Latest / The Speak Life Podcast / Philosopher Pressed on Outrageous Claim || SLP680

Transcript

Philosopher Pressed on Outrageous Claim || SLP680 · The Speak Life Podcast

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Insects matter more than people in the aggregate.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: That just sounds so non-intuitive, it sounds so outrageous.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: What what number, Matthew, of cockroaches is e is equal to me?
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I don't have an exact number in mind.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I think uh less than infinity, more than zero.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know the exact number.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_01: I do not think that you matter less than a bug.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_01: I think you matter significantly more than a bug.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_01: If it were a choice of saving you or an ant, I would definitely save you.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_01: If it were a choice of saving you or a hundred ants, I would definitely save you.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_01: It just turns out that there really are a lot of insects.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_01: There are I mean the exact numbers vary, but maybe a billion, maybe a hundred million insects in the world for every person.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_01: I think the Christian story fits somewhat well with my view.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_01: So one is at the central heart of the Christian story is a being infinitely above us in dignity, thinking that our interests matter so much that he was willing to become human and suffer and get tortured to death on a cross for the sake of us.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_01: So the central Christian message is that a being whose dignity surpasses ours by infinitely more orders of magnitude than ours surpasses insect, nonetheless cared deeply about us.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_01: I think that fits very well with the story on which we have duties to care about the beings below us.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_01: If God, who's infinitely far above us, has duty or cares about us, I think we have reasons to care about the beings who are below us.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: Hi, I'm Glenn from Speak Life.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: We like to see all things through the lens of Jesus.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: It's my great privilege to have on the channel Matthew Adelstein.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: He is the author of an article that went super viral, super hyper-viral.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: Insects matter more than people in the aggregate.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: It's been read, uh, or at least viewed, uh, over two million times.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: It's uh caused a lot of controversy and blowback, and uh I'm sure uh his mentions have blown up uh massively, and I thought I'd love to get him onto the channel and talk to him.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: When I said on X that I was going to interview Matthew, I said, what should I ask him?
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: And the first uh suggestion that people had as a question for Matthew is, what the hell, man?
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: So uh Matthew, thank you so much for uh for joining us uh from Princeton, uh where you are at the moment.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: Um what kind of reactions have you been having for the last week?
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: And what's it been like to be kind of at the center of this kind of storm?
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so uh, and thanks for having me on.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um I mean, it it so in the last week, I mean, I don't remember the exact day when it blew up, but I was kind of at a philosophy conference for a lot of the time when it was blowing up.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_01: So I just wasn't checking Twitter, you know, because I was you know at a philosophy conference.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_01: And so it was weird.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_01: I would like I went back like a few days later and then just noticed, you know, for example, Elon Musk had replied to my article and just ridiculous numbers of people had seen it.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um not what I was expecting.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um but yeah, it's been uh I mean it's been something of a surprise.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_01: Uh normally when I write articles, they're read some number of thousands of times rather than seen some number of millions of times in this case.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_01: Um uh but yeah, I so I think um yeah, I mean it's it's it's sort of an interesting experience to see like just everyone and their mothers on Twitter talking about something you wrote, many of them sort of commenting snarkly, many of them giving thoughtful replies.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_01: Um but yeah.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: Um what do you normally write about?
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: So if if we were to catch um your your um blog, your substack from a month ago, what were the what were the sort of things that you were uh sort of writing about?
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: What what are your areas of concern?
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_01: So it's somewhat eclectic.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_01: One of the things that I read about a decent amount is philosophy of religion.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_01: I think God exists.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_01: I read a reasonable amount about that, um, though I'm not a Christian.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I write a reasonable amount about uh I mean I guess recently I've been writing a reasonable amount about miracles um after Joe's conversion and various other things that have miracles have taken Substack by storm.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_01: So I've been writing that that a reasonable amount.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_00: Princeton is kicking off, isn't it?
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, Princeton, you're at Princeton, you're all going viral for various reasons.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_01: Who knew that the Princeton philosophy department would attract such uh such an interest from the outside world?
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_01: Um uh I I write a lot about just um moral philosophy, um, lots of other philosophical topics.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_01: I've written, for example, about uh uh factory farming.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_01: I think I think it's quite bad.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um I think animals, by and large, the ones we eat, are treated pretty badly.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_01: Um I've written about people, in my view, having obligations to give their money to effective charities that are saving people's lives.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_01: Um it's kind of an eclectic mix of like just whatever things I'm interested in at the moment.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_01: Often these are about philosophy.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_01: Um sometimes occasionally they're about politics, often they're about other things.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: I saw you uh in an effective altruism t-shirt in uh uh one of your pictures on, I guess, on Substack.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um is that a label you're you're happy to wear, effective altruist?
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: And and if so, like how would you define what that is?
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so I would describe myself as an effective altruist.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_01: What I think effective altruism is about is it's the central idea is that you should make doing good effectively a kind of important life project of yours.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um and so there are different ways of doing good.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_01: There are some charities that do much more good than others.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um the best charities, the most effective ones at saving human lives, uh, save lives for just about$4,000.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_01: And so the idea is if you're gonna be giving your charitable dollars, if you're really interested in helping as much as you can, um really you care about helping people rather than uh just feeling nice about yourself when you give to charity, for example, uh, then you should try to give your money to these really effective charities.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_01: Now, um, so one thing that I found unfortunate is like a lot of the responses on X have been like people have quoted my Insect article and been like, see, this is what the EAs believe.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think that's a very sensible reaction any more than pointing to like, you know, like the Westboro Baptist Church and saying, see, this is what Christian well, I I mean maybe that was an unfavorable comparison for me to the Westboro Baptist Church.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_01: But the point is, you know, like I the things I think on various topics are not like the mainstream EA view.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_01: The things EAs by and large do is give their money to effective charities, work on trying to make animals suffer less on factory farms in cases where just you read the descriptions and it's pretty uncontroversially horrible.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_01: So you read about the chickens that are crammed in these little tiny cages where they can't turn around, and you notice that EA actions have spared about 100 million of them from a cage each year.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you don't have to think, no matter what you think about insects saving 300,000 lives, sparing 100 million chickens annually from factory farms, uh, or from from uh small cages where they can't turn around, and this stuff looks pretty good.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_01: So I think it's unfortunate that like my like out there views have gotten tangled up with people's broader assessments of EAs.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_01: Um and then I guess the last thing I should say about this, many of my close friends are Christian EAs, where they think that you know the message that Christ uh preached very much about the importance of helping others, um, including people who are outside of our society, famously in the parable of the Good Samaritan.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_01: And so then, if, as it turns out, you can save the lives of foreigners for just a few thousand dollars by giving your money to effective charities, then that's a really good thing uh to do.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_01: So I don't think it's like distinctly secular, and I think it's much less controversial than probably the things that we're gonna be talking about uh for most of this conversation.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: And I do see um some quite Christian-ish um values highly regarded in the EA movement in in terms of the universalizing of a compassion ethic that calls on me to be sacrificial for the sake and the betterment of others who are beyond my my in-group.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um that's that's an incredibly kind of kind of Christ-like thing I can see.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_00: And and being anti-biased, which I I I see in your article as well as as something that's um very resonant with with a kind of a Christian worldview.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_00: And then we might get on to um what about human exceptionalism and and and is nothing sacred?
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_00: And we you know, we we can get into that with your article, but but before I ask you to kind of take us through it, is there an overlap in some of the concerns of your article and the concerns of effective altruism?
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: In I guess, I guess consequentialism might be a kind of an overlapping um uh area of concern.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: And obviously, um the effective part of effective altruism is about putting a number on things and being able to aggregate things, being able to weigh things and trade them off against one another.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: Um those those seem to be concerns that that overlap both with EA and your article, would you say?
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_01: Um Yeah, so I think often the criticisms are the things people say are similar, but I really don't think that either of these are good criticisms of EA.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um I mean, so EA does not require a commitment to being consequentialist.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_01: Um I have a friend who he's a deontologist, um, and yet he's still a big EA, uh, in that what EA is fundamentally about is trying to make doing good as effectively as you can a major life project in order to think that's worth doing.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_01: You don't have to think that you should always do the thing that has the best consequences, even if it involves violating side constraints.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_01: You don't even have to have any particular view about what doing good effectively looks like.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_01: You just have to think that insofar as you're in the doing good business, whatever your view is about what doing good is, you should try really hard to do that more effectively rather than less effectively.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_01: Um it's true that often this involves putting a number on things, and often involves like people like doing complicated math to figure out which ways of doing good are the most effective.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um but I think I think that this is kind of a sensible thing to do.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, uh just like a doctor in triage will try to treat the patients who are the most sick and who they can help the most effectively.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_01: Similarly, I think in terms of helping other people, we're in triage every moment of every day.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_01: There are people suffering and dying unnecessarily.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um so if what we care about is helping people the most we can, then we should look at different ways of helping people and how much good they they each do.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_01: There have been many attempts to do good uh that um have had been very well intentioned, but you know, the road to hell, as they say, is paved with good intentions.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_01: So if you're trying to do good, you really need to look into like how much good different different uh charitable activities do, rather than just throwing your money in some pot where you're not tracking uh very carefully how much good is that.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, and that reminds me of another resonance, I think, with EA, which which is kind of um, I mean, Jesus was very uh very hot on the the ways in which virtue can become virtue signaling.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um yeah, where where people give charitably, um, not for the sake of uh the end recipient, but but really for the for the sake of appearing to to do so.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_00: And uh and some of that quantif quantification that happens in EA and the just the desire to actually effectively help people is uh yeah, is is a major um majorly helps against the the virtue signaling thing, I I think.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, that's that's that's another area of resonance.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_00: Um let's get into your article.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_00: Insects matter more than people in the aggregate.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: And um shall I just maybe if if I just sort of give people what what a heading is and you can you can kind of um explain and and I really like the way that you um you laid things out here in in your article.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: Um but the the very first heading that you encounter is that you say 175 hours of death per passing second of human life.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_00: And here you're you're really just pointing to the the vast numbers of of insect life that there are in the world.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_00: Can you take us through that?
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_01: So one thing I want to be clear on, I do not think that you matter less than a bug.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_01: I think you matter significantly more than a bug.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_01: If it were a choice of saving you or an ant, I would definitely save you.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_01: If it were a choice of saving you or a hundred ants, I would definitely save you.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_01: It just turns out that there really are a lot of insects.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_01: There are I mean the exact numbers vary, but maybe a billion, maybe a hundred million insects in the world for every person.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_01: So if if you think about the scale, this is like uh, I mean, depending on the exact number, it's like roughly three Americas worth of insect, three American populations of people worth of insects per one human.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_01: And so you don't have to think that insects matter as much as people, or one millionth as much as people, to think that in the aggregate, insects matter a lot, and potentially even more uh than people.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_01: Um and I think this becomes a little bit more plausible when you think about uh so when you notice, it seems reasonably plausible that they can suffer.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_01: Um if you look at just the behavior of an insect, rather than kind of like just writing off their in interests entirely because they're kind of small and you don't actually feel empathy for them.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_01: If you try to imagine what it's like to be an insect, uh it doesn't it doesn't seem obvious that when an insect is starving to death or when an insect is getting crushed to death, that nothing of very much moral importance is happening.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, the though.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_00: Can can can you think yourself into the mindset of an ant?
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, famously Thomas Nagel talks about what it is like to be a bat, and and concluded that that even that jump from human psychology to bat psychology was was was just so incommensurate.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's just not even thinkable.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_00: Um does it even make sense to kind of swap places with an ant?
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so I don't think I definitely don't think you can like imagine exactly what it's like to be an ant, partly because we just don't really know, and partly because I think consciousness is the kind of thing where you can't know what another person is experiencing uh unless you yourself have undergone comparable experiences.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_01: Um this actually features in certain arguments for consciousness being non-physical, which I agree with.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_01: Um but uh but nonetheless, I think it it doesn't have to be like that you're imagining exactly what it's like for you to be able to ascertain certain features of another being's experiences and recognize that they're important.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_01: So you can see, you know, when a dog's in pain, you don't know exactly what it's like from the dog's perspective.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_01: Probably uh the dog's perspective is kind of like very different from yours in all sorts of ways.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_01: Nonetheless, you can recognize that something morally important is happening.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_01: Um and so sim I think we can do a similar thing with insects.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_01: We can see that something uh morally of note is happening.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_01: And yeah, I mean, so so as as the section title says, if you just look at how much time insects spend just dying, just in the times when like preceding death, either when they're starving to death, or dying of disease, or getting crushed to death.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_01: You just you you divide that time by the amount of times humans spend living in total.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um in total, it comes out to there being about 75 hours of passing insect death per one second of passing human life.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_01: And so like I don't think like it's insane to think like, yeah, 75 hours of insect starving to death, maybe yeah, that is like more morally significant than like one second of human life.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_01: Like if if I um if it if I get to extend my life a hundred seconds, and then I had to experience seven thousand five hundred hours of insect slow agonizing death, like I would not take that deal, you know?
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um and so then I think it it seems plausible just because the numbers are really large, um our intuitions are often unreliable when the numbers are much larger than we naively expect.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_01: That yeah, it looks like what's happening with insects is really morally important.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_01: And that's one of the things that if we're interested in uh uh trying to do good, it's one of the things that that we should be uh paying attention to.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_00: What would it take to convince you that that insects are happy?
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_00: Like if if they can feel pain, like like what's the what's the flip side of that?
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_00: What is the pleasure of a bee being a bee?
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_00: What is the the the pleasure of an ant being an ant?
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_00: And and does that factor into your equations at all?
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_01: Aaron Powell Yeah, so I think that it's good when insects are happy, it's bad when insects suffer.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_01: And then there's an empirical question.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_01: Do insects spend more time being happy or suffering?
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_01: And then there's also a moral question of like how do we uh treat the life of a being if it's moderately happy or moderately sad?
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_01: This gets into uh questions in population ethics.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um, my best guess is most insects have pretty bad lives.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_01: The reason to think this is that most Yeah, so the reason to think this is that most insects have extremely short lives.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_01: So insects are what are known as R strategists, meaning that they give birth to very large numbers of offspring, most of whom only live a few days or weeks.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_01: And so if you live like three days and then you starve to death, or you die of parasites, or you get eaten alive, it's somewhat improbable that uh that um uh you've gotten enough happiness over the course of the three days to offset uh the badness of uh the the pain of your death.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_01: If a person lived one week and then died painfully, like um, I think we would think probably their life contained more suffering than happiness.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_01: Um so I think a similar thing's going on with insects.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_01: Just one thing to say briefly is so I'm talking a lot about like pleasure and pain.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_01: I want to be clear, these are not, I don't think these are the only things in the world that matter.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_01: I think there's a lot more that matters than pleasure and pain.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_01: I think, for example, that relationships are a thing that matters a great deal.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_01: My guess is that insects don't have relationships of the right kind for them to uh get the great value of them.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_01: So if we're imagining what's morally important in insect's life, even if we're not hedonists, and I'm not a hedonist, uh, we will primarily just care about the amount of pleasure and pain in the insect's life, even though there's a lot more that matters in the world than just those things.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_00: I just I wonder whether we are transferring onto insect life um some quite human aspects at some points, but then denying to them human aspects at other points, such that it would be true that that if um if we as humans had as many offspring as insects had and they had lived such short lives as as we have, we would consider that to be a an abysmal tragedy.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_00: Um but on the on the plus side, you know, we we have um relationships.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_00: But but it seems like what you're doing is you're you're sort of you're affirming a very human-centered vision of pleasure and pain, and then denying the the relational side of what might be happening in in insect life.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_00: Um and I and also just wonder like when I watch a nature documentary, I don't I don't say this is a a hellscave of abysmal suffering, and I I don't consider it to be torture porn, even if I see like a mayfly, the life cycle of a mayfly it's so short, and then for one day, for one day they get to actually fly and be the thing that they are.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_00: Um but interestingly, it it's kind of it's how you frame the story and the music that's there, and David Attenborough comes in and gives gives the sort of the the voiceover, and there is a it's it's tinged with tragedy, but it's the actually the brevity of life in that moment um has us with glistening eyes wondering at the variegated nature of this this wild and diverse planet.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_00: And I and when I enjoy that, I don't think I'm enjoying torture porn.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_00: I I think I'm seeing something that's sort of beautiful in itself.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_00: How do you how do you respond to that?
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um so I certainly agree that like just like nature itself, so just you look at the trees and so on, like these things I think are very beautiful.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_01: Um I guess I I do think that uh the common sentiment we have towards nature, where we often think of it as in a way where we we almost think of it as this like kind of story, and so we th we primarily assess assess the story on its aesthetic qualities rather than considering things very vividly from the perspective of individual animals.
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_01: I think this is a mistake because I think the perspectives of the individual animals that comprise nature are real are extremely morally important.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_01: You know, there are about a hundred thousand fish per person, there are about ten thousand reptiles, thousands of mammals.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um there are huge numbers of creatures like your dog or cat who spend big portions of their life starving, running from predators, trying to rip them limb from limb, being eaten alive.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_01: Um and so I think I think it's a mistake to look in the the you know the dog or the you know some wild mammal, a rabbit, say, being eaten alive in terrible pain, and not consider this to be in some way a tragic situation.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_01: Now, this is not to make comparative, like maybe it, you know, I'm not saying like that uh it would be better if the rabbit had never existed, but I think we should at least think it is in some way tragic when animals in nature suffer terribly.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_01: And it's in some way good when they experience happiness and when they experience other goods in life.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_01: And then there's kind of a moral question of what we should do about that fact.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_01: And in general, I think the thing we should do is if there are ways that we can make animals suffer less uh in nature, um, we this is the kind of thing that that's that's worth doing.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_01: So, for example, there was an effort to rid the world of a particular kind of fly that would lay eggs in the flesh of live animals that would eat their way out from the inside, from the inside out, cause terrible pain.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_01: And we eradicated this in North America um because it was just like bad for uh like farmed animals.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_01: Um it's still around in South America and it causes large numbers of animals, extremely terrible pain.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_01: Probably the flies themselves don't live very nice lives.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_01: So I would be in favor of getting rid of those.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: guys in South America too.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_00: Yes?
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah?
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_00: No?
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_00: But okay, so so that is a kind of pest control where I guess you're doing a calculation at that point that the eradication of X number of parasites is worth it for the the saving of Y number of of mammals.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_00: Is that kind of what's what's going on in in how you're weighing up that morally?
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah I mean I guess I I my guess is it's also good for the parasites themselves, given that I think they have pretty bad lives if they're conscious at all.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_01: And so um my guess is like my guess is most insects have bad lives.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_01: And so I'm in in general all a sequel we have to be cautious about this sort of thing in favor of doing things that lower the population of insects.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_01: Just like if there was uh if there was a machine that was like creating these like dogs where they would live like one one week and then they would starve to death or be eaten alive or get devoured by parasites.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_01: I would think yeah we should shut off the machine you know it's like bad that that exists.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_01: Even if the machine was very pretty and you know David Attenborough could make a nice documentary where he tore the machine and you know made sort of uh dramatic statements about it and a nice British accent.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_01: I would still think no, you know shut down the machine because it's causing all this unnecessary suffering.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_00: But I I think at that stage there's there's a kind of an incommensurability in in comparing um a a dog on a fly.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_00: And and that may maybe you know w whether you think about it purely from an evolutionary point of view or from a kind of a theistic point of view or a theistic evolutionary point of view, that there are niches that various creatures find themselves in, whether it's from from uh you know the blind process of evolution or whether God is involved at some point.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_00: And that life is good and that if overall it was not good for that creature to find itself in that niche then probably it you know that niche wouldn't exist.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_00: And and probably those creatures wouldn't be in that position at all.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_00: And and whether you chalk it up to um kind of um evolution knows what it's doing, life finds a way or whether you chalk it up to God, it does seem like yeah there is a great diversity to the ecosystem and comparing a dog to a an ant or or comparing me to an insect is just something that that that almost can't happen whether you look at this from a scientific or a theological point of view.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_00: What would you say to that?
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_01: So I don't I don't think it's true that uh that any time some organism exists in the natural world that this is good.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_01: I mean for example smallpox used to exist it doesn't anymore and nearly everyone thinks that the efforts to eradicate smallpox were a good thing.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_01: In fact I think most people think that the efforts to eradicate that kind of screwworm from North America was a good thing.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_01: Now if we're asked to explain this I mean I guess uh my my view is that uh I think theists will need some explanation for how it is that the world that a good God who who had a good plan for the world from the outset how it was permitted to become so screwed up.
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_01: But then once you have some general explanation of how the world became so screwed up so that many features of the world disease, flesh-eating parasites, uh became introduced in the world, then there might also be animals that have lives that are sufficiently bad that uh it would have been better if they had not lived, because you know they primarily live we can then starve to death or die some other horrible horribly painful death.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_01: Now regarding um there was some other point you made but now I'm forgetting uh what you said.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_00: Well I guess I mean so you've made some powerful arguments for God's existence as you said earlier you're not a Christian but you are a theist um is is there a way of running the argument just from um okay the fine-tuning argument is good psychophysical harmony is good um we have strong reasons to think there is such a God we don't know what to do with all the suffering in this world but I but I I guess our intuitions about that being completely unjustifiable can be questioned because we we know God exists and so I don't see how it's justified for this evolutionary niche or this you know this creature to suffer in this way.
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_00: I don't see how that could be justified but I I guess my intuitions about that are wrong and this is a question above my pay grade um and and therefore that and therefore um these these creatures are not a waste of breath that that life is worth it for all of them in some kind of way if God exists.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_00: Like can you can you run the argument kind of that way like a given God I guess life must be worth it some way or another I don't see how it could be true but but I guess life is worth it.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah um so I think so I think I worry this argument would prove too much given the earlier smallpox example.
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_01: So you could similarly say look we shouldn't have gotten rid of smallpox because for some reason or the or another we know that smallpox is good in that otherwise God wouldn't have created it.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_01: I mean I I think that so uh I mean Christians think that the fall screwed up the world and then given that the fall screwed up the world I think the thing that they ought to think and I actually I mean I don't think the fall is what screwed up the world but I I think basically I think any theist I think the the most plausible explanation of the problem of evil will explain that will will you'll need some explanation not whereby every particular evil resounds to the greater good but instead whereby there's some greater good that comes from God permitting lots of unjustified evils.
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_01: So there's some greater good that came from God taking a risk and then that risk if things went wrong had the possibility of things going bad way.
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_01: So you know that famously this is what people say about the free will theodicy it's not like it's better if people use their free will to do evil things.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_01: It's that it's valuable for God to give us free will, even though this allows evil things to happen.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_01: And so then I think I think you'll you'll need some explanation of that to explain a world that's just saturated with all these instances of seemingly unjustifiable evil.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's much more parsimonious to think God has one general reason for allowing the world to get screwed up.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_01: I can tell you about my favorite theodicy along these lines um uh uh and then once you think that you won't be able to infer from some particular feature of the world that it it it's better for the thing to exist or that it that uh that God approves of it.
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_01: And I just think you'll have to think that because again we we think there are lots of features of the world that we'd want to get rid of if we could.
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_01: We w you know we're glad we got rid of smallpox and we want to get rid of malaria and so on.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_00: Right, right, right right.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_00: And it's a profoundly Christian thing to do to be the Good Samaritan and to ameliorate the the um the troubles that we see in front of us.
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_00: We are not to simply conclude that the guy by the side of the road um there must be a reason for him to be there and so who am I to intervene in nature?
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_00: Actually the Good Samaritan uh tells you to be an interventionist actually um and a compassion ethic reaches into situations to actually ameliorate them.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_00: So um I can definitely agree to that.
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_00: So in your article you you talk about just how many insects there are it's mind-boggling you talk about insect pain you have an intuition um that they do feel pain and you you put that intuition you that you you feel that they they might be able to feel pain uh at over 50% odds um you you then in uh the third little section you talk about the veil of ignorance now I'm I'm sort of familiar with the veil of ignorance from sort of John Rawls and kind of it's kind of a political idea really about like how can you justify an egalitarian liberal society?
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_00: And John Rawls says well you put yourself imagine that you put yourself behind a veil of ignorance you don't know who you're going to be in the society that you design.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_00: You could be a prince you could be a pauper so what kind of society are you going to have?
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_00: And obviously the um the clever thing to do behind that veil of ignorance if you don't know who you're going to be is to have a quite egalitarian society because you don't want to you know wind up as the pauper sort of thing.
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_00: And so so that I guess dating back to about 1970 was was an argument for justifying um egalitarian human societies um and you're using the argument here the veil of ignorance um to think kind of interspecies wide um to tell us about like what this thought experiment does um for you the veil of ign uh the veil of ignorance yeah so the veil of ignorance what was popularized by John and Rawls actually a version that came about a decade earlier from a Nobel Prize winning economist named John Harsanyi where he used it to argue for utilitarianism where he thought you'd be a utilitarian behind veil of ignorance.
• 31:12
  SPEAKER_01: There, I mean there are some assumptions that one one can disagree with but um yeah so the idea is just you imagine making decisions but not knowing who you'll be in society.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_01: So if I'm deciding whether or not you know to kill someone, if I thought I was equally likely to be the perpetrator as to be the victim of the act, I obviously would not kill them.
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_01: And if I thought I was just as likely to be the person who was helped as the person who was doing the helping, then just rationally I would want to help the other person.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_01: And so the thought is the veil of ignorance makes us tells gives us a glimpse, a window into what things matter impartially what things if we weren't like partial we would care about.
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_01: Now maybe there's more to ethics than impartiality um maybe and then impartiality and importance right so maybe you know lots of people think you ought to be partial towards your loved ones lots of people think that we have rights so even if something made the world impartially better you shouldn't violate it.
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_01: But it but I think I think it's at least a good guide to what like impartially matters in the world, what is morally normatively important rather than necessarily what we how we should act.
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_01: But then if you apply the veil of ignorance and you don't just arbitrarily exclude animals from the behind the from the veil of ignorance so you you imagine really there was a chance that you could have been an animal um uh then well the odds that you would end up a human are basically zero.
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_01: It's like I mean 100,000 fish per person, 100 million insects or billion insects per human, tens of thousands of reptiles, tens of thousands of amphibians.
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_01: So just like the odds you'd be a human behind the veil of ignorance are basically zero, you know so behind the veil of ignorance we would care a lot about trying to make the lives of insects uh go better.
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um no I should say one thing like often people think like if you talk about the veil of ignorance that you think this is what happened.
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_01: I obviously do not think that there was some like soul bank where they were like shuffled around and randomized.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_01: Yep and that's how and you lucky you you ended up a person.
• 33:05
  SPEAKER_01: The idea is that it's it's a thought experiment that gives you a glimpse into what's uh impartially morally important, what really matters in the world.
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_00: And I think on the societal level I I think I I get the veil of ignorance.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_00: I think it communicates um something about the preciousness of the individual and a universalizing of the compassion ethic that I'm meant to have like across persons.
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_00: I I think that's that's important.
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_00: I think one of the problems it it sort of presents just within the human realm is that I think most of my moral duties depend on me being the particular person that I am in the particular bonds of relationships that I that I already have.
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_00: I'm entangled so much that to begin my moral thinking apart from entanglement just seems to be starting in in the wrong place is is so before we get into the interchangeability among species, like what what what would you say about that?
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_00: Is my concern answerable from from within your system?
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_01: So I think the veil of ignorance, I don't think you should think of it as some like comprehensive thing that tells you what you're supposed to do in all cases.
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_01: Because you're right if you think that morality that part of what matters to morality is partiality where you're supposed to you ought to care more about your wife than somebody else's wife even if you can benefit your wife by a comparable amount or you can benefit somebody else's wife by a greater amount people think no you should benefit your wife even if behind the veil of ignorance you'd want to benefit her.
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_01: But so I don't think it's it you should think of it as just telling you what to do in all cases.
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_01: But I think you should think of it as as being a guide to um uh what matters impartially in the world.
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_01: So like what in the world is important?
• 34:52
  SPEAKER_01: Not what in the world tell gives you reasons to for act, but just to act but just like what in the world is impartially important?
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_01: In the eyes of God, how important are all the things?
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_01: Obviously those can come apart.
• 35:05
  SPEAKER_01: So your wife is not more important than somebody else's wife even though you have stronger obligations to her in the eyes of God, you know, they're they're equal.
• 35:13
  SPEAKER_01: And so then this is just supposed to be a guide to what impartially matters in the world.
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah impartial mattering is an important part of ethics it's not the only part and then if you think it's a good guide to impartial mattering then you end up uh thinking then then it starts to look like uh all you need for my argument is to think that yeah insects are just of the stuff that really matters in the world like a lot of it is what happens to insects just because there are so many of them you know 75 passing hours of insect death per second of uh human life yes but if I'm a king behind the veil of ignorance I can think to myself I I I can understand what it would be like to be a pauper and and and maybe I don't know the emotional and social and cultural difference and distance between the the the the the king and the pauper.
• 35:56
  SPEAKER_00: But but I can kind of do that.
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_00: When you start to use a sentence like what if I were a dog I I just don't think the I survives that transformation into doghood.
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_00: I just I think everything about I in that sentence as as the subject obliterates when you transform I into a dog.
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_00: I just don't see what part of me is left when I'm imagining myself as a dog.
• 36:23
  SPEAKER_00: How do you overcome that challenge?
• 36:25
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah so I don't think I could have been a dog.
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_01: I also don't think I could have been you or uh uh Bill Clinton or um Marilyn Monroe.
• 36:36
  SPEAKER_01: What you're supposed to imagine behind the veil of ignorance you're not supposed to imagine in some like that it's you in some deep metaphysical sense you being the person.
• 36:43
  SPEAKER_01: Instead you're supposed to imagine just not knowing who in society you are.
• 36:47
  SPEAKER_01: So rather than thinking that you're imagining like you becoming the person, you just imagine you not having the information about which of the people you are.
• 36:56
  SPEAKER_01: And then if you didn't have in information about which of the people you are so you you could only go on statistical facts to inform you of the probabilities of you having different properties.
• 37:05
  SPEAKER_00: Then you'd end up caring a lot about the most numerous beings in the world because odds are you'd be one of the yes I mean I I I absolutely think I sh I should have compassion and care for the dog and the insect and and and the creatures to to the degree that I can I'm just wondering yeah why yeah the this the subjective swapping of of uh of personality of consciousness with the other creature um yeah I can I can see all sorts of ways of thinking that animals matter and insects matter.
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_00: I yeah what why yeah why why go down this route of the of the veil of ignorance do you think?
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_01: Well so I think the veil of ignorance is like a helpful it's helpful for trying to figure out what impartially matters.
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_01: So like I think we're often blinded by the fact that we are humans, everyone we know is a human all our friends are humans, you know none of our friends are Mayflies.
• 38:03
  SPEAKER_01: But really just if you were taking if you're taking just the portion of subjective experience in the universe or on Earth at least that's human versus that's you know non-human animal the human, the share that's human isn't even a rounding error.
• 38:21
  SPEAKER_01: And so then when when you really internally vivid vividly think about that and you just think about like just how big a portion of it is non-humans experiencing stuff that does matter just like the pain of your dog matters then it starts to seem like what happens to the non-human animals on Earth really is important.
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_01: Nearly everyone is a non-human animal.
• 38:41
  SPEAKER_00: I have a friend who does stand-up and he had a joke which was like if I were an animal I would be a bug statistically and you know I think I mean that was obviously a joke not like a philosophy argument but I think I can you know that that that does get to something um so numbers seem to matter very much to you though like like the yeah the the number of such creatures starts to press on you and and is it's starting to make a moral case for you.
• 39:09
  SPEAKER_00: Like and and so is is that right like like why why does the why does the numerousness of a creature why is that indexed to their moral value or worth?
• 39:21
  SPEAKER_01: Well so it's not that any particular creature it's not like you matter five times as much because there are a lot of other beings that are like you.
• 39:28
  SPEAKER_01: It's that if you think that each individual one matters and then there are a lot of them there are many, many different things that are each mattering.
• 39:36
  SPEAKER_01: And so then collectively they'll matter an awful lot.
• 39:39
  SPEAKER_01: I I mean I think this is just intuitive in lots of contexts.
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_01: So if you compare how much does what happens in my life matter versus how much does what happens in the nation of England matter.
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_01: What happens in England matters more in part because there are a lot more people in England.
• 39:55
  SPEAKER_01: Now and so similarly I think if if insects matter and then there are a lot of them that that starts to matter an awful lot.
• 40:03
  SPEAKER_01: Many different instances of things that matter matter quite a lot to me.
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_01: Now so there's one view on which like you one thinks that maybe insects matter a little bit, but they matter categorically less than humans.
• 40:14
  SPEAKER_01: So just as no number of paper cuts could ever be as bad as one person suffering very intensely, you might think no no amount of things that happen to insects could matter as much as something that happens to a human.
• 40:27
  SPEAKER_01: And this I think is is the most serious objection the the to my view.
• 40:31
  SPEAKER_01: I guess I have kind of two things to say about this on which you think basically there are there are like lexical s some goods are are what are called like lexically superior to others where some goods just matter more than any amount of lower goods.
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_01: And so maybe insect welfare it's one of the things that matters but the welfare of humans just matters infinitely more.
• 40:52
  SPEAKER_01: So I mean here's here's a thought experiment.
• 40:55
  SPEAKER_01: So it turns out human lives they're just composed of a bunch of seconds.
• 40:59
  SPEAKER_01: You know a human life of you know sixty years, this is just consists of a very large number of individual seconds of human life.
• 41:07
  SPEAKER_01: And so if you think that each any individual second of human life can be traded off against insect life then um a whole human life can be traded off against human life, right?
• 41:18
  SPEAKER_01: Because if it's a question of uh so a person's gonna die, you can either add one second to their life uh or spare a thousand insects or a m a billion insects from intense suffering.
• 41:30
  SPEAKER_01: If you think you should spare the insect and you should spare the insect again and you should spare the insect again if you have the opportunity to continually do this, then rather than extending a person's life by 50 years, you should save a bunch of insects 50 billion times however many seconds there are in 50 years.
• 41:42
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so all this is to say that in order to think that insects can't be traded off against human lives, you also have to think that insects can't be traded off against any arbitrarily short moment of human life.
• 41:54
  SPEAKER_01: But then that doesn't seem right I mean if it were a question of extending your life by four seconds and doing so would involve torturing quadrillions of insects, torturing a number of insects greater than the number of people who had ever lived in the history of the world and then if you try to think vividly about what it's like to be an insect, like I don't know, like that seems way more important than four seconds of human life because that will imply that there's some number of years of insect wife that matters more than a person.
• 42:19
  SPEAKER_01: I also think that there are um so yeah so that I guess that's one thing to say I have more things to say about this but I won't.
• 42:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah yeah yeah yeah I yeah I mean for for me the the large numbers thing is is not really affecting the the interchangeability of of perspectives is is something that I I'm not sure can happen and and I and I think aggregating lots of low level um uh experiences probably that doesn't work.
• 42:54
  SPEAKER_00: There's there's there would be lots of ways of saying that um so I mean I mean China could defeat a small country like Fiji at weightlifting or Fiji could defeat China at weightlifting depending on how the competition's going to run.
• 43:12
  SPEAKER_00: Like you could just aggregate like that like get everybody in China to lift a weight add it all up and then get everyone in in Fiji to lift a weight and add it all up and China is is definitely going to win.
• 43:24
  SPEAKER_00: But if you have to qualify to get into the Olympics and you you have to be a weightlifter of a certain a certain strength then it is very conceivable that the Fijian champion is the one person who who made it to to the top and the and the the Chinese weightlifter made it to the top.
• 43:41
  SPEAKER_00: They can go head to head and Fiji can be can beat China no matter how many billion people being represented in that and that kind of thing.
• 43:49
  SPEAKER_00: And I I just think there are just lots of there are just lots of examples in which low levels don't reach a threshold and aggregating a lot of things that don't reach a threshold in any one Instance doesn't actually add up to that number going up.
• 44:04
  SPEAKER_00: Do you see what I mean?
• 44:05
  SPEAKER_00: And and and yeah, how would you respond to that?
• 44:10
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so it's certainly not true that like there for all properties, if you have lots of things that display the properties to a little bit, collectively they'll display the property to a greater degree than one thing that displays the property a lot.
• 44:23
  SPEAKER_01: Then their question is just is morality that way?
• 44:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um so is it the case that if you have lots of things that matter a little bit, uh that that matters way less than or that that'll matter more than one thing that matters a lot?
• 44:35
  SPEAKER_01: So um now, I mean I think there are a few arguments for this.
• 44:39
  SPEAKER_01: So one thing to say is just I'm not actually convinced that insects only matter like just some like infinitesimal amount.
• 44:44
  SPEAKER_01: I think maybe an maybe insects only matter a little bit.
• 44:48
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe they don't matter at all because they're not conscious, but maybe they matter like uh you know a reasonable amount.
• 44:53
  SPEAKER_01: Like maybe when an insect is in pain, it's not that different from uh if uh a human is in pain just in terms of the quantity of pain experienced, or if a dog is in pain, for example.
• 45:03
  SPEAKER_01: Um and so even if you think there's some threshold where basically stuff below the threshold gets rounded down to zero and stuff above the threshold, that's the stuff that can be traded off against each other.
• 45:13
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe insects are over the threshold.
• 45:14
  SPEAKER_01: I I think we really don't know.
• 45:16
  SPEAKER_01: And so in expectation, uh insects will matter a lot.
• 45:20
  SPEAKER_01: Now the other thing to say, so okay, I have three things to say about that.
• 45:23
  SPEAKER_01: So that's the first one.
• 45:24
  SPEAKER_01: The second thing is the thing that I said before.
• 45:26
  SPEAKER_01: If you think that no number of insects can be traded off against human lives, then you think that no number of insects can be traded off against individual seconds of human lives.
• 45:34
  SPEAKER_01: Then you have to think, look, if it's an issue of extending one person's life by one second or causing every insect on Earth and a million times that number to suffer intensely, that it's better to extend the person um that that uh the the one person x one extra second of human life matters more.
• 45:52
  SPEAKER_01: And I mean that I don't think is I don't think that's intuitive.
• 45:56
  SPEAKER_01: And it it's especially unintuitive.
• 45:58
  SPEAKER_01: Like I think we're a little biased against insects because they're kind of small and weird looking and gross.
• 46:02
  SPEAKER_01: But so if you I mean, in a in in uh the deep past, there were these very large insects that were like bigger than you or I.
• 46:10
  SPEAKER_01: And so if you imagine like a quadrillion of these guys like thrashing around in agony and being tortured to extend a person's life by one second, that would seem that would seem wrong.
• 46:18
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so that's argument two.
• 46:20
  SPEAKER_01: And then argument three is, and this last argument has been known about in the philosophical literature for a long time, and it's an argument that people, even the people who don't think that badness can aggregate in this way, often regard as a quite a forceful argument for badness aggregating.
• 46:34
  SPEAKER_01: So here's the basic idea.
• 46:36
  SPEAKER_01: Suppose we want to compare like one really one really great harm to a bunch of really bad harms, or just to one like very large harm to a bunch of very small harms.
• 46:44
  SPEAKER_01: So like one person being tortured versus some arbitrarily large numbers of people experiencing just a mild instance of suffering, maybe a paper cut.
• 46:53
  SPEAKER_01: Well, one person being tortured at that intensity level, that's less bad than 10 people being tortured at a slightly lower intensity level.
• 47:02
  SPEAKER_01: That's less bad than a thousand people being tortured at a slightly lower intensity level.
• 47:06
  SPEAKER_01: And you can keep going down this process, at each step of the way things are getting worse until the pain is so minor as to just be as bad as a paper cut.
• 47:13
  SPEAKER_01: And so then, because the worse than relation is transitive, which means that if A is worse than B, B is worse than C, then A is worse than C, from this it follows that some number of mild pains is worse than one very large pain.
• 47:27
  SPEAKER_01: This is a counterintuitive conclusion, but we know that our intuitions about large numbers are very often untrustworthy.
• 47:31
  SPEAKER_01: So I think there's some reason to discount it.
• 47:34
  SPEAKER_01: So in other words, if you accept transitivity, which means if A is better than B, B is better than C, then A is better than C, and you accept that if you make a pain slightly less bad and inflict it on a million times more people, things get worse.
• 47:45
  SPEAKER_01: It just follows as a matter of logic from those two that some number of mild pains is worse than one very large pain.
• 47:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um so there's there's there's this interesting like philosophical paradox where there are three things that each seem true and they can't all be true.
• 47:58
  SPEAKER_01: And then the thing I want to give up is that no number of small pains aggregate to be add up to be as bad as one very large pain.
• 48:06
  SPEAKER_01: Um but everyone everyone will have to give up something that seems obvious.
• 48:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I've I've I've I've seen that um that conundrum.
• 48:16
  SPEAKER_00: That's that's very interesting.
• 48:17
  SPEAKER_00: Um you you talk about bias in your in your paper, that we are we are biased against insects because they are small and they are you know ugly looking to our eyes and and and that kind of thing.
• 48:27
  SPEAKER_00: Um why is it important?
• 48:29
  SPEAKER_00: I mean I mean obviously that that resonates with some Christian Christian intuitions in me.
• 48:34
  SPEAKER_00: Um but what why why shouldn't we be biased against creatures, especially um if they are not going to help us in the struggle for survival?
• 48:45
  SPEAKER_00: Um what's what's wrong with bias?
• 48:48
  SPEAKER_01: So um I think if I mean if you're biased in some domain, that just means that your moral beliefs are influenced by factors that don't uh involve them tracking the truth.
• 49:00
  SPEAKER_01: So if you're trying to figure out what the r what the genuinely right thing to do is, then if you're very biased, then it'll it'll seem like it's it's sort of less conducive to to figuring out what the right thing is about morality.
• 49:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um so and we know that there have been lots of times in human history when we've made very serious errors because we there have been people who we didn't feel much empathy for, and so we've mis we've treated them really badly.
• 49:24
  SPEAKER_01: This is like the the story of human history of huge numbers of errors.
• 49:29
  SPEAKER_01: And so then I think we should be open to the possibility of the thing.
• 49:31
  SPEAKER_00: You gave examples of like the like the Holocaust and slavery, and that that that that's the sort of thing you'll you're thinking about?
• 49:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 49:37
  SPEAKER_01: Or I mean just for throughout a lot of human history, um uh, you know, as as you're fond of talking about, in the pre-Christian world, you know, like the the common sentiment was like go conquering other nations and treating people badly, that just like pillaging and conquering and this Nietzschean battle for conquering and strength and so on, that this was like morally justified, that you could do it um and and everything was okay.
• 50:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I I should say like so with the bias argument, um so I think what this illustrates, the fact that someone has a conceivable bias against some judgment obviously doesn't prove the judgment's right.
• 50:15
  SPEAKER_01: But if there are arguments for accepting some conclusion, but the conclusion's counterintuitive, and then you can show that there are reasons to think that our intuitions on the subject aren't very trustworthy, then I think that gives us a reason to think, oh, maybe like if if our intuitions aren't trustworthy, that's a reason to give up, to give up the intuition rather than to think the arguments are wrong.
• 50:32
  SPEAKER_01: So if you think the arguments I've given so far have some force, and you think there's good reason just not to trust our intuition about insects, these intuitions have a poor historical track record.
• 50:42
  SPEAKER_01: We know that basically uh like just if if you just increase the size of insects, then even though obviously this wouldn't be morally important, changing size doesn't change moral importance, this would change our intuitions about it.
• 50:53
  SPEAKER_01: If you made insects cuter, this would change our intuitions about it.
• 50:56
  SPEAKER_01: Um and lastly, we know our intuitions about large numbers aren't reliable.
• 51:00
  SPEAKER_01: Uh there was one study where they asked people how much they would pay to save 2,000 birds, and then to save 20,000 birds, and then to save 200,000 birds.
• 51:09
  SPEAKER_01: I think the numbers were they'd pay 68, um,$68 to save 2,000, 72 to save 20,000, and 70 to save 200,000.
• 51:19
  SPEAKER_01: So massive increase in the number helped.
• 51:21
  SPEAKER_01: No change in how much people are willing to pay.
• 51:23
  SPEAKER_01: Because we just are our in our brains are not meant to track like very large numbers.
• 51:28
  SPEAKER_01: We just don't have reliable intuitions about this.
• 51:30
  SPEAKER_01: So then I think, yeah, if if our intuitions about these things are just demonstrably unreliable in multiple ways, uh then uh there's much more reason to distrust our intuitions about insects.
• 51:42
  SPEAKER_00: So why, but then why violate those intuitions?
• 51:45
  SPEAKER_00: Um like like why why not go with the bias?
• 51:48
  SPEAKER_00: If the if the bias has gotten us to where we've gotten to, um if the if the bias has helped us to live and to survive and to pass on our genes in in that sort of way, why why why work against bias?
• 52:01
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's it seems it seems kind of woven into the struggle for survival.
• 52:05
  SPEAKER_00: We we've got in-group amity and out-group and enmity.
• 52:08
  SPEAKER_00: Like, and that's that's kind of it's it's the way of human civilizations, it is it is the way of warfare, you know, Rome spread via the the Pax Romana.
• 52:17
  SPEAKER_00: Why why should we look back at that and think that that was um in any sense wrong, if it did indeed bring a a form of peace, a form of stability that that helped Rome to spread and and gave some measure of pleasure and pain, even if you know the rights of the barbarians might have been downtrodden.
• 52:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um yeah, where where are you if it feels like you might be borrowing a sense of of kind of moral objectivity to to those uh to those so-called violations when maybe the Pax Romana and all the violence that was um attendant of the Pax Romana is justified in the end because it it it brought about rate of prosperity on on balance.
• 53:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 53:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um uh I mean I guess so I I'm a moral realist.
• 53:08
  SPEAKER_01: I think morality is objective, I think there are facts about it.
• 53:11
  SPEAKER_01: So I think one of the facts is I think it's immoral to go around conquering and pillaging and slaughtering innocent people.
• 53:17
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I mean, I guess I I can tell you about why I think moral realism is true, but if you think moral realism is true, and these are some of the more obvious moral judgments that are are more plausible, conditional on moral realism being true, then it seems like, yeah, we should think these were moral errors.
• 53:32
  SPEAKER_00: Um Okay.
• 53:37
  SPEAKER_00: So there therefore there are some things that are sacred in the in the so it it is not it's not a a cause of a just war to uh go in and uh subjugate a people, even if you've done the calculation and you think that in in the end the the pleasure versus pain payoff will on aggregate um come come out in in the in in the black?
• 54:05
  SPEAKER_00: Like uh So if if yeah, if you're a moral realist and you and you don't think that we should go and and slaughter other groups, is that is that weighed against by your your kind of consequentialist concerns to to prioritize on aggregates the the pleasure of a population?
• 54:25
  SPEAKER_01: Oh sorry, so I should say so while I'm so I'm a utilitarian, but I'm not a hedonist.
• 54:29
  SPEAKER_01: So I think there's more that that uh makes a person's life go well than just pleasure and pain.
• 54:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um uh like, for example, I think uh uh you know, I think I think relationships are of great valuable are of great value.
• 54:43
  SPEAKER_01: I think like if all my loved ones were swapped out by robots and I never knew, even if this had no effect on my mental states, I think that's this would be really bad for me.
• 54:52
  SPEAKER_01: Now I guess I mean you can imagine cases where some war ended up being conducive, uh being good by the lights of utilitarianism.
• 55:00
  SPEAKER_01: Um I th I mean there certainly have been wars like that.
• 55:02
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and then yeah, I think I think they're the right thing to do.
• 55:06
  SPEAKER_01: But I mean that gets us into more controversial stuff about about utilitarianism.
• 55:10
  SPEAKER_01: Um actually none of the things like the stuff about insects mattering.
• 55:15
  SPEAKER_01: Umitarianism.
• 55:19
  SPEAKER_01: And in fact, the person who one of the people who convinced me of this, he's not a utilitarian.
• 55:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um he's actually he's both a Christian and a philosopher and a non-utilitarian.
• 55:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yet he he was uh instrumental in convincing me of this conclusion.
• 55:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um that yeah, I mean, just insects.
• 55:36
  SPEAKER_01: Uh like what talk about mattering is so there's a question of what matters in the world, and then a further question of should you always do the thing that maximizes value?
• 55:45
  SPEAKER_01: Um and so this relates to what's the stuff that matters in the world.
• 55:48
  SPEAKER_01: And there are these further normative questions, you get to violate rights for the greater good and so on.
• 55:52
  SPEAKER_01: These are somewhat separate from things I was uh arguing in my article.
• 55:56
  SPEAKER_00: Sure, sure, sure.
• 55:57
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so having unshackled us from bias, um you get to uh nearly the conclusion, uh heading six is some number of insects is greater than one human.
• 56:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um do you do you think this is where people really started to kind of uh get their shoulders up around their ears and and and start punching out in the in the comment section?
• 56:19
  SPEAKER_00: Like um that that just sounds so non-intuitive, it sounds so outrageous.
• 56:25
  SPEAKER_00: Um what what number, Matthew?
• 56:27
  SPEAKER_00: What what number of cockroaches is e is equal to me?
• 56:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um I don't have an exact number in mind.
• 56:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um I think uh less than infinity, more than zero.
• 56:43
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know the exact number.
• 56:45
  SPEAKER_01: Um uh I agree this is counterintuitive, but I mean I guess I think the argument I gave before illustrates that we'll have to say some counterintuitive things.
• 56:55
  SPEAKER_01: So if we know basically this judgment there is subject to bias on multiple fronts, and that uh there are actually just multiple independent lines of argument that are point pushing against it.
• 57:07
  SPEAKER_01: Um where we'll have to say really weird things to avoid the conclusion.
• 57:12
  SPEAKER_01: And we know that throughout history there have been these, there's this very common failure mode, which is just counting the interests of beings who matter morally, rounding thinking either they matter not at all or they matter only minimally.
• 57:25
  SPEAKER_01: And so uh the people who we feel more natural affinity towards, they matter way more.
• 57:30
  SPEAKER_01: So if we notice that this is a very common error that people have made throughout history, I think we should worry maybe we're making the same error, especially in the case of strong philosophical arguments uh for thinking that we are making such an error.
• 57:40
  SPEAKER_01: I should say I don't think this is where people got off the boat.
• 57:42
  SPEAKER_01: I think people got off the boat at the title.
• 57:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um I think a lot of people, a lot of people who are being snarky on Twitter, I think just demonstrably didn't read the article.
• 57:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 57:51
  SPEAKER_01: Often they would say things that just demonstrated unfamiliarity with its content.
• 57:56
  SPEAKER_00: It strikes me that you're you're a um and I like this about you, Matthew.
• 57:59
  SPEAKER_00: I think you're a you're a provocative thinker, you're playful with ideas, um, you don't mind following uh a certain logic to a conclusion that that might be um profoundly unpopular, and yet you'll say it anyway.
• 58:13
  SPEAKER_00: And I I wonder whether that that kind of um that's how you approach sort of philosophy in in some areas.
• 58:21
  SPEAKER_00: And and you have a you have a lot of normy views as well.
• 58:24
  SPEAKER_00: I I know that as well.
• 58:25
  SPEAKER_00: But but I I think you you I think you've been remarkably resilient in the midst of a Twitter storm around this.
• 58:34
  SPEAKER_00: And I I I think you've so you've been you've been happy to say the controversial thing because you think that's where the logic leads.
• 58:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I just wonder whether actually one application of that mentality i is this philosophy.
• 58:50
  SPEAKER_00: That that there is you are you are following a certain moral logic to a conclusion that you you know you you won't back down from it unless you can be shown how the how the morality, how how the logic of it um doesn't doesn't really work.
• 59:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um have you have you always been provocative as a person?
• 59:10
  SPEAKER_00: Have you have you always um I don't know, in yeah, has has it been easy for you to be the outlier and and to argue for minority positions?
• 59:21
  SPEAKER_01: Um yeah, I mean I think I don't think I'm so like my sense is there are some people who they revel in controversy.
• 59:27
  SPEAKER_01: Like they really like to be like sort of being contrarian and disagreeing with people.
• 59:32
  SPEAKER_01: There then there are some people who just really hate it.
• 59:34
  SPEAKER_01: I'm probably somewhere in the middle where like if there are things I think are true, I I'm happy to say them.
• 59:40
  SPEAKER_01: But I don't like try to go out of my way to say things that are outrageous or say things in a maximally inflammatory way to piss people off.
• 59:48
  SPEAKER_01: Um at least I I hope I I mean maybe I do to some degree.
• 59:51
  SPEAKER_01: And if so, I think that's an error because I don't I don't I think one should try to be sober when discussing important ideas rather than just be like sort of bombastic and uh uh you know piss people off unnecessarily.
• 1:00:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um uh but yeah, I think uh I've just by and large generally been um not not that bothered by people disagreeing with me.
• 1:00:13
  SPEAKER_01: I mean you look back at just lots of ideas in the past that we now think are correct and very important, and they were regarded as very weird.
• 1:00:19
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, evolution by natural selection, like seem nuts uh and turns out to be true.
• 1:00:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um uh quant quantum mechanics, very, very strange.
• 1:00:31
  SPEAKER_01: Um, like just uh and so if we notice that lots of historical progress has been driven by weird and unpopular ideas, then I think we should try, we should strive to take weird and unpopular ideas seriously, even if we disagree with them.
• 1:00:45
  SPEAKER_01: Um uh and I think which is one of the reasons why I found some of the Twitter uh not to get too meta, but the the Twitter discussion frustrating, where it seemed like just very few people were sit thinking seriously about the arguments.
• 1:00:57
  SPEAKER_01: And it seemed like much more common was just people would see the title and make some dismissive sneer at it rather than uh think hard about the arguments.
• 1:01:04
  SPEAKER_01: And then I think like that's not a mindset that would have gotten you the right answers in cases in the past where the right view was bizarre or counterintuitive.
• 1:01:13
  SPEAKER_01: You know, um like if if you had if you're just always if you always sneer at new ideas that sound weird, you know, that would not have been a recipe for success in lots of cases throughout human history.
• 1:01:25
  SPEAKER_00: So what's the so what for this article?
• 1:01:28
  SPEAKER_00: So if if um if this argument wins the day, therefore we're going to approach life in a different way, in in what kind of different way?
• 1:01:39
  SPEAKER_00: What yeah, what are what are the stakes here?
• 1:01:42
  SPEAKER_01: So uh I mean I think there are a few things.
• 1:01:44
  SPEAKER_01: So like one thing is if you think that um insects matter a lot, then looks like insect farming is really bad.
• 1:01:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um so it's funny, why am why I'm often lumped with the like eat the bugs people?
• 1:01:57
  SPEAKER_01: I'm anti-eating the bugs.
• 1:01:58
  SPEAKER_01: I definitely don't think we should eat the bugs.
• 1:02:00
  SPEAKER_01: And primarily the insect farms, I mean they mostly feed bugs to farmed fish and then feed the farmed fish to people, and the farmed fish have really bad lives.
• 1:02:08
  SPEAKER_01: So like I think very anti-insect farming.
• 1:02:11
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so that's one practical takeaway.
• 1:02:13
  SPEAKER_01: The insects on insect farms are treated very badly.
• 1:02:16
  SPEAKER_01: Um uh they're often like microwaved and boiled alive uh and crushed to death.
• 1:02:22
  SPEAKER_01: Um they uh and I mean it there, there's like no serious upside to insect farming.
• 1:02:27
  SPEAKER_01: Uh it, you know, it like it's more expensive than other food that we feed to animals and we're for the environment.
• 1:02:33
  SPEAKER_01: So we're just torturing trillions of insects totally unnecessarily.
• 1:02:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um other things, I think it's not clear.
• 1:02:39
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's it's difficult to know what it's like to be an insect.
• 1:02:43
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, I think it makes sense to do more research into trying to figure out what it's like to be an insect, trying to see if there are things that we can do to improve insect lives, trying to figure out if uh insect lives are by and large good or bad.
• 1:02:55
  SPEAKER_01: That'll have important implications.
• 1:02:56
  SPEAKER_01: If you think they're mostly really good, then you want to increase their population, if you think they're mostly really bad, you want to decrease their population.
• 1:03:02
  SPEAKER_01: If there are things that we can do to raise the welfare of insects, um my guess is that's doing that much in that department is relatively tech infeasible.
• 1:03:11
  SPEAKER_01: I think it'll probably become a lot easier uh once we have much more advanced AI where we have just a lot more cognitive power and super uh superintelligence.
• 1:03:20
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I think it's more plausible that this this will be a lot more doable.
• 1:03:23
  SPEAKER_01: Um I think my best guess is at the margins, we want to do things to lower insect populations because they probably have pretty bad lives.
• 1:03:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um uh so I think I yeah, I guess those are those are some of the practical takeaways.
• 1:03:38
  SPEAKER_01: Um I guess if you're if you're if you're a per a person who prays, maybe you know, pray for the insects every once in a while.
• 1:03:44
  SPEAKER_01: It's one of the things I do.
• 1:03:45
  SPEAKER_00: Um well, yeah, yeah.
• 1:03:49
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, the the the duty of care that we have as humans to creation, I think, I think is um is so incumbent upon us um not to be needlessly cruel in in any of our um practices in in creation care and and to look at look after the animal kingdom and the fish and the birds and the insects and but but but from an unabashedly um human exceptionalist point of view, that that we do so because we have dominion over the we have God-given dominion over the world, that the world has wild potential, and that humans are a gift to the environment, are a gift to creation, which we we often turn out to be you know the environment's worst nightmare.
• 1:04:34
  SPEAKER_00: Um but we are we are meant to be stewarding creation towards a goal that it could not achieve by itself.
• 1:04:41
  SPEAKER_00: And therefore, um just yeah.
• 1:04:44
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, what uh what do you what do you make of human exceptionalism, for instance?
• 1:04:48
  SPEAKER_00: And and is is that just a kind of a is that just a slogan that that Christians bandy about that that doesn't really survive much scrutiny?
• 1:04:56
  SPEAKER_00: Or like how do you how do you feel about when Christians talk about human exceptionalism?
• 1:05:00
  SPEAKER_01: Aaron Powell So I mean certainly there's a lot that's exceptional about humans.
• 1:05:04
  SPEAKER_01: There's a reason that you know all my friends are humans, none of them are insects.
• 1:05:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um uh there's a lot that's great about humans, both intrinsically having to do with how the quality of lives we're capable of having, the kinds of virtues that we're capable of displaying, the kinds of relationships that we're capable of displaying, and also because of the good that we're able to do.
• 1:05:23
  SPEAKER_01: So like extrinsic effects uh due to our uh exceptionality.
• 1:05:28
  SPEAKER_01: Um I mean I think this is one reason why I think one human matters way more than one insect.
• 1:05:38
  SPEAKER_01: Um just I don't think that it's so extreme as to mean that one human matters more than an infinite number of insects.
• 1:05:44
  SPEAKER_01: And so then just because there's so many, you know, the insects matter a lot.
• 1:05:47
  SPEAKER_01: Regarding the thing about Dominion, um I mean, so I think so Tom Ha or not Tom Holland, sorry, uh Matthew Scully has a book also called Dominion.
• 1:06:01
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 1:06:01
  SPEAKER_01: Where that scholar, he was a speech writer for one of the bushes.
• 1:06:08
  SPEAKER_01: And he's a I think he's a vegetarian.
• 1:06:11
  SPEAKER_01: And he wro he wrote a book about he and he's a he's a right-wing Christian about uh the way we treat animals, talking about just it being very bad and really failing up to live to the values of dominion.
• 1:06:22
  SPEAKER_01: Um I think dominion, like parents have dominion over children in the sense that they have authority over them and power over them.
• 1:06:30
  SPEAKER_01: But nonetheless, they obviously have a duty to treat them well.
• 1:06:32
  SPEAKER_01: I think a similar thing with animals, and I think just by and large, we really are to a serious degree, in many cases, failing in that duty.
• 1:06:39
  SPEAKER_01: You look at the ways that the animals we eat for food are treated, the fact that 99% of them are raised in these factory farms, these meat factories where they're crammed in tiny cages where they can't turn around, they're subject to the kinds of mutilations that only a lone psychopath would ever carry out voluntarily, where you know chickens' beaks are sliced off with a hot knife with no anesthetic.
• 1:07:00
  SPEAKER_01: It's full of nerve ending, so it probably feels roughly like if someone cut off your nose.
• 1:07:03
  SPEAKER_01: Uh they're like choking on feces and ammonia all day.
• 1:07:06
  SPEAKER_01: Um I think even if dominion means that we have authority over animals, um, but it doesn't mean that we get to treat them however we we want.
• 1:07:15
  SPEAKER_01: And I think it comes with positive duties to treat them well.
• 1:07:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and then I I think yeah, I mean, I think I think that's true of how we have to interact with animals.
• 1:07:24
  SPEAKER_00: Do you worry that um if we put humans on a continuum with other species, such that the you know the the dial is turned up to 11 for humanity?
• 1:07:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um but the it's it's not a discrete break between the human species and the animal kingdom, and and um it's not an on or off switch.
• 1:07:48
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's it's more the dimmer switch in terms of what we are.
• 1:07:52
  SPEAKER_00: And and therefore a human is worth some number of mammals and and uh you know that there will be a greater number of vertebrates and an and you know a much greater number of of ants that a human is worth.
• 1:08:08
  SPEAKER_00: Do you worry that that if we are on such a a sliding scale among the species that when you just turn to the human population itself, that by the same logic you will treat different members of the human population on a sliding scale?
• 1:08:24
  SPEAKER_00: Because if it's about our faculties and uh uh about our you know abilities and capabilities as as a species that puts us on the sliding scale of the entire biosphere, why aren't we doing that within human populations?
• 1:08:38
  SPEAKER_00: And and and I, you know, it's it's dear to my heart that we have an equality before the law, which reflects an equality before God, that there isn't there is an equal moral dignity to every member of that population.
• 1:08:52
  SPEAKER_00: But it it feels to me like you're on more of a sliding scale, and I fear what that will do to human equality.
• 1:09:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so I think the phrase human equality, like there are versions of it that I agree with.
• 1:09:05
  SPEAKER_01: So human, all any human's interests count equally, just like I think any a human and an animal's interests, I also think matter equally.
• 1:09:13
  SPEAKER_01: We just happen to have vastly greater interests than the tip than the typical animal, certainly in the typical insect.
• 1:09:19
  SPEAKER_01: Um and I think we there's another sense of equality we ought to be equal before the law, you know.
• 1:09:25
  SPEAKER_01: It shouldn't be that some people have fewer rights and other people have more rights.
• 1:09:27
  SPEAKER_01: This you know is not a good way to run a society.
• 1:09:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um now, if the idea is supposed to be that humans are equal in the sense that any two humans are like equally worth saving, I guess I don't think that's true.
• 1:09:41
  SPEAKER_01: So if there is, you know, someone who's 90 years old and is gonna die in a week, or you could save a healthy 27-year-old, because you'd be advancing the 27-year-old's interests more if you save them, I think you should save the 27-year-old over the 90-year-old.
• 1:09:56
  SPEAKER_01: This is not to say their interests count more, it's to say that they have a greater total interest that you expand uh expand their interests more.
• 1:10:07
  SPEAKER_01: Um so yeah, I think I think uh so I would I would affirm what I think are the plausible versions of human uh dignity, of equal human dignity.
• 1:10:15
  SPEAKER_01: I I often think feel like it's it's like a little bit of a buzzword where like it's just not exactly clear what people mean by it.
• 1:10:21
  SPEAKER_01: Um but I think there are certainly versions of it that are true and important and good, and that I would uh affirm.
• 1:10:27
  SPEAKER_00: And when applying that to the the unborn, so that there's like there's 70 million abortions every year in the world.
• 1:10:35
  SPEAKER_00: Um there's only 60 million human deaths.
• 1:10:37
  SPEAKER_00: Once you get out of the womb, only 60 million of us die ex utero.
• 1:10:43
  SPEAKER_00: 70 million are killed inside the womb.
• 1:10:47
  SPEAKER_00: And as we've been talking about, it it sort of strikes me that like some some utilitarian instincts about this might actually um cause us to pay attention to that like a lot.
• 1:11:00
  SPEAKER_00: Like it even even if the life inside that womb is not intrinsically um you know equal to that which is outside the womb, you know, I I think personally it is, but even if you didn't think that, um utilitarians are are are um very future-oriented, right?
• 1:11:19
  SPEAKER_00: So that even if you just count it as a potential life, um we're killing a lot of people.
• 1:11:25
  SPEAKER_00: Seven we're killing we're we're killing more people in the womb than God kills outside outside the womb in that sense.
• 1:11:32
  SPEAKER_00: Um do do any of these arguments and as you're thinking about other life forms that that don't yet have the the same levels of consciousness that we have, does any of that sort of make you want to be pro-life?
• 1:11:46
  SPEAKER_00: I don't I don't know if you are pro-life or pro-choice, but but would any of it tilt you towards being more pro-life?
• 1:11:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so I certainly think once a fetus is conscious, it should be illegal to kill it.
• 1:11:58
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know the exact point where fetuses become conscious.
• 1:12:02
  SPEAKER_01: I think I'd want to look into that before making a law.
• 1:12:05
  SPEAKER_01: I think there are reasons to think that before the fetus is conscious, uh that uh abortion is not like there's not someone I think what what a person is essentially is uh a mind um or a soul rather than uh rather than an animal.
• 1:12:22
  SPEAKER_01: So I think prior, like if if my parents had gotten an abortion at three weeks, I don't think they would have killed me, because I don't think I existed yet.
• 1:12:29
  SPEAKER_01: Uh there was no mind there.
• 1:12:31
  SPEAKER_01: Um I think that there is so I think I think the following things about abortion, I think in general it's it's morally risky because there's some chance you're killing someone.
• 1:12:41
  SPEAKER_01: And you should only take things that are very morally risky if uh you have um a strong reason to.
• 1:12:49
  SPEAKER_01: Um so I definitely don't think it's the sort of thing that that should be taken lightly.
• 1:12:53
  SPEAKER_01: I think later abortions involve killing someone and should be illegal.
• 1:12:56
  SPEAKER_01: And I think uh that even abortions in the early stages, I think it's just it's good for people to come into existence um and live good lives.
• 1:13:06
  SPEAKER_01: And so for this reason, uh I think in general, abortions uh will be there's at least something bad about an abortion happening.
• 1:13:15
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly what the law should be, I think is is is more difficult to question.
• 1:13:18
  SPEAKER_01: I'm in favor I tentatively, I think early stage abortions should be legal and later stage abortions should be illegal.
• 1:13:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um could be wrong about that.
• 1:13:27
  SPEAKER_01: Uh um, but I I do like one, I do think like there's an attitude among a lot of people where they basically don't treat abortion as being like a morally serious thing, and they'll often make some dismissive comment about how, you know, uh uh you know it's uh it's a person's body, there and so it's their choice and not treat it as a morally high-stakes decision.
• 1:13:51
  SPEAKER_01: That I think is a very big mistake.
• 1:13:52
  SPEAKER_01: I think this is an important topic.
• 1:13:54
  SPEAKER_01: It's the kind of thing that's worth taking very seriously, whatever wherever one comes down, you should.
• 1:13:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:14:00
  SPEAKER_00: No, it it's it sort of came to mind as we were talking about because if you can think yourself into the mind, or if you can think yourself into the position of an insect, um, and we're going to grant that that kind of personhood to to insects, it it seems like um there should be there should be a great capacity for for um thinking about the unborn who are us, you know, who who are you know humans.
• 1:14:24
  SPEAKER_00: Um anyway, that was that was just a thought as we were as we were speaking.
• 1:14:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um you probably need to need to get on.
• 1:14:31
  SPEAKER_00: Um or do you do you have any any further time or or um yeah, maybe I can talk for maybe a half hour more.
• 1:14:40
  SPEAKER_00: Um, thanks.
• 1:14:41
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks.
• 1:14:41
  SPEAKER_00: That'd be that'd be amazing.
• 1:14:43
  SPEAKER_00: Um because uh my so my my Twitter thread um uh that I wrote was sort of um in response to um as as you're talking about sort of insects, um it did make me think of of Celsus, who was a famous critic of Christianity in the in the second century, um, who will will say he was he was struck by the anthropocentrism of of Jews and Christians.
• 1:15:13
  SPEAKER_00: Um and and it seemed kind of ridiculous to him, and and at points he would say things like, and and of course, we're only getting what um Orion is sort of preserving from from Celsus.
• 1:15:23
  SPEAKER_00: We don't we don't have his original works, we have him preserved in in quotation from from Oregon.
• 1:15:28
  SPEAKER_00: But as far as Oregon was was saying, Celsus would say, you know, in no way are humans better than ants or bees.
• 1:15:33
  SPEAKER_00: And and at points he would sort of make make a a comparison to um uh to insect life, which I I don't think even Celsus thought that ants or bees um were of the same value as humans, but just um what do the gods care about?
• 1:15:52
  SPEAKER_00: And they care about humans in their own niche, but but I'm sure the gods care about ants and bees in their own sorts of ways.
• 1:15:59
  SPEAKER_00: And so in my in my Twitter thread, I I just sort of went to in the in the same century um in Rome, the Apostles' Creed is being sort of hammered out, in which I I think here are some Christian intuitions that I have, and I'd love you to sort of comment on them, Matthew.
• 1:16:15
  SPEAKER_00: Um the second article of the Creed is all about the Son of God, Jesus Christ, God's only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried, um, he descended to the dead.
• 1:16:31
  SPEAKER_00: He ascended to the right hand of the Father, and he is seated at the right hand of the Father, and from there he shall come to judge of the living and the dead.
• 1:16:36
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's that's the sort of the bulk of the creed, actually.
• 1:16:40
  SPEAKER_00: And where that's um where I think those concerns um are kind of being brought to the fore as I as I think about your your article.
• 1:16:52
  SPEAKER_00: Um you've got you've got a doctrine of persons coming first.
• 1:16:57
  SPEAKER_00: Um the son of the father filled with the spirit is Lord before all things.
• 1:17:02
  SPEAKER_00: There are persons united in love before there is a world, before there is a consequence.
• 1:17:08
  SPEAKER_00: They're not using one another for anything else, but there is a goodness to this life of liberty, equality, and fraternity, you know, in eternity.
• 1:17:16
  SPEAKER_00: So that there's there's that kind of moral realm to who God is.
• 1:17:19
  SPEAKER_00: And then you've got the incarnation of Jesus, and um, if ever there was a decisive stamp of of approval on human exceptionalism, well, I guess God became one.
• 1:17:30
  SPEAKER_00: Um and and then the the life of Jesus is very much a life of suffering, which in scripture, interestingly, Jesus, Jesus uh it says in Hebrews chapter 12, for the joy set before him, Christ endured the cross, scorning its shame.
• 1:17:44
  SPEAKER_00: And it's it's kind of um Christ is doing a calculation.
• 1:17:49
  SPEAKER_00: He he is weighing up pleasure and pain.
• 1:17:52
  SPEAKER_00: For the joy set before him, he endures the cross.
• 1:17:54
  SPEAKER_00: And sort of Christians believe that, you know, all the the the suffering of the world is kind of concentrated down onto Christ as as he bears it.
• 1:18:02
  SPEAKER_00: So I can't make the calculation about whether life is worth it, whether suffering and and and pleasure will work out in the end.
• 1:18:09
  SPEAKER_00: But there there is a competent judge who who concluded that for the joyset before him, he could go through that suffering.
• 1:18:18
  SPEAKER_00: That that and therefore woven into the Christian story, and at the heart of the Christian story is suffering, and that there's it's it's a strange goodness to suffering at the heart of the of the Christian story, and then a vindication of his embodied human life, you know, forevermore at the right hand of the Father, as yeah, the the future is human, you know, on the on the Christian point of view.
• 1:18:41
  SPEAKER_00: And so the concerns that I'm seeing in the in the creed there are concerns for persons coming first, virtue coming first, there are things that are sacred, um there is uh a real distinct dignity to humanity.
• 1:18:57
  SPEAKER_00: And I guess the the Jesus story says for me that um pain is worth it and life is worth it in spite of immense pain and suffering.
• 1:19:08
  SPEAKER_00: And I just wonder if with those goggles on some of the concerns that that you're looking at look different.
• 1:19:17
  SPEAKER_00: Um so I guess you can respond in in any number of ways, whether poking holes in the story or whether um challenging me on whether my spectacles actually deliver the kind of vision that I'm that I'm actually um uh discussing.
• 1:19:31
  SPEAKER_00: But but yeah, how did how did how did my Twitter thread uh strike you?
• 1:19:34
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so let me yeah, let me say something about so I guess I'll primarily comment on uh I mean we could have a broader discussion about Christianity, uh, but my sense is that would be uh likely not I think it's unlikely I'll talk you out of it.
• 1:19:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um uh and I mean uh I think you know uh I think that uh I don't think that the things I've said, I don't I don't agree that they look worse from a Christian story.
• 1:20:04
  SPEAKER_01: So here here are some respects in which I think the Christian story fits somewhat well with my view.
• 1:20:10
  SPEAKER_01: So one is at the central heart of the Christian story is a being infinitely above us in dignity, thinking that our interests matter so much that he was willing to become human and suffer and get tortured to death on a cross for the sake of us.
• 1:20:33
  SPEAKER_01: So the central Christian message is that a being whose dignity surpasses ours by infinitely more orders of magnitude than ours surpasses insect, nonetheless cared deeply about us.
• 1:20:46
  SPEAKER_01: I think that fits very well with the story on which we have duties to care about the beings below us.
• 1:20:50
  SPEAKER_01: If God, who's infinitely far above us, has do or cares about us, I think we have reasons to care about the beings who are below us.
• 1:20:58
  SPEAKER_01: There are a number of passages from scripture that talk about the importance of caring about animals.
• 1:21:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um uh you know, there are the thing about the sparrows, I'm putting on the exact wording.
• 1:21:09
  SPEAKER_01: Um there's a passage in Isaiah that talks about how God is honored by the the wild animals, by the jackal and the owl.
• 1:21:16
  SPEAKER_00: Um doesn't mention the insect, but um uh Proverbs mentions the ant, yeah.
• 1:21:22
  SPEAKER_00: And uh we we are to learn from the ant, but yeah.
• 1:21:24
  SPEAKER_00: Especially sluggards.
• 1:21:26
  SPEAKER_00: They're they're yeah, their hard work is meant to is meant to uh teach all us sluggards, yeah.
• 1:21:32
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:21:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um now, so I agree that oftentimes there are there are many occasions when good comes out of suffering.
• 1:21:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um and uh in fact, I think this is an important part of the story of why God allows there to be so much suffering in the world that it's valuable for us to be able to suffer, to help one another, to forge these relationships with one another that potentially will last infinitely far uh in the afterlife.
• 1:21:57
  SPEAKER_01: Um so yeah, I think I think good does often come from suffering.
• 1:22:03
  SPEAKER_01: Um I think that uh in the case of so certainly my view is not that no instances of suffering have been fortunate.
• 1:22:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um that's certainly not a thing that Christians can think, where they think that you know the most important event in history depended on horrible suffering.
• 1:22:22
  SPEAKER_01: Um nonetheless, I think we you know, we think that uh w some instance of suffering, if it's unnecessary, or if it produces a good that's not commensurate with the degree of suffering, this isn't worth it.
• 1:22:34
  SPEAKER_01: So no one would say, look, Christ suffered on the cross, so don't give people painkillers.
• 1:22:38
  SPEAKER_01: No, like that would be silly, you know.
• 1:22:40
  SPEAKER_01: Um and so then similarly, if you think that the suffering contained in the life of an insect outweigh the goods contained in an insect, then you'll think that most insects' uh lives are potentially not worth living.
• 1:22:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um also, I should say that so there are like two questions.
• 1:22:56
  SPEAKER_01: So like one question is are insects really really important?
• 1:23:00
  SPEAKER_01: And then the second question is like once we think they're really important, what things make things go better for insects versus what things make things go poorly for insects?
• 1:23:09
  SPEAKER_01: Um and those can be disassociated.
• 1:23:11
  SPEAKER_01: So even if you think insect life is a great thing, we want to increase insect populations, that's consistent with thinking that insects are really important.
• 1:23:19
  SPEAKER_01: Um now I guess a last respect in which I think there's something uh fairly Christian about uh about caring deeply about insects.
• 1:23:29
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you know, you're fond of talking about how just how much Christianity has expanded the moral circle historically, has led just to very large numbers of people who were, you know, one once we lived in a world where kind of you know it was thought that permissible for the strong to dominate the weak, uh, that where you know might makes right, and so on.
• 1:23:51
  SPEAKER_01: And the the the Christian idea is like that moral considerations are like really important and should craft how we do.
• 1:23:57
  SPEAKER_01: By you know, God himself, the highest of the high, the king of kings, becoming the lowest in the low, getting tortured to death on the cross as a slave, in the traditional torture methods of slaves, that really you know upends the moral hierarchy in a way that I think is very consonant with caring a lot about beings that are below us in dignity.
• 1:24:16
  SPEAKER_01: The final thing to say is that um with respect to animals, uh whether they'll make it into the afterlife, I don't think this is something that the Bible speaks on definitively.
• 1:24:29
  SPEAKER_01: Um I don't I I certainly don't see a reason why if God if God's going to uh let people into heaven, I don't see a reason why he would, you know, snuff out your pet dog after a few years of life rather than permitting them to enter the afterlife.
• 1:24:47
  SPEAKER_00: Um The lion shall lie down with the land, Matthew.
• 1:24:50
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:24:50
  SPEAKER_01: And so then if you think God's like grand plan for the universe involves caring deeply about uh even redeeming the lives of the non-human animals, that that I think fits well with caring a lot about uh about animals.
• 1:25:05
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 1:25:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, no, I I I I totally see that.
• 1:25:09
  SPEAKER_00: And I think yeah, um I know you're a fan of of C.S.
• 1:25:14
  SPEAKER_00: Lewis.
• 1:25:14
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, he he once sort of talked about the incarnation and he said, you know, imagine the dog that is at your feet.
• 1:25:19
  SPEAKER_00: You know, would you ever become a dog in order to save dog kind?
• 1:25:24
  SPEAKER_00: Would you, you know, would you give up the relationships that you have in order to do that?
• 1:25:27
  SPEAKER_00: And and you know, the answer is of course you wouldn't, and yet, you know, God the Son became God our brother and and and that sort of thing.
• 1:25:34
  SPEAKER_00: But I I I think the the image of God, humanity in the image of God is the sort of the precursor to the incarnation.
• 1:25:43
  SPEAKER_00: You know, that the first Adam is the precursor to the second Adam.
• 1:25:47
  SPEAKER_00: Humanity are the kinds of creatures who somehow correspond to God in a unique sense, and therefore we were the pencil sketch and Christ is the oil painting, and and we we were the prepared place for God the Son to kind of meet us in order to you know catch us up into the Father-Son unity.
• 1:26:04
  SPEAKER_00: And so there is woven into that story of expanding the moral circle, there's also a story of um distinction.
• 1:26:14
  SPEAKER_00: You know, there's there's always there's also a story of um not utter continuity that such that you know Christ could have become any creature and redeemed the world through becoming a dog.
• 1:26:26
  SPEAKER_00: Um yeah, that the the story, even as it transgresses the the moral boundaries and and extends the circle of compassion, it's still it's still based on a nature to humanity, I think.
• 1:26:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I just wouldn't want to I wouldn't want to lose that.
• 1:26:45
  SPEAKER_00: Um yeah.
• 1:26:47
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so I so I yeah, I think it's plausible that Christians should think that there's some sense in which humans have some kind of elevated moral status and that we're made in the image of God in some unique way.
• 1:26:59
  SPEAKER_01: Um I guess the question then is uh, is us being made in the image of God?
• 1:27:05
  SPEAKER_01: Is this the sort of thing that increases our status infinityfold so that the creatures, you know, whatever the first being who was made in the image of God, whatever like the first generation of humans who was made uh in in God's image, did that being matter infinitely more than their immediate predecessors?
• 1:27:22
  SPEAKER_01: And there I think I think the answer is no, and I think that's not uh that's not what you should say what you should say.
• 1:27:29
  SPEAKER_01: I think that, you know, uh that um I mean, I I don't know that angels are made in the image of God.
• 1:27:37
  SPEAKER_01: I I guess I don't know exactly what you think about angels, but I think lots of Christians think like I don't know that angels are supposed to be made in the image of God.
• 1:27:43
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know that this establishes definitively that we matter like way more than angels.
• 1:27:47
  SPEAKER_01: You know, one person mat has m greater importance than any number of angels.
• 1:27:51
  SPEAKER_01: Like um uh certainly there's something unique in the Christian story about humanity.
• 1:27:56
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly what fall is for that, I think, is somewhat unclear.
• 1:28:00
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 1:28:01
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:28:02
  SPEAKER_00: Well, yeah.
• 1:28:17
  SPEAKER_00: Um I I think we are more discreet than that.
• 1:28:21
  SPEAKER_00: Um it it is more, yeah, we we are we are in our compartments and and therefore the incommensurability uh of of human you know valuing humans and valuing insects is uh is is not solved by cranking up the math to it to infinity, but but the the the sort of the threshold thing that we were talking about earlier, I think, that the the the there becomes an incommensurability not not because humanity is like infinity on a continuous scale, but that is just in a discrete class of its own.
• 1:28:58
  SPEAKER_00: Does that does that do anything in the in the argument?
• 1:29:02
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so I I don't think so.
• 1:29:04
  SPEAKER_01: So just when I was yeah, so if if it's a even if we're in a discrete class in order for this to establish that our interests matter categorically more than the interests of non-humans, so that saving one human is better than sparing any number of insects from any dreadful fate, I think what you'll need is some story on which um uh uh on which um uh there's there has to be some jump where at some generation the beings matter.
• 1:29:34
  SPEAKER_01: One being of generation N matters infinitely more than beings at generation n minus one.
• 1:29:40
  SPEAKER_01: Because, I mean, I guess if you if you buy evolution, which which I do, I think there are strong reasons that uh we evolved from uh yeah, that all life on earth evolved from uh a single common ancestor.
• 1:29:53
  SPEAKER_01: That if you go far pretty far back, we evolved from things there were we have ancestors deep in the past who are kind of like bugs.
• 1:30:00
  SPEAKER_01: So if you think no generation between that point and us mattered a million times more than the one before it, then we matter no more than a million to the power of n times more than those beings where n is the number of generations in the middle.
• 1:30:14
  SPEAKER_01: Um uh so yeah, I I think like ultimately, like here's what I think the view should be.
• 1:30:22
  SPEAKER_01: It's not that there's no sense in which humans have elevated moral status.
• 1:30:26
  SPEAKER_01: It's not that we're not made in the image of God or anything.
• 1:30:28
  SPEAKER_01: It's that basically other animals are in an important sense members of our moral community.
• 1:30:33
  SPEAKER_01: Other animals, their interests ought to be counted in a serious way when we're making decisions, and they ought to be counted in the same kind of way as our interests are counted when making moral decisions.
• 1:30:42
  SPEAKER_01: So it shouldn't be that when making decisions, the main thing you think about is what happens to humans, and then maybe occasionally you consider animals if there's sufficiently grotesque cruelty, but basically they're they're like a tiebreaker.
• 1:30:54
  SPEAKER_01: I think if you should think like they're part of our moral community in an important sense, where they're the source of significant reasons for doing or not doing things.
• 1:31:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 1:31:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 1:31:04
  SPEAKER_00: And I'd add to that that um there are two other biblical truths about the animal kingdom that that I think are important here.
• 1:31:12
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, one is in Romans 8, it talks about all creation is groaning, waiting for the sons of God to be revealed, waiting for resurrection, which will be a kind of a vindication of humanity in that sense, that you know, God the Son will will reign um in the f in the future, and all of creation is groaning up until that point.
• 1:31:35
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and I think what we sense when we sense that um not all is well in the biosphere, not all is well in insect life, not not all is well in the animal kingdom.
• 1:31:48
  SPEAKER_00: Um there is this this sense of groaning, it's fallen, right?
• 1:31:53
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's not what it ought to be.
• 1:31:56
  SPEAKER_00: So I think that's really important as we think about insect life and animal life more more broadly.
• 1:32:02
  SPEAKER_00: I also do, though, think that um they are enjoying themselves to some degree as well.
• 1:32:09
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, like in Job, you know, chapters 38 and 39, it talks about you know the horse is is is rejoicing in its strength, and the ostrich is rejoicing in its speed.
• 1:32:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um and it talks about um and it and it says even in Job 39 that all creatures um rejoice even in the presence of Bohemuth, and Bohemoth is like this apex predator in their midst.
• 1:32:32
  SPEAKER_00: And nevertheless, there is predation, um, they they live lives that are shorter than ours, that are more violent than ours.
• 1:32:40
  SPEAKER_00: Um yeah, there is an apex predator in their midst, and yet they can enjoy what they're doing.
• 1:32:46
  SPEAKER_00: And I I guess one one thing I'd I'd sort of love to kind of cast differently in in terms of your your vision is is it seems you have a very bleak vision for certainly the life of insects.
• 1:33:00
  SPEAKER_00: Does does that carry over to the to the to the lives of animals in the wild?
• 1:33:05
  SPEAKER_01: I think it depends a lot on just the details of the animal.
• 1:33:08
  SPEAKER_01: So the argument for thinking insects primarily have bad lives is that most of them have large numbers of offspring, most of whom die after a very short while of just days or weeks.
• 1:33:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um so I think a similar thing will carry over to fish, for example, or to amphibians.
• 1:33:25
  SPEAKER_01: I think it won't necessarily carry over to like larger mammals.
• 1:33:29
  SPEAKER_01: So my guess is, yeah, maybe the horse has a nice life on average, and then or elephants.
• 1:33:34
  SPEAKER_01: Lots of hardships, certainly, but probably more happiness than suffering.
• 1:33:38
  SPEAKER_01: And I think the opposite is true of fish.
• 1:33:40
  SPEAKER_01: I think fish have more suffering than happiness, same with insects, if they're conscious.
• 1:33:46
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I was I was at a farm recently with with the kids, and the go- I've got young kids, and they were they were looking at lambing, and um one of the lambs had had died um shortly after um being birthed.
• 1:33:58
  SPEAKER_00: And the the farmer kind of picked up the the dead lamb, picked, um, put it on the back of the truck, picked up a lamb from a different mother, um, kind of put it into the blood of the of the of the dead lamb and presented it to the the mother of the of the dead lamb as you know, here's here's your new child.
• 1:34:19
  SPEAKER_00: And and the lamb just kind of and and and the you know the the mother sheep just kind of chewed its cud and continued on.
• 1:34:26
  SPEAKER_00: And I I I worry that um in one sense we're we're bringing a real human exceptionalism into the equation.
• 1:34:36
  SPEAKER_00: If we are if we're thinking that those sheep are processing um a miscarriage in the same way that that you know uh humans process miscarriages, it's just it's just very different in the animal kingdom.
• 1:34:50
  SPEAKER_00: And and and maybe actually, in your position, is preserving more of a human exceptionalism than mine, because it's it's kind of taking um or or rather it's it's it's privileging more more of a a human-centered vision of the world.
• 1:35:04
  SPEAKER_00: I'll put it that way.
• 1:35:05
  SPEAKER_00: That that human concerns are now being put onto sheep and they're being put onto to insects as well.
• 1:35:11
  SPEAKER_00: And I I I just question whether whether that's actually what's going on at all.
• 1:35:16
  SPEAKER_01: I certainly don't think that like insects grieve over a miscarriage or whatever, the same way as humans do, nor do I think that about sheep.
• 1:35:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um nor do I think of that about dogs.
• 1:35:29
  SPEAKER_01: Um But I think uh so there's a lot of stuff that matters a great deal in human lives that doesn't matter in animal life.
• 1:35:37
  SPEAKER_01: Humans, we have these relationships of great value, we can display these virtues, we can learn interesting and valuable things, we can complete important achievements.
• 1:35:46
  SPEAKER_01: Animals can do none of these things.
• 1:35:48
  SPEAKER_01: Um maybe they can do a few of these to a small degree, but certainly to a lesser degree.
• 1:35:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um uh but there's still a lot that matters in insect lives.
• 1:35:57
  SPEAKER_01: Or well, sorry, in in animal lives, uh different things matter in different animal lives.
• 1:36:03
  SPEAKER_01: In insect lives, my guess is there's just little that matters beyond pleasure and pain.
• 1:36:07
  SPEAKER_01: And then my guess is because most of them die painfully after a short time, they don't have enough happiness to recoup the suffering that they experience.
• 1:36:16
  SPEAKER_01: Um but yeah, I definitely would not want to say that like the experience of an insect or of various animals is like similar to many kinds of experiences that humans have.
• 1:36:28
  SPEAKER_01: There are depths of emotional suffering that we're capable of experiencing.
• 1:36:31
  SPEAKER_01: But nonetheless, I think it's plausible that non-human animals, well, it's plausible with insects and basically guaranteed with other animals, they're capable of feeling physical pain.
• 1:36:40
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and they're capable of suffering in important ways.
• 1:36:44
  SPEAKER_01: That's I don't think that's the only thing that matters in the world.
• 1:36:46
  SPEAKER_01: But if they're experiencing, you know, millions of times more suffering than humans in the aggregate, then it starts to look like if that's one of the major things that matters in human life, pain, joy, and suffering, and there's so much more of it in the animal kingdom than in the case of humans.
• 1:37:02
  SPEAKER_01: And when you think about the badness of suffering, it doesn't seem like the kind of thing that's species relative, like a headache.
• 1:37:08
  SPEAKER_01: If if you're in pain because of a headache, the badness doesn't come from anything about you being a Homo sapien, it comes from the fact that it hurts.
• 1:37:14
  SPEAKER_01: So then if they're experiencing this just incredible amount of pain, maybe more pain in a week than all the pain experienced so far in human history.
• 1:37:22
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it takes less than one second for a population of insects to die more than the number of humans who have ever lived.
• 1:37:28
  SPEAKER_01: Um seems seems important to me.
• 1:37:31
  SPEAKER_00: Um Yeah, yeah, no, I can I can see why that is the case.
• 1:37:35
  SPEAKER_00: Final question, Matthew, you've been so generous with your time.
• 1:37:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um looking at the trillions and trillions of insects, and then there is just such a variety of animal life, bird life, fish life, and humans.
• 1:37:50
  SPEAKER_00: Um being in touch somewhat with their struggles and and pain and the brevity of their lives, nevertheless, do you think life is worth it?
• 1:38:01
  SPEAKER_00: All in all, do you think life is worth it?
• 1:38:03
  SPEAKER_00: If so, why, if not, why?
• 1:38:06
  SPEAKER_01: Um Yeah, I mean, so I think I think yes.
• 1:38:10
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I think that even being so I I think that there will be an afterlife where one will uh things will be infinitely nice.
• 1:38:20
  SPEAKER_01: And so in the afterlife, even if you thought that temporally on earth things are very bad, uh I think this will be outweighed and redeemed in the life to come.
• 1:38:30
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I think in addition that um uh well I think there's a lot of suffering, and my guess would be probably the amount of suffering so far in world history has surpassed the amount of joy.
• 1:38:42
  SPEAKER_01: I think there's the capability of producing really dramatic transformation in the world.
• 1:38:46
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, if you think about just how much joy and valuable relationships there could be in some kind of future state when you know we settle across the stars and you have like very large numbers of beings experiencing lives of great value across a million galaxies.
• 1:39:04
  SPEAKER_01: I think I think this would be capable of more than outweighing the suffering that's happened in human history so far.
• 1:39:10
  SPEAKER_01: Um so yeah, I think I think I think it has it it in total it'll it'll be worth it.
• 1:39:17
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know if it's if it's so far just taking a snapshot of just like the lives that beings have experienced on Earth.
• 1:39:22
  SPEAKER_01: My guess is there's been more suffering than happiness, but ha quick.
• 1:39:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 1:39:28
  SPEAKER_00: That's a surprising answer.
• 1:39:30
  SPEAKER_00: Like, yes, yes, both the both the the realism of of looking at the the groaning of this creation, but a surprisingly eschatological answer from you, Matthew.
• 1:39:39
  SPEAKER_00: That's that's really interesting.
• 1:39:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:39:41
  SPEAKER_00: No, lots to think about.
• 1:39:42
  SPEAKER_00: And Matthew, I hope this has uh really humanized you in the in the in the eyes of people and and yeah, they can see your heart in uh in these arguments.
• 1:39:51
  SPEAKER_00: And I I really appreciate like it's it's I I hadn't studied philosophy.
• 1:39:56
  SPEAKER_00: My my my undergraduate degree was was philosophy in the 1900s, and so I've I've forgotten everything about philosophy.
• 1:40:03
  SPEAKER_00: But um you you have a real ability to communicate very well, very simply, to stand your ground, to be provocative.
• 1:40:11
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think it's provo provocative for its own sake, but I but I think um uh I've I've seen you weather this storm in um in a quite robust um and and still cheerful way, and and I'm quite impressed by that.
• 1:40:26
  SPEAKER_00: So um well done you and uh yeah, thanks for thanks for reaching out and um making this possible.
• 1:40:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:40:32
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, thanks so much for having me on.
• 1:40:34
  SPEAKER_01: I saw someone on Twitter suggest like there was some image where it was like it had like a thing I typed and then it had like an insect typing it out.
• 1:40:43
  SPEAKER_01: Um so the joke is that you know it's it's like it's uh I'm an insect.
• 1:40:48
  SPEAKER_01: And then that would explain a lot.
• 1:40:49
  SPEAKER_01: But so hopefully this has dispelled once and for all claims.
• 1:40:53
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, you know, replace image generation.
• 1:40:57
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:40:57
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, thanks so much for having on.
• 1:40:59
  SPEAKER_01: I think this has been a very interesting conversation.
• 1:41:01
  SPEAKER_01: I've I've enjoyed your work.
• 1:41:02
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah.
• 1:41:03
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, it's been a very dressing.
• 1:41:04
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
• 1:41:05
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I'll catch you again online.
• 1:41:06
  SPEAKER_01: And people can find you where online, Matthew?
• 1:41:09
  SPEAKER_01: So I read a blog uh called Bentham's Bulldog.
• 1:41:11
  SPEAKER_01: It's at Bentham's.substack.com, or if you just Google Bentham's Bulldog, it should come up.
• 1:41:16
  SPEAKER_01: Um I guess I'm on Twitter as well, and I have a YouTube channel called The Liberation Under Ideal Conditions.
• 1:41:22
  SPEAKER_00: Very good.
• 1:41:23
  SPEAKER_00: Matthew, thank you so much for joining us.
• 1:41:25
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.