Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / "Why Eat Animals?" with Jamie Woodhouse

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"Why Eat Animals?" with Jamie Woodhouse · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  What a lovely time it is to be a New South Welsh person.
• 0:09
  Summer is two weeks away.
• 0:10
  We're out of lockdown.
• 0:12
  The international border is open for citizens and permanent residents, at least.
• 0:17
  Rest of the world is still a non-grata for Australia, but that'll change next year.
• 0:22
  New South Wales has a new premier, new leader, and things are frankly looking up.
• 0:28
  We're outside again. We're wandering around.
• 0:31
  The windows are open. People are having parties. There are barbecues going on.
• 0:35
  And I don't want to say I told you so.
• 0:38
  But to the rest of the world and to those of my listeners who were ringing their hands
• 0:43
  and sending me furious tweets after my various appearances on American podcasts
• 0:50
  and writing in Barry Weiss's newsletter and in defence of vaccine mandates
• 0:55
  and trying to explain Australia's pandemic overreach, not to justify it,
• 1:00
  but to contextualise it and to make the point that whilst I disagreed with much of Australia's response,
• 1:06
  it was all within the context of things that liberal democracies might want to do in a time of emergency.
• 1:12
  It was just that Australia's emergency had been time shifted from the rest of the world
• 1:18
  because Australia had blocked the rest of the world out, including the pandemic,
• 1:21
  largely with the exception of Melbourne and Victoria,
• 1:24
  largely from two months after the pandemic in 2020 until the southern winter of 2021.
• 1:32
  Anyway, all of that's water under the bridge now.
• 1:35
  But there was a lot of, Australia has fallen, Australia has become an authoritarian totalitarian dictatorship
• 1:40
  and my response was always just, well, let's wait and see.
• 1:44
  If we get to high vaccination rates and low hospitalisation rates
• 1:51
  and Australia is still doing what it was doing in June, July, August and September of this year,
• 2:02
  then I would have had grave fears for the future of Australian democracy.
• 2:07
  Again, this is not a defence of everything that happened.
• 2:11
  It's a defence of thinking about it in the context of what democracies have to do to protect public health
• 2:18
  rather than the context of how democracies collapse and fall into totalitarian dictatorships.
• 2:24
  So I'm feeling good and I'm actually heading abroad in a few weeks,
• 2:31
  which is beyond exciting.
• 2:34
  I don't think there's a two-year period since I was 18 when I haven't left the country,
• 2:40
  multiple times, having somewhat gotten used to having one foot in New York City
• 2:45
  and one foot in Sydney for 12 years while I lived in New York.
• 2:50
  The past two years have been, forget about, trapped inside intermittently during lockdowns
• 2:57
  but just trapped in a continent that's stranded on the underbelly of the world
• 3:01
  has been stressful enough for me.
• 3:04
  So we're heading off to see my partner's family, take the kids on a bit of a holiday,
• 3:09
  spend Christmas in New England, amid the snow and the santa's and all that fun stuff.
• 3:16
  I hope you're well, I hope you're family are well, I hope you're chugging along
• 3:20
  and dusting yourself off after the various stresses of the past couple of years.
• 3:26
  The world has never been more connected and it's never been more divided
• 3:31
  and most of the media still panders to what you believe and distorts what you don't
• 3:37
  and reinforces our biases and exaggerates our divisions.
• 3:40
  We are living inside echo chambers.
• 3:45
  But as one of the various taglines of this show goes, change doesn't happen inside an echo chamber.
• 3:52
  One thing we've got planned over the holiday period is an ask me anything episode.
• 3:59
  I wanted to give it a crack and see whether or not there's anything that you would like
• 4:03
  to ask your wise professor here, Professor Zeppes.
• 4:08
  If you have a question about literally anything, shoot it to us in an email,
• 4:16
  ideally as a voice memo, just record it on your phone, an email it to uncomfyconvose
• 4:21
  at JML.com. That's uncomfy with a Y, UNCOMFYconvose, CONVOS at JML.com,
• 4:30
  uncomfyconvose at JML.com. You could just tweet a question at me in text,
• 4:36
  but that's much less interesting than getting your voice on the podcast.
• 4:39
  So do that over the next couple of weeks. That's starting today,
• 4:42
  which should be the 17th of November and we'll run it for at least two weeks.
• 4:46
  But don't leave it. Just do it now. Just think, have a noodle.
• 4:49
  Have a noodle on what you might want to ask old Uncle Josh.
• 4:52
  I've just gone from being a professor to an uncle. It could be creepy.
• 4:55
  Next, not be a husband. Anywho.
• 4:58
  It's time for us to have conversations that are a little bit more exciting,
• 5:03
  a little bit more boundary pushing. Allow your question to be such a conversation.
• 5:08
  It doesn't have to be highly original. It might just be something that's been floating around
• 5:12
  that you're wondering about my opinion on, which you've been talking about with friends and family
• 5:16
  and wonder if there's a more interesting way to think about them,
• 5:20
  the box inside your inside which you're all sitting.
• 5:23
  So let us step out of the bunker, let us stretch our legs,
• 5:26
  let us step on some landmines. It's time to have uncomfortable conversations.
• 5:32
  Get a humans. Do you eat bacon? Do you eat horse? Have you tried dog?
• 5:49
  Would you eat chimpanzee meat? Under what circumstances would you eat human flesh?
• 5:58
  If you've ever read any of Peter Singer's writing,
• 6:01
  you'll be familiar with his sense of utilitarianism or consequentialism.
• 6:06
  He wrote the book Animal Liberation, which really exploded onto the scene in the 1970s
• 6:11
  and almost launched the animal rights movement.
• 6:14
  And today in the 2020s, the next generation of thinking around how to think about
• 6:21
  the well-being of other animals is emerging in the form of a framework called sentientism.
• 6:29
  Sentientism is the idea that we should be judging the well-being and the rights,
• 6:36
  I don't even want to use the word rights, the interests of non-human animals
• 6:41
  according to their ability to feel pain and have sensations and have aspirations and to suffer.
• 6:51
  And the person who's spearheading this way of thinking about the world
• 6:55
  or rather the formalistic sort of movement of sentientism is a bloc named Jamie Woodhouse in the UK.
• 7:01
  He's trying to develop sentientism as a philosophy, as a global movement.
• 7:05
  He hosts the sentientism podcast. He hosts the sentientism YouTube videos.
• 7:10
  He's published articles. He's presented academic seminars.
• 7:13
  He's building a range of global sentientism communities that are open to everyone.
• 7:18
  They span over 100 countries. You can find him on Twitter at Jamie Woodhouse and at sentientism.
• 7:25
  And you can look for his podcast and YouTube channel and so on and so forth.
• 7:30
  He also believes in updating the universal declaration of human rights to essentially include sentient rights.
• 7:38
  What are the implications of all this hoo-ha on what you eat on our industrial factory farming?
• 7:46
  And on how you think about yourself as your position in the animal kingdom?
• 7:51
  Jamie has a lot of answers and I have a lot of questions.
• 7:54
  Enjoy this conversation with Jamie Woodhouse.
• 8:07
  Let me start with what sentientism is because I think people will be curious about how you define it.
• 8:14
  Yeah, of course. So it's a world view or a philosophy of life, if you like.
• 8:19
  And I'd summarize it in a sentence as evidence, reason and compassion for all sentient beings.
• 8:25
  So that's it. How is that differ from general kind of being a good person and humanism and secularism?
• 8:32
  Well, that's the odd thing about it because it sounds quite anodine and somewhat obvious.
• 8:36
  But when you carry it through the implications can start to get a little bit more radical.
• 8:42
  So the first part, the evidence and reason aspect, which you might more formally call a sort of naturalistic way of thinking about the world, has a great deal in common.
• 8:54
  It's almost a full overlap with secular humanism or other ways of naturalistic thinking about the universe.
• 9:01
  So using evidence, using reason, trying to engage honestly with reality to try and understand it with humility.
• 9:08
  So there's nothing really new there on that side of the fence.
• 9:12
  And the compassion part also echoes a lot of religious and non-religious world views.
• 9:18
  There's an aspiration there for a universal compassion.
• 9:21
  I guess the difference is that rather than looking at a particular group of people or even humanity as a whole sentientism, I guess the clue is in the name, says that we should grant moral consideration or we should have compassion for every being
• 9:36
  that has sentience, which is in simple terms the capacity to experience anything at all, but to suffer, to flourish, to feel things, to enjoy things.
• 9:48
  And presumably that doesn't mean that you grant equal consideration to all sentient creatures.
• 9:56
  It doesn't have to. So I've tried to keep this way of describing sentientism as very, very basic.
• 10:02
  So it really is just evidence, reason, and moral consideration for all sentient beings. It doesn't go beyond that and tell us.
• 10:08
  There's another sentient being right there in the background.
• 10:11
  So there's a massive variety of different opinions within people who might call themselves sentientists.
• 10:18
  So in that way, it's very pluralistic. It's really just a platformer starting point.
• 10:23
  So there are some people who think in a sentientist way who will aspire to be more egalitarian if you like.
• 10:30
  They say, look, if an entity is sentient, we should try and accord it the same moral consideration.
• 10:35
  But I think most of me included will recognize that there's such an enormous variety of different types of sentient experiences.
• 10:42
  It might make sense to grade moral consideration or recognize that different types of sentients are going to have very different sorts of interest needs.
• 10:50
  And that could lead you to grading your moral consideration.
• 10:54
  I mean, it would sort of have to, I mean anyone who treated an ant the same as a chimpanzee.
• 11:02
  And anyone for whom if you were conducting a science experiment in a lab was willing to do to the chimpanzee exactly what they would do to an ant.
• 11:11
  And simply through their arms up and shrugged when you said, do you care whether or not I use a magnifying glass on the ant or I burn the chimpanzee alive.
• 11:20
  Anyone who said, well, it makes no difference to me because they're both sentient would be a psychopath.
• 11:26
  And whether I call them a psychopath or not, I don't know, but I'd agree that's a pretty extreme point of view.
• 11:32
  You know, the other classic example is, you know, would you save a chicken or a human from a burning house if you get any save one?
• 11:39
  I think even the people who theoretically push for something that's more egalitarian, you know, things break down when you're really under pressure and you've got to take those tough calls.
• 11:49
  So let's let's let's talk in a sec about the whether or not humans have a special status because I think that's an interesting objection to sentientism.
• 11:58
  But we we you sort of you bounced over a bunch of of terms as if they're universally known and they are amongst people who've studied philosophy, but they might not actually be by everyone.
• 12:10
  So let's just start with each of the the legs of the stool that you're constructing here. The first being you mentioned secular humanism and naturalism. What's what's naturalism?
• 12:19
  So naturalism can mean again a few different things. There's one is it's a way of understanding a way of building beliefs. So that's really the evidence and reason.
• 12:28
  It's a philosophy about how to believe that says you should gather evidence try to do that neutrally recognize your biases and use that evidence to build beliefs through reasoning and critical thinking.
• 12:45
  So you might set that against supernaturalism which generally might be a way of believing that would accept reveal believes maybe religious beliefs mystical spiritual beliefs where they're not explicitly not founded on evidence and reason they're based on a faith or some other mode of believing.
• 13:03
  So that's that's the basic way of thinking about naturalism as a method if you're like a way of understanding reality and building beliefs, but it often links to another form of naturalism which just says you know the natural world is all that exists.
• 13:16
  There is nothing supernatural beyond that. So in the realm of religion that might lead someone to be you know are there a very strong agnostic or an atheist, but it can apply in many different fields of knowledge as well.
• 13:28
  And is that different from materialism materialism being yeah the idea basically the form of naturalism that says that all that there is is the material world and there aren't spirits and ghosts and gods.
• 13:41
  It's closely related but it's interesting because you can find distinctions at the boundaries so there are some people who will say that their supernatural belief is grounded in a naturalistic understanding of the world.
• 13:54
  So if someone tells you they've used evidence and reasoning to come to a belief that there is a deity arguably they're claiming to have used a sort of naturalistic method but achieved a supernatural result.
• 14:06
  That doesn't make too much sense to me but you know there are wrinkles around the edges.
• 14:10
  Yeah you know that makes that makes some sense to me that you know you can imagine before before people are discovered radio waves or something like that you can imagine people thinking that natural the naturalistic and the materialist explanation.
• 14:23
  We're the same but then you discover UV light or something that's beyond the spectrum that we can see and you go actually this is a naturalistic explanation for something that is seemingly immaterial.
• 14:34
  Yeah exactly and I think even if someone makes a supernatural claim but says they're based basically thinking naturalism at least you can still have a reasonable conversation about the nature of the evidence and the nature of the reasoning.
• 14:47
  I think once someone has said I don't need evidence and reasoning anymore it's hard to find a basis for discussion once someone's got to that stage.
• 14:55
  And I think even many naturalists and I probably include myself in this I'm a methodological naturalist I'd say like I won't believe something until there is evidence and reason.
• 15:05
  That doesn't mean I'm 100% sure there's nothing supernatural.
• 15:08
  Something supernatural conceptually can exist but you know without evidence for I certainly won't choose to believe in it and I can't imagine how I would find evidence of something that is supernatural anyway because as soon as you find evidence of something to me by definition it's part of the natural world.
• 15:26
  Right yes there's an analogy there to sort of alternative medicine and things like that you know there's a clever saying alternative once alternative medicine works then it's not alternative anymore it just is medicine.
• 15:39
  There's no such thing as alternative medicine alternative medicine is just a bunch of stuff that doesn't work that you call alternative because if it did work you would just call it medicine.
• 15:49
  It's not exactly that yeah.
• 15:52
  And quite often when we talk about naturalistic thinking you know people will instinctively think of atheism or agnosticism and they'll think about the religious field but as you say there there's so many different fields of human knowledge where people believe things without decent evidence or reasoning alternative medicine.
• 16:09
  There's no longer some kind of conspiracy theories.
• 16:12
  Right yes.
• 16:14
  Anything Gwyneth Paltrow sells.
• 16:16
  There's a long list I guess.
• 16:19
  Yeah that's interesting although they would probably couch their belief in naturalistic language.
• 16:26
  I mean you might not if you believe in ghosts you probably don't but if you believe in the power of crystals or you believe in.
• 16:35
  Well I'm trying to think of you know like homiopathy yeah then you probably are using naturalistic language and just saying that there are limits to the scientific method about that it's too narrow in what it is trying to measure.
• 16:47
  And that you're measuring things that that don't quite fit the scientific paradigm but that nonetheless work within the context of the natural world.
• 16:54
  Yeah yeah and I think that's very common is to use that naturalistic language but it doesn't take long to dig through that once you start to actually look at the evidence that's being used.
• 17:01
  Yeah quite quickly becomes clear whether there's integrity in that.
• 17:05
  Yeah I usually just try to get people to do the thought experiment of gathering a thousand random people and doing a double blind trial.
• 17:16
  Yeah that really is very simple like if people claim that homiopathy works then there is no mysterious like onus that the scientific method is putting on a discipline that is that is too onerous you know for it to pass if it works.
• 17:36
  Like it's not like you have to fill out forms in triplicate and submit them to some scientific body to get recognized as having as working naturalistically.
• 17:45
  All you need to do is get a thousand people together you will get two batches of a thousand people and have one of them you know take a homopathic remedy and have the others take a placebo.
• 17:55
  If there's a difference between the homopathic people who got the homopathic remedy then great there's some utility and in some strange examples there actually is some ever then you have to tease out what's actually going on because people who go to homopathic doctors and spend an hour an hour and a half a week talking to them and then get their sugar water or that just their plain water which is what homopaths prescribe.
• 18:19
  Then they actually do have same it does seem to have an effect so then you got to figure out okay is it the water or is it the fact that they're getting essentially a quasi therapy from this person once a week but anyway I think it's a good rule of thumb to just get people to imagine gathering a thousand people together and then seeing if there's an impact and that usually shuts them up about.
• 18:37
  Whether or not there are mysterious sort of non immaterial or non non rational ways of understanding the effect of some mystical pursuit.
• 18:48
  Yeah it's a simple straightforward test and I think you can get into all sorts of details about quality of evidence and different methods and you know I'm not saying it's all just narrow scientific evidence either you know my personal experience is a sort of evidence I know this coffee mug is here and I haven't done a randomized control trial to work them out so there's you know you can think of evidence in quite a broad way but I think you're right you have to recognize the sort of statistics of grading how important evidence is you have to be open to a range of different evidence.
• 19:17
  You can't just cherry pick the stuff you support your things you want to believe in and I think it's also useful to I mean personally I'm quite like a probabilistic way of building beliefs in the outside of formal feels like maths.
• 19:32
  It doesn't make sense to be absolutely 100% sure of anything really you should always leave a little bit of wiggle room and then rather than saying you know I believe this or I don't believe that in a binary sense you can just grade your credence in something along.
• 19:46
  With the strength of the evidence you've seen but you're always open to new ideas so yeah provisional beliefs probabilistic beliefs and where they have a moral impacts you know maybe we should add prudent to that list as well.
• 19:58
  Yeah yes credence is a great word and I wish if everyone could know one thing then you know one of my top three to five things that I wish people understood that they don't.
• 20:10
  And is the difference between a credence and a belief in the philosophical sense like in I remember in first year epistemology at university learning about how we conditionalize our credences which is just jargon for how you sort of slide your potential beliefs up and down the probability scale on the basis of what evidence they've got.
• 20:30
  Let's use start to look at all of the things that you understand about the world to just be sort of probabilistic on some sense in some sense makes it much easier to talk about truth and reality because it's not a binary on off switch it's just yeah okay maybe that's true like to what extent do I believe that the Napoleonic wars happened.
• 20:51
  I do but I don't believe them terribly much I mean there's quite a it's it's entirely possible that there's some some you know I don't know some there's some conspiracy about pretending that the Napoleonic wars happened or that Napoleon never existed and once you take it back to you know with Jesus were all of Jesus's miracles true I mean it's it's possible it's just not very likely so then conversations with religious people I think become a lot easier.
• 21:18
  Once you yeah once you're able to make it not about absolute yes or absolute no but just about I'm provisionally not believing that because there aren't really good reasons to yet.
• 21:30
  Yeah I agree I think it makes conversation so much easier because it can close the ground between you and you can find common ground you know maybe edge towards a more common understanding of.
• 21:40
  Are you agree on even if you don't agree on everything but it requires a certain humility and and I think people who are you know maybe.
• 21:47
  Atheist or skeptical naturalistic thinkers might will often criticize you know the spiritual or the religious for being dogmatic and close minded fixed and maybe sometimes over confident and over arrogant of course most naturalistic people often come across as quite arrogant over confident yeah you know we have the evidence we have the size we have the studies we've done it all here's the artist.
• 22:10
  You know everyone who doesn't believe this is an idea too and I think you know even people with a naturalistic world you could.
• 22:17
  Benefit from folks in a little bit more on the humility that that credence approach brings you know we could be wrong there is always new evidence and.
• 22:25
  Even crazy ideas have proven to be right in the past yeah I mean definitely but what what irritates me though about that disjoint between the religious and the
• 22:34
  religious in in terms of who is the more arrogant is that the religious person will hide behind humility as a way of making incredibly arrogant claims about I mean it's it's frankly and
• 22:47
  normally arrogant to claim that you know that you know with any certainty what happen things that we all know we don't know like we know that we don't know what happens after we
• 22:56
  die we know that we don't know what the purpose of the cosmos is like these are huge mysteries there are no mysteries more profound we know that we don't
• 23:04
  understand the nature of consciousness and what out what the relationship between our lives on this planet is to the purpose of the universe like these
• 23:12
  are huge questions and for a religious person to say that they know what the purpose of the cosmos is and they know what happens
• 23:19
  after you die and then to point at the at the atheist and say the atheist thinks that they're so arrogant knowing everything about the universe when ours is not to question why
• 23:28
  because the universe is more magical than anything that you could fathom is like an enormous bait and switch that does frustrate me.
• 23:36
  And me too and I think we sometimes forget how outlandish the claims of even the most moderate religious world views are I mean it's not just you know the fundamentalist religious views that you know go
• 23:50
  to extreme places even moderate religions have some absolutely outlandish crazy claims.
• 23:55
  Yeah I mean in some respects the fundamentalist is easier to get your arms around because if you truly believe that the creator of the universe wrote a book then very well I like I understand that
• 24:07
  worldview I don't agree with that but it's internally consistent to to believe what's in that book I mean if the creator of the universe wrote a book you should
• 24:15
  pretty much do what's in that book like I certainly would if I believed that it's a bit harder to know what to do with someone who believes that who says that they believe that the creator of the universe wrote a book
• 24:24
  but that we should cherry pick from the book or the things that just happen to comport with what secular modern secular society says like we shouldn't stone gay people to death or whatever
• 24:36
  and you know and and interpret the book through the more ways of today that that makes less sense to me than frankly the jihadists who flies planes into buildings like he's more dastardly but he's sort of more internally consistent intellectually.
• 24:53
  Yeah I agree I agree and you touch on one of the reasons why this is important because some people will look at this philosophy and say look why do you need this naturalism aspect by Tim why do you just focus on the
• 25:05
  compassion surely that's you know the most important thing if we're thinking about trying to make the world better if we all just care about each other and other
• 25:13
  centric beings isn't that enough and I think there's a degree to which you might say well maybe but the reason I think the naturalistic stuff is important one is just intellectually I think we're more likely to be
• 25:25
  correct about the world if we take a naturalistic approach I just don't see that there's a verbal alternative to honestly engaging with reality and understanding it and understanding the world is quite useful if you want to make it better so you know I think actualism is important from that perspective
• 25:40
  but it's also important because even for people who have a very broadly compassionate worldview and a genuinely compassionate worldview if they have beliefs that aren't grounded in reality
• 25:52
  those ethics can be warped and you know otherwise good compassionate people can do absolutely awful things you know you've hinted a couple of examples there as well so there are some sort of supernatural poorly founded beliefs that are just silly or farm or
• 26:09
  don't really have much bearing up the world that you know I don't think the flat earth has done much damage out of the world but it seems there are many different types of
• 26:18
  supernatural thinking that for various reasons can lead people to do bad things either because you know something is promoted as being more important than the lives and the suffering of sentient beings you know whether it's a deity or an all powerful leader or blood and soil or the nation state
• 26:37
  whether it's because that sort of theoretical universal compassion is then constrained or conditional to just our in group or just people who follow the rules in the Bible or you know there's constraints put on that compassion and others are excluded and often sent to burn and how.
• 26:53
  So yeah so I think that that's part of the reason why I'm keen to have both the compassion baked in but also a naturalistic worldview because I think if either of those things slip essentially bad things can follow.
• 27:07
  Let's let me articulate a compassionate naturalistic world view for you which goes along the lines of the natural world is an extraordinary place and it's populated with amazing sentient creatures and non sentient living things presumably like plants and perhaps some of the very lower life forms like molasses or whatever we can argue about the edges but that this whole cycle of life this whole Mufasa and Simba and the pride lands are operating in.
• 27:37
  In a sort of a beautiful orchestral dance of which humans are an intrinsic part and we find ourselves of nature not apart from.
• 27:47
  Nature and as omnivores we kill other animals and their nutrients come into us and then we put them out and we die and we create you know more of the the cycle of life and.
• 28:01
  Whilst that may not be maximally compassionate a maximally compassionate natural world would also be a dysfunctional one and that the natural order of things is for us to kill and consume animals what's wrong with that.
• 28:17
  Yeah so that's quite an attractive way of thinking certainly the modern sort of zeitgeist when we think about the climate change and environmental issues we're facing so people move from if you like an anthropocentric view once focused on humans and humans matter and we're the ones that count they sort of skip over what I'm suggesting which is a centiocentric world view which says that all sentient beings matter and they go to the next.
• 28:41
  Steps on the stage as you said either a sort of bio-centrism that cares about all life or even the eco-centrism or a holism that says look it's about the entire system the earth as a guy and so on and I think as much to be said for that way of thinking seems quite compassionate you know it's going even beyond where I am and saying look the whole system matters and even things that aren't sentient matter.
• 29:05
  And from my perspective I'd agree with some of the conclusions about what I'm thinking because clearly the environment we all share even the non-sentient stuff you know rocks and rivers and plants and rivers and ecosystems are critically important for us as humans and all the other sentient beings that live in them so I have what you might call an instrumental concern for all of those things I don't think they weren't moral consideration in their own right because you know river or rock or a tree.
• 29:35
  I don't think can experience suffering in the same way as your eye or the puppy behind me can but I still share that concern for them and we should look after them and respect them and care for them and you know help develop an environment that we can all flourish it but where I think it goes wrong and you hinted at this in the last part of your description it's what some people think of as the you know natural is good fallacy or the natural is naturalistic fallacy where just because something is the way it is without majoring.
• 30:05
  The human intervention by definition it must be good or ethical or positive so there's this sense that you know there is a circle of life there is a system we must play our part and I think that's partly where it goes wrong and when you look under the covers of that way of thinking often it's really just a veneer for focusing back on good old humans again so you know we care about other humans in a normal way.
• 30:32
  Our concern for the environment really is because we need it to survive we actually see other sentient beings as part of that environment that are there for us to use again for human purposes for us to survive and even the wider environment and ecosystem is there just to provide us you know ecosystem services to keep us in the right temperature range to keep us with the right fresh water.
• 30:54
  And even to give us the sort of aesthetic pleasure that many environmentalists focus on when they think about the natural world so I think when you scrapped under the surface of some of those more expansive philosophies often they're not quite as ethically generous as they seem and they're really just a veneer that covers up a very anthropocentric world view.
• 31:12
  And that way of thinking in essence can excuse and allow us to continue causing massive catastrophic suffering and death to other beings and if any ethical system you know excuses or allows you know that type of suffering and death I think there's something going wrong with it.
• 31:32
  Right and I mean you could also make the point that the world view that I articulated if you were actually going to take seriously the it's okay if it's part of the natural order of things argument then there are all kinds of things that humans have traditionally done like rape each other and slaughter each other's tribes and you know.
• 31:58
  And essentially kill babies and maybe eat each other and there are all kinds of things that we've done that are perfectly natural to do and it's the sort of life.
• 32:08
  Yes is the circle of life to eat babies and you know there are all kinds of things that we currently do that are not at all natural like wearing eyeglasses or going to the moon that you know or inventing antibiotics or you know inventing vaccines against coronavirus.
• 32:25
  Right no but I'm saying that there are good things right there are things that that I regard as being positive diversions from like a like a like a coronavirus vaccine so that's where the naturalistic fallacy becomes.
• 32:41
  Yeah it's not a guide either way it's not a good guide either way so you know so from where are we getting our our morals in your in your world.
• 32:51
  So how do you know that factory farming is wrong.
• 32:55
  So it's an assessment so that the moral consideration of sentient beings I guess one way into this and people differ as to how they get to this conclusion but is to think about why we care about humans in the first place.
• 33:08
  So you know going back to that I guess the sort of Descartes starting point our own experiences is you know ability to have to have those experiences probably one of the things we're most confident of you know it's almost hard to avoid even if my brain is in a VAT or I'm you know sub routine running in a teenager simulation I'm still experiencing something because I can you know that's what everything else gets filtered through so I'm very confident I experienced things.
• 33:36
  And I think when we think about why do we care about other humans it's really because we have a credence that they have experiences to and in a sense morality to me and I think to most people is just a decision to care about the experiences other people are having.
• 33:55
  So in the same way as you might say you okay we care about other humans because we know they too can suffer and flourish you know I don't like suffering I'm pretty sure you don't too morality is my decision to care about that this sentientistic approach is just logically saying okay well if we care about other beings that can suffer and can flourish.
• 34:16
  Should we just extend that to all entities that have the capacity to suffer you know Jeremy Bentham was another famous dead guy that said this I think it's 1797 or something again he asked that question you know when we're thinking about moral consideration the question is can they suffer.
• 34:34
  So that's how we get to focusing on sentience as you know the basic characteristic for moral consideration the the qualifier if you like.
• 34:46
  But to answer your question about you know why is factory farming bad requires you to take some extra steps but I think in factory farming they're quite simple steps because
• 34:58
  whether or not you take this sentientist start and then apply you know utilitarian approach or a they ontological approach using rules or a virtue ethics that says it's good to be kind to sentient beings or a care ethic that talks about care you know almost whichever ethical system you then choose to put on top of thinking about sentience.
• 35:19
  When you look at the you know pleasures and benefits that flow from farming animal farming and you look at the suffering and the pain and the death that's caused I think it's quite hard to come up with any sort of calculus that really suggests that's justifiable.
• 35:37
  It's interesting to then I guess the the unspoken question that underlies a lot of this is is there any justification for treating other sentient creatures as tools to the ends as tools tools to human ends like what let's grant.
• 35:58
  I think that if I'm starving in the frozen tundra unallowed to kill a deer and eat it do we great are we granting that.
• 36:10
  It depends a different this is one of the areas where I can tell you my personal opinion but sentientism itself is irritatingly neutral because it just says evidence reason and compassion for all sentient beings.
• 36:21
  And that compassion for sentient beings or that moral consideration for sentient beings doesn't mean you must never is never acceptable to cause suffering or death to another sentient being you know it's not a sort of pacifist sort of extreme view where it's never justifiable to cause suffering.
• 36:36
  It just says you have to have moral consideration and take each entities sentient into account as you're working out what to do so it doesn't necessarily give us cut or dried answers to lots of ethical problems you have to put an ethical system on top of that.
• 36:51
  But I think what I would say is that it does suggest that you need to seriously take into account the experience of each individual sentient being and in a way that doesn't necessarily change between the different scenarios so you might imagine you know the deer that you have to kill because it's a survival question for you.
• 37:11
  That this still goes through maybe an analogous experience to one that's on a you know a pig on a factory farm so in a way nothing really changes the moral weight of that side of the argument you know the victim's perspective what does change is whether or not there's a justification for that so on one hand you know there's your own survival on the other hand there might be a marginal taste preference or a social norm around consumption of a particular product.
• 37:39
  So hopefully that helps it doesn't I'm not sure that I'd concede that the that even on the suffering side of the ledger the deer being killed in the wild after having lived a perfectly happy life the way that a deer should is the same as a pig in a factory farm because the reason we object to pigs in factory farms is not just because it's scary and painful for them to get killed.
• 38:07
  Because they have to endure a life of torture and torment leading up to that point as well whereas the deer it's oh I totally agree if you think about the life of the animal as a whole you know I there's some very interesting work going on around wild animal suffering at the moment which implies that the average wild animal doesn't necessarily have a great time to but I think I think but I think you're right on on average that you know the life of a factory farm animal is is worse than that of a free living area.
• 38:36
  So I mean even if the even if the deer had a really shitty life in the forest at least I'm not morally complicit in that I mean that's not my fault was with actually farming the the pig is put there for my benefit.
• 38:48
  I agree and I think and I think even in that even in a tough wild existence the factory farm existence is still another step worse I guess I was more thinking about you know the moment of the of the killing itself yeah yeah and then there may well be differences there but you know neither being wants to die both will suffer fear and stress both will suffer physical pain and you know both will have their lives ended so it's more in that context.
• 39:10
  Yeah all right so let's let's flip to the other side of the ledger then which is the justification for doing the killing as you say in the case of the factory farm pig it's usually just that I have a mild preference for the taste of bacon over the taste of peanut butter on toast.
• 39:26
  Yeah right which doesn't seem like a very compelling it seems really really weak as a justification for constructing the entire edifice of these vast hog farms especially in places like the United States where they're so poorly mistreated so taste preference isn't very good but that's why I'm trying to get us to a point at which we can.
• 39:45
  We can agree on the killing of an animal so that we can sort of build your worldview out from there so if I'm going to die and I'm in the tundra I mean I would almost argue that it it's conceivably there are circumstances under which it would be conceivably ethical for me to kill another human being.
• 40:05
  And that human being if it was if I was strong and gonna survive and there was another human who was probably gonna die and let's just give that human a criminal past as well and say that they did some horrible things and that they were associated path or serial killer.
• 40:22
  Then I think we can grant that that maybe I kill that human being and I eat them in order to survive if I have to so if we're gonna grant that then I think we can grant that I get to kill a dear can we.
• 40:35
  Well yeah I mean I would go along with that personally again sentientism as a worldview doesn't tell us the answer it just gives us the raw material of what we need to take into account but personally I personally I go along with that perspective yeah.
• 40:48
  So I don't think it doesn't negate the wrong that's done to the victim but it does give us a justification that I think could get to be a point where it's reasonable.
• 41:01
  Right and that justification is still predicated on sentientism because I'm the sentient entity doing the killing if I'm a robot if I'm an artificial intelligence where the lights are out but I just want to survive because I've been programmed to survive and I'm just I'm R2 D2 but I'm I'm feeling and there's nothing that it's like to be me and then I kill the dear then.
• 41:21
  In on the sentientism that's definitely not justified because the dear is having experiences and I'm not.
• 41:26
  Yeah I think that you know the experience of the victim and then the negative is counted in terms of it is impact on a sentient being in the same way as the justification or the positive.
• 41:36
  You know rational also has to be grounded in something to do with the sentient being as well yeah yeah okay and so we've basically agreed that there's there are circumstances under which I can use a sentient creature against its will and inflict pain and suffering on it.
• 41:55
  As simply regarding it as a tool for my benefit now that is characteristic of the way that all of human civilization treats the natural world at the moment but with total impunity.
• 42:07
  So can you give me an impression of how you personally like map out the difference between the two like what kind of circumstance under which is it okay for me to treat other sentient creatures as tools for my own benefit.
• 42:24
  Yeah and again I do want to reiterate the different people who use sentientism will differ with my personal opinion there as well but I think there's an interesting thought experiment two interesting thought experiments we can do just to test our intuitions here and one is to say okay well let's think about how this situation would apply as you've just done in the survival situation with a human.
• 42:48
  And that doesn't necessarily mean that we have to accord humans the same moral consideration is all non human sentience but it's an interesting thought experiment because it can help you work out if you apply a completely different ethical system when you think about humans to if you think about non humans and I suggest there's a problem there so that's one interesting way into the question.
• 43:06
  The other one again as with standard human ethics is to consider the perspective of the victim and to genuinely do that because it's very easy to categorize the victim in a certain way so that we can then ignore their perspective and I think it's important to consider them as an individual and with the limited tools we've got imagine what it's actually like to be in their situation and that can help balance think that as well.
• 43:29
  And where I think that gets you to is a situation where you know there are some thought experiments and some extreme survival situations where you can imagine a justification being built for you know harm your killing another being.
• 43:43
  And another sentient being but the in the vast majority of situations where we interact with non human animals today you know obviously farming looms largest in that picture given you know I think people may not be familiar with the scale but roughly I think it's 80 to 100 billion land animals per year and it's very hard to count the fishes but it's something around one and a half to two trillion fishes a year.
• 44:10
  They are farmed or caught and killed for human consumption.
• 44:14
  Wait are you saying more than a trillion a thousand billion fish?
• 44:18
  Yes.
• 44:19
  Yeah.
• 44:20
  80 to 100 to two trillion.
• 44:23
  So to put that in context we've got eight billion people on the planet.
• 44:28
  Yeah.
• 44:29
  Is that right?
• 44:30
  There are at least ten times as many non human animals.
• 44:35
  That's land humans on land alone.
• 44:39
  Yeah.
• 44:40
  Just to just to eat every year and then for other animal products as well but most of it's food.
• 44:47
  Right.
• 44:48
  And then more than 100 to maybe 200 times as many humans as exist on the planet in terms of the fish that we're killing every year in the oceans.
• 44:57
  Yeah.
• 44:58
  Yeah.
• 44:59
  I mean the scale is absolutely breathtaking.
• 45:01
  Well.
• 45:02
  Okay.
• 45:03
  So yeah, carry on.
• 45:04
  And when you look at that scale and you say okay how much of that is justified through a human need to survive the answer is end up being pretty close to zero I think.
• 45:16
  I think so for the vast bulk of it we can look at edge cases and we can consider some you know tough thought experiments and things around the fringes.
• 45:25
  But it's pretty clear that the bulk of that activity is driven by social norms marginal taste preferences traditions cultural preferences and ironically in the current context it's not even good for humans either.
• 45:41
  So the scale you talked about is interesting because you know one of the other things people will talk about as they're worried about the environmental crisis or the climate crisis is they'll say look it's there's just too many humans on the planet.
• 45:54
  You know we're maybe we're over populated we're using too many resources the planet can't cope in terms of fresh water and energy and look at all the emissions we're kicking out.
• 46:04
  And you can see that might be attempting mode of thought you say there's only one planet there's eight billion humans.
• 46:10
  Now population growth is slowing but you know we're still going to maybe get to nine 10 billion in the next few decades you know how can we cope with that.
• 46:18
  And it's put in a different context when you recognize the scale of animal farming is you've just laid out you know if we haven't got enough space for eight billion humans how the hell are we sustaining 80 to 100 billion land animals and then couple of trillion fish on top of that so the actual human footprint on the planet is a fascinating analysis.
• 46:38
  If you look up the our world and data site around land use which says okay here's the entire planet let's work about work out which part of that is you know actually habitable land because obviously some of it is impossible to live on.
• 46:55
  Yeah with once you've got the habitable habitable land left I think it's less than one percent of that land is actually lived on by humans.
• 47:05
  So it's a tiny proportion our footprint on the planet is actually pretty small so you say well hold on if we're only living on one percent of the habitable land.
• 47:13
  Why does it feel like we're you know burning the planet and using up so many resources and and the big chunk that is driving you for a station and deprecation of the wild and using up a lot of the remaining habitable land on the planet is agriculture.
• 47:29
  And that's not just animal agriculture is also arable as well but then you look at the fact that much of the arable plant agriculture is grown to feed the animals and you start to realize how much of the agricultural land is used purely for animal agriculture.
• 47:47
  So I think the rough numbers are this animal agriculture uses 78% of the available agricultural land but only produces 18% of the calories and something like 36% of the protein.
• 48:05
  And so so it's that footprint of the animal agriculture industry that coming back to your earlier point means actually there's a negative justification for doing this just from a selfishly human point of view it's it's not even a benefit to us.
• 48:19
  Not to mention the diseases of overeating and the you know the consequences of feeding antibiotics to effectively found animals and antibiotic resistance.
• 48:29
  Kind of kinds of other downsides to it but just sticking on the the ethics of it fall from the animals perspective for a moment.
• 48:37
  So you've got all this you got all these animals I've just got the list here of the amount of meat production globally in 2019 chicken and pigs chickens and pigs are neck and neck as the as by far the most consumed animals in terms of the tons of their flesh that humans consume.
• 48:58
  Then about half of that is is beef and then way down below at the at the you know sort of less than one tenth of the amount of chicken and pig are lamb goat turkey duck buffalo and then below that are goose rabbit and horse.
• 49:18
  So basically we're just important and there's an important thing to do on the ethical front which is we've got to convert that tonnage just how we know what to talk about animals as products and commodities we've got to convert that to lives individuals yes and when you do that fish jumped to the top of the chart and then chicken.
• 49:36
  I think this might be I think I might just be looking at land animals because fish aren't even in the top 10.
• 49:41
  So that must be all the animals chicken are so far out in front it's unbelievable in terms of actual.
• 49:47
  Well this is an interesting I mean I have I think it was actually Peter singer who was who I was interviewing who was making the point that you know if you want to think about units of consciousness then in some ways the people who think that they're doing the right thing by not eating red meat and you know I don't want to you know be cruel and kill cows.
• 50:11
  So I'm just going to eat chicken you know I somewhat mistaken because you can you can eat a half a chicken at a single sitting so you need to kill a lot more animals than just having a slice off the bomb of a cow.
• 50:25
  So yeah you get to this sort of deaths per meal ratio which is pretty morbid and unpleasant from.
• 50:31
  But I think it's important because as you say when you look at you know the big environmental problem with animal farming is it's sheer inefficiency so if you take a load of plants feed it through an animal you basically lose nearly all of it you know it's tended to.
• 50:45
  Shit and piss and blood and heat and you know hardly any of it gets used that's why the protein output is so low compared to the plants you feed into it.
• 50:54
  But that varies a lot by different animals so that's that's partly why cows are you know one of the most environmentally impactful because they're so inefficient at taking the soil wheat or even grass in one end and producing.
• 51:10
  So as you say many people for environmental reasons are saying okay look at the methane emissions from cows look at the land use look at the water use look at the pollution let's move to a you know a more efficient type of animal like a chicken.
• 51:27
  I guess the two points are one they're still breathtakingly inefficient compared to just eating plants ourselves which fortunately we can do.
• 51:35
  But the important ethical point exactly as you said you could be shifting your diet from to try and reduce the environmental impact by going from cows to chickens but you're actually causing you know it unimaginably more suffering and death by making that switch so.
• 51:51
  Yeah you're getting more kilos of protein out of each input of vegetation but it's requiring more minds to be to endure horrible experiences and then slaughter in order to produce that protein because it's just more animal.
• 52:12
  The other thing that I want to touch on though here before we leave this kind of thought experiment is.
• 52:27
  The sophistication of the animals sentience right you mean you pointed to this at the beginning of the conversation but let's let's look at this macabre chart of chickens and pigs comprising so many hundreds of millions of tons of flesh a year and then you've got your cattle and your sheep well below that let's assume for the sake of argument that sheep are idiots and that pigs are smart.
• 52:54
  I think there's there's some scientific basis for looking at the sociability of pigs the intellect of pigs they are you know they exhibit a lot of characteristics of that we associate with intellect and goodwill and sort of planning and aspirations and they certainly have they understand what the difference is between what they feel what the difference is between a flourishing life and a painful life denuded of all hope.
• 53:23
  Let's let's assume for the sake of argument that sheep are as dumb as they look and that they really live lives of extremely rudimentary planning and almost no sense of themselves as creatures throughout time but just you know that what it's like to be a sheep is just I see things and I smell things and then a minute later I have no idea who I am you know they're basically Alzheimer's patients all the way they they're just.
• 53:53
  They're just having experiences but they have no idea that tomorrow is ever going to come or that yesterday ever happened then if you can click your fingers and you can suddenly make lamb the most popular meat and you can eliminate pork is that a win.
• 54:17
  Well you can always make a bad things slightly less bad but there are always much better alternatives than that as well we'll come back to plants later as you said so I think the sentient is perspective doesn't necessarily tell us how richly sentient being is or whether or not we should grade them and how just as follow the science but I guess there's some points of caution here one is that the more we understand about non human animals and their experiences their consciousness and their sentience.
• 54:45
  The more conscious and sentient they seem to be it only seems to go well why I haven't come across any research yet where someone's done a study and gone oh you know there's actually actually less cognitive or experiential capacity in this animal that we thought there was always seems to get richer and richer.
• 55:05
  What is the actual capacity maybe but we we routinely find that animals are dumb like just the bumping up against the limits of their own planning cognition and so on like I mean it depends sometimes.
• 55:17
  I agree but I think in general you know our expectations aren't rained in and they're generally pushed in a particular direction and you know that's certainly true of chickens it's actually true the research I've seen on sheep you can see what's happened with you know octopuses.
• 55:33
  Corvids pigs as you've already mentioned so I think we need to really apply that prudent when we're thinking about you know what is their experience likely to be like as we go through this process you know I do think that you know there are likely to be animals that will have maybe a rich experience and some that will have a less rich experience and yes you know harming and killing the one with less rich experiences would be less bad but I said the other point of caution I guess again is to bring it back to think about the human analog because.
• 56:02
  Just different non human animals have different cognitive capabilities different abilities to plan for the future you know some might just be experiencing things moment to moment you know like a.
• 56:14
  A new baby others might feel it's existential angst or be able to plan for the future so I think that's another interesting cautionary point to say sometimes you might be able to find those analogs for a simpler sentient being.
• 56:27
  Within humans and let's think about how we might treat those humans differently to.
• 56:32
  So I yeah I just I think you're right you can find ways of doing things that are a little more bad but when there are obviously radically better alternatives available I'm not sure there's enormous value in you know tweaking things at the margins right and you're point about the difference the different human beings is that if it were the case that we could
• 56:56
  put ourselves on the back for eating more lamb and less pork that might also be the case that we should put ourselves on the back.
• 57:04
  For eating brain damage human beings instead of killing other people yeah as an analogy and again I don't want to sort of appeal to intuition here but I think it's a useful check on ourselves to say.
• 57:15
  You know hold on are we applying a fair consistent ethics here or have we got some sort of special magical mode of ethics that only applies for humans because we're special.
• 57:26
  The you know there's an interesting thing that I'm trying to get my head around here to do with you keep using a word experience and my intuition keeps going back to something along the lines of intellect planning cognition.
• 57:41
  And you mentioned Bentham earlier who famously said the question for about animal rights is not can it think but can it feel.
• 57:49
  And I remember speaking to Dawkins about this and he he was saying that actually counter intuitively it's possible that.
• 58:00
  That animals that we regard as being more stupid and therefore more justifiable to kill may have an experience of pain and suffering that exceeds that of more intelligent animals because if you think about it from an evolutionary point of view the intelligent animal has an additional.
• 58:19
  Way to protect itself which is its intellect like a human being is full of thoughts as well as feelings of pain and fear but he was just speculating he was saying we don't know this for sure but it's conceivable that if you're a rodent.
• 58:38
  Then your experience of fear and pain have to be dialed up a bit more intense than a humans do because you're not capable of reasoning your way out of danger you have to rely exclusively on your on what it's like to be you.
• 58:54
  And so I wonder whether or not you even think that intellect and cognition and planning and love and flourishing and a sense of yourself as a being existing in the world are relevant considerations at all in determining how we treat other sentient creatures or are they entirely.
• 59:13
  Or may they may in fact flow the in the opposite direction and we have to give more consideration to dumber animals.
• 59:20
  Yeah I think I think I'm rich and makes a really important point there could flow the other way I think they can be relevant but only in the way that they affect the experiencing.
• 59:30
  That's the way I put it so I think in some circumstances you know there are things that as a human you know I can have positive or negative experiences that I don't think sheep is likely to be able to have.
• 59:42
  So you know that might give me a little bit more credit in some aspects but I think Richard makes a really important point that actually are more advanced human cognitive capabilities can actually help us mitigate suffering you know we can meditate we can understand the context of something we can understand why something is happening and that might actually reduce our suffering.
• 1:00:01
  And again you can draw that back into a human context you know there might be something painful that a small child has to undergo where they actually suffer more viscerally than an adult because an adult understands.
• 1:00:12
  You know the benefits of the thing the doctor is having to do whereas the young child might not and there's also some interesting research even about the different potential.
• 1:00:22
  Experience of time that different non human animals might have and it's possible that you some of the insects for example might actually experience in a more condensed accelerated way per second than we might so again I think I think you're right we need to be very careful and very prudent here about simplistic assumptions that you know if you're a less intelligent animal you suffer less you may actually suffer more and there may actually be different.
• 1:00:50
  You know radically different modes of experiencing that we don't fully understand and I think that's still grounded in some way and that we do share an evolutionary history with other non human animals so I don't think we're talking about something that's completely an utterly distinct but I think the variety and that sort of follow genetic trees is very rich or we should be prudent about you know trying to estimate what those experiences might be like for non humans.
• 1:01:15
  So we said we'd come back to reading vegetables and trying to find out what the forces of protein are you vegan.
• 1:01:22
  Yes yeah yeah so I had quite a long journey to observe vegetarian from my mid 20s and then been vegan for about four years now so it took me a while yeah.
• 1:01:33
  Is it work?
• 1:01:35
  Yeah yeah I mean it's a decision I've never regretted never looked back on don't ever see changing and I'm super comfortable and it's it's a strange process to go through because I think the hardest thing and the reason it took me so long and it's almost embarrassing to say this was it was a social norm thing.
• 1:01:55
  You know I went vegetarian at that point for the same ethical reasons I'm explaining now you know I didn't want to needlessly cause suffering and death to other sentient beings but I stopped at vegetarianism because of that stage it felt like vegetarianism was a bit weird but it wasn't as weird as veganism you know that's really weird.
• 1:02:14
  And it's almost embarrassing to say in an ethical context that a social norm sort of help you back or constrain what I was doing but that's just the way it is for nearly everybody on the planet.
• 1:02:24
  But it's one of those things where you look at the decision before and it can feel a little daunting you know socially, behaviorally, habits changing practicalities you've got to work through but once you've done it from talking to many people who have gone vegan the vast majority find it was much easier than they thought it would be and it just feels like a natural.
• 1:02:44
  You know very obvious step to take and you reduce your cognitive dissonance you don't have this illusion that you've achieved some sort of perfect pure state because there is no ethically pure state you know even you know the strictest vegan is still unwittingly causing some degree of suffering and death in the way they live the lives there's no purity here to achieve but it does feel like you've taken you know a strong positive step to a more compassionate way of living.
• 1:03:10
  And what about those edge cases that people must constantly you know bang on about I mean you sort of pointed at it earlier when we're talking about me hunting the deer in the tundra but you know and saying that look wild animals it's not a it's not a terrific life for a wild animal either necessarily and a vegan a non vegan uses the users animal products in some ways that might be completely benign to sentient creatures like you know bees go around making their honey.
• 1:03:39
  I have the honey not a big deal. I don't think about as the bee. I don't think bees have property rights really.
• 1:03:46
  You might extend that to eating oysters the oyster probably doesn't like it very much but I don't know what it means to say that a mollusk likes anything or dislikes anything terribly much doesn't have a centralized brain.
• 1:04:00
  It's nervous system doesn't come together like like that. Where are you with those cases.
• 1:04:05
  So again there's a massive diversity of different sort of sentientist views on those and people will disagree.
• 1:04:11
  Personally I take quite a sort of prudent line on those things and that I tried not to participate in anything which involves you know use or exploitation of animals and I fail of course but that's what I tried to try to do.
• 1:04:26
  And on the boundaries of sentience I also grant you know some entities of benefit the doubt that others you know might not so even with the simpler insects or with by valves I still grant them the benefit of the doubt but there are are other people who are sentientists who are you know confident enough that muscles can't experience suffering that they don't think they weren't moral consideration so I think there's space for a diversity of views there.
• 1:04:47
  I guess my the one thing I would say is that when people think through these edge cases it just to watch out for our own motivated reasoning because it's very easy to sort of drift back into a position where you know we hope for an outcome and then we sort of try and line our reasoning up to leaders in that direction.
• 1:05:06
  So you can see that around you know honey production for example if people actually look at the facts of how that process works they might find that it's not quite the you know wonderful happy human be symbiosis that they thought it was when people think about you know another common case that comes up as someone might just consume venous in for example and they say look these dear live you know happy lives in the wild their shop cleanly and quickly without pain you know by professional and we want to do that.
• 1:05:36
  We need to do it anyway because they're overpopulated but again when you look into that situation and you realize that the dearest states that are selling the venison are also explicitly breeding more deer and then saying okay now they're overpopulated so come up with your guns and shoot them.
• 1:05:54
  And then you also do what I suggest earlier on and take the perspective of the victim living in the woods with its family again all of a sudden something that from a sort of motivated reasoning standpoint sounded temptingly reasonable you know the cracks appear pretty quickly so that's the overarching point I'd make even on some of the edge cases is let's just be prudent let's think about the perspective of the victims if there are victims.
• 1:06:19
  And watch out for that human motivated reason because we are very very good at it right yes granted but the fact that that motivated reasoning could be tainting our arguments does not itself negate those arguments I mean the you know I ate kangaroo that once a week and I use all the same arguments that you were just articulating about venison.
• 1:06:42
  But nobody's breeding more kangaroos and they really are a lot of them and they really are going to die one way or another in probably pretty horrible circumstances dying of thirst or whatever it might be and yeah I'm in a way in a way it's in a way it's saving them from a worst death.
• 1:07:01
  I wouldn't say that it's a moral act it may be but it's not why I think it's okay I just think it's okay because either way it's not a it's not a lot worse than the alternative for them and it's considerably better for me.
• 1:07:16
  I guess the other thing to consider is you know are there other alternatives so I think one of the things that quite often happens and this gets us into a fascinating space of wild animal ethics and thinking about you know there's vast amounts of suffering in the wild.
• 1:07:30
  Arguably even more than there are in our farms is either better alternatives and a typical human pattern tends to be if you see a problem in the wild whether it was over population or environmental destruction tends to be to jump to culling of some sort and this really fascinating work going on that says look if we actually
• 1:07:52
  grant moral consideration to these beings as well rather than just treating them as a you know a thing in the in the environment are there some alternative approaches we can use that.
• 1:08:03
  You know on the extreme end can be about in a genetic modification or you know radical bioengineering of the wild to reduce the amount of suffering but.
• 1:08:14
  And the more immediate space there are some really pragmatic safe straightforward things we can do around vaccines for non human animals to help them with disease sterilization or contraception programs that can manage deep population instead of culling and fencing and you know other sort of practical interactions with the wild.
• 1:08:35
  So again it's just another point of caution really is to say look if you think about the perspective of the victims involved in this process as you would you know with the human.
• 1:08:46
  You know it can lead you to some more compassionate responses because I don't think many people are thinking you know of human over population as a justification for culling hopefully there are some.
• 1:09:00
  You want to get into eco fashions but but but again I think it's an interesting check and a test to say let's think about the perspective of the victim is there a more compassionate way of solving this problem bearing might all the different interest and there may not be you know there may still be really hard cause and there may be some awful things we need to do but let's at least by those perspectives in mind.
• 1:09:20
  Jamie we've been talking here as if we accept that there is you know we've been sort of talking under the umbrella of the initial world view that I articulated about there being a kind of a natural order that is worthy of risk of some sort of respect.
• 1:09:37
  But it's just I don't want to let you go without addressing an alternative point of view which is a more traditional old fashioned world view that probably dominated until the 60s 70s maybe 80s which is the humans really are different that we are obviously unique in the animal kingdom we're not a part of a symbiosis we you know obviously religious people have reasons for believing this because they think that.
• 1:10:05
  Our souls were you know make us unique from other animals but even if you're not religious you can look at our tool making you can look at our going to the moon you can look at our buildings and our vaccines and you can go you know what we deserve we're deserving of a certain consideration that other sentient creatures just.
• 1:10:24
  And that gives us a certain entitlement not an entitlement to be needlessly cruel but an entitlement to like to basically the argument about well if you're going to discriminate against animals for being dumber than us then you might as well be eating brain damage babies that like that doesn't cut past master because there's something unique that humans are you a deserving of unique consideration that other animals aren't what's.
• 1:10:53
  What's your attitude to that yeah so i'm sympathetic to the fact that you know humans are different and and we are special I think we're amazing animals at the same time we are animals you know we do share an evolutionary tree with the rest of life you know we're not magically distinct as you say and there's some sort of supernatural way with the soul or you made an image of a deity but even under a naturalistic way of thinking you know we are we have amazing.
• 1:11:23
  Capabilities and we can there are things we can do that are.
• 1:11:27
  You know breath taking and phenomenal both for good and for real of course i'm but i would suggest that with those capabilities should come responsibilities and that includes responsibilities for those.
• 1:11:42
  With less power with less ability to shape the world and with less ability to you know look after themselves and have good lives and i think that philosophy is widely accepted not by everybody widely accepted within our species just because certain countries have.
• 1:11:59
  Distinctive power distinctive capabilities shouldn't but they factor give them more moral consideration than countries or cultures or groups that maybe our weaker or have less capabilities you know in a way that's capability argument you know most people within the human species would say well that's not really morally relevant what's morally relevant is.
• 1:12:19
  The capacity to suffer and to flourish not how powerful you are so and i just just we should take that approach that we would see as problematic within the human species and so well we should apply that across all sentient beings to.
• 1:12:34
  So that's how i'd counter it because i think when you dig into it and you say well okay what is it that makes human special it almost ends up begging the question because the answer is well because we're human and.
• 1:12:45
  Okay well yeah but what is it about that you know when you're talking about the young child or.
• 1:12:50
  Doesn't have these extra capabilities or you're talking about a disadvantage she doesn't have this power you know what is it about them and the answer is well they're human and to me.
• 1:13:01
  That's a you know it's a labeling.
• 1:13:04
  Rather than pointing at something that is deeply morally salient.
• 1:13:09
  But i think the main point would be with those capabilities should come responsibilities for others that have less power than us.
• 1:13:17
  Yeah right what do you think sentience is like i mean we're talking about moral philosophy sentience about ethics right but to pivot to like ontology.
• 1:13:28
  Why why are if we are animals why are animals sentient at all.
• 1:13:33
  So this is another area where sentientists will disagree about what sentience actually is so and we can get into some of the weird.
• 1:13:41
  Ranges of possibility there but my personal view and i think this is probably the most common is that.
• 1:13:48
  I see sentience really as a class of information processing and i don't mean that in the sort of narrow computer sense with hardware and software and so on i mean in the very rich broad sense of information processing.
• 1:14:02
  Of matter and energy interacting in patterns and flows so i think it's not all information processing i think it's just a particular class of information processing.
• 1:14:10
  And i think it most likely evolved sometime during the precambrian in quite simple animals because it proved useful in an evolutionary sense for an entity to be able to develop a very simple representation of itself of other agents around it.
• 1:14:27
  And it's environment as a whole to model those things and also to actually feel something positive about moving towards good things and feel something negative about moving away from bad things i think that that was probably the genesis of.
• 1:14:41
  The genesis of sentience was because it was evolutionally adaptive and then you know it's just gone from there and followed through and dizzying diversity of different types of sentient experiences until we reach the you know the portfolio of sentient beings that still survive the evolutionary process today.
• 1:15:01
  Why would it be evolutionarily adaptive for it to feel like something to be alive like you can imagine a simple animal doing all the things that a simple animal does.
• 1:15:12
  Without it actually feeling like something to do them it could just be like a sophisticated computer program that is following algorithms why does it have to feel something why does that pain i mean it has to.
• 1:15:24
  It has to have some sort of pain encoded in its information processing as a signal to not do this thing and to avoid circumstances in which it's getting hurt.
• 1:15:34
  But there's no reason why it should have what philosophers call the qualia that the actual you know the real visceral sense of being in pain.
• 1:15:45
  Yeah and i'm not sure whether it whether it is something that evolutionally required or not i think it you know it happened to happen that way but whether it could have happened a different way and we could be living in a universe of.
• 1:15:57
  You know entities today that are doing the same sorts of things but experiencing nothing you know the lights not being on you know i'm not sure and as you say in a way you know a thermostat is driven towards certain actions by its environment.
• 1:16:13
  But there's something distinct there seems to be something distinct about the processing that's going on in our minds and the minds of other sentient beings that is over and above the sensory processing and the muscular processing and even some of the basic decision making.
• 1:16:32
  So it's unclear at the moment and neurology and artificial intelligence research and neurosciences and i guess that's the raw material of what they're working on at the moment but it does seem like there are.
• 1:16:48
  particular types of information processing going on that seem to be correlated with as you said qualia consciousness and sentience and actually most of what our brains are doing doesn't seem to be conscious or if it is conscious it's conscious in a way that the bit of consciousness that's talking to you now isn't aware which is a free.
• 1:17:08
  So so so for many people and for some sentientists as well that sense of qualia as being distinct from the physical processing and the information processing leads them to suggest that it must be something separate you know sort of dualist way of thinking where we have a matter of the processing information processing and then separately there's this consciousness thing so some sentientists do think it's.
• 1:17:33
  You know something like that some sentientists are more dualist others think that it's possible that at a very minimal level any information processing might have some sense of awareness so even you know electron spinning around an atom might have some.
• 1:17:50
  Super basic awareness that's not a view I described you but you know you may have heard of panpsychism and people in that way I think of a super expansive.
• 1:18:01
  I guess mine is is is a bit more classical and I think a little bit more mainstream which is just it's a class of information processing that evolved for these reasons and this just happens to be what it feels like to run that class of information processing and a sense that qualia is something distinct and almost has this magical central feeling to us.
• 1:18:22
  So that's the way it is you know you might call it an illusion you might call it an epiphenomenon but I think it is just the information processing I don't think there's something distinct but other sentientists will disagree with me.
• 1:18:34
  Right and lastly you mentioned AI there does that mean that if if information processing is you know gets sufficient if as it gets sufficiently complicated it can it can feel like something to be doing it.
• 1:18:49
  What sentience is then you believe that sentience could or will emerge in artificial systems and if if it did then we would have to accord them the same rights that you accord the the bees whose honey you don't take.
• 1:19:06
  Yeah in concept in concept I mean it might be breathtakingly hard it might be very difficult you know we might struggle to assess it and infer it in the same way as we do with other non human animals but at least conceptually I don't see why not I don't see why you know ultimately we discover that sentience and consciousness is a class of information processing I don't see why that information processing can only run in a biological substrate you know what working it running something else as well.
• 1:19:32
  I don't think it would happen by accident because I think it would I'd have to come through some sort of pseudo evolutionary process that drove in that direction or we'd probably need to design it in ourselves and there's some people thinking in the AI safety and existential risk spaces at the moment trying to help us get ahead of that game and make sure we don't do it by accident.
• 1:19:52
  But in concept yeah I don't see why not but again most sentientists you know their priorities very much on the 8 billion human sentience and the maybe couple of trillion farm sentience and the quadrillion world sentience that are out there today but I think it's interesting to have a philosophy be future proved and and ready and to instead of it focusing on you know humans or animals or some other sort of arbitrary characteristic that we put at the center.
• 1:20:20
  You know the characteristic I think is of real moral salience which is sentience so yeah I'm open minded about the idea of artificial sentience.
• 1:20:30
  Jamie it's great to talk to you I'm going to go and eat some meat guiltily and have some honey and strawberries afterwards and your opinions will continue to bang around in my head thanks for thanks for being with us.
• 1:20:42
  It's been a real pleasure Josh thanks for talking and if I've nudged your guilt a little bit and helped you build the confidence to break out of those outdated social norms you know I've done my bit for the morning.
• 1:20:57
  Uncomfortable conversations is produced by Stefan Posthuma follow me Josh leaps on Twitter and Instagram for all the latest may your day be fruitful your mind humble your enemies generous and your conversations perfectly sparklingly.
• 1:21:12
  Uncomfortable.