's advocate in some of this, because I want to try and provoke to give you the opportunity to answer questions. Some things I'm intrigued by and may not agree with, but anyway, but on the whole, I do. And therefore, it's hard to become a devil's advocate. It has a profound effect in my own life I have to say, because I will say this. And people always say, I make it about me. but anyway. I remember when my daughter was about seven, we were in Aspen. I was doing a book

signing at a bookstore called the Explorer Bookstore there, which was one of my favorite bookstore. It's a Catherine Thalberg. You probably know them, maybe. Catherine Thalberg. I was there, actually, but wasn't there a bookstore, wasn't that a bookstore called the Tattered page or something like that? No, that's in Denver, tattered cover, not in Aspen. There's a famous tattered cover. Maybe now they've changed it, but the originally used to be called the Explorer bookstore, and it was run by Catherine Thalb. I was there once, but it was. quite a long time ago too. And her husband, Bill Sterling.

Yeah, I met him. Mayor of Aspen. And they were famous because they had a big controversy. They tried to ban furs in Aspen. Yeah, that's why I was there. That's where I met them. Yeah, they brought me in to talk against furs. Good, excellent.

And well, around that time, or a little bit after, my daughter, we were there, and my daughter was six or seven and loved Catherine's dogs. They're always dogs in the store. And so Catherine gave my seven-year-old daughter. She said, here's a book, you have to have to. to read. It was animal liberation. And my daughter's a vegetarian now, and I don't know if there was a causal relationship there, but it had an impact. And it's nice to see, so it's an important book, but it's really nice to see that it's been, I'm not sure updated is the right way to say, but it has.

It's been brought. A lot of things have changed, and a lot of things haven't changed. And I think that's the key point. It's sort of, one reads this saying, yes, is progress, but on the other hand, not only is there not enough progress, in some sense, we've taken steps backwards in certain ways. And it's frustrating that your own frustration comes out. We'll come there. And I'm now, by the way, don't eat meat. And although I still haven't yet removed fish from my dive completely, being surrounded by the water here. And so you waived a hand of the water. Does that mean you hold a fish out of the water yourself? Or you? Well, that's we'll get there. We'll get there because I've actually, we'll get there because I did fly fish and I have,

I fly fish here. And now when I fly fish here, I hope I don't catch fish because it's so much more relaxing. I do it for my kayak. But actually, I don't think I would catch fish anymore. I don't think I, I used to catch fish and I used to do the worst thing, which was catch them and leave them in my bag and drive them back. This was in Colorado. And then I finally realized, no, I should kill them right away. And at least that's better. many people who fish don't realize that. It's mind-boggling to me. Yeah, well, it's not easy. I mean, it's, you know, it's for some reason. And maybe it's this, you talked about this in terms of how we can convince ourselves. I forget there's a term I'm going to use later, convince ourselves

with doing the right thing when it's what we want to do. But it seems a lot of neglecting the fish is a lot easier than taking a rock and hitting them on the head with it. That's an act, overt act of killing. And for it's the kindest thing you can do. But it's not, it's a lot, it seems more violent than just letting them die. You know, and it's really weird. It's really a weird thing. Anyway, we'll get there because I do want to talk about a fish or at least, you know, and the muscles and oysters, which is something I understand you have your own issues about.

I do, this is a big lobster place. And I've stopped eating lobster for the moment after reading your book because I, I really have to, I've always thought that lobsters, that this illusion of the lobsters felt pain when they were being boiled was an illusion. But I understand there's new research. that regard. But we'll get there. It's based on, the bottom line is that your book is based on the fact that the equal consideration of an interest should, it's species is to assume that that stops at humans. So why don't you just take it from there? Yes, well, there's a lot to take.

Yeah, I know, and we'll go, I'll try and eat you through it, but yes. Right. So if you have that principle of equal consideration of interests, then you have to ask yourself, how serious are the interests of the animals that are violated here and how important are these interests to us humans. So the first point is, of course, we don't need to eat animals to survive. That's, you know, well known nowadays. Everybody knows people who are vegetarian or vegan. If you're vegan, it's advisable to take some B12, but, you know, otherwise you don't need to eat them. So it's really, it's a matter of choice about your diet. You think that you enjoy these things more, maybe. But once you learn some non-animal-based cooking, plant-based cooking, I think there's lots of great

dishes out there. There's a wide variety of cuisines. I would really challenge somebody to show that they get more enjoyment from their food than I do. By the way, the new book reintroduces the recipes. That was very happy. That's right. It reintroduces the recipes. in a more personalized way, some of my favorite recipes from the first edition. That's right. So, so, you know, that's the first thing. And then what happens to the animals? And this goes back to what we were talking about before, what Richard Keshen alerted me to and Ruth Harrison documented in her book, and which unfortunately is still going on with the great majority of the meat produced. And that is the animals are confined indoors. They're very crowded. This is particularly

with chickens and turkeys and also with pigs. But cattle are also spent a good part of their lives on feedlots. And these are really very bad lives for animals and for a whole variety of reasons. By the way, we will go through each of them. I want to spend a little time with each of them. So we'll have more time. Okay. So yeah, so yes, you were starting out with the kind of basis of it. So if that's the case, then I don't think we're justified in supporting those industries for needs that are not vital to ourselves. And I should add, of course, that in terms of net food production, feeding grains and soybeans to animals is just wasteful. It doesn't produce more food for climate. Yeah, I want to get to those factors, but I wanted to start with just the basic,

if you wish, philosophical notion. Yeah, so it is that idea, which we talked about before, that pain is bad, you know, pleasure, happiness is good, and that to say that they're only good when they apply to humans is in some ways analogous. I'm not saying it's a parallel in every respect, of course, but in some ways it's analogous to what racists and sex. have said about blacks and women. So I think we need to get past that prejudice. We need to recognize that non-human animals can feel pain. Again, maybe not all of them.

You mentioned oysters before. I'm not going to say that oysters can feel pain. But certainly all the vertebrates and some of the invertebrates, you mentioned the lobsters. Octopus also is another one in vertebrate you could think about, are capable of feeling pain. And so we shouldn't sacrifice their interest in avoiding pain for relatively minor interests of ours. Okay.

And that's, yeah, that notion that we, that, that consideration should not extend to animals other than humans, as you've called speciesism, in analogy to racism. I actually, you know, I know it's near the end of your book, but I was still, I was looking, again, the bio, I think it's the Wikipedia BioVue, and I was kind of amazed how people take for granted this notion that that's not a good thing to do. And especially philosophers

who you think, I mean, this quote, which I hadn't seen before in your book, but I did see in this, I think it was in the Wikipedia bio view, a Roger Scruton who criticized your book Animal Liberation. I was shocked at this quote

that that book contains, little or no philosophical argument. They derive their radical moral conclusions from the vacuous utilitarianism that counts the pain and pleasure of all living things as equally significant and ignores just about everything that's been said in our philosophical tradition about the real distinction between persons and animals. What has been said in our philosophical tradition about that real distinction? I mean, it's just makes it, it's just, I was amazed. It ignores everything we said about the distinction between the real philosophical distinctions between humans and animals, of which he didn't elaborate.

I kind of was shocked. Yes, right. Well, I'm not sure he was thinking of. Aristotle famously thought that everything exists for us, basically, a pre-Darwinian view of our role. He may have been thinking of Kant, who regarded the fact that we are self-aware, autonomous beings, as entitling us to use and not having obligations.

towards those beings who are not. But to me, you know, the definitive answer to that was given by Bentham in that footnote that I mentioned earlier where he says the question is not can they reason or can they talk, but can they suffer? Can they suffer? And we're going to get to, I want to, I love why you're leading me along to just where I want to go. But I must say what, I think what upset me most, it pushed my buttons.

One, not, not, if I have problems with philosophy, and I, I do every now and then. And people seem to think I have a case against philosophy. I don't. But the one kind of argument that I hate is the appeal to authority when I've been in debates or discussions. And I see people quote Kant or Aristotle. I don't who cares? I mean, it's fine. They're good thinkers. But that's not an argument that saying, you know, these great thinkers have said this. It's the quality of their argument, not the who said it that matters, it seems to me. And so, you know, saying that this philosophical tradition, who cares about traditions? The question is, is what is the distinction between you and animals? And does it validate treating them significantly

differently? In certain ways, yes. I mean, I don't have a conversation with my, I do converse with my dog, actually. But I don't expect my dog to respond in that regard. But anyway, So I pushed my own buttons, but you hit, I don't know if you want, now we won't go there. But the key thing is the capacity to suffer. That's often the argument's made. If someone has something or some entity has a capacity to suffer, we should not cause them to suffer unduly if we can avoid it. Yeah, that's right. And in fact, Bentham also went on to say, well, if we're talking about being able to reason or talk, then a horse or a dog is better.

at it than an infant of a day or a week or a month old. Yeah, we'll get, we'll get to the distinction between dogs or monkeys or great apes and young children, which is something you've brought up, which is upset some people, but it's true. Well, at least the fact that they can reason better is certainly true. But let me now try and at least push on this a little bit. It's a question of degree and it's a question where you draw the line, of course. And you point out, well, maybe the line is between shrimps and oysters or musk.

And then you go past that later on and talk about insects being sent in. But this really hit me because in my new book, the last, which is about things we don't know. My last chapter is about consciousness, which is something I thought in advance we knew the least about. and after spending a lot of time reading about it, I'm convinced that was right. Consciousness is something that we don't, it's hard to even define, much less know where it is.

And another discussion with Chomsky, he said he thought maybe the notion of focusing on consciousness and the mechanism of consciousness may be itself ill-advised. But one thing that was clear is that we tend to equate behavior with awareness or behavior with consciousness. and that's clearly inappropriate. So, you know, amoeba and other, you know,

single-celled animal, single-celled living entities will avoid, will have behavior that makes it appear as if they're conscious. They can even almost appear to have learned where not to travel or how to be away from a hot or an acid solution or something like that. And so we have to be particularly careful. I think Joseph Lodoo and others of the people that I've read have said to distinguish between behavior and awareness or consciousness. And then to take that a little bit further, DeMosio was another guy who said basically the key

thing that sort of he thinks that leads to conscious awareness, self-awareness, is feelings, is the fact that we have feelings that first started just as homeostasis, being aware of of being able to manipulate what's happening in our body by nervous system helps a complicated organism maintain its homeostatic condition, whereas a simple organism doesn't need a central nervous system necessarily to do that. But that leads to feelings. But then we have to be careful to again not attribute the cause relationships between behavior, between stimulus and behavior and feelings could be different than what you think it might be. Again, to take the example of anxiety, as Ladoo talked about,

we tend to think that these anti-anxiety drugs will stop anxiety. What they tend to do is stop the physiological response. But it's quite likely that the physiological response is what ultimately produces the sense of anxiety sometimes later on rather than the other way around. And so if we assume that people are in pain, or suffering, we may be just anthropomorphizing. So in an extreme way.

And to assume that is it may be inappropriate. What do you have to say about that? Well, I think you're right that we can't identify behavior with mental states like suffering or pain. But they can be a reasonable indication of it. And I think, you know, they're one of the important indications. Another indication might be trying to directly observe a nervous system and see to what extent it parallels ours. And I think that works for vertebrates to some extent. But it isn't always enough.

Because even with vertebrates, there might be different parts of the brain involved. And so, you know, you were talking about fish before. That's why there were some challenges to the idea that fish can feel pain. But, you know, then how do you show that it seems like some other parts of the brain are actually performing this function of consciousness in fish from the doing us? Well, one way would be to try and look at the behavior and look at it in a somewhat more sophisticated way. So I think you're right that just, you know, there's no reason to believe that an amoeba can feel pain just because it moves away from something that, damage or threaten it but when you look at fish there's research that shows that they actually will make trade-offs between things that normally they seem to want to do preferred states

and those that they want to avoid so yes you if if you put a barrier in a tank that will give a fish an electric shock if it passes through it it won't pass through it but suppose that this is a fish that has a companion, the kind of fish that is with, it pairs up with another member of its species. And the mate is on the other side of this barrier. Will the fish go through it? Well, that will depend on how strong the shock is. So if the if the shock is not extremely severe, yes, the fish will cross the barrier. If the fish is, if the if the shock is really severe, the fish may not cross the barrier. And the same will be if you vary the incentive to being food, for instance, and how hungry the fish might be. So it looks like they're trading off

in a somewhat similar way to what we might do. And then another factor is, if you give them analgesics, it seems to have a similar kind of effect that it would on us. That is, they are readier to do things that would otherwise previously cause them some pain. So it's, you know, when you get these kinds of parallels, I think it's reasonable to say the balance of probability is that they're conscious and can feel pain. It's not certainty. I agree with that. But I certainly think it's a balance that we ought to give them, you know, to give them the benefit of the doubt, in other words. The benefit of the doubt, I was going to get there. I think your argument, which make, I mean, the strongest argument we make is that we don't know, and we might as well give them the

benefit of the doubt on the whole. But I guess I'm, I constantly want to ask us skeptical questions. The behavior of the fish, well, you know, I mean, the fish has by evolution behavior, which is, you know, reproduction, reproductive behavior, wanting to be with a mate, need to eat, et cetera, et cetera, which may have nothing to do with intent, clearly. And if, if, if, sir, if the, if the thing that's produced like the shock caused humans pain, It may cause, we don't know that it's pain in a fish. It's just maybe something that their internal homeostatic system says it's best to avoid. But the argument, I want to use your own words against you in some sense here.

Well, I was taken by this because you talk about plants. Yeah. And whether plants are intelligent. That's an interesting, you know, a question. But you said, this advance in our understanding of plants shows that they're not the passive objects that we may imagine they are. quite interestingly. I thought that was very the discussion was interesting. But this does not show

that they are conscious or capable of feeling pleasure or pain. Self-driving cars can communicate by sending electronic signals, electrical signals, are intelligent and can learn for the mistakes, but they're not conscious. It's true that plants are natural, evolve living beings, whereas self-driving cars

are inanimate objects made by humans. That is not, however, sufficient reason for concluding that plants are conscious. If we can design objects that respond intelligently to their circumstance, but without being conscious, then hundreds of millions of years of evolution could produce a similar outcome. And so I would in some sense would say, couldn't use that argument for most animals? I mean, 100 million years have caused the animals to appear to be intelligent without being conscious or self-aware

or even feeling the kind of feelings that we do. Well, I mean, and obviously you're right. I'm using it to suggest that plants are complex but are not. conscious. I think in the in the case of vertebrates, the evidence is much more plausible that something similar has evolved in them than in us because we have a common origin and the behavior is similar in the ways that I suggest. And the anatomy and physiology are similar to some respects and differ, you know, depending on what species we're talking about. So I think it's it's much more reasonable to say it probably works in the same way and there is some kind of awareness as there is with us.

The more difficult cases are the ones where there isn't a common origin and I have to acknowledge that isn't only plants, it's also invertebrates. So I assume this can't be certain but looking at what others are written about it, I assume that the common ancestor of us and an octoberts was not a conscious being. It seems like, you know, we're talking maybe as much as 500 million years ago. And it seems likely to have been a simple organism that wasn't conscious. And yet, when we look at the behavior of the octopus, and of course, millions of people have now seen that octopus might teach a film. Yeah.

But even without that, there's a lot of research about what octopus can do and how they are and so on. So it's, you know, yes, I think your objection might apply to an octopus. It's giving me some doubt, but I can't really say that I'm... No, I'll give it. I've already octopi or are intelligent. I stopped eating them before that film, but other things. I mean, just amazing how intelligent there. But nevertheless, you know, people, again, when I tried to understand consciousness,

people would say, yeah, we have a common origin. But if you look at the prefrontal cortex, if you look at the way the neurons are developed in that part of the human brain, we share that at most with some of the great apes and maybe some birds. And so there are differences. So I guess the question is, and this is the question I think you face yourself, where does this stop? Does it ever stop? Does it go all the way down to plants? Or there is some line. And I think, of course, it's hard to know.

And I guess the only answer one can give is unless there's a good reason, give them the benefit of the doubt. Unless you need to give them benefit of doubt. But again, you drew the line, I think, somewhere originally between shrimps and oysters, and I think you still do. Yeah, I still do. And, you know, though in general, I accept your view, and we do have to eat something. So that would be a reason for eating plants if anyway. But I think also in evolutionary terms, it's reasonable to think that consciousness is more likely to evolve in beings who can move away from danger that they sense. And that would be a reason for thinking that there are a lot of animals, possibly even insects who can be conscious, but not plants and not an oyster.

But again, bacteria and amoeba can certainly move away from danger. That's right. But then it's just so hard to imagine that the capacity for consciousness can reside in a single cell. Maybe that's speciousness. I don't know, maybe it's hard to imagine. It's, what is it, multicellularist? Yeah, yeah, it's multicellularism. But maybe in next century, that'll become a... Multi-sellerism is more reasonable than speciesism.

I think the key question is, the difficult question, it's a difficult question we can, none of us can answer, is who can suffer. and I think, and that's a problem. That's a deep problem that I don't know. Each of us may decide on our own level because I don't, you know, if we do some research, if we try and be responsible. But I think your point is that while it's debatable, there is clear suffering in animals, we should at the very least be worried about suffering of animals where we can clearly see suffering. the tenuous cases are maybe debatable.

And those tend to be the animals that we eat. And I think that's a key point. And so I want to go through some of the arguments chapter by chapter, more or less, not quite chapter by chapter in your book. And then I do want to again raise some philosophical questions perhaps or things that came to my mind. But the first version of suffering, I was just most shocked about, I guess. I mean, factory farming, I think I knew about it because we talked about it a lot when we had our dialogue in Phoenix. And I was kind of aware, but I still, I'm always amazed at the level that we cause suffering.

But the one thing that really surprised me was animal experimentation was namely, and now this will get a whole new set of people angry with me. but the the facile nature of most of these psychology experiments, I was shocked. I'm not a psychologist, but it doesn't seem to me you have to have a PhD in psychology to see that the kind of ridiculous tortures that are applied to animals are both not only unnecessary, but they are torture, and that they're not going to give any insight into humans, which is what they're intended to do. I mean, when you describe the way that a wide variety of animals from dogs, to monkeys to other animals are literally tortured and, you know, confined and remove and

and not allowed to have stimuli to see if it's going to in any way reproduce the emotional disturbances of human to have without realizing that the emotional disturbances that humans have is intimately related to our ability to communicate in our society and our conscience. But doing that just seems like they remind me of Nazi experiments. I mean, I just couldn't see the difference between them. There's no, am I missing something? No, I don't really think you are missing something, unfortunately. And I do think that these, you know, even if you didn't care about the animal suffering,

you should think that they're basically a waste of public funds that is going into this work. And the description of them as torture is in many cases appropriate too, because what they're trying to do, for example, and they describe in the book, Let me say in the first edition, I described a series of experiments that were trying to produce what was called learned helplessness in animal to give them inescapable electric shocks until they became helpless and passively accepted the shock. And that was in some way supposed to give us an opportunity to learn something about depression in humans. And that went on since the 1950s or something and obviously hasn't helped us to overcome depression. has caused an immense amount of suffering. After a while, the experimenters, some of them acknowledge this,

that this is not helping us to learn about depression. And you want to think, well, then they stop. But actually, what happened is that line of experiments switched into looking at post-traumatic stress disorder. Now, if you're going to try to study that in animals, obviously you have to give them traumatic stress in order to create this PTSD. and then, you know, maybe hope that you'll somehow learn something about treating that in humans. But, you know, so that's where the torture comes in. We've got to give this animal such a traumatic experience that it's going to somehow mimic PTSD in humans.

But that's a terrible thing in itself. And, you know, I won't describe now, but people can read the book to see exactly how they try to do it. Just unbelievable. I mean, just you can't help but what mind came up. with some of these things. But anyway, go on. Yeah, that's right. But, you know, so in the end, it doesn't help. Because as you just said, you know, that obviously has a lot to do with the way we see the world and the way we relate. Well, I can't understand. I mean, I would never suggest that

you give humans traumatic stress. But the point is, there are a lot of humans with PTSD, and you'd think the way to try and understand it would be to study them as humans. That would be a much better use of our tax dollars, absolutely. No question about that. So, okay, so that's the sort of low-hanging fruit, the obvious examples of animal experimentation, and, of course, the awful experimentation that was done in animals for the perfume and other industry, which, you know, that's a low-hanging fruit. But I do, and so people should read the book to see some of this, because it is surprising,

even if you've heard some of it. But you have argued that animal testing is not always bad, or at least principle is not always bad, if there are clear benefits for, say, humans. So I want you to at least elaborate on that because it appears contradictory. I don't think it is necessarily, but it appears contradictory. So I wanted you to...

Let me just slightly modify what you said. I don't think that experiments are necessarily justified merely by the fact that they have clear benefits for humans. The benefits for humans, or let's say, since we're never certain when we do experiments, whether there will be benefits. So let's say the expected value of the benefits for humans, that is the benefits discounted by the odds that we won't achieve those benefits, has to be greater than the expected negative value for animals based on this principle that we talked about before. or equal consideration of interests. So since it's pretty certain that the animals will suffer pain, the expected value is basically the value of,

or the disvalue of the pain and suffering that is going to be inflicted on them. So if there is significant pain and suffering, there has to be a reasonably, either a reasonably high probability of a benefit for humans, or the benefit has to be very large for a lot of humans. And if that is the case, and we are genuinely applying this principle of equal consideration of interests, and we are doing everything we can to avoid inflicting suffering on animals,

including looking for alternatives that don't use animals, and increasingly more alternatives are being developed in various ways. And if we are using animals to minimize their suffering, both in the experiment itself and in terms of how they have, because that's another low-hanging fruit. The close confinement and miserable housing of many. I want to talk about each of those indeed. Right, yeah.

But again, as a consequentialist, as a utilitarian, I can't say it's always wrong to harm an animal, no matter how great the benefit. That would be just like saying it's always wrong to tell a lie, no matter how great the benefit. So I don't believe that, But I do believe that you need to be as impartial as you can in counting the interest of the animals against the possible benefits to humans. And that's just not done in the present system, right?

There is no equal consideration of interest for animals. But without speciesism, then, the same argument, I think, could be applied to experimenting on humans, right? Well, it could be. I mean, on infants, say, or... Right. Right. Yeah, if you tried to do it on normal humans, then I guess there would be the factor that this would become known and we would all be fearful that, you know, humans were being, I don't know how it was happening. Maybe they were going into hospital and then they

were getting sent off to the labs and so we wouldn't go into hospital and we would die at a much greater rate or maybe we would, they were being kidnapped as they crossed parks and so we wouldn't, parks would be empty. So obviously for normal, you know, aware humans, I think that would not be a good practice. But yes, you could consider it maybe for humans not capable of understanding such things. You mentioned infants, but, you know, infants generally will be loved by their parents who will understand it. So you're not going to find many. Now, you know, you might say, well, there could be abandoned orphaned infants or abandoned often profoundly retarded, profoundly intellectually disabled humans. I mean, I don't want to labor this because we can get near the end.

I mean, some people object to the rational arguments you've given that regarding infants and maybe people in latter stages who are comatose. but one could say, yeah, the infants have parents and they'll extremely suffer, or older people who are comatose, you might want to say harvest their organs for some, for people to save people's lives, and their families will be, will be negligent effectant, but you might say that's the pain and suffering, that's the marginal cost, but is it, can you save more, you know, are you helping more people in the process? I think you have to at least ask that question. Yeah, yeah, you might. And of course, you know, people do leave their bodies for dissection to help train medical students and so on.

That's after their dad, not before. Right. But you could, I would certainly be equally prepared to say, and should I ever be irreversibly comatose, you know, not dead, not necessarily brain dead as that is defined, which is another issue. But just should it be somebody scans my brain and it's clear that I can never recover consciousness. Yes, you could use my body for research that might be more valuable than research on animals because I am, after all, a member of the species that you're trying to benefit. Yeah, no, I have to agree with you there. Well, maybe we'll get to that near the end. I mean, I brought my mother here when she's 100, and she dotted the house, and I have very strong feelings about the efforts that were made for no reason whatsoever to keep her alive in my house that were very difficult.

we'll see if they get there but let's okay i wanted to hit that philosophic question it's a deep it's a deep question and it's going to cause people some people anguish that we even had that discussion but nevertheless that's what these that's the point i think is to get people thinking about these questions but i do want to now go to the factory farming which some people may not be aware of i mean i think if i if i if i you know i just was i was a young man and i i you know and and he who can't understand why why don't we meet and basically said he was going to eat more meat because I was arguing with him. And but, but people should be aware. It's not that, that farms are happy, nice places all the time and that at least in the West,

in the first world, most agriculture is factory farming. And in the process of that, there is incredible suffering. So why don't, why don't we, I don't want to belabor this for the long time, but why don't we spend a little time with each of the animals? Let's talk about chickens. Okay. So if we're talking about chickens raised for meat, one of the big problems is that they are bred to grow extremely fast. They get to the weight at which they're sold in about half the time or less from traditional chicken raising. Now, what's wrong with that? One thing that's wrong is that their leg bones are not maturing past enough and not strong enough really to hold their weight.

So experts who looked at their welfare, particular Professor Webster who founded a Centre for Animal, Farmed Animal Welfare in Bristol in England, says that for the last couple of weeks of their lives, it's like forcing someone with arthritis to stand all day because they're in pain from bearing their weight. You might ask, well, why don't they sit down? There's a reason for that too. They're reared in very crowded sheds and their droppings have fallen onto the floor mixed with a litter that's there. And it's not even cleaned out between each block of birds. They're only six or seven weeks old when they're sold. And if you have a moist atmosphere with a lot of bird droppings, that forms a caustic solution. So if they sit on the litter, they actually get

caustic burns, alkaline burns on their thighs and their breasts, and that's painful to them, so they don't sit for long periods. Now, there's a second aspect of this growing so fast, or being bred to grow so fast. That is just, you know, something that people never think about, and it just shows what the whole system is like. The parents of these birds also have to have huge appetites and grow very fast. But if you gave them as bad, much as they want to eat as you give the young chickens, they would be so fat when they were sexually mature that they would never be able to mate. The male just could not get to the right place on the female from this fat body that he would have. So to do that, to get them sexually mature and

survive, you have to starve them basically. Standard thing is you skip a day feed. You feed them only every second day. And these are birds bred to have great appetites. So each, say every second day they're really hungry looking for more food everywhere and that's just you know that's just something the farmer the factory farmers industrial farmers would do that's the way to produce chicken cheaply and the fact that i guess the other thing that i i can't comes to mind for me is is that is that they're constrained in such small spaces they can't turn around they can't um these are the egg laying hens now right i was talking yeah yeah it's the egg laying ones who are yeah again we're really constrained the egg

egg-lain ones. And so you talk about eggs, because I do eat eggs. But I always eat eggs that say free range. You should have, in Canada there and Prince Edward Island, you should have access to good free-range eggs. They will not come from hens who are kept in cages. They will come from hens who not only are cage-free, which is a label widely used in the United States, but can still be a very crowded system, although not in small cages. But free range should mean that they're able to go outside, at least in suitable weather, and range around, you know, pecking the grass, chase butterflies or whatever. And that isn't a bad life, you know. So if you have that, then you could, you could say, well, that's a reasonable deal. The bird gets a decent life.

The shorter life the hen would normally have, because once the rate of lay drops off, they'll send the hen to be slaughtered. But yeah, it's not, it's not too bad a life. So it's okay to eat those free-range eggs, is that right? I think so. I must say, I don't know what the conditions are like in winter, in Canada, right? In Australia, they can be out all year round, but probably not where you are. But, yeah, look, it's a lot better. So, you know, it's an interesting question because I've thought about that.

Okay, and pigs now, which are, who are extremely smart, let's start saying that. And what happens to them, so why don't you mention pigs? Sure, well, pigs are all. So standardly kept inside. They never go outside at all in their lives. They're very crowded. But the worst problems are for the mothers, the mother pigs, the breeding sars, who are still commonly kept, this is in the United States,

certainly commonly kept in individual stalls where they can't turn around. They have nothing to do all day except stand up and lie down. And for a little while they get some food, they eat quickly. And like the chickens, the breeding chickens I was talking about, they too have to be kept fairly hungry because if you fed them as much as they have an appetite to eat because their offspring also should put on weight as fast as possible, they would also get too fat.

So, yeah, they're also likely to be hungry as well as being very restricted in their movement. I was right. They're also bred to be, I mean, they become very fat so much quicker than pigs in the wild would be. Isn't that the case? Oh, yeah, absolutely. That's true of the ones who do get set in the market, yeah, even though they're killed fairly young. So, but they still are already quite large and fat. But it's the, it's the parent pigs who have more health problems with more health problems with their appetite. And they often become lame too, because their legs don't really support their weighting. And the behavior also, my understanding is that, you know, we think of pigs as filthy in these

things, but in fact that if they're sort of, I don't know what they wouldn't call it wild, but if they're not, that kind of behavior is not observed, right? No, if they're, if they're, so pigs are naturally forest animals and if you leave them in the forest, they're quite clean. They'll have a dunging area, which is away from where they sleep, and the sour will build a nest with twigs and leaves before she has her piglets, and she'll keep that clean as well. So, yeah, no, it's only when they kept confined that they become filthy. And, you know, it's true in the factory farms, they're quite often kept on slats,

on metal slatted floors, which are hosed down. So then they're not filthy, but they're also not comfortable because, you know, they're just lying on this. they're not given any straw or betting because that has to be changed and that costs money and labour so they're just on bare concrete or slats cows well cows particularly the dairy industry the real problem there that people often again don't see is that a cow will only give milk if she's had a calf within a certain period let's say roughly a year so you have to make cars pregnant each year if they're to continue to give milk. And of course, cows are mammals,

and there's a close bond between the mother and her calf. And to take the calf away from the mother causes her prolonged distress. And dairy farmers will tell you that if the cars were in a particular spot, usually now these cars are intensive and they're not moving around. But in more traditional farms, if the cars could, would walk past the spot where they're calf was taken from them even even weeks or months ago some of them would still stop and look around and call for their calf because they would remember that that was where they lost their calf and the fate of the carp isn't good either because yeah especially the one that reveal but um but uh the i want to ask by this for a personal reason because i live i'm surrounded i think

by a lot of dairy farms and i actually like i i'm i drive by and i see all these cows in the field during the day. And I, and when I come by at night, I see them all cows coming in from the field and lining up into the well-lit area where they, and then at night I see them all kind of lined up there. And it just sort of, it looks like a nice life. And I don't know if it's just because I live in P.E.I or, but on the other hand, I've also, I was also surprised a neighbor of mine was a dairy farmer. And he was, he's gone to Africa to try and help them improve the output of their cows for milk and stuff. And I think you were, and it's surprised me because he said, here they get like 40 liters

per cow or something, immense number. So you'd think it'd be the kind of factory farming that would be bad, but I don't see it. So I don't know, am I missing something or, or, I don't want to comment on the cows in Prince Edward Island because I don't really know anything about them, whether the productivity is because they're given supplemental rations or because of the way they're bred. I honestly don't know. But the majority of milk produced in affluent countries is not from cows that are grazing in fields. It's intensive.

The public came to realize that over the summer this year, I don't know if you read, there was a barn fire in Texas. Barn is a bit of an inverted commas word here, which is 18,000 calves, right? So there were 18,000 cows that were locked up in this barn. and that, you know, they went going out. You know, you can't have fields for 18,000 cats. They were intensively found. That's where they were kept. And then food was brought to them.

So they were not moving around. They were not out there grazing. And, you know, that's the way of big milk production, unfortunately, in a lot of countries. And unkeeping, I suppose, one could say the car, as you say, that keeping the cows pregnant and moving the calves, we'll get to that. I want to talk about companion animals later on. But, yeah. I mean, I have to say, I don't, because I have lactose reasons,

I have soy milk or milk anyway. But, but, so I feel better all around where I see the cows. There are plenty of non-dairy alternatives to. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The thing that was, again, hits home for me and a little bit of surprise. Well, not quite surprised. My wife, he was actually worked on big boat, fishing boats when she was going through college. But fish, again, I have been a pescatarian in that sense of eating fish and not meat.

And it's an issue that I'm grappling with. And certainly we cause incredible distress. I mean, the fish that are picked up in nets and just basically suffocate or are crushed. I mean, huge. I mean, these are factory fishing boats. These are not, you know, and, but why do you talk about that a little bit? Because I didn't realize the numbers are like trillions. Well, it's really hard to know because the statistics are kept in tons rather than individual animals.

But the best estimate that I've seen suggests that the number of fish caught and killed each year is something between 1 and 2.7 trillion. fish, which is just a completely mind-boggling number, of course. And there is basically no humane slaughter for them. So they are suffering in various ways, depending whether they're, as you said, hold up in nets or whether they caught on long lines, you know, lines kilometers long with thousands of hooks on them. That's pretty bad. And for the sustainability of the oceans, it's obviously very bad. But there is also, intensive fish production. And, you know, when, for example, if people buy salmon, 70% of salmon is now farm salmon, not free caught salmon. And the problem with that is that,

well, the number of problems. One is that the salmon who would normally travel across the ocean famously and then swim upstream to spawn are confined in nets going round and round in circles. Secondly, salmon are carnivorous fish. So to feed these salmon, It's like factory farming is when I said it's a waste of food value. This is actually a waste of fish because somebody did a study of salmon. Salmon takes about three years to grow to market weight around four kilos. And the salmon, by the time they've been killed, has been responsible for consuming 147 fish. You know, caught from the oceans generally, low value fish, ground up and made into pellets.

So it's a huge amount of suffering, not just the suffering of the salmon you're eating, but the suffering of the fish who went into that salmon and the impact on the ocean of all of that catching a fish. And I suppose the lost possible, I mean, the fact that, yeah, the fact that as with cows, as you talk about, you know, the number of calories and protein out versus in is always a small fraction, fraction less than one. Absolutely, yes, yes, that's right. It's not at all an effective way of producing food. And sometimes actually it takes food from poor people because, you know, fraller's serving the affluent world just off the coastal limits of, let's say,

countries in West Africa. And so some of those people can no longer get fish because they were fishing villages that the fish just aren't there. And that's partly responsible for the African migrants who are desperately trying to get into Europe because they can't sustain themselves where they're. they grew up. Yeah, so that's exactly. So it's a matter of, yeah, okay. So, and you make that point often is that, is that even if you're thinking things are done for the benefit of humans to the extent that they are, they often have quite the opposite effect. And one of the, one of the effects, which is, which you talk about, and I want to talk about, because again, I've heard mixed, I've studied this

law because my last book was about climate change. One of the negative effects of, of eating animals, related to climate change. Yeah, absolutely. And so it's one of these things where you think you're benefiting humans, but in the long run, humans may suffer because of it. Now, I think that it's unambiguous that it's better for the environment and better for climate change, not to eat animals,

not to breed mass amounts of animals for meat. but but I am more I am wary of some of the comparisons that are often made by saying well if you just gave up eating meat you we'd get this much you know we'd save this many tons of carbon or this many and one of the arguments is again okay you're taking protein and calories that could be used to feed humans and and you know sometimes in the ratio of 40 or 100 to 1 you're your your your uh centralizing them and concentrating them in a meat animal, when in fact you could have just used all that, you know, protein and calories to feed human beings anyway.

And so you're actually sort of wasting resources. And those resources that are being wasted are also contributing to climate change. But I want to, and so you talk about that cogently in the book. And I don't know if you want to add anything to what I. I've just said before I get to potentially. I think he said it very well. Okay. But there is the issue that, okay, you can't, I'm wary when people say, if you just

turned over this to that, you gained this much. And I think that that's unrealistic because, of course, you'd end up having, if you stopped eating meat, you'd end up still having to have, at least in the Western world, a kind of factory agriculture that would be producing these calories and protein that would in one way or another, if you're using more land than you were using before, then you'll be producing more carbon. Well, sorry, but I don't see why you're using more land, because we're using so much land to feed to these animals,

which, as you just said, is shrinking the amount of food available. So I think we'd be using less land. Well, yeah, let me go to the third world in the case where there's land and then there's arable land. So the question is, would there be, so you have to get calorie, I mean, take those people fishing off the coast of Africa. That's a concentrated protein that they can get because they presumably don't have arable land to enough arable land per person to sustain themselves, right? And so there's lots of arable land in North America and other places around the world. but they're parts of the world where there isn't sufficient land if you could have it to

support local population sustainably without many other resources. And fishing is one example of that. But there's also the question of, you know, sort of buying cattle that are produced elsewhere or animals that are produced elsewhere that you haven't raised. locally. And so, you know, there are these hairy issues at the edge that I wonder whether I've read, I guess I wanted to ask you, I've read numbers for as far as the impact of climate change, on climate change of say a world stopping eating meat, flesh.

I've read factors of two to five reduction in carbon to as low as 5%. Bill Gates actually in his book, I think tried to do a really realistic, Have you read, have you looked at Bill Gates's book on this or no? I mean, you know, it's a much better book than I thought it'd be trying to basically calculate doing a reasonable calculation of the kind of economic cost-benefit analysis of doing certain things. Like as I say, obviously meat production is carbon-intensive and wasteful and bad for the environment in every way, but what realistically would be required to sort of turn that around. So I just didn't know if you if you've, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if,

I am wary about statements that it would dramatically cut human carbon production, which I've read in some of the literature if we went to a vegetarian diet. But I think the case is still open a little bit, and I didn't know if you would... Well, I certainly think it's agreed that it would cut it. And you're right, the question is how dramatically it would cut it. And it also depends on the time frame that we're talking about, because the greenhouse gas that is produced by most animals, especially the ruminants, is methane. And methane breaks down faster than carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

So what most people do is they calculate how much worse methane is than carbon dioxide over a century. And the answer that they get to that is something like 27 times. but we don't have a century to cut our greenhouse gas emissions and save the planet from catastrophe. We maybe have 20 years. And if you talk about the relative impact of methane to carbon dioxide over 20 year period, then it's something like almost five times as much. It's anyway, it's close to 100, I think. It's like 80 times as much.

So when you put that into it, then you do get a much more dramatic. You get a much more in a right number. Again, having thought about this, and I try to balance because, you know, as I say, I wrote a book about climate change, but I'm not sure catastrophe is 20 years away. I mean, catastrophe may be away 20 years away for so many reasons. But, you know, I happen to think the catastrophe that's most likely to result from climate change is not the physical impact, not the fact that it'll be hotter in places or, or the fact that sea levels are going to rise by at least a quarter of a meter or a half meter before the end of the century.

I'd say the end of the century is more realistic argument for when there'll be serious impacts on human population, especially in coastal areas. I happen to think the bigger threat is the sociopolitical impact, namely the multiplier effect that you'll have climate refugees, and that's going to produce sociopolitical problems like it did in Sudan, and that's going to produce wars, and we have nuclear weapons. And so, you know, I'm wary about saying that I'm not, I think climate change alone, physical climate change in 20 years will make certain places on the earth uninhabitable, I suspect, that are almost uninhabitable now. But I'm not sure. It's not only what the world will be like in 20 years.

It's whether we have more than 20 years to prevent what it's going to be like in 50 or 80 years. Yeah, no, that's right. I mean, in that sense, I may be more of an optimist. I'm not sure we have any time left in that sense. But I'm also an optimist about technology. And there are technologies that might, you know, we can make projections, assuming current trends, which is a personally reasonable thing to do. But they're all, you know, not that I think it's that realistic to have carbon capture.

I don't know any good. And I've been in Iceland and visited a carbon capture facility there. and I work with people at my old university and trying to develop cheaper ways of carbon capture, but even the cheapest is $100 per ton, which means when you're talking about 10, you know, when you're talking about gigatons of carbon, it is economically prohibitive as present.

But technology, you know, technology may help in various ways. I happen to think we're most likely going to be led to geoengineering for better or worse. And I don't know, but, you know, I'm willing to at least be open to the fact that they're things I don't know that we may be able to do, at least ameliorate those effects in this century. But that doesn't mean we, that's not an argument to stop worrying about carbon. It just gives us a longer, longer time to be able to do the right thing, maybe.

But it's also not an argument, presumably, against reducing the risk of really bad things happening. Exactly. When we can do that relatively easily. And I think that comes back to your argument about effect, in some sense, effective altruism. The calculation of marginal cost. Yes, you know, I think I said in my book, it reminds me of those, you maybe never watched those dirty, hairy movies with Clint Eastwood, but he used to point a gun of the guy,

the gun may have one bullet in it. And he said, you're feeling lucky, punk. And ultimately, we have to say to ourselves as a civilization, well, these worst scenarios are really disastrous scenarios may not be the case. But the risk, you have to bounce risk off impact and ask is, are you willing to risk it? Are you willing to risk that it's not going to happen? That is the problem. Yeah.

Anyway, let's, I want to, I want to get through. I don't want to keep you too long, but let's go to the standard objections, which I think it's worth you talking about, two of them that I can think of. One that I used to give to a friend of mine, an Indian friend of mine, a colleague and physicist, when I used to say, why ate meat? I said, well, those cows wouldn't be around if I wasn't eating them. That's the first one. And the second one is animals kill other animals, so why should we kill animals?

The floor is yours. I'll feel with the second one first because it's easier. Actually, I think it's a really bad argument. You know, we don't take moral lessons from what other animals do. We, you know, other animals may do a whole range of bad things. And, you know, this is almost the argument that, well, it's natural, so it's good. And, you know, nobody really thinks that everything natural is good. So I don't think that's a serious argument at all.

The other one is a serious argument, assuming that the animals are having good lives, right? The other one is it's no argument at all for factory-farmed animals to say they wouldn't exist if we weren't going to eat them because then you just say yes and that would be better if they didn't exist than if they had those miserable lives. But for the free-range hens may be that are laying the eggs that you're talking about, I think you could argue that their lives are worth living. and you could argue that if there were no customers for the eggs, they wouldn't exist. And so then the question is, is it okay to have a system which is harming these animals

in the sense of killing them at the end of their lives or in the case of the hens at the end of their laying when they're no longer laying as many eggs? Is that justified because there'll then be another animal, not yet. existing who will come into existence. And that is a really interesting philosophical question. It's related to questions that were developed by Derek Parfit, who was Oxford philosopher who died six years ago, who I knew well and regard as one of the most brilliant philosophers I've ever met. And he discussed it in terms of human population. So you can ask similar questions about is it better to have a larger human population if the total happiness on this planet is then

greater, even if the average level of happiness is lower, right, because the total is greater. And that's something that philosophers are still discussing, and all sorts of views are put up to try to find a coherent answer in that and a lot of other situations that perfect. developed in his work. So it's relevant to questions about creating more lives, if they're good lives, as against causing some harm to existing beings. And that's why I say it's a good, it's a good argument in the sense that it's an argument that I do not claim I can clearly refute, because if I could, I would have to have a solution to the population problems that Palford raised. and I and, you know, a few hundred other philosophers, many of whom I really admire, have not yet come up with a solution to that problem.

So, you know, I think you mentioned, though, something did resonate with me, which is, which is, it's hard to argue about the lives of hypothetical beings versus beings that are around. So, for example, if we didn't even meet, we have a lot fewer cows, but the fewer cows we, have would live better lives if we had cows. And so why should we argue about all the hypothetical cows that would be? Yeah, I mean, one philosopher once said, the question is, should we be making people happy or should we be making happy people? And most people, when you put that to them that way, we'll say, well, we should be making people happy.

We're not in the business of trying to manufacture happy people. But, you know, this is something effective altruist talk to also is it, would it be a really bad thing if our species became extinct? Of course, it would be bad in that we all died, but would it be bad in the way they think that then there would not be untold vast numbers of humans living in millions of years in the future, who we can reasonably hope might have very good lives. So, you know, I don't find that I have a clear-cut answer to these questions. And that's why I would say, if in fact the animals that you're consuming really have had positive lives, if you can really be confident of that. And, you know, you prefer to keep eating them and putting aside the climate change issues and a waste of food that's involved, let's assume that it's not a waste of food because they're grazing on grassland.

land that is not arable land. You know, then it's, it's hard for me to say, clearly, yes, this is wrong and this is why it's wrong. Okay, in fact, you just say that. You say you can't, yeah, in fact, I didn't remember it, but you said it elsewhere. If farms give animals really good lives and they humanly kill them, then I don't say that killing them, you know, is wrong.

It's the suffering that's wrong. So in that regard, there was something I read later on in the book. When you talk about how people are concerned about protecting animals, by the way, just so you know, I want to go maybe 15 more minutes if you can do it. Okay. I know I'm pushing you to the limit. I'm making you suffer, but it's for the benefit of humankind. Okay, okay.

Your suffering is. I'll struggle through it in that case. Yeah, I've thought about this. And the effect of altruism, it's worth it. I hope. But you argue that, you know, sometimes people say we should be helping animals and we're not. And you say the American ecologist Aldo Leopold once a keen hunter of wolves later came to see that eliminating wolves leads to an increase in deer population, which in turn causes a deer to overgraze the habitat resulting loss of other species. Eventually, the population

of deer will be controlled by their food supply, and when that runs out, they'll starve to death, a slower and often more distressing death than being killed by a wolf. Well, that's true for wolves and deer. But presumably the same thing is true for hunters or culling animals, calling kangaroos in Australia or calling deer. The same argument is that it's better to be shot by a hunter than to starve to death. How do you argue about that? Well, I agree with the fact that it's better to be shot by hunter than starve to death.

The question is, would you have starved to death otherwise? But, you know, let's say where I am now, I'm in Princeton, and there are deer around Princeton. And the natural predators of those deer have been eliminated, whether it was wolves or First Nation humans. And so the main population control on the deer population is starving to death in winter. So, yeah, I don't really, you know, object to. the deer being shot, I think they ought to be shot only by people who can really demonstrate

that they are expert shots who can kill the deer instantly and have strong hunting ethics. But in that case, for a limited number of deer to be shot so that there won't be starvation in the population in winter, yeah, I can understand that. Okay, good. Okay, I want to just go through four or five sort of deep ethical questions, quick answer ones, though, which came to my mind. I think they're quick answer. Maybe three or four anyway. You, I didn't realize you quoted Churchill. Maybe it was from the book, but I don't think so. saying 50 years, something like the future in 50 years or something like that, where he said what a waste it is to produce a whole animal just to have the breast and legs. And you argued if he was talking 100 years, hence he might have been accurate.

You're talking about lab produced meat, which you think is a good thing. I'm intrigued by the idea, but I'm also skeptical in the sense that one's thinking, If you're thinking about feeding a few hundred people or a few thousand people or a few million people, it's one thing. But if you're really thinking of replacing, say, factory farming with lab-produced meat, I'm assuming it's going to be an incredibly energy-intensive, high-tech business that's not only going to be costly but very carbon-intensive. And it's also probably going to benefit only probably wealthy countries and not, and not, poor countries. So it sounds like a good idea, but I'm skeptical that it will ultimately be a good idea. What do you think about that? I think those are entirely empirical

questions, and I agree that it would not be a good idea if it remains expensive and if it is energy intensive. But the studies that I've seen, there was one contrary study, show that it will be far lower in greenhouse gas emissions than meat production is. What is the real question is, can the price come down enough to actually replace factory farming? I don't think anybody knows that yet, but there are hundreds of millions of dollars in investment going into it. So, you know, maybe we'll find out. Well, I certainly have great faith in technology in the sense that what's expensive now won't be. I mean, if anything is an example from computer memory to anything else, the technology tends to

always bring the price down. But I just don't know. And it'll be intriguing to see, of course, it'll partly, it'll be all depend on the salesmanship, whether it's attractive to people to have meat that's been produced in the lab. Here's another one that hits home in a sense. You don't talk about companion animals in the book at all. and I don't know your view on companion animals. I know that you have the view that you do say one thing, which is true.

And my brother happens to breed dogs. I've often hits me about this. Is it taking the little puppies away at eight weeks? So I couldn't do it. But, you know, that you're concerned that causes suffering for the mother. And that may be the case. But what about companion animals or, you know, if you go get a companion animal from a shelter or whatever? Do you have any pets?

I don't, but we did adopt a stray cat when our children were small and they wanted to have a companion animal. Yeah, I mean, I don't have any in principle objections to companion animals, especially if they're adopted. You know, the interesting thing you said cats, you're from Australia, and I was because they're Australians hate cats. That's not true. Well, I mean, they just, I always hear about how bad they are for the birds. and we have a cat sleeping right next to me right now that came from Australia with us. All right, really, okay.

Yeah, I mean, I think people who have cats should not let them out, especially not at night and put bells on them because they are killers. There's no question about that. But what about the fact that, of course, the animals like cats are carnivorous, so you have to feed a meat of some sort? Yes, that was a big problem, yeah.

It is very hard to... I mean, I've been told that there are foods that cats will eat and that will nourish thematically. But I think it's difficult. So I hope that such foods will become available, but it's a problem with having cats. When you had a cat, you had a cat prisonly when you were a vegetarian already, but you fed the cat meat, but I assume you fed the cat meat. We did, yeah, we fed meat or fish generally.

Actually, I did experiment. I got some, I found some advertisement of some companies. that made a powder that you were supposed to be able to add to tofu and it would be the cat would eat it and it would be nutritionally adequate but our cat did not like it I have to say. Yeah, our cat, yeah. I mean, you know, unlike my dog, I have two dogs, but the cat is, you know, knows very well what it likes and it doesn't like things other than meat and fish. But, okay, here's a maybe, I don't know if it's the deepest one, the hardest one,

the others are pretty simple perhaps, but I, I tried hard to think of a speciesist argument that might resonate with me. And you point out at the end of the book, maybe someone, I'm not, this isn't the one that's going to stump you, so don't worry about it. But he said maybe someday someone will come up with some argument that'll suggest it. But here's the argument that I can think of that suggests to me that human suffering is, is qualitatively different than animal suffering in a way that suggests that maybe equal consideration might be at least moderate. and that is the awareness that things could be different.

The chickens that are confined to these cages, which are reprehensible, have a life that is miserable in which they suffer. But as far as I can imagine at this point, they're not aware that it could be any different. If I did that to humans, their suffering would be multiplied by a huge factor, by the fact that they're aware that they don't have to,

to be confined, that they could be roaming, that they could have a better life. And therefore, that leads to a, in some sense, I would argue, is maybe an empirical argument that maybe equal consideration should be modulated. What do you have to say about that? There is an empirical question about what they experience. But I don't think it would lead to modulating the principle of equal consideration of interest, it would lead to say humans have a greater interest in, let's say, not being confined or caged or imprisoned than chickens do, because they have an awareness that things could be different. And let's say the chickens don't. I mean, in the case of laying hands, it's actually not clear that they don't because until they're already

old enough to lay, they actually can walk around. Yeah, I'm just thinking one, not the laying hands, the one that sort of just made for meat. Ah, right. Okay. Yeah. So then it would be a matter of saying it's worse for humans, but it's saying humans have a different interest. Because the distress that the chickens feel, let's say the pain they have in their legs because their bodies are too heavy for their immaterial leg bones. if you know and this wasn't my parallel if uh professor webster said this is like somebody with

arthritis then yeah well okay perhaps you should have said it's like it except that they don't visualize something different and the person with arthritis remembers before they had arthritis yeah but yes it's worse but there's still the physical pain yeah if you know the physical pain you could suffer even if you had had that kind of pain all your life or didn't remember that you not had it earlier, and that would be true for the meat chickens as well, incidentally. So there's still some pain. So I think what you modulate is the extent to which the pain is the same as the pain a human would feel standing up with arthritis all day.

And that may be true, but I still don't think that the pain of the chicken is so slight that it's going to justify us in preferring to have a meal of chicken. chicken rather than a meal of some plant-based alternative. Okay, excellent. Okay, I just want to throw that out. Okay, two last little bits. And then, then, you come out saying bad things about wool,

and I was shocked about that because having been to New Zealand and other place, I've seen sheep that haven't been sheared, they can't walk, because they're like now so heavy that they can't even move and, you know, they've been discovered, they've been lost. In what sense is, I would have thought

wool is a symbiotic, a perfectly example of a symbiotic relationship where humans shear the sheep to keep them comfortable and utilize the products of that for warmth and other things. What am I missing? You know, missing the fact that this is a commercial production and people are doing it to make money. So, for example, you know, I was in Australia in the country just back a month or two ago. And this is winter, right? Southern Hemisphere. there were newly shorn lambs out in the fields. Why? Because that way they get, they shear them twice a year.

They get more wool off them than if they waited until the weather warmed up before shearing them. Then they'll only be able to shear them once a year. So it's all profit maximization. And I doubt that it's any different in New Zealand than it is in Australia. Or Patagonia, maybe. I'm not sure. Okay. So the idea is that it's factory. it's not the in principle it's in the practice basically yes that's right in principle you could have sheep having ideal idyllic conditions you would shear them and you would share them gently

that doesn't really happen sorry either but you would share them gently and take your time so that they didn't get cut or distress and and you would only share them at the time when they didn't need the wool okay two last questions one a trivial one in almost every area you talk about the U.S. is behind Europe and the rest of the world. Why? Is it because of agribusiness? It just seems to be universal than when it comes to rights, these issues of humane treatment of animals, particularly the U.S. seems to be behind Europe, Australia,

well, the rest of the world. It's because of the corrupted United States political system. Agri-business is one of the corrupting players, but it's the fact that money plays a bigger role in general in U.S. politics than it does either in Europe or Australia and probably in Canada too because I think parliamentary democracies generally work better than the US system. My evidence for that is that whenever you can put a vote before the public, as in those states that have citizen-initiated referendum like California, you get over 60% of Americans voting against factory farming.

And that's happened on a number of occasions. But if you try to get it through either, you know, the Federal Congress or even like failed to get it through the California state legislature either, then the lobbyists take over and you don't get there. Okay. And that related to the question I didn't ask, which is the question of preference voting and the utilitarian purpose, which seems to be so much more rational way of voting, but we'll have to leave that to another discussion. I want, I do, one of the, the one thing that I found profoundly I disagreed with is,

one sentence near the end of the book. Wow. What was it? 76. You talked about why you don't think an appeal to sympathy and compassion alone will convince most people the wrongness of speciesism. Even where other human beings are concerned, people are surprisingly adept at limiting their sympathies to those of their own nation race. That I agree with.

The next sentence, shock me. Almost everyone, however, is at least nominally prepared to listen to reason. I'm shocked. Even with the word nominally. Yeah, even with the word nominally. Do you find evidence, empirical evidence for that in the modern world? Well, I could only say that even the people, you know, I'm in the United States now, there's a lot of crazy people with bizarre conspiracy ideas, but they try to argue for their ideas.

But that's arguing as different than listening. Oh, I see. And listening to reason is something that, I mean, I spend my whole, well, not my whole life. I spent a lot of my life writing and have to try and argue that reason should be the guide for our behavior and for the process in which we investigate the world. And I find that that people, as far as I can see, listening to reason is something ultimately, in order to get, I hate to say, it goes back to, I guess it's hum, right, that reason is a slave of passion. To get people to listen to, is it Hume or I think it's Hume, I don't know. But Hume is talking about reason and action, right? I know, I know. But in order to get people listen to reason, I think you have to

approach them their passionately. As a teacher, you know, I don't expect my students were interested in what I have to say. I have to convince them to be interested in what I have to say. And often I have to use passion as a way of doing that. So anyway. Okay. You're sort of undermining your reason then if you think. you're by using, you don't think you can actually persuade them by reason. Well, I think it's a matter of assuming, I think in order to get people to listen, that's the key point. And this is from a person who's often confused of never listening,

often accused of never listening. I think you have to think about what people hear versus what you're saying, and how can you be effective communicator? How can you, and often you have to think of a way that people will listen to what you're saying without listening to what they think you're saying. And anyway, it's a, it's a conundrum that is someone like me and you, who spent a lot of their life trying to communicate, in my case, science and your case philosophy and often science,

it's an issue that we have to deal with all the time. So last question, which is what can be done? And I think, you know, from an effective altruism point of view, you can say what was the most, there were two questions that your publisher sent me, among the whole list that I found interesting. The rest were just kind of, anyway, what is the most successful example of animal welfare protest and particular, what are the greatest sides?

What one step can we do today to further the goal of ending speciesism? What the heck? Let me ask that question. Yeah, so the most successful examples have been the use of democratic channels, particularly in the European Union, to ban from the European Union things that are still mainstream in the United States, and some of them certainly. in many other countries, such as the standard page for laying hens, the individual stalls for the breeding pigs that we talked about. We didn't talk about veal calves, but individual stalls

for veal calves. So I think that's the most successful activities worldwide. What can we do? Well, we can still work with animal organizations. I think they do make progress. I think they are responsible for significant change. Look for the good ones. Now, the equivalent of the life you can save for global poverty, and the equivalent of that for animals is animal charity evaluators. So go to animal charity evaluators.org, find effective organizations, join them. And of course, you can also contribute and you can be an example, as Richard Keshen was to me, by not eating animals yourself. And you didn't add it, but I'll add it for you. The other thing we can do is talk to each other and like you do, you know, in the extreme because you have a bigger softbox

in some sense I do, but to be able to try educate each other. Oh, absolutely. And, you know, I guess I've always think that's ultimately the solution. So, you know, the only tool you have as a hammer, then everything looks at nail, but as an educator, I, you know, I think ultimately, there was a survey recently I just saw posted, which asked people what had led them to become a vegetarian. And number one was conversation with a friend. Yeah, yeah, conversation with a friend and having the tools. And that's one of the reasons, you know, I don't want to sound like I'm in advertising, but that's, I mean, that's the value of a book like this.

And is that if you want to have useful empirical, if you don't want to just talk, but have empirical evidence as well as clear logic, which is fine, you know, this is great because, you know, we touched on the edges of when it comes to factory farming, for example. but you know the examples in here are compelling and and I think for me that was a that was a large part of the impact in in my changing my probably our discussions maybe early on in changing my doctor it took a while took a long while for me but let me say that but but I'm coming there anyway I want to so I do want to thank you because when we talk about what we can do most I think it's educating others and and and you do you do as as I often say I know you like me are an atheist and like our old friend Stephen Weinberg and I always like to say that you're doing God's work

because I thank you very much for the time and the personal suffering that you had to go through in this but I really enjoyed it and I hope you did too. I did enjoy it even if I was starting to get hungry and tired. Yeah, I'm okay, thank you so very much. It's always a pleasure to spend time with you. Thank you. Right. Thanks, Leib.

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