 If animals have the ability to suffer, then is it immoral to eat meat? What is the moral status of factory farming? If it's immoral to eat meat, then what is the scale of the atrocity being committed every year as billions of animals are slaughtered and eaten by humans? These are the questions I'm trying to answer on the 81st episode of Patterson in Pursuit. Hello my friends and welcome to the 81st episode of Patterson in Pursuit. This week we're talking about a doozy of a topic. Is it immoral to eat meat? I know there are some passionate views out there. Many of you are probably vegetarians, and many of you are probably carnivores. I'm sure we have the whole spectrum covered on this show. But it's a topic I've not really addressed at all, and so I've brought Dr. Michael Hummer back on the show, who has recently written a four-part series of dialogues on this particular topic. The articles are called Dialogues on Ethical Vegetarianism, and they will be linked in the show notes page this week, stevedashpatterson.com, slash 81. Dr. Hummer is back on the show in episode 59, where we talked about approaching infinity. So we've got a completely different topic for us to discuss today. We didn't only talk about vegetarianism and factory farming, we also near the end talked about empathy, and whether or not it's normal to feel a certain way in particular circumstances, and what the connection is between empathy and morality. We even got into a little tiny bit discussing free will and how it ties into morality. So if you're interested in this topic, I hope that you enjoy this episode. Dr. Michael Hummer, welcome back to Patterson in Pursuit. It's great to have you back on the show to talk about the ethics of eating meat, which I consider to be one of the most difficult topics out there. But as you just told me a minute ago, you think it's not so difficult. So I'm so glad to have you to talk about this, because you've recently been working on releasing content on this particular topic. Yes, thanks for having me. Where I kind of want to start with you, we might parallel a bit the dialogues, but I kind of want to start at the beginning and then we'll, I think we'll get into some deeper topics. So let me give you my impression of the topic and why it's so difficult for me, and then you can help explain to me what pieces of the puzzle I'm missing. So I have this general desire to not be in pain and to not undergo any suffering for myself. And I look around and I see other creatures like other humans, and I assume that they're like me. I think that they act kind of as I act. You know, if I get poked with something, I say, ouch. If they get poked with something, they say, ouch. I think, okay, maybe they have this kind of internal experience. And then for some reason I think, you know, I don't want those creatures to undergo suffering either, just like I don't want to feel bad. I don't want them to feel bad either. And that's nice. That sounds, you know, let's be nice to each other. Let's not hurt each other. Okay, that's good. That's easy going for humans. But then I also look around at other creatures like animals, dogs, let's say, and they also seem to feel pain. If I poke them, they will bark or yelp. And I think, well, hang on a second. Is it the case that all of these creatures have the same type of internal experience of feeling pain? And if so, it seems odd that with this particular set of creatures, I cut them up and I eat them. Like if we're talking about cows and pigs, I eat their flesh. And that would strike me as a bad thing if I were doing it to humans, and yet I have this exception for other creatures. So already I'm thinking, okay, what's going on here? How do you see this problem? Like is this a legitimate problem? Is this something that, you know, is only made up by philosophers who create problems when there are none? Or is there really an issue here? Yeah. Yeah, it just sounds like every moral. So, I mean, this seems like parallel to a problem that people might have had a couple hundred years ago, where let's say people in America are believing in individual rights and they believe individual rights for white people, but yet there's this other class of people, the Africans, and they're enslaving those people. And there's a conflict there. And well, you know, the answer is slavery is just wrong. And, you know, why are you doing it? Probably just because it's the convention in your society. That's what's happening with animals and the meat. So you think it's just pretty straightforward. This is a bad thing and it's just, it would be something like slavery. As we look back, you know, 150 years ago, Paul, do you think in the future we're going to look back and say, gosh, this is a huge ethical issue that that generation just overlooked? Yeah, pretty much, right? So, I mean, you know, today when we look back at slavery, we kind of can't understand how somebody could have done that. I assume most of us, you know, how could you not see that that's wrong? But people at the time couldn't see it. And like what we're not realizing is the force of social conventions. It's the convention in your society. Then you just pretty much accept it. So, and it can be something horribly wrong. And you just keep doing it because it's the ingenious society. Like that's what we miss when we think about slavery, but we don't have to miss it because we can just look at ourselves right now. And, you know, think about the things that we're doing right now just because it's society. So, if that's the case, if that's straightforward, then what kind of atrocity do you think is being committed? Because if it's true that something as basic as eating meat is immoral, then you have a, you've got a circumstance where most people on planet Earth are committing this moral bad, you know, multiple times throughout a day. Like do you view this as an extremely bad issue, like an urgent issue? Yeah, it might be the worst thing in the world. People think that I'm exaggerating when I say the worst thing in the world. Almost always when somebody says something is the worst thing in the world, they're exaggerating intentionally, but not in this case. So, because the numbers, just the sheer numbers of animals involved are greater than the numbers of humans affected by any problem that we talk about, right? So, like, we kill something like 57 billion animals in one year worldwide just to enjoy their flesh, and almost all of them are in factory farms. So, 57 billion, the entire human population of the world is only 7.5 billion, right? So, like, we're killing, you know, something close to 8 times the entire human population in animals. And it's hard to see how that could not be the biggest problem. Well, so what about the, so the other part of the intuition is, okay, well, there's a difference, there's a difference. It's not, killing must not necessarily be a bad thing. But when I walk around on the grass, I'm killing little insects under my feet. There's got to be this category distinction between humans, which seem to be this really important creature, and maybe the rest of them. Right. Do you buy that argument? Well, there might be relevant distinctions, but it would be convenient if the distinction is the creatures that you care about matter like a million times more, or maybe infinitely more, than everything else. If you're going to say, you know, some creatures matter more than others, how do you know that the line is humans, you know, humans above the line and everything else below, and everything else below just either doesn't matter at all or matters only one millionth as much? Why would that be the case? So, a couple of ideas that would come to mind, something is like general intelligence. So, all these other creatures that are out there are, some of them seem like automatons when you're talking about insects, but maybe there's some value that humans get because we're so supremely intelligent in comparison to the other species. Right, yeah. Well, so as I say, if you think that, so the usual response to that is, well, if you think that then, I guess that means that mentally retarded humans are fair game, right? So, there are some humans that have extremely low intelligence. In fact, there are profoundly retarded humans who can't even talk and would have less intelligence than an average animal. Does it mean that it's okay to torture them and then, you know, possibly cut them into small pieces and eat their flesh? Most people have an immediate negative reaction to that. So, it looks like, you know, we don't think that intelligence is that important. Right, now, I think it might be true that it does make your life as a whole more valuable. So, it might be true that if you have to either save a smart person or save a retarded person that you should save a smart person. Maybe that's true, but it's definitely not true that you can torture the retarded person. So, what do you mean by torture? What if we're talking about, like, that sounds like it's intentionally malicious. What if we're talking about the quick death? Like with the cows, for example, they have that machine that, you know, sticks a nail in their brain, you know, it's supposed to kill them instantly. Right. Well, I mean, what I mean is that just the entire lifetime of most animals that are raised for food, their entire lifetime is an unhappy lifetime, right? Like they're stuffed into tiny crates or stuffed into these barns, you know, just packed together with other animals, sitting in their own feces, hardly able to move. You know, they have things like they cut off the beaks of chickens or they cut off the end of the beak and it contains nerve endings. So, it's probably incredibly painful, but there's no anesthetic for any of this. And they just do things like this. They cut off the tails of pigs, again, without anesthetic, which probably feels about the same as when your finger cut off. And so it's just like, and then just the entire lifetime of the animal, they're not able to do any of their natural behaviors. It would be sort of like if you had to live in all closets for your entire life. If you did that to a human being, I think we would call it torture. Like there would be no, if you did these sorts of things to human beings, actually there would be no doubt. Nobody would have a problem with calling that torture. So with those examples, like the cutting of the beak and the cutting of the tail, from what I understand, those are to prevent the animals from hurting each other. So like the, to prevent the chickens from pecking each other to death or from the pigs biting each other's tails off. It's kind of like, it'd be like a more extreme version of cutting your dog's nails that it might hurt and sometimes you might cut the quick, but it's actually kind of for their own good in those cases. Well, sort of, I mean, it's for their own good in the context of being stuffed together with all these other animals in these unnatural conditions, right? But that doesn't take away the fact that it's probably extremely painful, right? So do you think that there is a kind of, like in the animal and its state of nature is definitely a happier animal? Right, yeah. I mean, sort of like asking, well, would you rather live in a tiny closet or just live a normal life? Well, but it does seem like there's a bit of a difference there with humans. So I'll just give, I'll make a devil's advocate case and I'll say my personal experience. I can imagine plenty of scenarios where, let's say, the lives of dogs are completely unnatural, let's say, in the United States. And they're essentially pampered compared to what life would be like as a wild dog. So I don't think it's just the unnaturalness of it that is either good or bad. But on the other hand, my wife and I have recently done some traveling in different places in the world. And when we were in, I think it was New Zealand or it might have been Ireland, they had like cows that weren't all packed together. They were out in these huge pastures. And I remember very vividly, but my wife and I were just talking about this the other day, like the little calf springing around as if she was like a four-year-old kid out on a field, just like practically spinning around in circles just to enjoy, which is not something that you see, you know, American cows don't do that. They're too fat, they're too crammed together. But it seemed like it was not a state of nature, but there's a more, definitely a, it seems to be a happier state when you give animals more space, which is not hard to understand. Yes, I mean, as you brought up, the way that we treat our pets is typically much better than they would be treated in the wild. But the way that we treat livestock is much worse. I mean, the natural life isn't the best possible life, right? But, you know, living in a factory farm is very much worse. Okay, so is your argument then really about factory farming being an ethical issue versus just eating meat per se? So if we had, if we raised all of our animals, let's say, on our own farms, killed them ourselves in a humane way, do you think that's an ethical problem? Well, so... I mean, if we were to talk about farming because of your space, like I think almost any moral view, I think any plausible moral view has that that's wrong. If you had perfectly humane farms, then there would be an issue, right? Like different moral views would disagree. Clearly, you can't torture other creatures. Whether you can kill them painlessly then would be debatable and would depend upon whether you believe that they have rights. And to figure out whether they have rights, we would need like a theory of rights. We would need to know why anyone has rights in the first place, which is really hard to answer, right? So like, I don't have a theory of the foundations of rights. I think that I have them, but I don't really know why. So it's hard for me to say who does it, doesn't have them. I guess if it's like not sure, then you should try to avoid killing the creatures that even might have rights. Okay, so let's kind of explore a little bit down that route. So why would we say at all that it is definitely a bad thing for consciousness to experience suffering? That seems like it's kind of almost smacks of self-evidence, but really it's more of like a description of a state of things that like for the conscious creature in that state, it probably would prefer not to be in that state, but why should we care about that? Why should we care about the preferences of conscious beings at all? Yeah, I mean, can I just say that this is sort of an ethical axiom? You can imagine somebody saying, well, yeah, why should we care about other humans, right? This is the challenge of the ethical egoist that people have been worrying about in ethics for a long time, right? Well, if you meet somebody who really doesn't care about anyone other than themselves, there's probably nothing you can do other than put that person in jail. So you can't persuade psychopaths to adopt morality, but if you do care about people other than yourself, then it seems to me like the question is, well, why would there be a relevant difference between other people and just other sentient beings in general? Okay, so I think it's very compelling to have kind of empathy towards, let's say, higher-order creatures. So humans is trivially easy for most people. Maybe their pets would probably be right up there, maybe cows and stuff, but what about when you get down to the lower-order creatures? Let's say rats. So rats are something that most people don't like. They're not furry, they're not cuddly, and they're probably not tasty. I don't know, I've not eaten a rat, but they certainly don't look that way, and yet they seem to have the same, I would guess they still have the same internal experience. If you step on a rat or you poke a rat, it squeals. So are you saying the same argument would apply to something like you shouldn't use mousetraps that kill mice, or the harvesters that go through the fields and get grain for the harvest that are killing a bunch of these creatures in the fields. They're also committing a kind of many atrocity? Well, so a couple of things. One, we're not sure whether it's wrong to kill an animal painlessly. You know, what you're just talking about probably wouldn't be very painless at all. We're also not sure what's going on in the minds of other animals. So kind of the lower down they go, or the simpler they are, the harder it is to imagine their experience. So we don't know if they're experiencing kind of the same thing that we would experience. And that being said, I would say, well, you should probably avoid doing things that plausibly might be causing harm, if you're not sure, if you don't have a good reason for doing it. So a good reason for doing it would be, well, I have to do it to survive. A good reason for doing it is not, I'm going to slightly increase the pressure during my meal. What about if you have a mouse infestation? Because that's not a matter of life and death, but it's all convenience, but it seems like most people would be like, get the suckers out of there, fumigate them, kill them, whatever you got to do. Yeah, I don't know. There's probably some painless way of getting rid of the mice, but I don't really know because I haven't looked into it. I never had a mouse infestation, so I never had to think about that. I guess I'm also kind of wondering what the mice are doing to you. That's so bad. Well, getting into your food, they're very expensive. They're dirty. They're gross. They can affect your health, physical well-being, which is not a life or death issue. It's like a quality of life issue. Yeah, I don't know. There's some point at which it's okay to cause harm to other creatures. You have a pretty good reason. And it's not exactly obvious when the reason becomes good enough, but there are some cases that we just know are not good enough. You can sort of raise cases where you can imagine the reason getting stronger, how much of a nuisance are the mice getting to be. And you can have doubts about how much experience the mice actually have. So you can make cases where it's unclear whether it's okay. I think that most people should focus on the clear case. So you should first fix the thing that you're doing that's very clearly wrong. And then after that, worry about other cases where you might be doing something wrong. What if it's the case that these edge issues, these edge cases reflect on maybe one of our principles or one of our axioms are mistaken. So in the case of rats or small critters, you have millions upon millions that get chewed up in the combines. Literally as the farm equipment's going through the field, it kills a lot of creatures in the farm equipment. It also takes away all of their land, say they essentially die, destroys their houses. You're causing all kinds of mental anguish if you're even eating vegetables that are kind of mass produced. So it seems like if we follow the line of reasoning that leads us to vegetarianism, it should also lead us to planting our own food so that we don't rely on farm machinery. Well, I mean, what you're doing is sort of describing cases in which you would have a lot stronger reasons for what you're doing and the reasons against it would be weaker. Right, and then sort of saying because of that case, maybe it's okay for us to continue our behavior in the case where we have much weaker reasons for doing it and we're causing more harm. So that's probably not going to be as successful. Well, that's kind of correct. But what it's doing is it's challenging some of the fundamental claims. Because if this idea is that it's not okay to kill other conscious creatures for your own convenience, then if that's the claim, if that's kind of the axiom or the ethical principle, then if this would be a case, if it's a universal, then that would also say, well, you also have the ability to grow your own food and growing your own food means that a lot less creatures are going to die and you're not patronizing factory farming of vegetables which kills a bunch of conscious creatures. So if the latter case is not something that we would accept, I would say, okay, well, maybe that means that the axiom is not quite correct or that the foundational principle isn't quite correct. Yeah, so the principle is not it's always wrong to kill. It's not even it's always wrong to kill a sentient being. And in fact, we don't even think that about intelligence. It's not always wrong to kill an intelligent being. The principle is something like, well, you have a reason for not causing pain and suffering. And in order to overcome that reason, you need to have pretty good reasons in favor of whatever action would cause pain and suffering. But couldn't we just say the same thing about the vegetables? So to save argument, you're causing pain and suffering by destroying all of the land and by killing a lot of them outright when you have a simpler alternative. You have an alternative that is plausible that you're only choosing the more violent route and the more convenient. Yeah, I don't think this alternative is possible. Okay. So what is it like we're all going to go and become subsistence farmers? So we have to basically dismantle all of the industrial society and we're all going to be living in poverty. Well, if you just think about the sheer magnitude of the benefits of modern society. I mean, I agree, but I'm challenging the principle. I'm saying, actually, I think that is where the argument leads. Because what you're saying, you're making an economic case to commit a kind of ethical atrocity. So this same argument, right, when the slave owner said, well, what are we supposed to do if we don't have slaves? We're all going to be in poverty because the slaves are economically efficient. So if we reject that case, if it's the case that in order to live a morally good life, you have to be poorer, I think, wouldn't you have to choose the morally good life over the wealth? So you're sort of assuming what's in dispute. So I guess you're assuming that self-interest reasons can't outweigh moral reasons or something. If you have a moral reason for not doing something, a self-interested reason can't outweigh it. But we know that that's almost independently. I definitely wouldn't say that. I would say that if you're talking about weighing economic gain versus the weight of the suffering of other conscious beings, it seems like if you want to have a kind of principle, then I guess I should ask, maybe I should make this statement in a formal question. Are you claiming that there is some kind of purely economic trade-off where we're going to say, okay, if this action brings us that much wealth, then we can cause a bunch of undue suffering to innocent creatures that did nothing wrong? Yeah. So consider a related case. When you drive your car, there's always a risk that you're going to kill another person. And just in case you're going to say that the other people deserve it because they're driving the car to, there's a risk that you'll kill a pedestrian. In fact, something like 50,000 people are killed in car accidents every year. So why don't we stop this horrific practice? Right. Well, yeah. It's basically because it would ruin our economy and ruin our way of life. And it looks like there's a moral reason for not imposing a risk on other people, which you're doing every time you drive the car. It looks like your reason for doing it is basically an economic reason, but it's a self-interested reason. But that doesn't mean that it's impermissible, right? I agree, but why can't I just say the same thing about factory farming? That the benefit is cheaper food that's ever existed for all of humanity. That's a big economic benefit. Yeah. But look, you get that benefit. In fact, you get more of it if you become vegetarian. Food is going to be even cheaper if we become vegetarian. And we're going to continue to have the benefits of modern society. The only thing that will happen is that some of our meals will be less pleasurable. If you look at the sheer magnitude of the harm in question with the 57 billion animals that are basically being tortured and then killed, it's plausible that a single year of that outweighs most of the suffering in all of human history. Well, how much of this argument comes down to that economic claim that would actually be cheaper if we were to be vegetarians? Because I know coming from humble backgrounds, vegetables are very, very expensive in comparison to cheap fast food. You can get a lot more nutrients, a lot more caloric density per dollar. If you're eating at McDonald's, then you can if you're eating vegetables. You mean you can get fatter by eating at McDonald's? Yeah, which is very important at the margins. If you're poor to be able to get fatter, I think this is false. If you really wanted to get the cheapest calories, get a bunch of rice and or potatoes or something like that, you can get tons of calories on it, and it's super cheap. You can buy big 10 pound bags of rice. I don't know how much that costs anymore, but it's going to be really cheap. But look, this is the main point. As I say, the amount of suffering that we're causing, it just looks like the amount of suffering that we're causing to the non-human animals outweighs by orders of magnitude all of the benefits that we get from everything, from our entire existence. It's not really plausible that you can justify causing that amount of harm to get a little bit more pleasure during meals or even if you were saving a little bit of money. I think there's the nutrient factor as well. Meat is packed with all kinds of things that it's really, really hard to get if you take meat out of your diet. The big ones are B12, that's the popular one, but there's all kinds of micronutrients as well. If you eat a bunch of beans to try to get, for example, you're going to be causing inflammation in your body because there's phytates and things in the beans and the same with flaxseeds. It's not just... I'm highly skeptical of this. I'm skeptical of this argument partly because I think most meat eaters are pretty unhealthy and I think most meat eaters, in fact, don't care about their health and I think they're mostly eating tons of saturated fat and they're clogging their arteries and all this, but then they only start talking about their health concerns when you start pressing them to change to a vegetarian diet. Maybe you are a health nut, I don't know. Well, it's actually a good example because my wife and I have been dealing with health issues for the past several years and we tried going vegan for a bit and felt terrible and a lot of people have that experience and so yeah, as we've been trying to build a healthy diet, good quality meat is a... You're probably doing it wrong. You're probably doing it wrong. So I haven't noticed any problems. So I'm not an expert on nutrition. I haven't really researched that. I was never worried about it. Nothing bad happened to me from not eating meat for the last 20 or 30 years or something. Although, in fairness, I'm also eating scallops and clams and things like that, which have a brain. So you probably get the same... Yeah, I definitely don't think that you can... It might be possible in theory to get the kind of nutrients from a vegetarian or vegan diet that you can when you eat meat, but I think it's extremely difficult and really not realistic for the vast majority of people who don't have a long time to plan these things out. You mentioned saturated fat. So in the world of nutrition, there's been this dogba for a long time, well, maybe 40 years or something like that, that saturated fat is this really bad thing but it turns out it's not a bad thing. Proper circumstances, saturated fat is really good for you. It's really good for your animal saturated fat. Animal fat is really good for your body. It's really good for your brain. So there's very strong evidence that says, actually, our bodies benefit greatly from eating high-quality meat. Now, crappy meat, you might be correct. I would agree with that. So I'm skeptical about this. If somebody say that, I'm not a nutritionist, so I'm not going to argue about that. I'll just say that you can find, you can go argue with Mylan Engel who talks about the health benefits of being vegan. So as I say, okay, you need some meat in your diet, so just convert to only eating scallops, clams and oysters which don't feel pain and you'll still get the protein and whatever. That's not correct. But two things. First, I definitely don't think that's correct. It's not the case that meat is interchangeable. Red meat has different things in it than scallops has different things than fish, different things than poultry. But let's say, for the sake of argument, that's correct. But in fact, meat is good for you in the right context. Would that change the argument? Does that actually change whether or not what you're claiming is correct? So it depends on how large the benefits are supposed to be. But so with most ethical questions, you can describe a bunch of hypothetical cases that are difficult. And I think it's usually unproductive when it comes to all of the hypothetical cases. Frequently, we find that we're just not in the difficult case. And thus, we don't have to spend a lot of time keeping time to resolve the difficult case. So I think our actual case is, well, the actual reasons that we have for eating meat are just not anywhere close to being strong enough. So periodically, students will tell me something about how, oh, they can't give up meat because something is going to happen to their health. And I simply don't believe them. And you might think that, well, since I'm not a doctor or a nutritionist, I don't have anybody to not believe them. But I don't believe them. I think that they're making rationalizations. And I haven't experienced any of the negative consequences that I'm supposed to have from not eating meat. So I think it's both. What about all the other people, like the tons and tons of people online who say I try to go vegan, try to go vegetarian, and I had all of these side effects? Like there's a lot. That's a huge community of people. No, no. So I haven't seen a scientific survey. They might have been doing it wrong. So I have no doubt that it's possible to construct a vegan diet that's not good for you. But, you know, it's also possible to construct one that's fine. So they were probably just not doing it right. But I mean, so just to push back a little bit here, your argument is appealing to your own personal experience and body composition in saying, well, because I've been doing this, I don't believe other people. And the human body is this unbelievably complex system that varies from person to person. Like some people are allergic to grains and other people aren't. And there's all these variables. So to say, because you've tried it for 20 years, other people, when they report their experiences are wrong, seems dubious. I mean, of course, it's not just me. There are many vegans doing fine. And I think it's very plausible. So just before doing the experiment, like of course you should believe that some vegan diets are unhealthy, right? We can already assume that. So I think it's a very plausible explanation that some of the people would be doing it wrong. So what about the set of people, hypothetically, who are doing it right, doing it by the book and even ethically motivated to do so? And let's say that failed what, like let's say they got depression because they weren't getting enough saturated fat or whatever it is. Do you think in those cases, if your body composition is such that really it does significantly affect your well-being, do those people get kind of an exception to the ethical rule? Well, so I don't know exactly what you're talking about. So, and I don't know if these are real cases or just hypothetical. So I'm not sure what the answer is. So I don't think that we're going to get very far on this because we're debating about an empirical scientific question and neither of us is a scientist. There are people who know about this including some people who are vegans that would be more appropriate to talk to but I can't argue about the cells of biochemistry or things like that. I'm trying to give a theoretical example. I'm skeptical when I hear about things like this. When I try to articulate why I'm skeptical, I think it has to do with the fact that when talking to people about vegetarianism, I get so many things that are obvious nationalizations. When I hear a new thing, if I don't know for a fact that the factual claims are true, then I tend to suspect that it's another radical example. I tend to suspect that it's another rationalization. I hear you. There's bad arguments on all sides of every issue. I totally agree. So I'm saying in the theoretical case that there's this set of people, maybe it's large, maybe it's small, maybe it's non-existent, saying in the circumstance in which actually the vegan diet significantly reduces your quality of life for whatever reason. We can imagine that somebody's got some, let's say, genetic abnormality where they can't digest soybeans properly or whatever it is. Does the rule then not apply? Do those people say, okay, now in those individual cases, it is justified for them to eat meat or maybe just humanely raised meat or what do you do with those hypothetical people? Yeah, they should probably try to minimize the amount of suffering, so they should probably try to get the certified humane meat which is animal welfare or organizations that examine meat producers and certified humane is a specific organization that looks at whether they're humanely raised and slaughtered. They should probably just try to minimize that. You might also try to only eat meat from the animals that you think are less likely to be sentient or something like that or less sentient than other animals. Last thing that I want to talk about, we've kind of hit it at a couple of angles here, but it's this idea, it's kind of like an abstract scale that you have. On the one hand, you have the benefits of eating meat in addition to factory farming and on the other end of the scale, you have the massive amount of suffering that's caused by that action and you weigh them and you say, okay, it is very clear that the benefits do not at why the costs. So there's a couple of things I want to ask about that. One is, are you appealing to a kind of objective moral system when you say that that's very clear or is it appeal to kind of our, almost everybody's intuitions on the topic. You weigh one versus the other. It's kind of like, let's say, eating something gross. Eating vomit is like pretty much universally seen as gross and we all have this very strong gut feeling that it's just gross, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's like some objective principle that that is gross. When it comes to ethics, is that what you're doing or are you saying it's objective versus this kind of thing that we agree to? So as you might know, I'm a moral realist, so on any ethical question, I think there's an absolutely correct answer. I mean, this particular issue isn't special. So if somebody asks me, why should you not murder children? Well, it's causing a lot of harm. You don't have any good justification for it and then you say, okay, but are you claiming that that's an objective moral? You sound like every moral truth is an objective moral. If you don't believe in objective moral truths, there are multiple different theories that people have that are alternatives, but they generally try to preserve some of our intuitions about things that are right or wrong. So people who hold some subjectivist theory still try to explain why you're wrong to torture children. Okay, so what I want to say is if you have some anti-realist theory or whatever your theory of ethics is, if you have some theory that can still explain why you can't torture children, it will probably also get you to the result that factory farming is wrong. Okay, so then the other question about that is maybe a little bit more meta, and when we're making these kind of... One of the reasons I struggle with ethics in general, not just of this particular topic, but ethical ideas in general, is because I haven't overcome some basic skepticism about the foundations, like the meaning of ethical claims, but that aside, it does seem odd that in this circumstance when we're trying to decide is some particular phenomena wrong or right, is this an atrocity or something that's not a big deal, we are kind of by default giving a special exception to humans because we're saying, oh, we're these moral creatures, like when we see a lion horribly maul some other creature, it's like, oh, well, that's nature. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think most people I don't think feel like animals in general are moral creatures. But why then do we give ourselves the exception? If we're a part of nature, why would we even be having this discussion? It's like, well, we're just doing whatever we're doing with just another species that has discovered farming and that's the way it is. Yeah. I mean, well, human beings have sort of developed over time from being, you might say, more animal-like to being more civilized, I guess. So, I mean, if you say, oh, well, why don't we just act according to our nature, you know, follow our instincts, include being other animals. That also includes making war on other humans. So, maybe we should go back to raiding other tribes in order to kill the men and kidnap the women. Well, no, I mean, it's a large amount of progress. There's a large amount of progress that's happened that consisted in kind of restraining our natural impulses. And you might think, well, oh, so then, you know, why don't we get lions to restrain their natural impulses? And the answer is that we can't. So, like, if we could make lions become more intelligent and morally sensitive than great, right? But there's no plausible plan for making that happen, right? So, when you're making, when you're concluding about different creatures and their capacity for making moral decisions, is another kind of assumption here, or something that we pack into our framework of analyzing this issue that humans even have the ability to make moral decisions? Does this whole theory presuppose some kind of will, some kind of free will that we're also saying, well, these other creatures maybe don't have it, but we actually genuinely have the ability to choose. And that's where we get moral claims because it seems like if we didn't have the ability to choose, well, then moral claims don't really have any purpose to do it. Yeah, human beings have the ability to choose and kind of moreover the ability to use intellectual moral reasons to overcome our instinctive drives, right? So there's the thing that you feel like doing and the thing that will give you pleasure and then there's the thing that when you reflect seems like the right thing to do. Non-human animals generally don't have the ability to do the thing because it's more the right. They just have the ability to do the thing that they want to do or that's why we can have moral obligations. The non-human animals can't have moral obligations but that doesn't mean that we can't do wrong to them, right? They can't do wrong because they don't really have free will in the same way that humans do. We can still do wrong to them because we have free will and we have the ability to reflect on our actions and not do the thing that we feel like. Is that another... How essential is that assumption to the... I guess not just this moral case but all of moral claims that you could make is that we do have the ability... I guess that we have free will. Is that something that's just packed in from the start? We have to assume it because otherwise we don't get any morality really or any meaning or obligatory power to our moral conclusions if we can't choose in the first place. Yeah. I think... This isn't specific to this moral issue. I think every moral issue requires an assumption that we have free will. This is one of these things where there's a philosophical controversy about it but most philosophers who would deny free will there's some philosophers who deny that we have free will most of them would try to come up with some account of why you can still talk about morality. Right? If you can't then that's a big mark against your theory. If your view is we don't have free will and that entails that there's nothing wrong with torturing babies then there's something wrong with your theory. What if the theory were something like we don't have free will and that's why when we say it is wrong to torture babies what we really mean is it will result in bad outcomes if we torture babies or I have a negative feeling towards torturing babies something like that. Yeah. My response would be that's not what it means. So when we use this talk about right and wrong and what you shouldn't shouldn't do so one function of it is it's used for evaluating other people and deciding how we feel about their behavior but another function of it is it's used for decision making. So when you make judgments about what you should do you then use those decide what to do and that's crucial to the concept of short. If you don't think that you have free will then like the whole thing doesn't kind of doesn't make sense. If you don't think you have free will then you can't say that you should or shouldn't do anything. And then when you're deliberating about what to do your deliberation doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense to be deliberating about what to do if you don't have any choice about what to do. Well you don't have a choice of your deliberation either. Yeah you must think that you're being forced to deliberate or something and no choice but to deliberate but I think it's sort of impossible to seriously take on this anti-free will view. You're going to be constantly disbelieving your own theory constantly struggling to get yourself to believe it right but constantly failing. I agree and that's a whole other maybe that actually is the hardest issue. Free will is one of those things where when I think about the theory of it I go gosh how could that work and then I think about the experience of being me and I think how could it be that we don't have it. It's like this really difficult pickle but that actually brings us to the beginning of the conversation because in the beginning of this conversation we were talking about whether or not there's this kind of category exception for humans versus the other creatures but maybe we actually just discovered it. Maybe that's the ethical principle is that don't inflict unnecessary suffering on creatures that have free will because humans seem to be the creatures at least that do have free will. Right so then it's going to be permissible to torture babies because well and you know babies are really dumb okay might also be permissible to torture but no they can't do anything they just sit there crying right. So they're not reflecting on their actions and forming moral beliefs and deciding to restrain their impulses or anything right. It's also probably going to become permissible to torture some mentally ill people right so plausibly some mental illnesses take away your ability to deliberate and rationally reflect on your actions and I assume that we don't think that if it's not permissible you need to see on this. So you think then that free will is something that is not given to humans as a general category it's something that kind of evolves in some humans or maybe most humans they eventually develop the capacity of it at some point in their development. You develop free will to grow up right. When you're first born you have an extremely low degree comparable to non-human animals and then it develops. Also you know you can have mental or brain damages that can inhibit your free will right. Okay this is really interesting if you I'm I don't know about free will but I am really curious about this idea of the development of it and this maybe intimate connection with the rational faculty and the ability to choose but would you agree with the following claim that in one particular species of creature it seems to be that they have developed some metaphysically distinct and unique capacity that is in contrast to the way that the rest of the universe works really profound and remarkable. Like we don't talk about planets having will we don't talk about plants having will. We don't talk about practically anything else and yet it's as remarkable as it seems when you give it that kind of story or perspective. I don't understand free will so I'm not sure how amazing it is right. I think consciousness is amazing. I think consciousness is the like the real thing that part some things from you know most of nature and that's the thing that we should be most amazed by. Developing free will is sort of it's a further development of the mystery of consciousness but I think it's not so the difference between a non-conscious being is a very large qualitative difference difference between beings that have free will and those that don't is I think more of a difference of degree because the beings that we say have free will namely us we don't have the maximum degree of freedom we're not perfectly free and the beings that we say don't have free will they just have very little free will they have little freedom right so like it's sort of like the non-human animals have very low levels of intelligence which don't enable them to think very hard about what they're doing. It doesn't give them very much control over their actions but as you get more intelligent and more reflective and maybe more self-aware maybe more aware of your own impulses able to reflect on the reasons for and again then you get more control but that obviously comes in degrees so it starts out really low and then we normal adult human beings have pretty high levels but we could develop more in the future so I'm guessing then that your perspective on moral intelligence maybe is similar to your perspective on general intelligence in the sense that it really is a process of evolution that we see in nature lower levels of intelligence and we see actions that correspond to low levels of general intelligence and humans might be in the process of developing their moral intelligence so just like a thousand years ago things that seemed totally reasonable actually turned out to be appalling maybe at present things that seem totally reasonable like oh yeah going down to the burger store and getting a burger might in the future in hindsight seem to be totally appalling because we're on that spectrum of evolution yeah I think that's right so I mean I don't think of moral thinking as being totally different from thinking in general so I think there's general intelligence and you use your general intelligence and your faculty reason in general to think about morality but it's just that people started out not knowing much about this just as they said about not knowing much about every other subject so like the theories that people had about physics and biology and medicine and geography they were all totally wrong and then they just gradually get better over time which is like the way our moral views are getting better over time but like people today when we think about the theories of a thousand years ago when we think about the scientific theories of a thousand years ago we think they're just ridiculously wrong they're basically totally wrong and I think that's a similar phenomenon it's much as when we look at their moral views we think that they're totally wrong yeah well I think that's a great note to end on and a couple of times we've kind of bumped into this consciousness and you dropped a really interesting phrase there you said that consciousness maybe is the thing that is most remarkable that is like the biggest category difference between what is conscious and what is unconscious I tend to agree but I would love to know your thoughts on that because I'm exploring myself I'm pushed into something like a metaphysical dualism like a hard cartesian substance dualism that there is mind and there is world and maybe an interaction between the two but they're like categorically separate things but I wonder what your thoughts are on that obviously we can't talk about it but maybe you can come back on the show and share your metaphysical thoughts on what the mind is yes I'm sympathetic to a kind of emergent dualism okay but I don't have time to defend that now right right well great thanks thanks very much for coming on the show and you know I feel like maybe this is one of those things if morality is on the spectrum of intelligence maybe I've got some kind of intelligence block here because I really have a difficult time I don't have a difficult time feeling the the pull of moral reasoning because I definitely am empathetic compelled but the rational justification of finding foundations I just I have a real block on even getting to the point where ethical claims have are like something more than statements of preference you know yeah well just think about how you would respond to somebody who is violating other people's rights in very severe ways and you know they think well it's just a matter of preference if you have a view that explains why they shouldn't like why you shouldn't you know rob other people or beat other people up and so on you'll probably also explain why you shouldn't torture animals and if your view implies that there's nothing wrong with beating up other people then you know you're probably probably getting confused like you're probably wrong you should probably set aside the abstract theory I guess the difficult like when I think about the feeling I have I very much have a deep feeling that people that are violating other people's rights are you know jerks and it makes me feel horrible and I would want to bonk them on the head that type of thing but I have a hard time distinguishing is that feeling of disgust categorically separate than a feeling of disgust if somebody you know is going and eating vomit like it really is a very strong feeling of disgust and you know I just can't identify if that's in the same category or if it's in a totally a completely separate category well they're both feelings but so I mean there are plenty of things that were wrong but I didn't feel disgusted and there are plenty of things I find I don't feel wrong I don't think eating vomit is wrong and like I'm not even at all tempted to think that that you know there are cases where you can judge something to be wrong even though you don't have any personal feelings about it so it was wrong of Emperor Nero Agrippina like 2000 years ago I know that it was wrong but I don't care you don't have a feeling of disgust about it I don't think so you know if it is it must be such a slight feeling that I'm not because what is Agrippina to me that happened 2000 years ago like I never even knew either those people I could probably get myself to feel more about it if there was like a really vivid description that filled in all the details right and so that I could have this vivid image in my mind then I probably feel something about it but I do feel something about it and it was interesting you made that distinction to think things that I totally accept that there are things that are not wrong that you feel disgust but the other one things that are wrong that you don't feel disgust I'm thinking well it's hard for me to think of something like that that I don't feel some measure of disgust if something is morally I would call morally wrong do you have any other examples um well are you sure you really mean disgust because to me the things that you the things that are disgusted are all the things that are wrong like uh okay you know somebody embezzled money from their company so I think that's wrong I don't think that's disgusting well it depends on the context so like concretely if it's the case that in the process of embezzling money they're breaking a bunch of contracts lying to a bunch of people harming people then yeah I do I do definitely feel disgust like a disgust mixed with an anger I think would be the that flavor of emotion yeah so you know I would feel anger if it has something to do with me um and I might be able to feel anger if enough details were filled in even if it didn't have to do with me imagining the victims or something like that um but it seems weird to me to feel disgusted what is the thing that you feel so like with the circumstance of somebody murdering somebody else 2,000 years ago is it just like is it just yes I know factually thinking that that is a bad thing although I feel nothing don't you feel bad for the family or that injustice took place well I'm not feeling much of anything right you know I don't know if I'm unusual or if you're unusual I don't know either but I find it hard to feel much of anything about some person who lived 2,000 years ago about whom I know nothing other than that she was murdered really all I know is that she was Nero's either his mother or his wife he killed both of them and he murdered her that's all I know you know why that is it's because you're not eating enough animal fat so it's a better of health that's a joke I say well it could be a benefit it could be I don't know if I'm the odd ball or if you're the odd ball in this circumstance because it almost seems like that and that's also why I have this difficulty with the category distinction of determining whether or not there's something unique about ethical claims versus you know claims of preference or statements of feelings of disgust in that type of thing because in my own internal experience I have a difficult time imagining something that I really believe is morally wrong and I don't have a the same general like conscious feeling of disgust that's so I was going to say I don't know if this is true but I hypothesize probably you're unusual because usually the emotions that people have are tied to themselves so usually you feel mad because something negatively impacts you also like the feeling of disgust usually has to do with some kind of contamination so if you think that something will contaminate its environment then that thing is just oh you know what I think I think it would be something like I'm disgusted by the human that the dirty or contaminated human that would do such a thing so my disgust maybe is directed towards my feelings about the human Nero rather than the actual act itself yeah right Nero's character in general was probably disgusting right I've also heard that Libertarians tend to be lower on empathy than people with other political ideologies but empathy has a lot to do with our moral reactions but I wouldn't have a problem I wouldn't have any difficulty empathizing if I actually saw Agrippina like if I actually saw the individual who was being wronged or if I knew details about their lives I wouldn't have any trouble empathizing I just don't have any scenario where all I know is that they're the victim of a crime but you know that the abstract is correlating to the concrete so it's like that you don't know the details of course but it's still I know that there are details right so that might be part of how I know that it's wrong so I don't know but I know that I would feel a negative reaction if I witnessed the scenario if I knew the details or something like that okay so this is I don't want to keep you too long but I got to ask you a basic question now because you brought up a word that I don't understand and especially in this context which is empathy so is empathy the thing that one is feeling when you observe or think about the injustice or is empathy like the ability to have feelings of this nature or something else that could be both in any other context right but so you know sometimes used as used to refer to a capacity and maybe sometimes used to refer to an episodic mental state like you're empathizing right now but it's sort of being able to put yourself in the other person's shoes and kind of imagine their experience from their perspective you're probably not really imagining what it's like you're not imagining fully what it's really like but you're having an experience that is something like the experience that they're having but of course like when you empathize with someone who's in pain you're not like feeling a pain that's like the pain that they're feeling but you're sort of able to understand from the inside what that's like yeah okay so maybe this is that maybe puts it in context because a circumstance which I kind of have the same thing that I think you're describing is when it's not about people and maybe about numbers 6 billion people died in the Holocaust 6 million Jews were killed by Germans in the Holocaust that for me I definitely have a feeling I have the same kind of feeling that I did when you mentioned the case you know 2,000 years ago but it's not correlated to the number 6 million like I don't feel at 6 million more times it's purely abstract like I can't even comprehend the measure of feeling that you know that feeling of empathy magnified 6 million times so that's a case where it's like I know it's wrong and 6 million times more wrong but I can't feel that right yeah you know the famous quotation attributed to Stalin that a single death is a tragedy a million deaths is a statistic right you probably didn't actually say that you know most break quotes turn out to be apartment but it's still a good point and it's possible that you would feel more from a vivid story about a single person being killed hearing a news item about millions of people being killed but you still know that the millions of people being killed this works right right and I think this is related to the animal ethic issue I think most people have difficulty empathizing with beings who are not of their own species and you can understand evolutionary reasons for why that would be but even if you have trouble empathizing with them you should reflect and like you can still know that it's wrong right you can still know that it's wrong without the empathy just as you know that the killing of 6 million people is wrong yeah and I think just imagining the circumstances where a lot of these animals are in an infactory farm just supplant a cow for your house pet and I think people would have no difficulty having a very strong feeling of empathy for animals in that circumstance right yeah alright well that's a great conversation I appreciate it Dr. Huber and I think I'm going to have to invite you back on the show a third time to talk about consciousness because it's rare that there are substance dualists out there and so I I'm going to invite you back on the show so that there's a comrade I definitely want to take your brain on that too alright that was my conversation with Dr. Mike Huber who is a professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado at Boulder as with pretty much any other topic you see these ideas come bundled together it's usually not just straight forward is eating meat good or bad we also have to incorporate ideas about free will because if we don't have free will well we can't choose and that kind of takes away the power of ethical statements we also have to get into nutrition is it the case that eating meat is really good for you or essential for you if your brain is starved from good animal fats and it results in people being more likely to be depressed well does that change the ethical position on eating meat you have to also import ideas about consciousness if it's the case that animals aren't conscious then of course it wouldn't be a problem eating them well then what is consciousness where does it come from how does it work so my opinion unless you really understand all these different areas and have working theories based on sound foundations trying to come up with a coherent answer to the problems of eating meat I think is a lost cause but I don't think that's unique to this particular topic and this is why in the content that I'm releasing the interviews that I'm having cover lots and lots of different topics try to create a rational world view but all pieces the puzzle together so that questions like this can be consistently answered but that's all for me today I hope you guys enjoy the rest of your week