TRIGGERnometry - The Moral Case Against Eating Meat

Episode Date: February 23, 2020

Alex J. O'Connor runs the CosmicSkeptic YouTube channel and podcast https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7kIy8fZavEni8Gzl8NLjOQ Support TRIGGERnometry: Paypal: https://bit.ly/2Tnz8yq https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@failinghuman) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kissing. And this is a show for you. If you're bored with people arguing on the internet over subjects, they know nothing about. A Trigonometry, we don't pretend to be the experts. We ask the experts. Our brilliant guest this week is a YouTuber called Cosmic Skeptic. Welcome to Trigonometry. Thank you for having me. It's going well so far. Unlike the pre-show banter. It's good to have you, man. For anyone who doesn't know you, just tell everybody who are you. How are you where you are? What has been your journey through life? A lot of questions. My name is Alex, as you say. I'm a YouTuber, which is a strange term to apply to myself, but I suppose it's the only one that fits. I've been doing it for about three years.

Previously, I was talking about atheism online, was the main thing that I would do, trying to contradict religious claims that people were making. Beginning is a kind of tongue-in-cheek, edgy atheist-type thing, and then you realize that you start getting emails from people all around the world, saying, you know, I'm trapped in my country and my parents will kill me if they found it about my religion, what shall I do? And you think, ah, maybe I should start taking this a little more seriously. And so we start talking more about philosophy and the politics of religion. And then I took a complete 180 in the past year or so and started just completely talking about almost nothing other than animal rights all of a sudden.

So that's the most recent kind of path that I've taken. I'm essentially just somebody who says things on the internet. I mean, you say you ask the experts. I don't know. I mean, that's a very charitable term. I don't know that I'd be able to apply that to myself in any respect, but people seem to have enjoyed what I've had to say so far. So that's about all I've got going from.

I love how British that is. Just to downplay any level of expertise that you have. And actually, when you said you did a complete 180, I thought you're going to go, oh, I'm a devout Muslim now. Yeah, that would make quite a clickbait headline. I made up producer laugh, so that was a good joke, finally. I do consider it sometimes. I think about the level of ad revenue that I'd receive

if I made some video about why I'd convert it to radical Islam or something. Oh, mate, that would be demonetized. No revenue for you. Maybe not the radical part, yeah. No, but let's talk about religion because one of the things that we've talked to quite a few people about, and I know that you've debated Douglas Murray in the past on certain issues, one of the things that neither of us are believers in that traditional way. But one of the things that we've talked to a lot of people about is the impact of a lack of religion on society.

And it feels like we're living in increasingly individualized times. And a lot of people have linked that to the death of God, if you like. And everyone, essentially, I think Lawrence Fox, when he was on our show, said that he feels a little bit like it will become a religion of one. So do you have any thoughts on, you know, religion may not be true, but it's a glue that by. society together? Yeah, well, look, I mean, it's clear to me that the only reason why, it's certainly true that the people who lose their religion are left with a kind of feeling of emptiness a lot of the time. You have to ask why that's the case. One thing that people try to do is just ignore that that's the case or deny that it happens. Of course it does happen, you know.

But the reason it does is because these people are told from birth that the thing that gives their life meaning is their devotion to God, that they are nothing without completely, and utter subjugation to the Creator that they were made to appease. And they're told that if that goes away, there would be nothing for you. If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile, you're still in your sin. It's a miserable existence. And so when that faith is taken away, or not taken away, but fools away from them, and they realize that there's just no grounding for it, of course they're going to feel

like there's no purpose for life, because they've been told and conditioned for all of their life that that's where it comes from, right? So the whole problem with this and the reason why I think that people in society are beginning to feel like they have a lack of purpose is because of the fact that we act as though it's the only place it can come from. We don't teach children the meaning and purpose and fulfillment that can come from connection with other human beings without needing some kind of divine buttress for it. You don't need it to be predicated. You don't need the love that you have for your friends and for your family to be a derivative of the love that the creator has for you. It can just be a love that you have for yourself, and that almost makes it all the more special and meaningful. If you really think that this life is just a precursor to an eternity, by the very nature of something being infinite, it means that this life that we're living is totally meaningless.

What does it matter if we're suffering, if we're dying? What does it matter if you pass someone on the street who's freezing to death? Because they've got an eternity of bliss waiting ahead of them, provided they're a Christian, of course. but this kind of thinking completely soaks meaning out of the life that we have now and so I think it's almost quite ironic when people turn around and say but if we take away God from society there'll be no meaning to live

it's like we have every meaning to live the moment when we take that away because we realize that this is all we've got and we'll make the most of it. It's very interesting that you say that and especially that this is all we've got because it's when you finally accept that that in reality, you start living because you realise that life is precious and finite.

And that every moment you have could be your loss and you need to make the most of it. Absolutely. It's like, you know, I don't know, if somebody told you that you were going to die next year, you know, got some kind of illness or something, how would that change your life? I mean, there'd be a lot of people I tell to fuck off.

I don't know. I don't know. Maybe some people will be happy as well. Who knows? But whatever the case, it would change your life in a great many ways, you would start having a lot more enthusiasm to complete the tasks that you want to complete, right, if you told you had a terminal diagnosis. But here's the thing, right?

Let's say that diagnosis was six months, right? That would totally change your life. Let's say it was one year. It'd still probably be pretty effective. What have you had only two years to live? And it's like, well, yeah, but what you realize is that we are in a state of terminal decline. We are going to die, right?

the further away you move, maybe the less urgency there is in your action. But if you stretch that onto infinity, then there's no reason to do what you're doing today. It's like having an infinite pool of money and being given a dollar versus having $100 in your bank account and being given $10. So it's like it's life-changing. The one day that we have today to get the things done we want to do becomes far more urgent when you recognize that there's a limit to your days. And that's kind of in an exaggerated form, you see it very clearly with people who are diagnosed with terminal illnesses, who have like a bucket list.

But we're all on that diagnosis right now. It's just that our diagnosis is maybe 70 years or so. So, of course, we should be applying the same logic. We should say that it's the shortening of that life that should give us the very meaning to get out of bed and do the things we want to do, because we're not going to have a chance to do them after we've perished. And it's very interesting as well, that idea. What do you think about the counter argument to that, that especially religion means that you are part of a group?

We're tribal animals. Being part of a group means that we feel more connected. We feel happier. We feel safer. Yeah, well, I mean, if it's false hope and false safety, then a true friend wouldn't allow another friend to be part of that community with them, right? It's not like we can't build communities on secular foundations, right?

It's not like that can't be done. Can you give us some examples? I mean, talking broadly, like the camaraderie that you can have with just a friendship group is far more meaningful than the camaraderie that the average person I would say who's maybe an Anglican has with the members of their church on a Sunday when they go along. I mean, you know, I used to be a Catholic, and I remember when I used to go to church. And, like, yeah, it was quite nice. You show up, and there's some people there.

And a few kind of elderly ladies sat singing the hymns and stuff. It's not like that was the basis of my social function. You know, there are so many other ways in which we can connect with other human beings. If you play a musical instrument, you can join a band or get in an orchestra, you can join a choir, you can go to a comedy club, you know, you can do whatever it is you want to do. And it has precisely the same effect, but without the spiritual baggage. You're told, no, do you know what, you can come and sit with us and have a nice time and we can do things together and we can become friends and share these experiences. But I'm not going to be continually reminding you while we're doing so that you're destined to hell. if you don't kiss the feet of a God.

That's the difference. I'm not requiring anything of you. I'm not saying that, yes, you get my love, but you also have to have this fear. I'm saying, no, let's get together, let's love each other, let's have a good time, and not worry about the extra baggage that isn't necessary

for the thing that's being used to justify the existence of the institution. See, it's interesting because I'm kind of somewhere towards you, but also maybe not quite there, for the reason that Francis was talking about. like if there was a religion that didn't require me to believe in God, I think I'd probably sign up. Yeah, so what about Buddhism? Sound nice to you?

Well, yeah, it does. I mean, it just kind of feels weird. It's just wrong. It's foreign, isn't it? I think that's what it is. Yeah, I think that people, again, they say things like, well, what about a religion where, you know, you don't need to believe in a God? What about a religion where you don't actually need to meet up and have religious observance? And it seems like what we're saying is like the further away you get from what would traditionally be called a religion, the better it gets.

It's like, yeah, that's what I'm saying in so many words. The further away you get from religion, the better your religion is, of course. But what does that say about the concept of religion as a whole? I mean, how are we defining religion here? It's a very difficult thing to define. Most people, most scholars will go for a kind of family resemblance model. There's not like a list where every religion has all of them. And if it doesn't have one of them, it's not a religion.

So you'll have things like belief in God, moral code, community ethos, and you don't need all of them, but they kind of, as long as there's enough of them there. But like, what we're beginning to do is kind of pluck these away until we're just left with these singular characteristics like community ethos. And we're saying, I guess we could technically call that a religion. It's like, you're welcome to that if you want. But I really don't think that's what people mean when they lament the removal of religion from society. I mean, what if we replaced the state religion with that kind of pseudo-spirituality, that kind of like vague notion of like something other, like, we wouldn't be a religious state at all. We'd just be a state who has a strange metaphysical thing that it sometimes references when it talks about community ethos, right?

If we're talking about religion, let's talk about religion. If we're not talking about religion, then let's not label it religion just to keep ourselves kind of satisfied. Look, I spend a lot of time telling you what's wrong with the world. So let me tell you about something that's actually right. Sleep, specifically getting more of it, better quality, the kind where you wake up and feel like a human being rather than someone who's been thrown down a staircase. Most mattresses are just layers of synthetic foam and crossed fingers.

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These are mass-produced objects. Someone has put thought into them. I'll be honest. I'm not the person who thinks carefully about where he sleeps. My dating history will tell you that. I'm the person who's been on the same mattress for eight years and called it fine. But the older I get, the more I notice that fine isn't actually fine. Your body tells you, if you're going to invest in anything for your home,

your bed is the one that pays you back every single one. night. Avocado products are made, not manufactured, and thoughtfully crafted with real materials to deliver lasting comfort and support. Go to avocado greenmatress.com slash trigger to check out their mattress and furniture sale. That's avocado green mattress.com slash trigger. Avocado green mattress.com slash trigger. Now I hear what you're saying. I guess what I'm saying is, I mean, one of the fundamental transformations in human history was when we went from the kind of, the kind of, pagan religions, which where the temple, it was the house of God, where actually one of many people weren't allowed inside. It was just serviced by the priests to being the church being the

house of the people, where people would come together, right? I mean, look at what's happening now in our society. People have made politics a religion and have split a kind of faith, let's say, not maybe a religion, but people have become very religious about their politics. It feels like to me, maybe you don't agree, but I don't know. I mean, I agree, but can you name a time in history when that hasn't been the case? No, I think it depends. I think it depends. My point is that I feel like increasingly there's nothing that binds society together beyond those divisions.

So, for example, in a country which was strongly Christian, let's say, people might be left or right or conservative or labor. But there would be a set of commonly held customs or values that they would all share. that at the end of the day they would say, well, yes, we are all British or we're all Christian or whatever it might have been. Now I feel like the fractures are becoming so much stronger and so much bigger because there is not a glue that binds us together. And I hear you that there's a lot of superstition and irrationality when it comes to religion. I just wonder whether the social impact of having these, you might call them delusions. You know, Richard Dawkins might call it a delusion, which he does. I wonder whether some delusions have utility.

I mean, look at Yuval No Harari and his book Sapiens, where he talks about the fact that the reason that we as human beings, as homo sapiens, have been able to achieve what we've been able to achieve, is our ability to have myths that bind us together beyond that tribal small group. Do you see where I'm driving? There are multiple things to say. The first is that to say that something has been useful as a, useful as a means to produce evolutionary results doesn't mean that we should continue to use it to base our societies upon.

I mean, like rape was also an evolutionarily useful tool, but we're not going to say that because of that we should still be doing it. We can recognize that that was probably necessary in the evolution of our species. And if it weren't for that, we wouldn't be here. But it's another thing entirely to say that we should, because of that, we should base our social institutions on it. There goes the monetization. somebody's going to clip that Alex and it's going to go viral you know it's not the worst thing that I've been glad to say

Cosmic Skeptics says rape is necessary Believe me there are far worse things that I can say when we get on to veganism I think that What were we talking about? We're talking about religion being a necessary Perhaps delusion to bind people together We're talking about the balance between

Our value of truth and our value of comfort let's say. Also, I'd be careful to note that your point is valid in saying that politics is so divisive that maybe we need something transcendental that people can refer to and agree upon. But what do you want it to be and what do you want to happen when people don't agree with it? The reason religion has been so successful as a social, as a, at producing social coherence in the past, it's because anybody who deviated from it has been marginalized or killed. Of course it's going to produce a coherent society of everybody who doesn't comply is kind of gotten rid of, right? What are you going to do with the dissenters? The whole point... Hey man, I'm Russian. I know what we're going to do with the dissenters. The whole point of the individualist revolution, the enlightenment, the realization that maybe we should start treating people as though they have value of their own accord and not just

in the utility that they serve to greater society is to say that actually, no, there is value in a difference of opinion. And if that means that we have to give up these cherished institutions of religion, which ostensibly have caused social cohesion and progression, but when we really analyze it, have actually caused a lot of disruption, have actually caused the opposite, right? For every example you can give of religion producing a well-oiled functioning society, I can give you an example of where it's completely destroyed one, right? It does both.

And it's one of those trade-offs that we have to make, right? And to me, I think that firstly, most people wouldn't be comfortable with the idea of admitting something is false, but saying that we're going to just accept it and use it as though it's true anyway. I mean, I've got no problem with people accepting religious ideas, recognizing that they're false, but kind of embracing the ethos and living by those principles anyway. I think that's what someone like Jordan Peterson does. I don't think he actually believes in the metaphysical claims of Jesus' resurrection, but

he sees a great mythical meaning in it. It's fine. Again, he's welcome to that. I don't mind that at all. But my point is this, there are people on this planet who believe that the Earth is 10,000 years old, right? They are wrong. They are incorrect. Provably so. There are people who don't believe that we're evolved creatures. And what effect does that have on the rest of it? I mean, you might say that if you accept that we're evolved creatures, then, you know, our special place as humans is gotten rid of, our meaning is taken away. And this is what people said when the origin of species was first puppet. But the opposite is also true. If you restrict people from learning about evolution, like people are trying to do in the United States, for instance, then you restrict them the opportunity of realizing their place in the animal kingdom, their place in nature and the respect that they should have for nature because of that fact, right? It goes both ways, is what I'm saying. But as a philosopher, I'm interested in what I think is true and arguments that I think have rational grounding for them.

And so, I don't know. If somebody came along to you in any other field other than religion and said to you, listen, I've got this thing that I believe. And you say, well, here's why I think it's not true. And you go, yeah, you know what? You're actually right. I mean, I don't think it is true. But, yeah, I just kind of like it. Well, it's interesting that you make that point.

Sorry, Franz. Let me just finish this bit with Alex. I actually, you've already made me question some of what I said in terms of the idea. Like when you said, what do we want that thing to be that binds us together? That's a very interesting question, and I think a very important one. I guess the issue is that everything is so politicized that even what the three of us would certainly, I imagine, agree in this room, you know, the enlightenment values of freedom of expression, freedom of scientific research, all of this kind of stuff. That's divisive now. You know, being pro free speech makes you right wing now, all this kind of thing.

So it's just a question, I guess, is can we come to a common set of values? But again, look at national identity, you know, saying we're British. that's now toxic. I think we, I guess as a society where we are now, and maybe why people say that the death of God has caused this, is that we are unable at the moment to come together around the common set of values, no matter how big or abstract they are,

just because everything has become so divided. But let me put a counterpoint to your final point, which is about the utility of false beliefs. One of the things that I'd say to you as a comedian, for example, is it's incredibly useful as a comedian, to believe that you are incredibly funny, even if you're repeatedly proven wrong by an audience. It was one gig, mate.

Fuck, I'll change. But anyone will tell you that confidence is a huge thing in almost any career in any profession. The belief that you are able to do something helps you do that thing better, even if maybe you're not actually that good at that thing. Yeah, but I mean the difference is that, firstly, you recognize that it's being used as a tool, right? It's what I think Brett Weinstein is called these metaphorical truths.

For example, the gun is always loaded, right? It's a useful thing to believe, even though you know it's not, like you should treat it as though it is. But you're not making this metaphysical claim. You're not actually necessarily believing this thing. It's like if you're on stage and people say, you know, imagine the audience in their underwear. It's like it's imagination. That's the point. You're using it as a tool for yourself.

It's kind of inward-looking. And I have no problem with that kind of inward-looking stuff. But if you started saying, no, I am a funny comedian, and someone says, I don't agree with you, and you say, no, you're wrong. And I'm going to teach your kids that you're wrong. And I'm going to institute, I'm going to put myself in Parliament because I think that parliament needs a bit more humor in it. And someone might even agree with them.

I might say, yeah, it'd be great to have some comedians in Parliament, but not you. And you say, no, no, you've got no choice about this. Then people might start saying, actually, this is going beyond just a tool. and you're going to have to actually be a lot more justified in your claims that you are quite funny. I mean, the Church of England has 26 seats in our upper parliamentary house reserved for its bishops, right? The only other country I can think of that does that is the Islamic Republic of Iran, right? It's absurd. In what other area would we allow this, right?

Like, if we had 26 seats in the House of Lords reserved for white people, and someone said, that's absurd and racism, and someone said, oh, I know, but, like, it's probably quite useful for, like, British nationalism. They'd be like, what are you talking about? This is absurd. Like, as soon as you start putting this into our politics, not just our politics, but our political institutions, you're going to have to have a hell of a lot more justification for that. I've got no problem with people doing it for themselves.

You know, what will you believe in private, what you believe in, and what helps you get through the day, gets you out of bed in the morning, that's no business. of mine. But if you start trying to teach it to my children, if you start trying to get schools funded by the government that proselytize this nonsense, then I'm going to call it what it is. I mean, which is absolutely fair enough. I'd just like to say 26 white people in Hassellors is not enough. So, Alex, what would your counter-argument be to the fact that many people see atheism as a religion and that you have, you know, absolutists, you know, and there are people who adhere to it in almost militant fashion. Yeah, so imagine, I don't know, take the sport of golfing,

right? Let's say you've got the people who golf and then you've got the people who don't play golf, I don't play golf. I'd say that somebody was really annoyed for some reason that people who played golf, let's say golf course just kind of opened up and took over some of the land that they used to walk through or something and they can't get there and they're really really annoyed. And so they make this sport out of like, you know, throwing bricks onto the golf course or something to try and disrupt the golfing. And someone comes along and says, all these bloody non-golferes, they're a sport in their own regard, you know, throwing bricks and stuff. And I'm just like, no, no, I just don't play golf. It's just something I don't know. And they're like, oh, well,

you're a sport. You're taking part of sport. And I say, no, you don't, you know what's, literally I just don't play golf? That's it. And someone says, what about these extremists who are going around throwing bricks into golf and trying to score points, but getting in the hall. That's, like, those people may also be people who don't play golf, but you not play in golf is not definitionally that, right? And it's the same thing. Being an atheist is just not being religious, right? The word literally just means, it's not atheism. It's atheism. Theism is just the Greek, comes from the Greek theos for God. A just means without, right? You're living without the existence of the God. Of course, there are people who hate religion,

and are extremists in that regard. And all of those people are atheists, but not all atheists are those people, right? To call atheism or religion just completely shows a misunderstanding of what people mean when they use the term. I don't know any of my friends or colleagues, atheist friends or colleagues,

who make the claim there is no God, who actually make any propositional claims about it at all. They are just unconvinced of the claim that there is a God. So they're agnostic rather than atheists, you can say. This is the same thing, right? Well, they're not the same thing, but they can exist at the same time, is what I mean to say.

Agnosticism is similar to Greek, but comes from the word for knowledge. So with agnosticism, we're talking about, what people know. Do you know that there's a God? Well, of course, no one knows. That makes us all technically agnostic.

What we're interested in is what we believe. And that's where Theism comes to play. You're either a the atheist, meaning you do believe the claim, or you're an atheist, meaning you don't. Doesn't mean you believe the opposite claim. But if you do believe the opposite claim, you are an atheist.

That's a subset of atheism. That's not what atheism is. And people point to, people point to communist atheistic regimes and things like this and say that atheism is a religion and it's caused harm and things. It's like that's definitionally just not what atheism is. Hashtag not all atheists. Something like that, yeah. And do you not believe that we have this because I'm an atheist, but I also believe that there's a part of us that needs to believe in something.

So, you know, you see this, you know, with horoscopes and you see this where, you know, where we have this sort of materialism, where we buy and consume in order to fill a void within us. Do you not think that we need something? If we do, then you should try finding it in humanity. It's the most fulfilling. What do you think is going to give you more purpose in life? Your daily horoscope that tells you,

oh, you know, watch out for a bad signal from a bird today or something. Or from the love of your friends and family. Do people really think? You're assuming a lot about his family, but I mean, it's really important to think about this. Like, why is it when people say, but without religion, I mean, you need something like a like a horoscope. Why's that the first thing that comes to mind? I mean, what's a horoscope compared to the multitude of other things available to us?

Like, I've never understood when people, when people say things like, they say like, you know, but surely you believe in something. What does that even mean? Like, yeah, I believe in the existence of an external world. world. You know, I believe that I'm wearing a blue jacket right now. What do you mean believe in something? Do you mean you believe in something that provides transcendent purpose? Do you mean you believe in something that provides just any kind of purpose? Do you mean you believe in something that has explanatory power about how we got here or explanatory power about why we got here?

Like just to say you must believe in something is such a broad thing to say. It's like, well, everyone believes in something, sure, but that's like almost trivially true. So it's like I don't understand what you mean by that. Thanks for destroying that argument. Francis gets destroyed every episode and you've just had your moment for this one. Let's move on and talk about animal rights because this is something you've been, I think it's fair to say, fairly outspoken about. What's your position on veganism and animal rights? I think that the refusal to exploit sentient creatures for non-necessary purposes is not just morally virtuous, but a moral obligation should be a baseline of our ethical conduct, not an extension of it.

So don't eat meat, don't exploit animals. Don't exploit animals, yeah. Don't eat them, don't eat their products, don't wear them, don't use them for entertainment in sport. Entertainment. I was trying to think of the last time I used an animal for entertainment. Let's not bring that up. That was Russia before the internet. Alex looks horrified.

Oh, believe me, the things that happen in factory farms are far more horrified. Yeah, of course they are. Okay. And that's actually the interesting, that's one of the first interesting points that people, that people will raise their eyebrows at that are, and this is something that I realized myself, back when I used to eat meat, someone once made this point to me, they said, it's a beastiality. It's pretty, pretty disgusting and wrong right. And I'm like, well, I mean, instinctively, I want to say yes.

And they say, but if you have sex with an animal, there's at least a chance that they might enjoy it, you know? And maybe they do. I mean, it's a good chance that they're probably having a good time, or at least it's a pleasurable experience to a sense. This conversation has taken a time, but anyway. I'd love you to do that as a routine at a woke comedy club. That'd be fucking brilliant. But like I, this is the thing, right? The eyebrows go to the back of head and then you say, but think about this, right? Like, when it comes to like slaughtering and killing an animal, that's obviously not in their best interest. They're obviously not enjoying that kind of thing. So it's like, it was an argument from kind of saying, like, if we're allowed to literally take a, take a cow, put a bolt through its brain, turn it upside down, slit its throat and watch it bleed out, then that's just fine and no one cares. But as soon as soon as you,

you should put your penis in it, oh, that's a big ruckus. And I was like, that's a really good point. Now, luckily, I'm able to go the one way of saying neither of those things should be done. But I think as a meat eater, these are the kind of, these are the kind of absurdities that you have to start considering. Like, what else can that kind of justification allow you to do? The kind of justification that we produce, that we desperately kind of clamberful and we're trying to continue eating our burgers and our milk and our eggs, those justifications,

you want to be careful with them because they can lead you to our, whole host of really unfruitful places, I think. So how many meat-free days a week do you reckon you can have, if you want to have sex with a cow once a week? Do a little hedonic calculus. Yeah. Work it up. So you're a vegan.

Put forward the case as to why we should be vegan. So there are a few ways to go about it. The first thing to note is that usually I make a case from consistency. I don't work from the ground up. I take things that I think other people already believe. and I try to just extend the logic. So let's start with something we do agree upon. Presumably speaking, we're not racist.

Right. Now, you know, sometimes you've got to be careful. Yeah, sometimes you need to give it lower than that. We just mess up. You've got to be careful these days. I just think about why. Right now, it's weird because we're kind of proving a negative here. It's like it's not, the argument shouldn't be why you're not a racist.

It should be why should I be a racist and that argument is flawed. But let's still think about it, you know, reflect on that, right? Or let's take sexism as well, kind of keep them all in mind. Are men and women the same? Are white people and black people the same, right? There are differences between people. People have different height averages. They have different skin colors.

They have different hair length and things like this, right? But to be anti-racist or to be anti-sexist isn't to deny that differences exist. It's to say, like, who cares about those differences? Those differences aren't morally relevant, right? So let's think about the differences between an animal and a pig, let's say, for instance. So one difference is that a pig has more legs than we do, right? Is that what justifies the difference in treatment? Of course, it's, I mean, obviously that's morally irrelevant, right?

But the question becomes, what is the morally relevant difference? What is the difference between a pig and a human? The difference between them, that justifies the idea that if we even, even hurt one without their consent, we can be thrown to jail, but the other one we can do literally whatever we please to. What's the moral difference here? And not only do you need to find that difference, but it needs to be such, to be consistent here, we need to find the difference that if that difference were also true of the human,

we'd be okay with doing it to the human. So if we say, like, the pig is different in this respect, it lacks this quality. If that's really the quality that justifies the difference in treatment, then we'd have to say that if the human being also lacked that quality, we'd be okay with slaughtering them. So the question is, what's that quality? Because it's not me who has to do the justifying here, right? If you're causing suffering, you should justify that behavior.

Every time we cause any kind of suffering, we justify it. And a lot of the time we can do so. We justify wars because we think that they serve a greater end. What justification do we have for torturing and killing innocent beings? I guess the argument there would be, and I'm not suggesting, by the way, that human beings are carnivores by the process of evolution, but carnivores eat other animals. right so but tigers don't eat tigers right it's not because they have a moral hierarchy of some kinds it's just they they don't eat other carnivores right um so uh from a evolutionary perspective my understanding is that we are we are kind of like 99% vegan i suppose in terms of our

evolution that's kind of how we evolved um but there would you know if you look at apes or monkeys what they'll do is they mostly eat fruit vegetables whatever mostly fruit, of course, and roots and stuff like that. But every now and again, they'll catch whatever and eat it. Yeah. Right. So the argument to what you're saying would be that we evolved for a small part of our diet, at least, to hunt and eat animals, just like almost every other animal is either prey or predator in the animal kingdom.

Right. So there are two potential arguments at hand. One is to say that this occurs in nature. how can we be held morally responsible? We don't hold the lion morally responsible for eating the gazelle. The other argument is to say that actually we do need some kind of meat because it's part of our evolutionary heritage, which means that we actually have a requirement, right?

So on the second point first, it's demonstrably not true, right? The only thing that gives us what we need from the food that we eat are the nutrients contained within them, and we can prove that all the nutrients you need to survive and not only survive, but be healthy, can be achieved on a vegan diet, with quite considerable ease, in fact, especially living in London. It's one of the easiest things to do.

And again, it's a point about necessity here. Is that really true? I'm going to ask you now because I don't know. It's true. So the first thing that people worry about is protein. Protein is the least of your concerns. I mean, it's very easy to get the right amount of protein on a vegan diet. The thing you really want to watch out for on micronutrients,

things like iron deficiencies might be high among vegans because, you know, people don't want to eat their leafy greens, but that's really all you have to do. You can take a multivitamin supplement if you want to. You don't have to, but you know, something like over 60% of the American adult population do that anyway. It's a fairly common thing to do. The only thing that you can't really get from a vegan diet is vitamin B12.

It's the one thing that people will always bring up because it's like the one thing that only comes from animal products. Well, first thing to know, it doesn't technically come from animal products. It comes from bacteria and the soil which the animals eat. We used to get it either through drinking water and we'd get traces from. the dirt in the rivers, or because our food wasn't perfectly clean in the specks of dirt, but also the stuff that we get from the animal products today, those animals are being fed, B12 supplements, and then we're then eating the animals. So if people want to say that it's,

they don't want to take a supplement because it's an unnatural thing to do, well, everything about factory farming is unnatural, including the fact that they're being fed, fed the supplements. But it is absolutely true that every single nutrient you need can be achieved on a vegan diet. Okay, and let's come back to the lion and gazelle thing. Well, lions also rape each other, right? If you want to... That's problematic, isn't it? If you want to base your ethical conduct on the conduct of lions, then you go ahead, but you're not going to have a very good time.

I mean, lions will often find a new pride and male lions, and they will kill the younglings, kill the male and rape the female to repopulate the area with their younglings. Now, imagine somebody trying to justify being a rapist by saying, well, you don't judge the lion for doing it. you'd laugh them out of the room. It's like, of course we don't, because we don't base our ethical conduct on the conduct of wild animals. The difference that we need to consider here is moral worth versus moral agency, right? Moral agency is where you can be held responsible for the actions that you commit. Moral worth is weaker than that.

It just means that you have, as I say, like moral worth. I mean, it is what it says on the tin. So you could take, for instance, a severely disabled human child, clearly, or even just a normal human child. Let's just take someone who's young enough that clearly they don't have moral agency right. If they do something wrong, we don't really hold them responsible for it because we recognize that they don't have that agency.

But that doesn't mean they don't have moral worth. If somebody tried to hurt them, they wouldn't be justified in saying, but the baby just hit someone. Why can't I hit the baby? It's like because there's a difference here, right? Like you need to, we need to act in the ways, we need to act in accordance with

what our kind of natural position prescribes, right? Like we have a capability for rational thought. In fact, the very thing that people often use to justify the slaughter of animals is the thing that should justify the opposite. They say, like, yeah, but we're on another level to these animals. You know, we're better than them. We're higher than them. And it's like, if that's the case, then we're better than they are in terms of their violence towards each other. We're better than they are in terms of the idea that they have to kill each other for food.

Like, we're better because we're moral creatures. We're better because we have a conscience. We're better because we're able to rise above that kind of naturalistic carnivism. But hold on. Look, a lion isn't going to survive on a vegan diet. It's digestive system, it's whole body, it's everything about the lion is, I don't want to use the word designed, but has evolved to make it a carnival. A lion cannot survive without eating other animals. Absolutely.

But you can. Yeah, I hear you. But my point is that lions could very comfortably, I imagine, survive without raping each other. Maybe not as successfully as they do. But eating meat for a lion is a natural part, an essential part of its evolutionary background. So I don't think you could judge a lion for eating meat, right? So the argument would be that human beings evolved to some extent to behave in that way as well. So judging us for doing that is kind of, there's something, there's a weak link somewhere in argument.

Maybe I haven't identified it probably. I'm glad you changed the word. You changed the saying it's essential for the line. You change from saying it's natural or something saying it's essential. Yeah. That's exactly the point, right? It's necessary for them to do so. They're obligate carnivores, right?

They don't have a choice in the matter. We do have a choice. We don't have to eat meat. If we have to eat meat, then that's another matter. What we have here is a situation where, as we've all accepted at this point, we don't have to do it. And when you accept that, it means that what you're doing is by definition unnecessary. And the next stage of the argument is that, well, what we're doing causes suffering. So what we're doing is causing unnecessary suffering, right?

And I think that the baseline of ethical conduct is to try to eliminate. eliminate unnecessary suffering. It's as simple as that. I mean, why don't we apply the same arguments to dogfighting, people who breed dogs? I mean, people generally have agreed that that's an evil thing to do. They're not going to get their money to that. Why? Why are people outraged when there are festivals in China where people eat dogs? Why are their protests on the street of London when that happens? Because we're completely selective with our empathy. It's not like we don't care about animals already. These arguments that we make about what's natural and what we should be allowed to do to other animals because of our evolutionary

heritage. It's like, if you want to use those arguments, let's apply them consistently, and see how okay you are with dogs being put into battery cages. We have animal cruelty laws because we've recognized that animals do have some kind of moral worth. And if they have any kind of moral worth, even the most minimal sense of moral worth, then what we do to the factory farms is in no way justified. And certainly not by saying that, well, you know, for a lion, it's necessary to kill other beings in order to eat. And so for us, even though it's not necessary, it's kind of maybe a little bit necessary, but not really. So maybe we should, you know, stick a pig into a torture chamber. It's like I don't see the, I don't follow the argument,

right? Did you want to? No, I wanted to touch on factory farming, actually, because this is something that's been brought up again and again and again. And I think people, the average person, who would be exposed to this, sort of understands that factory farming is not a good thing, but we're all busy people. We don't really have time to explore these particular subjects. Could you just tell the listener or the viewer why you believe that factory farming is wrong? They're concentration camps for animals, right? The level of suffering going on in these farms is so unimaginably huge. I think

that's the real reason people don't know what's going on, not because they don't have the time for it. Everybody would have the time for it if they had the slightest inkling of what was going on. There are, I mean, it's a different experience for different animals, right? So, for instance, with eggs, to take one example, it's not the same chicken that gives us meat that gives us eggs. There are broilers and layers, and the layer, they're genetically engineered differently, right? So the ones that lay eggs, obviously only the females lay eggs. So when the males are born, they're totally useless, right? And so I ask people, what do you think they do with them?

And they say, well, I guess they're sold for meat. And I say, no, no, it's a different type of chicken. So what do you think they do with them? And they say, I guess they kill them. It's like, yeah, how do you think they do it? They gas them or something or chop off their head. They put them on a conveyor about and throw them into a blender. Just chicks, just alive simply because of the fact that they're male.

Millions and millions and millions of them on end, just so that we can eat eggs. baby chicks just being ground up alive, right? The treatment of pigs and cows is obscene. To get milk, cows are forcibly impregnated. And then they give birth to a calf. I mean, they produce milk for the same reason we do. It's for their children. But the children, obviously, then, have to be taken away.

And that causes the same kind of psychological distress that it doesn't a human being. Again, what for? So that we can have a glass of milk. And then what happens to that cow? Well, it's continually impregnated and continually has the children taken away for years and years until it finally can't do it anymore, and then it's sold for me, and it's slaughtered. It's like, who doesn't know that this is the kind of stuff that's happening? Who doesn't know that in order to have milk, a cow has to be pregnant?

It's the same thing with a human being, and who doesn't know that if that milk is meant for the child, then the child has to be taken away? And who doesn't know that that child has a bolt put through its head or is sold for meat? Like, who really doesn't know that this is happening? And who thinks that it's justified? I mean, just think about what's going on here, right? Unimaginable levels of suffering. Millions and millions of animals killed every single hour.

Just because we think they taste nice. It's a hell of a justification. What other kind of immorality that we're going to allow people to justify because of their sensory pleasures? I wanted to talk to you about the practical side of this because the reality is the majority of people meet. and while I think the point you just made it is very strong, I don't think we're going to convince people to not eat meat based just on that.

Because if that was possible, it would have happened by now. Do you know what I'm saying? So first of all, actually, just on the factory farming, I mean, would you be a lot more comfortable with people eating meat if it was all grown kind of like free range, grass-fed, all this kind of stuff. Yeah, so the first thing to note is that labels like Free Range

are generally mythical. The requirements for something to actually be free range is people have this idea of like, you know, happy chickens and happy eggs and stuff. Like, it's just not true. You know, these animals don't have to be happy

to produce the food that we eat from them. Chickens on free range farms, they'll have access to the outdoors for half a year. You know, these animals are still caged. They're still bread. They're still getting osteoporosis because they're laying too many eggs.

Still, all of these problems are going on, even if they took a free range label on it. If anybody's interested, you can watch footage from these farms. My friend Ed, who works for an organization, co-founded an organization called Search, recently did an expose into UK dairy farms. The campaign is called Dismantled Dairy, just showing people what's going on in these farms. A few years earlier, he produced a documentary called Land of Open Glory, showing what's happening on red tractor-approved farms, on farms that have these kind of labels

that are supposed to kind of satiate customers into thinking that it's an okay thing to do. But remember, we're still talking about, we're still talking about life here, right? We're still talking about animals being exploited for their products and for their meat so that we can have something that we think tastes nice or so that we can wear them and stuff like.

The levels of justification are totally mismatched, right? We're not just saying that we want to slaughter and kill and exploit animals for some great noble purpose, right, because we want to win a war, because we want to kind of use horses as transportation to get us onto the battlefield or something like we might have used to be able to say, right? And we're not just saying, we want a slightly inconvenient a cow so that we can have our mild convenience of taste, right? Like, it's completely mismatch.

Like, it means a single meal, a single burger, that that bit of a bit of a little of milk that you have in your tea means absolutely nothing to us, but it means absolutely everything to the animal that produced it. We've got to ask ourselves if we're justified in doing it. And I also disagree with you in saying that, like, we're not going to convince people to be vegan based on this argument alone. I mean, you say it would have happened already. It's like every moral argument takes time, right? The difference with this, like, how long, as Peter Singer asks, how long do you think it would have taken for black slaves to become liberated if they couldn't have spoken for themselves? How long do you think it would have taken for

women to be granted equality if they couldn't fight for their own rhymes, right? This is one of the arguments I always make when I'm defending freedom of speech, that actually it's very important for people who are oppressed in some way to be able to do it. So I guess you're saying animals don't really have freedom of speech. That's the thing you recognize, how important it is. How important it is to have the ability to speak for yourself in order to actually achieve anything in terms of social justice. Well, these animals can't talk for themselves.

Like they need someone to talk for them. I mean, they can talk in the sense that they can scream. And if you've ever seen an animal on a factory farm, then you know what it's trying to say to you. You don't need to ask. You don't need a translator. But they can't write essays. They can't write political diatrives. They can't argue.

They can't argue back to the person who says, shut up, I like the way you taste. So you're going to suffer and die. There's no argument back to that that they can produce. It has to fall on us. And of course it's going to take a long time. But you know, you might have said the same thing. like in the 1700s. You know, people roughly knew that slavery was a bad idea.

If you read the, you can read the, the letters and the correspondence during the time of the production of the United States Constitution, the founding fathers having this incredible, noble and totally unrealistic and utopian success of creating this nation. And they're writing the Constitution. They're all in high spirits. And then comes the question of slavery. And they're using, you know, they're using metaphors. They're using euphemisms because everybody kind of knows that it's the elephant in the room.

They knew it was it wrong. And somebody in mind at that point said like, yeah, come on, like, you know, obviously, if it were going to happen, it would have happened by now. People aren't going to be convinced by the moral argument to abolish slavery. It's going to be, have to be practical things. We're going to have to prove that there's an economic benefit to abolishing slavery. Problem is that there wasn't. In fact, it was the complete opposite.

So what happened is people had to say, no, I'm sorry, time. Time is up here. The moral argument is strong enough. And if you're not willing to consider it, if you don't have the time, then we'll make you have the time, we'll give you the time, we'll provide the time, we'll put in the work, we'll do the investigations, we'll do the research, and we'll put it to you and play in English, and then it's up to you to just decide whether you want to be on the right side of history or not.

And Alex, what do you think about those people who go, okay, so you've made those arguments about factory farming, it's diabolical, it's awful, however, even farming, agricultural farming creates a huge amount of damage to the local wildlife. to the ecosystem, the use of pesticides, the use of fertilizers. So actually the reality is that all our impact on the ecosystem through our farming is detrimental. Yeah, so the thing to know is people say, for instance, like, you know, growing crops, the kind of crops that we need on a vegan diet, growing soy, these things are really, really bad for the environment. It's absolutely true.

But we're currently growing enough crops to feed the world population three times over, and then we're feeding it to livestock and then we're eating the livestock. So we would still be minimizing our impact on the planet by going vegan. We'd actually be using less soy because 85% of the soy that we currently grown is fed to livestock, it's fed to cows, right?

So like, I agree with you, you know? Like, yeah, we should be reducing the amount of soy that we're growing. We should be reducing the amount of crops and the land that we're taking up. But if you want to do that, you're still going to want to go vegan. I would also say that

The animal agricultural industry is such a large contributed to global warming. Most people who are going vegan these days are doing it for environmental reasons, which I resent because I think that's a bad reason to go vegan and leaves us with the concern that they might switch back again if the environmental crisis is abated. It's just like a nice thing to have on the side for me, right? The moral argument is so impenetrably strong that I don't think it needs anything else. So how great is it that just by the way, if you do this, you'll also be doing single best thing you can do as an individual to save the environment?

You'll also be doing wonders for your health. These are nice little add-ons, but they're definitely not necessary to make the argument. I can just see the comments under this video, three cucks discussing how best to be a soy boy. That's what it's going to be. It's like you're actually more of a soy boy. Katie Hopkins called me a soy boy. Yeah. Yeah, so I've been there, man.

Having said that soy is disgusting. We stood up Katie Hopkins once. by mistake. A friend of mine was supposed to be interviewing her and she'd emailed him but it had accidentally gone to his junk folder so he was waiting at the wrong place. So she was sort of the Oxford Union kind of waiting around for us to show and we just, we never did. It's one of my kind of claimed fame that I got to stand up, Katie Hopkins. Whereas I just called it a soy boy by her, which is very painful, having to admit

Katie Hopkins is not always wrong. But there's one question that I wanted to ask. So you bring up the health issue. Why is it healthier to be vegan? Well, it's not necessarily healthier. It's just that, so So it's, there are health benefits, for instance, to not eating things like red meat. And you'll often find that when people go vegan, they start paying attention more to their, to their diet and you're less at risk of going overweight. You find yourself paying more attention to the nutrients you need, because you need to get the right nutrients to be healthy. You start focusing on that and you become healthier.

Like a vegan diet or a meat diet, like, there are benefits to both health-wise. Although I think it's recommended that you eat absolutely no red meat. because it's a carcinogenic and a cause of heart disease. Although, you know, it's all a little bit kind of muddy, right? No one really quite knows. What we do know for certain is that being a vegan is healthy, right? That's one thing we do know. We know that you can also be healthy on a meat eating diet.

To say which is healthier, like, it's a difficult argument to make. You could probably say that eating meat will give you a more convenient way to live a healthier lifestyle and you'll get more muscle mass and things like this. But my argument is this, if it is healthy, I don't care what's healthy. I care about if it's healthy, then it's not necessary to eat meat, and then it's immoral to do so, right? Like if we found out that it was, if it was healthier for our diets, if we started eating the flesh of tortured babies, human babies, people would be like, well, obviously we're not going to do that. And I say, what, are you denying that it's healthier? It's like, of course, no, no, like, we can recognize that something's healthier, but also recognize that that's not an argument to do it.

So if meat eating is healthier Like, okay, great, I still think It's wrong, still think we shouldn't be doing it Just as if you take steroids in a sports competition You will perform better, that is actually true But we're still not going to allow you to do it No, I'm Russian, I know I know all about that

We've been there, done that Listen, we're almost out of time I wanted to say by the way on the whole male chick thing That's just like just a bunch of males On a conveyor belt being thrown into a blender That's like a feminist wet dream But before we let you go The last question we always like to ask

is what is the one thing that we're not talking about as a society that we ought to be talking about beyond the scope of maybe what we've covered already? Yeah. Well, I mean, annoyingly, the thing that does bring to mind is animals, is the treatment of animals, right? It's like, they are so not spoken about. Like, the idea, so things like religion, things like, things like that, they get mentioned in, in our house of common. They get brought up in politics. It's like at least on the manifesto.

Animals are nowhere to be seen, right? The idea that we should, the idea that we should be vegan is totally radical, right? It's this totally radical idea such that like, if you found it even mentioned in a party's manifesto, you'd think, whoa, that's crazy. But what are we talking about here? We're talking about boycotting an industry

that's torturing innocent creatures. How is that become a radical thing to do? The reason why is because people aren't talking about it. People, people, it's not normalized. When you say that these things are going on, people say, well, I'm sure that, that must just be a bad apple. You know, that can't really be happening. Surely, like, there'll be regulations in place, you know, that kind of thing. It's like, no, there's absolutely not. And the reason we're not aware of that is because we're just not talking about it. The moment that we do begin talking about it as a society is the moment that it will begin to end,

because there's no way once you give in a moment's thought and you realize what's actually going on that you can continue to justify it. The only actual justification for the way that we're treating these animals is ignorance. And that's a hell of a justification and it's not one that you're able to make for yourself because the moment that you start making it,

you're no longer ignorant. So I think that certainly that it's obvious to me and I think it will be obvious to future societies that in the same way that we look back on history and it's full of white dudes and we think, ah, where were the women? It's like, it's one of those things. It was like clearly, you know, people just weren't, like, representing them.

They just weren't talking about them. It's like, we look back and it's quite obvious to us now, right? I think it'll be equally obvious in the future that people will be like, hold on. These guys were like losing their minds over potentially exiting the European Union. Whilst in the time it took between, you know, the vote and today, we've slaughtered, what? Hundreds of billions of land animals and trillions. of sea animals. And future societies will look back in the way that we look back and say

like, so these guys were like arguing about this political union, while they were literally owning slaves. These people were arguing about these weirdly specific issues. Well, people were on slave ships. How could they possibly have that kind of cognitive dissonance? I think people will say the same thing about us right now.

How were they not talking about this? How was this not front page news every single day? It's just because it's not in the conversation. Well, thanks very much for coming on the show. You have a brilliant YouTube channel. How do people find you online? Where do they go for that? Everything is just cosmic skeptic. It's quite an unusual name. So forward slash

cosmic skeptic on any side and you'll probably find me there. Fantastic. Well, go and check Alex out. It does some great work. Thanks very much for tuning to watch us this week and we'll see you in a week's time with another brilliant episode. Take care. See you next week, guys.