Morality in the Animal Rights Debate with Sam Harris

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Sam Harris, author of the New York Times bestsellers, The End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation, and The Moral Landscape, answers questions submitted by users on Reddit.com.
Hear Sam talk about everything from meditation to religion, and see if one of your questions got answered!

To purchase Sam's books, click the links below:
The End of Faith: http://amzn.to/gIudHF
Letter to a Christian Nation: http://amzn.to/eTemcG
The Moral Landscape: http://amzn.to/jAPZur

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Education

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• Sam
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• meditation
• religion
• morals

[vincentfdr]

This guy is a genius.

[vincentfdr]

Sam is absolutely right. I would eat a child, baby, or a mentally impaired human because it just makes sense. We eat animals that have just as much or more conscience as the retarded or young children and we are have more to experience in life than them. So I do not see why we shouldn't eat them especially when I hear their flesh tastes similar to pig flesh. Also if not children or babies because of their "possible" ability to grow to our "level", at least we could eat the mentally impaired.

[OrganicKing]

LOL what is this wellbeing shit he keeps talking about? this is almost like pseudo science cult!

[normalkuriboh]

@InSearchOfAnExit By the way, thanks for the intellectual dishonesty.

[normalkuriboh]

@InSearchOfAnExit Okay, let's do 'state of mind'. No, animals have no state of mind. They cannot have it, either. We do discover the primitive instincts of solidarity and altruism, but that just affirms the fact that evolution has bred into us morality. You are obviously a moron, as you have not fully punctuated any of your sentences. I have researched both sides of this. The human brain is simply much more developed, and therein lies thought. Furthermore, there was an alternative to slavery.

[InSearchOfAnExit]

@normalkuriboh debated this in what class exactly? not zoology for sure.

no conscience or state of mind? utterly ridiculous. the more we learn about non human animals the more we are amazed at their complexities and sentient capacity. if your statements are the result of debates in your class ask for a new and more informed teacher.

and so what if animal products play a massive part of the economy. this was the same argument used to maintain the african slave trade.

[InSearchOfAnExit]

and why do we need to kill them? we can live perfectly healthy lives without doing so which means we kill them for our own pleasure. that doesn't sound very moral to me. not our contemporaries?! f*^k off. what exactly qualifies for being our contemporary? you need to think about that.

[InSearchOfAnExit]

@hatemysis yeah, i too thought he'd be smarter about it as well. i'm sure he'd have issue with the slavery and the eating of say autistic humans. i'd like to hear his response to that though. he's usually pretty consistent and well thought through most of what he believes; expressing this consistency when he includes possible beings that could be smarter than humans (even on the level of us to bacteria) but he simply says we shouldn't eat them but didn't say weather they could eat us.

[AntiSpeciesistWorld]

@MrBrutus101 Because plants are not sentient and they don't feel pain and were not over-consuming plants, if we were then it would be an ethical issues since its effecting sentient beings who depend on oxygen but since were not it's not an issue and even if the whole world went vegetarian, we wouldn't need much more plants because even meat-eaters consume plants in anyways, the only difference would be there not consuming meat, there wouldn't be really any need to eat more plants.

[MrBrutus101]

Animal Rights argument is an inconsistent logic. Why only extend moral significance to animals and exclude organisms that provide oxygen for us?