 Save 10% with my code bobby10 on raw organic grass-fed and grass-finished freeze-dried organ meats from grassland nutrition. Link in the description box. Still, this doesn't justify eating factory-farmed steak though, does it? Why not though? But in and of itself. If you for example don't have enough money though and you are starving on your vegan diet though, then you can eat factory-farmed meat though. On top of that as an atheist you can eat humans as well because you don't have any god in your life. All right guys, welcome back to the channel. If you're new, my name is Bobby. Guys, today we're going to react to rationality rules with his video veganism will win, but you're wrong about why. Rationality rules is an atheist YouTuber and as far as I know, he's a vegetarian, not a vegan. Yes, rationality rules because it is rational to be an atheist. Let's have a look. He really has the moral high ground. Atheist discussing moral high ground. Can you see the joke? All right, so um, toss it to you. The amazing thing is I briefly considered what to order in light of having to face this moment and then I said, okay. Wasn't worth it. That's right, yes. Now why make it easy on myself? Why make it easy on myself? I once said of Sam Harris that he'd be remembered long after we're all dead, as if he's in the lofty category of Darwin, human Einstein. And while I certainly no longer believe this, I still hold Harris in high regard. He's played a crucial role in the development of my thinking and for that, he'll always have my gratitude. He's undoubtedly an extremely intelligent, insightful and well, moral person. Why are you atheists so obsessed with morality? Where does morality come from? You heard this question a billion times before, but you still cannot see it. You're going to die, close your eyes, and that's that. There is nothing after death. Remember, there is no consequence to what you do. There is no good and evil. Everything is subjective anyways. So what is morality to begin with? What do you base it on? On society? Does society dictate what moral is? If that is so yet again, why does it matter? Why do you care? There is no consequence to what you do. Just live your life and die. What's the reason? Or is he in his moral landscape? He champions the thesis that morality is about maximizing well-being and minimizing suffering. So consequent is well being good. If there is no ultimate good, if there is no right and wrong, why is well being better than suffering? Why? So I'm basically a consequentialist. And yeah, when he gave up on veganism due to dietary needs. I do eat meat. I was a vegetarian for six years and began to feel that I wasn't getting enough protein. Which is a premise our grant for sake of argument. What did he do? Did he attempt to figure out what exactly his body was missing? Say protein, amigas, iron or vitamin B12, and then source the animal products that can supply this with the least amount of stuff. Exactly. Because we know in detail what is found in red meat. We are so scientifically advanced. We can tell you every single atom that is found in red meat. Of course, we do not. Just look at nutritional science and how it is evolving. We constantly find new factors, beat vitamins, beat preformed vitamins, beat anti-nutrients and what not. You're going to tell the guy to simply eat oysters. No human being has sustained a diet based on oysters. And moreover, yet again, why is the suffering of the cow bad if there is no bad? No, he went straight for steak. Oh, bad evil. There is no animal with much of the same physiological apparatus as us. So what? What's more, he buys it from a restaurant. So it's very likely factory farmed. Now, this doesn't strike. So what? Yet again, even if you grant the premise, I'm going to use the same wording as you, and you are about maximizing human well-being. Go into a restaurant enjoying a steak, newsflash maximizes human well-being. Look at me as consistent with his thesis. So maybe Harris doesn't drink his own Kool-Aid. Or maybe his thesis needs revision. Or maybe Harris is a moral monster. Well, I think that I have. What is a moral monster? Do I have to repeat myself one more time? Morality in your worldview is dictated by society. So let's go back to Nazi Germany. Within that society, you would have different moral views. Are they therefore correct? A compelling reason as to why Harris is not vegan, as to why I'm not vegan. And indeed, as to why most of us are not vegan. And in this video, I'll do my best to explain it. That said, though, let me make clear from the outset that I'm not claiming to have an ethical argument against veganism. No, I'm merely going to provide two reasons as to why I don't buy the case for ethical veganism. How about human nutrition? To properly nourish a human being, you need animal food. And then controversial argument that most people subconsciously reject ethical veganism for one of the same reasons that I do. Honestly, if you don't have God in your life, you have to jump through all of those hoops. Yeah, I know, it's a tool order. But well, I'm suffering. It's a challenge. Let's see if I can serve it. He's showing carnivores that eat other animals. The day may come when the non-human part of the animal creation will acquire the rights that never could have been withheld from them, except by the hand of tyranny. The French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason why a human being should be abandoned without redress to the whims of a tormentor. Perhaps it will someday be recognized that the number of legs, the hairness of the skin, or the possession of a tail are equally insufficient reasons for abandoning to the same fate a creature that can fill. What else could be used to draw the line? Is it the faculty of reason or the possession of language? Humanity? But a full grown horse or dog is incomparably more rational and conversable than an infant of a day or a week or even a month old. Yeah, how about the potential that that toddler one day will become a flourishing member of society and the cow cannot be there? Even if that were certain, what difference would that make? The question is not can they reason nor can they talk, but can they suffer? Is suffering bad? That's my main man, Jeremy Bentham, dropping one off if not the most famous vegan quotes. And upon hearing it at the age of 18, I couldn't stop thinking about it. And yes, I know I was a really cool teenager. In fact, I lost a lot of sleep over Bentham's words until six months later I gave up meat and poultry entirely, becoming a pescatarian. Long story short, five years later I became a vegetarian and since then I've been progressively reducing my dairy and egg consumption, with today my diet consisting of about 95% vegan products. Give it a year or so and I strongly suspect that I'll be entirely vegan. But it's not because I find the ethical vegan arguments convincing. What a strange person. So yeah, why do you do that? The question is, why am I not vegan yet? This seems... No, the question is, why are you vegetarian for so long? It's like a fair question. You are an atheist as a set, you're gonna die, nobody will remember we all gonna die, everything just turns black, just eat steaks until you die, enjoy yourself. And it's certainly one I get a lot in the comments. No morals, no God, no ethic, who cares? In fact, it's such an interesting question that when pitching a series of topics to my wonderful patrons, they overwhelmingly voted for me to answer the vegan question. Though, one wisely warned that there's very little upside to this project, since I'll likely piss off vegans and lose a bunch of subscribers. And I think this is probably true, it's solid advice. And... advice I should follow. But as I'm certain my patron will appreciate, I think that taking a swing at some of the harder topics is the right thing to do. Come whatever may. Too many minds avoid this topic, because frankly, I think they're morally confused. And this includes my form. Just looking at this guy you know, he didn't need to tell us that he was listening to hours and hours of Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins and alike brainwashing himself. And you know what? Perhaps I still am. You'll be the judge. Okay, man. Drawing from Tyler Doggett's Stamford Encyclopedia entry on moral veganism, ethical vegans tend to stake their argument on two premises. With the first claiming that certain actions, killing animals for food we do not need, for example, are wrong. Okay, why do babies die when their third vegan diet? Why do we have a 84% dropout rate of veganism? Why do we have so many depressed, sick vegans on antidepressants? Can you please answer the question? Premise asserting that a mode of production or event, recreational hunting, for instance, instantiates the first premise. Schematically, this is X is wrong, Y involves X, therefore Y is wrong. Among the candidate values for X are causing animals pain for the purpose of producing food when there are readily available alternatives, extorting sentient beings, inflicting suffering or to give a human scent. Yeah, the premise is always that there are alternatives. Listen, man, just because the vegan cheese from the distance looks like regular cheese doesn't mean it has the same nutrients. No plant food has vitamin B12. We're talking about real, authentic vitamin B12, not some supplement gunk. No vegan food has vitamin D3, DHA, EPA or proper vitamin A. So there is no real alternative. Trick example harming the environment. Your whole example is wrong. And candidate values for Y are industrial animal farming, free range farming, dairy farming and recreational hunting, to name but a few. Now, my illustrations are going to focus on the dairy and egg industry. That is, vegan objections to vegetarianism. And it's for two reasons. First, it's because I'm a vegetarian. And a large point of my meandering here is to explain why I'm a vegetarian instead of a vegan. And second, because it stands to reason that a successful moral argument against the vegetarian position is going to simultaneously defeat the omnivorous position. It's so self-defeating and frustrating to listen to you, man. We already deconstructed that if morals are based only on society, society is ever changing. We could technically evolve into a society that only eats humans. Everybody that dies becomes food. There would be morally nothing wrong with it. If we accept it as a society that that is good. Remember, there is no universal good. There is no universal evil. There is no right and wrong. Essentially, everything is coincidental. So therefore, even your thoughts are just coincidence. There is absolutely no coherent thought right now being produced, you're just flesh. The first position entails all of the harms caused by the vegetarian position and then some. So what I've done is found an argument for ethical veganism that strikes a healthy balance between one, being a strong argument and two, resembling a typical popular argument. And in the process of attempting to still man it will account for the dialectic. In my opinion, too often vegan arguments are shut down due to certain details being undefined or misunderstood. And my hope is that this approach will mitigate these issues. To feed the world as it is right now with our mega cities, we do need factory farming. Why do we need it? Because plants do not have the nutrients that are contained within animal flesh or the organs or the excretions. Chicken periods! Do you get it? Plants do not have the same nutrition. Therefore it becomes necessary. If altruism foundation is not the strongest argument for veganism is as follows. Premise one, we shouldn't be cruel to animals. That is, we shouldn't harm animals unnecessarily. Premise two, the consumption of animal products harms animals. Premise three, the consumption of animal products is unnecessary. Conclusion, therefore we shouldn't consume animal products. All right, let's get back to his arguments. We shouldn't be cruel to animals. We shouldn't harm animals unnecessarily. As I already said, plants do not have the nutrients that are contained within animals. So therefore it is not unnecessary but rather necessary. Premise one is false. Premise number two, the consumption of animal products harms animals. Yes, animals eat other animals. You are atheists. You see human beings as animals. So therefore if animals eat other animals, we can proceed and continue to eat other animals. On top of that, if you take the Darwinistic worldview, we are the top of the food chain. We are the apex predator and therefore we can eat other animals because we're just animals. If animal products harms animals. Premise three, the consumption of animal products is unnecessary. As already explained, no, it is not unnecessary. Vitamin A, vitamin B12, DHA, EPA, vitamin D3, K2, the list goes on. Conclusion. Therefore we shouldn't consume animal products. Now this strikes me as a broadly convincing argument and the author solidified with a very compelling question. At which point could one plausibly block this line of reasoning? If you consume animal products, then which of these premises do you reject? Because all of them. Seemingly we have to reject one of these premises or go vegan. Yes, all of them. And I say seemingly of course because it's possible that one can completely accept the vegan argument and yet simultaneously be convinced of a mutually exclusive argument that supersedes priority. So all of them and health being at odds with veganism. Why the fuck aren't you vegan yet? I began to feel that I wasn't getting enough protein. Still this doesn't justify eating factory farm steak though. Does it? Why not though? But in and of itself. If you for example don't have enough money though and you are starving on your vegan diet though then you can eat factory farmed meat though. On top of that as an atheist you can eat humans as well because you don't have any god in your life. The argument is pretty simple. If we shouldn't unnecessarily harm animals and the consumption of animal products unnecessarily harms animals then trivially we shouldn't consume animals. It's that simple. Okay, trivially we should go out into nature and kill all the predators so no animal can ever eat another animal. Let's fix it. Let's analyze each of these premises and then strengthen them when and where we can. Premise one. We shouldn't be cruel to animals. That is, we shouldn't consume animal products unnecessarily. The statement that we shouldn't be cruel to animals is very compelling since rejecting this implies that one is perfectly fine with animal cruelty. Yes. But without the word unnecessarily in the forefront. It's not even cruelty. It's not as if humans actively torture animals for fun. Even though I've seen kids do that. It is about food production. The death is very quick. If you compare us killing animals to any other animal killing animals you will see that we are the most compassionate ones. This premise is just false as it's easy to conjure a situation and where people kill animals is justified. For instance, the poisoning of rats to prevent spread of disease. Killing rats with poison is without a doubt extremely cruel. It's a very, very nasty death but it can in certain situations be justified on account of it being necessary to keep children safe etc. And especially when other means of preventing proliferation are not as effective. The restated form of this premise however doesn't suffer this objection since it states that we shouldn't harm animals unnecessarily. Given this let's drop the form apart. We shouldn't harm animals unnecessarily. Or as my dear friend Alex O'Connor has more potently put it. That extraordinary harm and mistreatment requires extraordinary justification. Lastly let's switch the word animals with sentient beings as it's the capacity to experience feelings and sensations that's of specific relevance not the kingdom a being belongs to. Now for sure I'm being pedantic here and despite this change I will from here on use the words animals and sentient beings as if they're synonymous. But since we're strengthening the argument let's dot the i's and cross the t's. Premise 2 The consumption of animal products harms animals. On a literal reading this premise is just false. It's not the consumption of animal products that causes harm but rather the process of acquiring the animal product that more often than not causes harm. When a hunter cooks an egg Nobody likes a wiser it's not harming the deer. No he harmed the deer and the deer's kin if it had any when in an act of pure masculinity he equipped himself with an incredibly powerful and accurate weapon found a safe space and pulled the trigger from hundreds of feet away. Isn't the gun a people? Likewise when someone such as myself cooks and eats an egg I don't harm the chicken. No I harm the chicken when in an act of pure masculinity I paid someone else millions of feet away to harvest the chicken period for me. So it's not the consumption of animal products in and of itself that causes harm but rather the deliberate acquisition of products from sentient beings that causes harm. Now I use the words deliberate acquisition because it carries the connotation of consciously and intentionally obtaining the product and not necessarily with currency. If for instance I did some gardening for someone on the assumption that they're cook me fish and chips as payment as I said if you don't have god you have to go through all of those mental hoops payment then make no mistake about it I would be deliberately acquiring the fish but suppose instead that I found a dead fish washed up on the beach and decided to take it home and eat it in this case is it fair to say that I harm the fish or deliberately obtain but who harmed that fish maybe it was a bigger fish maybe we should start an investigation send the police into the ocean well as far as I'm convinced the answer is no and so I just don't see an explicit issue with such an act to be clear I've never done this but given my understanding of ethical veganism this seems perfectly consistent with it just so long of course I'm not deliberately walking along the beach to find dead fish now some will argue that taking the fish harms other animals that would have otherwise consumed the fish and while this objection is worth considering I think it's ultimately nullified by the fact that vegans also harm surrounding animals when they forcibly occupy land to produce and consume crops thus since both cases suffer the same objection within the context of comparing the two cases this objection can be ignored to get back on the rails the question is does the deliberate acquisition of products from sentient beings harm sentient beings at a glance the answer is obviously yes when I buy a pint of milk I pay for an industry to harm sentient beings however there are some interesting objections that are worthwhile mentioning for instance in order to acquire the milk it's necessary to ensure that the cow receives adequate shelter and sustains which in the state of nature they often don't from this it can be argued then that on average farming increases the well being left and right here what's more if it wasn't for humans yes exactly man on farms animals live like they are in heaven they have access to food 24-7 in abundance and on top of that they do have shelter they are super safe in nature they would be eaten from the butt hole up oh they pull him by his penis or what are they doing I am assuming animal projects that billions of animals wouldn't have existed and thus experienced any happiness in the first place now while a fair few find these objections compelling I'm not among them we've never applied these objections to humans that is we'd never say that since we provide shelter and sustenance to other humans we can confine them and end their life prematurely yes because they're not humans although if we didn't eat other humans they would never experience any happiness in the first place and once human comparison comes up the dialectic spirals in a thousand different directions and so we're put a pin in it here that said if there's enough objection to this premise I'll revisit it but honestly I think it's philosophical masturbation to argue that the delivery alright guys and this sit I'm gonna cut it off here this guy is in love with his own voice he can listen to himself for hours I personally cannot the video is long enough as it is if you want me to continue right now we at minute 13 of the video and the video is 31 minutes long if you want me to continue then I will for today I'm shutting it down if you like the video leave it a thumbs up if you haven't subscribed already guys please do so if you want to support this channel all the links are in the description box below thank you so much for your support and as always may god bless you all yes you too atheists much love and peace