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Nov. 1, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:27:44
ATHEIST ETHICS vs ANIMAL RIGHTS?!?
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*Taple Music* Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyne from Free Domain.
I'm here with Thomas.
And Thomas is very concerned about animal rights.
He's not doing video. I think he's currently embedded in the belly of a whale.
He's talking on animal rights and in fact is feeding the whales with his own flesh.
So that's our plan for today.
We're going to have a chat about a topic that obviously is very important, comes up quite a bit, and has to do with...
Well, I guess the first thing we're going to ask or talk about is what are rights and Thomas's view on animal rights.
And I will, of course, be happy to take questions from the chat and we can respond to those as well.
I'll throw them up for Thomas to listen as well.
And really appreciate everybody dropping by today.
Let me just go to one other place and tell people that we're here.
And then we will get started.
But hey, let's check in with everyone.
How are you guys doing today, this afternoon?
It is Halloween!
It is the 31st of October, of course, 2020.
Two days. Is it two days?
Wait. Sunday? No, two or three days from the U.S. election.
And I'm not sure that animal rights are going to be key to what's going on in the U.S. election, but we will certainly be interested in seeing what's going on there.
Good. So, Thomas, welcome.
Thank you. Welcome to the show.
Very nice to meet you.
And you've been quite keen, I guess, on getting this for a while.
Sorry it took a little while to get started.
But I wonder if you could tell, like, introduce a little bit of yourself to our fine listenership and, I guess, talk a little bit about what led you to this topic as a whole.
Yeah, should I start with, like, my initial question that I sent to you?
Yeah, let's start with that. That gives us a good...
Okay, so... Yeah, paste that in Skype, too, if you don't mind, and I can throw it in the chat.
Oh, you know what? I don't have the capabilities to do that right now.
No sweat. All right, I will read it out, though.
It is, I have a specific issue with regards to UPB and animal rights, where my understanding of your argument is that because animals have no capability of understanding UPB or the idea of consent, that UPB doesn't apply to them, thus it's morally acceptable to eat them.
The place my head goes is, well, where's the moral line drawn then?
If UPB doesn't apply, then is it morally okay to torture animals?
What about have sex with them?
Where's the line drawn and for what reason is it drawn?
And the background to that would be, I mean, I've been a vegan for 10 years, and I've just seen some of the horrible things, like through documentaries, undercover footage that happen in factory farms.
And I do very much care about living a moral, ethical lifestyle.
I really love UPB. I love the idea of it, rational system of ethics.
I think it's amazing. But when I was reading it and I got to the animal part, I just found myself disagreeing with that section.
It's funny, I mean, it's not a criticism, but it's interesting that the way that you sort of pointed out, you found yourself disagreeing, almost like it arose within you, I guess almost against your will, if that makes sense.
I could definitely see that.
Like, I'm starting with the conclusion and then finding out, like, the reasons to justify it or something.
Okay, yeah. And listen, there's nothing wrong with that.
That's not an argument as to whether it is or is not a valid approach to take.
I was really struck.
And listen, I actually prefer people who have strong emotional responses to particular ethical questions.
And the strong emotionality of the response in no way, shape or form diminishes from the approach.
But it is interesting because, look, I mean, I had very strong emotional reactions to questions of property rights.
Of course, I have very strong emotional reactions to questions of child welfare and so on.
So I just thought it was interesting.
And it's good that we're both passionate.
I mean, nothing is worse in a sense than a very important topic, not having passionate people to advocate for it, if that makes any sense.
So I'm glad that we're both there on that same line.
So tell me a little bit about what...
Sorry, go ahead. Oh, we definitely agree more than we disagree.
You know, I'm ANCAP, free market guy, I'm all that.
Right, right, okay. No, and we may end up perfectly agreeing on this, and that's wonderful too.
So tell me a little bit about what got you into...
Veganism to begin with. And I guess animal rights is a question as a whole.
So the first tipping point was I had a vegetarian girlfriend at the time that heavily influenced me.
And then as I started researching it and looking into it, I watched this documentary called Earthlings.
I don't know if anybody's ever heard of it or seen it.
Oh my God.
Oh my God.
It's really bad.
Really bad. Like, I lost my appetite for meat after watching it.
And can you give us just a quick one-two on what that was about?
Yeah, sure. It's kind of a long documentary, but specifically with meat.
I mean, I could go on for a while, so stop me whenever.
But, okay, there's the killing, which is obviously bad.
But when you put it on, like, factory farm levels...
So, like, I can very much understand the argument of, like, eating meat to survive or something like that.
But then, when you have, like, okay, we have to process a thousand chickens today, and we have to do that quick because economics is, you know, behind all of it.
And so the way we do that is, you know, we slice the necks of the chickens, hang them upside down on this, you know, long factory.
Like, it's very much a factory. They hang the chickens upside down on this conveyor, and then it dumps the chicken into the boiling hot water that, you know, they're supposed to be dead by the time they get to that point, and most are, to help remove the feathers.
But, you know, every now and then, an alive chicken gets dumped into a vat of boiling hot water.
Which is like, you know, not the intended outcome, but an inevitable outcome.
And I mean, there's one example, but I mean, pick an animal and I can find some awful unethical practice behind it, even with something like dairy.
So I was vegetarian for a year.
And then I learned about how, you know, with dairy farms, for example, behind dairy, well, not only do they kill the cow after they're not able to produce milk anymore, but male cows are essentially worthless to a dairy farm.
And so what happens to the male cows, the calves, many of them, not all, but many of them end up just being locked inside of a box.
So that they can't move.
They're in darkness. They can't see anything.
And so their muscles don't develop.
So their meat is soft.
And that's where veal comes from.
So even just financially supporting milk, the dairy industry, you're kind of subsidizing the veal industry.
And it's all just this interconnected mesh of just fucked up.
What happened with the girlfriend?
Oh, I'm still with it. We've been together a long time.
We're both vegans. Ah, okay, okay, got it.
And are you married, or how long have you been together?
Not officially. We've been together, oh man, I'm on the spot, I think 14 years?
Right, okay. We've been together a very long time.
And do you guys have kids, or...?
Yes, with a sad, like, that could be its own show altogether.
Okay. Got it. Got it.
Alright. When you were growing up, what was your relationship with animals?
I had a pet dog, pet hamster.
We also had a pet cat.
And did you see any Cruelty towards animals when you were growing up.
And please understand, I'm just trying to sort of understand your emotional background to this topic, which has nothing to do with whether we're right or wrong in our arguments, but I always like to get to know people a little bit more before I sort of try and dive straight into untangling each other's epistemology.
Yeah. Can you ask the question again?
Yeah. Did you see any animal cruelty or mistreatment when you were growing up?
Not to any extreme degree.
Like, I remember we had a party at my house when I was a kid and, you know, some of the kids that were invited over were like hitting my dog.
You know, nothing too crazy.
You know, nothing like, you know, something brutal.
No. All right.
Okay. All right.
So do you want to give me your major arguments?
I think first of all, since we talked about animal rights as a whole, Rights is one of these words that, man, you know, it's a mess to try and figure out what it means.
You know, rights seems to be basically a sophist, not your sophist term, but a sophist term, which legitimizes the use of violence against others to get what you want.
You know, I have a right to healthcare so I can throw doctors in jail who don't provide it to me or whatever.
So if we're going to start to talk about animal rights, what do you mean by rights as a whole?
I mean, the same idea as in we think of humans, like the idea of negative rights, that human beings are born with property rights, and any rights, you know, else that we have are essentially just stacked on top of that foundation of property rights.
I believe that any autonomous creature, which we could maybe drill into and define more, but any, you know, sentient being that especially has the capability of feeling pain, we have to take into extra consideration.
But my argument is that the animal's body is their property and they have a right to their own body.
And so right here obviously requires for human beings to agree with you that the animals share this rights, right?
Sorry, that's a bit of an abstract way of putting it.
So I try to avoid the term rights, although, of course, it does end up creeping into the discussion almost against my will.
will.
It's like a virus.
But the reason I do that is because if I start talking about, well, you have a right to your property, it's like, okay, well, what if someone disagrees?
Well, you try and convince them.
What if they still disagree?
Well, you can use violence to defend your property.
You have a right to bodily integrity.
Okay, well, what if somebody disagrees?
Okay, well, you try to convince them.
What if they don't agree?
Well, then you can use force to defend them from stabbing you or raping you or whatever it's going to be, right?
So it is, basically, it is a, I wouldn't say an excuse, but it's a justification for For violence, not in specific self-defense, right?
So if somebody's coming to steal your car, you won't die without the car, but you can, in most places, use force to prevent that person from taking your car.
It's not immediate self-defense.
And so it is the right in many ways, or it's a justification for the initiation of the use of force, not in immediate self-defense.
So instead of rights, I would sort of I suggest the term properties, which again leads you to the problematic phrase, property properties.
But what I would say is that human beings have the property of self-ownership, and that could be universalized, and you can't argue against self-ownership without using self-ownership.
So, of course, somebody was kvetching at me about universally preferable behavior on Parler, which P-A-R-L-E-R.com.
You should really follow me on Parler.
I've got some great stuff there as well, of course.
But it was kvetching at me and saying, well, you never proved self-ownership.
It's like, your argument of UPB fails because you never proved self-ownership.
And it's like, dude, I don't know why people can't slow the F down and look at what they're doing.
Because most of the answers...
With regards to ethics and universality, most of the answers are simply involved in slowing down and looking what the F you're doing and figuring it from there.
Because this guy was saying, you know, my argument is that we are responsible for the effects of our actions, right?
Now, if somebody responds to my argument and says, Steph, your argument is false...
Then they're saying, I am responsible for the effects of my actions, which is creating this argument and putting it out.
And they don't, if there's a guy named Bob standing next to me, and I say, we're responsible for the effects of our actions, they don't turn to Bob and say, Bob, your argument is wrong, because Bob didn't create the argument.
I've created the argument, and I'm responsible for the effects.
I'm responsible for the effects of my actions, you know, whether that is creating something like a painting, whether it's strangling someone or kicking a dog or whatever it is.
I'm responsible for the effects of my actions.
And that, of course, is foundational to law, right?
I mean, if a guy's got an invisible twin, ringer style, and he commits a crime, you don't go and arrest the invisible, like you don't go and arrest the identical twin because the identical twin did not, even though it looks and sounds just like the person didn't actually produce the action.
That is in question or that may be illegal.
So we have the property of self-ownership and it's impossible, functionally, completely, totally, absolutely impossible to argue against self-ownership.
Because to argue against self-ownership, you have to identify the person who made the argument.
You have to accept that their argument is an effect of their self-ownership and that they are responsible for that argument.
And then you also have to exercise self-ownership to create and transmit an argument specifically to the person Whose argument you're trying to rebut.
So it's absolutely, completely and totally impossible to have a debate without accepting that we own ourselves and we own the effects of our actions.
And I tried to sort of put that across in a humorous way as I tried to.
But everybody kind of wants to rush into a debate without sort of saying, okay, what are all of the implicit things we have to accept in order to even have a debate?
So we have a property called self-ownership.
And the non-aggression principle is universalizable in a way that the initiation of force is not universalizable.
We can all simultaneously not stab each other.
That's all possible, assuming we're not at some BLM protest.
We can all simultaneously not stab each other.
It can be universalized. It is completely impossible.
To simultaneously murder, for everyone to simultaneously murder everyone.
Or for murder to be universally preferable behavior in the same way it's impossible for theft.
To be universally preferable behavior because theft is taking someone's property they don't want you to take, right?
Whereas if you say theft is universally preferable behavior, you're saying everybody should want to steal and be stolen from at the same time.
But if you want to be stolen from, it's not theft.
Like it just can't work. You don't even have to experiment.
You don't have to say, well, what if we both try and steal something from you?
It's simply logically.
Doesn't work. So I just wanted to really, really briefly...
It's why I don't have a whole...
I barely reference rights in my book on ethics, which is available for free at freedomain.com.
Just click on Books. It's available for free.
You've got the audiobook. There's a PDF. There's an online version.
And you can, of course, also buy it.
So I just really wanted to point this out.
The universalization is pretty key when it comes to ethics.
That's how we know things are different from something like aesthetics, which is a sort of subjective preference for...
A form of something in the world.
It could be art or a sunset or maybe in a food or something like that.
So that can't be universalized.
You might prefer sunrises.
I've heard rumor of sunrises, and I believe I may have seen them when I was a kid having a paper route, but it's been a while.
I'm kind of a night owl.
I will see a sunrise, but only from the start, not the intermediate part.
So you may prefer sunrises.
I may prefer sunsets. That's a form of aesthetics, but it doesn't really rise to the realm of ethics.
With the realm of ethics, there's two things.
Number one, it has to be universalizable.
And number two, you have to be able to use force in order to defend it, right?
And I go into all the reasons for that in the book.
I won't go over all of them here.
I know you've read the book, but I'm not saying you have to agree with everything I'm saying, but is that a reasonable place to start?
Yeah, absolutely. All right.
So let's take it for a spin.
Let's put the rubber to the metal, so to speak.
And if you could start to talk about your argument regarding this stuff, I would really, really appreciate it.
Yeah, okay. So essentially, what my argument is that if I were to, let's say I'm the butcher...
Thomas, are you back?
Yes, I believe so.
All right. What happened there? My phone overheated.
I was outside and it's a hot day.
I live in Los Angeles, California.
And I just went inside, went on my laptop instead.
Okay. All right. Good. So you were just starting your case.
Okay, so sorry about that.
So my case is that because an animal can't use language like humans can, the only argument that it can make when it faces the threat of death if I'm about to do something to that animal is to move away, like to retract itself from a source of pain.
That is the only way that the animal can express an argument of please stop doing this to me or I don't want this to happen.
Because an animal can't express its thoughts, you have to extrapolate as best you can what the animal wants based on its actions.
Sorry, did you have more to add to that?
No, that's it.
Well, I don't think there's any doubt that animals don't want to be killed.
Animals don't want to be eaten.
I think there's the fight or the flight.
If a five-year-old kid goes up to a hungry lion, the lion's not going to run away.
The lion's just going to bite the kid's head off.
I'm sure you've seen those videos where...
The kids were sort of up against the glass in a lion enclosure at some zoo, and the lion's just trying to pour at them through the glass.
Oh, yeah. So, yeah, there's the fight or the flight.
Yeah, and I mean, I don't think there's anyone around who would say, oh, yeah, no, the chickens love to come and get their necks rung, you know, or what is it?
Paul McCartney, who's a famous vegetarian and has been for decades, said that if slaughterhouses had glass windows, nobody would ever eat meat again, right?
Yeah, absolutely. Okay, but, you know, the fact that animals don't want something doesn't necessarily mean that we are obligated to respect that.
I mean, necessarily, right?
So I think it's fairly clear that animals don't want to be eaten, animals don't want to be killed for food.
I mean, that's why the zebra runs away, right?
So is there anything else that you wanted to bring to bear on the question?
I don't think so.
Maybe just one sentence of that.
I believe that that by recoiling from a source of pain, for example, or in trying to preserve its own life, that is it exercising its property rights.
Okay, but I mean, just because someone...
We want to abstract the argument as much as possible.
So if a creature doesn't want something and desperately doesn't want something, that doesn't mean that we're obligated to respect that creature's wishes.
I'll take a silly example, but maybe it's not that silly.
A criminal desperately does not want to get caught.
And he will run from the police, he will fight the police, all that.
A criminal desperately doesn't want to get caught.
Should we respect that? But see, a criminal would have done something wrong, like what did the animal, what did a cow do wrong?
Well, so now we're bringing something else into it, right?
Which is, we're bringing ethics in, but that's kind of begging the question.
So we're trying to figure out whether ethics apply to creatures, right?
And so if you say, well, but we can't do any harm because You know, the cow didn't do anything wrong, then we're already saying ethics do or do not apply to creatures, right?
So your argument was the animal doesn't want it, therefore we shouldn't do it.
And I'm just, this is a cratic method, right?
Can you find an example where an animal doesn't want something but will do it anyway, right?
Or if an animal does want something, like if a man wants to rape a woman, and is the woman allowed to shoot him if that's the best way that she can keep herself safe?
Well, yeah, absolutely. In fact, I would kind of consider it ridiculous if she didn't.
So, just because someone doesn't want something, a creature, a human being who is an animal, doesn't want something, doesn't mean that we should respect that person's wishes.
You know, I mean, another silly example where it's not a moral issue is a kid who doesn't study really still doesn't want to fail the test, right?
Desperately doesn't want to fail the test.
But nonetheless, if the kid fails the test, the kid fails the test.
Should we say, well, the child's emotional preference Is something that we should take over and above everything else?
Well, no. So preferences, strongest preferences that you can imagine, I don't think are necessarily binding upon others.
And I guess that would be my sort of rebuttal to that.
There may be other arguments. That's why I was sort of asking for more.
There may be other arguments out there we can float around.
And I'm not saying this one's definitively disproven, but emotional preference is not necessarily binding on others.
Alright. I mean, I have a few angles I could approach this from.
To what degree, then?
If we don't have to respect the animal's preferences, what would UPB have to say about me torturing an animal?
Causing as much pain as I possibly could, would there be any immorality in that?
So... That, I mean, it's a great question.
It's a great question. And is this, I mean, you would obviously say yes, that that would be- I would absolutely say yes.
And would you say yes, that it's the same moral level as torturing a human being?
Okay, so I have two approaches to this.
One is that I do feel that humans are more important and I place our relevance above animals, but the animal's pain response is going to be equal to a human.
So as far as which one of us feels more pain, I mean, I would call it equal.
Okay, so a human being, and I'm not restating this to sort of make it sound silly.
I really just genuinely want to understand the perspective.
So a human being who tortures a cat would be in the same moral negative or would receive the same punishment from society, whatever that might be, as somebody who would torture a child?
No, society wouldn't.
No, no, but in your moral philosophy.
Yes. Okay, and I appreciate that.
I mean, that's an honorable position to have that kind of consistency, because it kind of goes against an emotional grain, which is, look, I have no problem.
90% of my arguments go against people's emotional grains, so I have no problem with that.
So, yes.
So, the cat has as much right to bodily integrity as a human child, right?
Yes. Okay. Let me ask you this.
And this sounds like I'm answering a question with a question, which is, according to Miss Manners, extremely rude.
But let me ask you this.
Do you think that someone who steals for necessity To some example, right, a situation where there's been a terrible flood or a natural disaster of some kind and someone has no food, their children have no food, and they go into a grocery store that has been abandoned and they take stuff.
Would you consider that as bad as someone who just goes and steals something because their friends dared them to and they don't even need it?
Yeah, if you wouldn't mind, I think I know where you're going with this, and can I just respond to where I think you're going with it?
Oh yeah, no. Let's do a shortcut or two.
Let's wormhole this mofo.
Yeah, absolutely. I'm not trying to cherry-pick anything, but there's a specific sentence in UPB that I completely agree with.
It says, as we stated, we have discussed above, where there is no choice, where avoidability is impossible, there can be no morality.
And I agree with that statement.
You know, you're starving to death.
You've got to steal some bread. Great.
You know, as a vegan, one of the questions I get asked all the time is, if you were trapped on a desert island and you had to eat meat to survive, would you do it?
And my answer is yes.
Like, I'll eat meat if I'm in that situation, if I actually do have to do that in order to survive.
Well, and I'll back you up even further than that.
So when I was a kid, some of the things that formed me intellectually or maybe even scarred me emotionally was as a kid, I had almost no – I don't think I had any restriction or control over what I was able to read or what I was able to watch.
My mom would show me the most inappropriate, adult, creepy movies, and I had access to books that I think I would find tough to read even now.
And one of the books that I read, I must have been maybe eight years old, maybe nine years old.
I think the book was called Alive, and our lovely, gorgeous Borg brain of the chat will let me know about this.
And the book was about an airplane.
For some reason, I think it was a bunch of soccer players.
But of course, it's been, you know, 48 years since I read it.
But the book was about a group of soccer players on an airplane that crashed in the Andes Mountains.
And they...
Some of them survived.
Some of them didn't survive. And this is back before GPS. And, you know, it's a white plane lost in the snowy peaks that go on and on forever.
And... I'm sure you know the story as a whole.
I'm sure you guys know the story as a whole.
Yeah, cannibalism. Yeah, so some people were frozen.
Like the plane crashed and some of the bodies were thrown into the snow or they were packed in snow or whatever.
And they were preserved, of course, because it was freezing cold.
And the people who survived, they, of course, went through all the food they could possibly eat.
And then they started carving off strips of meat from the passengers who had died and they ate those.
Yeah.
And, you know, I think that if you're some, you know, creepy German fetish merchant, it always seems to happen in Germany.
And you start cannibalizing people against their will, like a murderer and all of that, or you're just attending one of Lady Gaga's spirit cooking parties or something like that.
But it's just a joke, although I did see her eating a really creepy cake.
But anyway, so if somebody's in a necessity in that case, I would have great sympathy for them.
Being forced to eat human flesh in order to survive.
And of course you would not choose death over eating an animal.
So the reason I bring all of this up, I'm sure you're aware of this, right?
Is it does have something to do with necessity.
It has something to do with necessity.
And so torture, of course, is not necessary.
Now, of course, you can argue now that eating meat is not necessary.
That is exactly my argument.
No, and that is perfectly valid.
But in terms of if you're going to start to say people don't have a right to do what is not necessary...
Then you have a fairly big problem on your hands.
Is it necessary to have air conditioning?
Is it necessary to have a car?
Is it necessary to have more than a bare minimum of clothing?
Is it necessary to go to the dentist?
So if we're going to go with the necessary stuff, certainly if you want to survive and you're stuck in the Andes and it's still weeks for help to come, you're going to have to eat human beings if you want to survive.
So that's necessary.
Now, if you're going to say, well, having a steak, it's not necessary, but human beings can survive relatively well on like 1,200 calories a day, right?
So anything over and above that is not necessary.
And, of course, it would be better for the planet.
It would be better for the plants.
It would be better for the soil. It certainly would be better for the animals if we could restrict human beings to, like, no air conditioning, no cars, no big houses, no, you know, whatever, right?
No calories over 1,200 or whatever.
So the problem is that once you start to go from that which is necessary to that which is not.
Now, it is never necessary.
For a human being to torture an animal, it's never necessary.
It's not like you're trying to get information out of them, like, who is Kaiser Assose and torture the cat, right?
So there's no circumstance that I can think of.
Maybe, again, the Borg brain of the chat can let us know.
There's no situation that I can imagine or conceive of where it would be necessary for a human being to torture an animal.
And this is to me why this would be in a moral category, that it would simply be for destructive, ugly, vicious, nasty, sadistic pleasure that you would choose to torture an animal because it's never, ever, ever necessary.
Now, you can say, well, but you can live without meat.
Yeah, but you can live without a lot of things.
And that is...
I think that's one of the challenges.
And I know this hasn't resolved everything 100%, but I think this is where we kind of joust in the middle here, and I think that's kind of important, right?
So if you can refine the what's necessary argument, because if it's too broad a net, then we end up with totalitarian control and everybody ends up like Winston Smith in 1984 with 1,200 calories a day, right?
Yeah, for sure. I think that, I mean, outside of the desert island scenario or Venezuela, I mean, we are in, at least I am in California and many places in the first world, but we live in capitalist abundance.
You know, a loaf of bread costs me $2.
You know, there's probably a 1200 calories in that loaf of bread.
And I'm not saying everybody has to live on bread, but there are, in this modern day, there are a lot of meat alternatives that are more ethical because we do have that choice.
Like, I eat veggie burgers all the time.
Veggie burgers, there's a vegan replacement for just about everything.
You know, pizza, ice cream.
If you can consume that product that you might still love because you want the taste, the taste of the steak might be delicious.
I remember the taste of steak.
I've been vegan for 10 years, but I remember it.
It tastes good. Steak's good.
I don't think that that animal's suffering is worth my taste buds being satisfied.
I think that I can satisfy my basic nutritional requirements in a more humane and ethical manner.
Right. Now, here's where we are on kind of the cusp of Where we part ways, which is good.
I mean, if we just agreed and everything, it wouldn't be much of a debate, right?
So I think that the cusp of things is that I would consider not eating animals more in the category of aesthetically preferable actions.
So just for those of you who don't know, this is real brief.
So UPB slices and dices human actions into three categories.
The first is morally neutral.
I mean, I went up and went to the washroom.
You're acting. Is it good? Is it evil?
Well, I guess as long as you're not peeing on Chelsea Handler like someone did in some horrible video out there on the internet, well, it's morally neutral.
It's neither good nor evil, right or wrong.
Then there's aesthetically preferable actions, which is something which is better but not enforceable.
Through violence, right? So being on time, you know, telling the truth in general, not like when you're under oath, but you know, telling the truth in general, being on time, being polite, being reasonable, not screaming at people, and so on, right?
Not calling people names, like, distract the things that you can do, which other people can avoid.
Other people can avoid it, right?
So if I have a relationship with someone and they, I don't know, whatever, they just wake up one morning and decide to start yelling at me and calling me terrible names.
I don't know, maybe they get a job for the mainstream media or something.
Well, they're not inflicting that on me in a way because I can just choose to not associate with that person.
If I have a friend who always shows up an hour late or whose phone overheats now, if I have a friend who always shows up late, he's not enforcing that on me.
Right? Because I can just choose to not see that person.
I can choose to tell him to get there an hour earlier if he's always an hour late or whatever.
And like everybody usually has one friend or one family like that.
It's usually when they've got young kids, right?
Where it's just like, yeah, we'll be there at four.
It's like, sure you will. Sure you will.
No, you won't. Aesthetically preferable actions are things which it's better to pursue, and it's nice to have, but it's not a have to have, because you can avoid these things.
A home invasion is kind of different from someone who yells at you and calls you names, right?
Because if someone's yelling at you and calling you names, you can just get up, you can walk out, or you can have that person removed from your house if they won't leave or whatever, right?
That's more of a home invasion kind of thing, I guess.
But let's say you're out for dinner, someone yells at you.
You can just pay your part of the bill, you can get up, you can walk out, you can never have to have anything to do with that person again.
So you can't shoot that person because they haven't confined you.
They're not imposing their will upon you violently.
And you have every single option in the known universe, which is do everything except hang out with that person, which still gives you enormous latitude, right?
But something like a home invasion, somebody who runs at you with a chainsaw or whatever it is, steals your car, you don't have the option to not have that happen, right?
So that's why you can sort of use force in all of that, right?
So where I can get to...
Is the aesthetically preferable action of not eating meat, in that it's better, but it's not something that you can enforce at the point of a gun.
Because this is where you have to get to when it comes to ethics.
And this is the big test for me, and I put this big test out there for everyone, which is, what justifies the smell of cordite?
And gunpowder, what justifies bullets shattering bone?
What justifies people getting shot in the stomach, having their stomach acid eat through their internal organs and die an agonizing death, right?
Like, what is it that justifies that?
Because that's when you start to talk about ethics, virtue, right and wrong, you're basically talking about taking the pin out of the grenade of human violence.
That's what it's about. Now, if someone, some woman is, a guy's chasing her and he's overpowering her, he's going to rape her, he's strong, she's got a gun, yeah, shoot him.
You know, that's what ethics, like ethics pulls the pin on the grenade of human violence when you start talking about ethics and rights and so on, right?
And so if someone is going to come and murder you and kill You know, and I'm a stand your ground kind of guy as well, like running into the woods doesn't seem quite right.
So can you stand your ground and use force against that person who's going to come and kill you?
Yeah. And so when you start to talk about ethics, you start to talk about bullets going through the air.
Now that's the big question.
Now, if I was still a vegetarian and I had a strong...
Preference for people to not eat meat.
And it would be aesthetically preferable.
And aesthetically preferable can be quite strong.
Like be on time is kind of a mild one.
Don't verbally abuse people.
That's a pretty strong one. Now, if you're being verbally abused, it still doesn't mean you get to shoot someone because you can just get up and walk away.
So I would put it at a very strong aesthetically preferable action.
But the question comes down to this.
Is a third party Allowed to use violence to prevent the action you're banning.
That is an excellent question.
I'll finish in a second. I'll turn it back over to you.
The question is, you see some woman, some guy's jumping on her and attacking her and he's unzipping his pants or whatever.
Can you shoot that guy?
Can you hit him over the head with a block of wood?
Can you wrestle him? Can you initiate the use of force in order to protect her?
I'd be like, yeah, absolutely you can.
And I would argue it's aesthetically preferable behavior to do it, to protect that woman, assuming that it's not going to be massively dangerous for you.
So that to me is a very strong aesthetic preference.
Like, you know, if you know the Heimlich maneuver and some guy's choking and you're really enjoying your profiterol, you get to say, I could save the guy, but it's a really good profiterol and I don't like it when the ice cream melts all over the pastry or whatever it is, right?
I used to sell those. I used to work many, many years ago at a restaurant, I don't know if it's still around, called The Mermaid in downtown Toronto.
And I used to upsell profiteroles like by the bucket full.
That was the first time, by the way, I was still a broke student back then.
It was the first time I remember being in real contact with Extraordinary Wealth when a guy came in.
I guess he'd had some big business deal, whatever.
He was there with his girlfriend and he ordered like a $1,500 bottle of wine.
And I was like, oh my God, people think this exists.
It's amazing, right? So I'm, you know, what is it that's willing to take the safety off the revolver, right?
You see a guy eating a steak?
I don't know, man. Are you willing to let the bullets fly?
Because that's, to me, where the fundamental question of ethics is.
That's a phenomenal question.
I personally would not be willing to shoot somebody over that.
But I think in terms of an ethical system, I mean, ethics has to do with morality, correct?
Like, could you say, for example, could you make the argument that it is virtuous to kill animals in order to provide food for people?
Like, is it a virtuous job to kill a cow and provide somebody's steak?
Is there virtue involved in that process?
Like, I very much think you could make an argument that there's virtue involved in growing corn to feed people.
Like, that's very virtuous.
But I don't think that you could make the same argument with raising a cow.
Well, see, but the moment that you're starting to talk about virtue, then you're starting to talk about sanctions for not doing it, right?
So it's virtuous to respect people's bodily integrity, right?
And so if...
If someone is violating that virtue, then they're going to stab someone, strangle someone, rape someone.
If someone is violating your moral standard, what are you willing to do?
Now, if you're willing to shoot them, I would say, well, that's UPB. If you're not willing to shoot them, but you still feel very strongly about it and have good arguments for it, I would put it in aesthetically preferable actions.
That you can make a very strong case for it.
You can, you know, maybe call people names a little, like you probably have some names for people who would choose to eat animals, you know, as cruel or thoughtless or sadistic or selfish or whatever it is, right?
So you can use some pretty strong language and you can make a very passionate case and you can thunder from the pulpit and you can do all of that.
But... I think it's good if people work out.
I think it's good if they eat sensibly.
I think it's good if they don't consume too much.
But I'm not going to shoot fat, lazy people who consume a lot, right?
So that's, to me, you start to pull out the V-bomb, like the virtue bomb or the morality bomb or the rights bomb, and suddenly, you know, there's a rolling grenade in the tent, right?
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
I mean, I see where you're coming from in that it's almost like Almost like its own category.
You're calling it, you know, aesthetically preferable actions, like APA, maybe that'll be your next book.
But I see where you're coming from with it not being, like, UPB is about what you can shoot people over.
Yeah, and I mean, that was not going to be the original title of the book or anything because it sounds like kind of crazy, like I'm trying to justify stuff.
But, you know, to me, this is not specific to you, but to the essence of sort of what we're talking about is that when people start pulling out virtue and ethics, then they're talking about the sunny side of the equation.
The dark side of the equation is evil and all of that.
And evil is that which is inflicted upon you which you cannot escape and do not want.
Obviously, inflicted upon you is kind of embedded in the language.
And to me, one of the big problems in the world is people say they take things – and I'm not necessarily putting you in this category.
I'll just tell you why I'm so passionate about this – is that people take things that are aesthetically preferable and they move them into the realm of ethics, which unleashes human violence in the pursuit, right?
So, example – Yeah, it's better if people who are sick get healthcare.
I prefer it, obviously, and you do and the people who are.
I prefer it when people who are sick get healthcare.
I really, really, really do.
I mean, the idea that somebody has cancer and can't get treatment or like, I really, I prefer it when people who are starving have something to eat.
I enormously prefer it.
Massively prefer it. If people are homeless in the cold or whatever, maybe out bursting into flames like people do in your backyard or something, right?
So if people are really suffering, I mean, I would really, really prefer it if some comfort was given to those people and they got soccer and felt better and got treatment and got food and got shelter.
I would really, really prefer it.
That's a very strong aesthetic preference for me.
However, if I say, well, people have a right to healthcare, people have a right to shelter, people have a right to food, then I'm saying, okay, if they have a right to it, then it's virtuous to provide it to them.
And therefore, if you fail to provide it to them, you're evil.
And then they can use force against you.
So that, to me, is where...
And people move stuff from aesthetically preferable into the category of good and evil without recognizing that they've just taken the pin out of the grenade.
And so it's an emotional thing because we all so strongly want...
Everything to work out well.
To me, it would be wonderful if men and women and different ethnicities, if they all had generally the same outcomes, I think that would be wonderful.
Wouldn't that solve a whole bunch of problems?
I really, really would prefer that, and I'm certainly a staunch advocate of absolute equality under the law.
But we all know that absolute equality under the law doesn't lead to Outcomes that are the same as a whole, right?
Maybe over time it will, but right now it generally doesn't.
And the more free a society is, sometimes the more these, quote, inequalities of outcome tend to accumulate, right?
So I very, very much want people to get health care, but I'm not willing to take the safety off the gun if a doctor doesn't provide that health care, if that makes sense.
And that to me is the big issue.
Yeah, it makes perfect sense.
I do have a follow-up question, if that's okay, very related, in that, like, okay, we can't shoot people over killing cows, but I do think it's at least an important question, and maybe even deserves some more attention in UPB or something, of To what degree?
Like, some of the awful things that go on in factory farms, like, to say, like, okay, just because we don't have a right to go in and kill all the butchers doesn't mean that it shouldn't be morally reprehensible and completely condemned.
Okay, so you're back to morally reprehensible and completely condemned.
And that, again, is real close to the border of taking the safety off, right?
You're pulling the pin on the grenade, right?
Let me give you something specific.
Yeah, yeah, please. Like, shock and horrify me.
Like, let's have me fight against the strongest foe, so to speak.
So you can make an argument that this is from government action, but it is a side effect of treating animals as commodities.
So recently, because of COVID and all the shutdown and everything, and the demand for meat plummeted, a lot of meat suppliers, you know, we find ourselves with an excess supply of animals with nowhere to go.
And so these people were in Iowa, they were trying to figure out the best way to kill large numbers of pigs, you know, economically.
And the way they were experimenting with that, they tried shutting off the ventilation in their warehouse to see how hot it would get to see if that would kill the pigs.
And they could only get the warehouse up to 120 degrees.
Didn't kill any of them.
And so they found out a way to inject steam into the warehouse and essentially boiled the pigs alive.
And it didn't kill all of them.
Some were still alive, you know, in the morning when they went in and they finished them off.
I mean, this is what, like, meat dollars go to.
And by purchasing meat, it is, in my view, like you vote with your dollars.
Well, technically that results from not purchasing meat, right?
Well, I see where you're coming from, but it's a cycle because this is a temporary.
If people permanently stopped buying meat, then they wouldn't get the pigs in the first place and put them through such a process.
Okay, but now how do they normally kill the pigs?
I believe with, there's like, I don't know if you've ever seen the movie No Country for Old Men, but there's like this gun with like a rod that shoots out into the brain very quickly, typically humanely.
So, I mean, the life is ended, but pain is not really part of the equation, right?
generally speaking but that doesn't count for like on a factory farm like the life of the pig like that's the moment of death but like when you were here in California I don't know if you drove by this there's this factory farm on the I-5 when you're going from LA to the Bay Area and there's just thousands of cows living in their own shit I call it cow schwitz you call it what?
cow schwitz I don't...
schwitz? what do you mean?
It's like a play on the concentration camp Auschwitz, but with a cow.
Oh, Cowschwitz! Okay, I'm so sorry.
It's an air tube headset here, so the audio is not fantastic.
Okay, got it. And there's no quality of life for those cows.
Like, it's not just the death that's suffering, it's their life that's also suffering.
Oh yeah, so for those who don't know, I mean, the way that cows are treated in factory farms is generally pretty appalling.
I mean, you have cows who are stuck in stalls their entire life, who are so starved of stimuli, they will swing their heads back and forth and beat their heads to a pulp because they're so incredibly bored and restless and trapped.
It is a form of torture.
I think it is a form of torture to treat animals in this fashion.
Now, you could say, ah, yes, well, but it is more efficient and it makes meat cheaper and so on.
And it's like, yes, that certainly is a case.
That certainly is a case, but you're right.
It's not just the moment of death that matters.
It is the quality of life as a whole.
And if you've ever seen this, and I saw actually this just by accident somewhat recently, if you've ever seen a video of a cow who's been released from one of these factory farms, The cow is overjoyed, is literally jumping through the fields in the same way that you would be if you got out of a concentration camp where you were trapped and would eventually be murdered, right?
So, listen, I'm with you 150% as far as all of this goes and whether people are willing to pay the extra for free range or grass-fed or whatever it is.
And, of course, there is the whole health cycle, too.
I'm not an expert on this, and you probably know a lot more about this, but my understanding of the cycle is something like this.
That because the cows are all jammed in together and wallowing in their own feces and trapped and wounded, sometimes because they're so undissimulated, they'll break their skin, beating their heads against the wall.
They end up getting a lot of infections.
So what do you do? Well, you throw a lot of antibiotics into the meal that you're feeding the cows.
And then what happens is the antibiotics end up in the meat.
People eat a lot of antibiotics.
And then the bacteria get resistant to those antibiotics.
And it means that when people get Significant infections, the antibiotics don't work as well.
Is that something like how it rolls?
Oh, very much. You're being very accurate with your descriptions right now.
So it's very bad for people.
It's bad for the cows, obviously, but even if we say the cows aren't part of the equation, the way in which we consume animals at the moment Is really rough.
It's brutal on a huge number of the animals and very, very bad for human health ecosystem as a whole.
Yeah, and to add on to it being bad for humans, the psychological health of butchers, the people who work in the slaughterhouses, the mental health rates for them, I mean, I don't know exactly what they are, but, you know, the rates for depression and anxiety are higher than the average population.
Yeah, I don't know if that's cause or effect.
Like, I don't know if...
Either way, it's disturbing.
You know, if the job attracts psychopaths, you know, then that would be disturbing in its own right, even whether it's cause or effect.
Yeah, just for those who don't know, we don't know, again, maybe the studies have been done, but I don't know if people know for sure whether becoming a butcher makes you depressed or anxious, or whether depressed or anxious people just end up as butchers, right?
But either way, we certainly don't necessarily want an occupation that requires this level of cruelty.
And, you know, of course, the argument is, and I know I'm sort of getting behind your argument here, which to me is perfectly valid.
We're not in pursuit of victory.
We're in pursuit of the truth, right?
So if you want to understand, you know, I don't want to speak for you or for vegans as a whole, right?
But I think it's kind of important for you to understand.
If you want to understand how Thomas feels about cows, think about how you feel about horses.
Right? So... We don't eat horses in the West.
Horses generally roam free, and they're beautiful animals, noble animals, and so on.
Why the hell do horses get away with stuff and cows don't?
They don't have as much meat on the bone.
No, but, you know, nonetheless, I mean, you know, there's still more meat on a horse than there is on a chicken, right?
Oh, that's, yeah. Right, so how is it that...
What is it?
There's a line from some Tarantino movie where the guy says...
Why do you love squirrels and hate rats?
Or the fluffy tail makes all the difference.
I mean, it's basically the same thing, right?
And so why is it that we will kill and torture in a sense, not for the sake of torturing, but because it just makes meat cheaper.
We'll do all of this to cows.
But if somebody did this to horses, we'd be completely appalled.
I mean, isn't that one of the things in 1984, right?
Boxer, sorry, not Animal Farm.
Boxer, the horse, is dragged away to the glue farm because he's too old to work.
And it's like, oh my gosh, this is the most appalling thing ever.
But it's like, you know, in the cycle of the farm, you know, 50 cows would have been killed during this time period.
But suddenly the horse is like the worst thing in the known universe, right?
Dogs and cats, too.
Dogs, you know, so this is the same thing with dogs and cats as well, right?
So, you know, we will eat a chicken, but if you bite the head off someone's pet parrot, they'll be completely appalled, right?
Like, we do have this really fragmented consistency when it comes to these things.
You know, back in the days at the start of the Wuhan flu, right, when people were like, oh my gosh, they eat this and they eat that, and there's a video of some mom feeding her kids tadpoles, and we're like...
It's astonishing to our sensibilities, but, you know, Hindus worship cows, right?
So the way that, I assume, I've never really looked into it, but you probably have, the way that the Hindu would look at how we treat cows would be like sacrilegious, like appalling beyond words, right?
Absolutely. So, yeah, we are way inconsistent.
Now, as far as how you deal with Yeah, I'm with you.
Don't pull out the guns. I got you.
But in terms of like what we can do as individual human beings, how can we make more ethical choices in our everyday lives?
I don't see any other answer but that.
Unless you're in that like desert island, this is necessary for survival.
Like as an individual wanting to make the most moral, the APA, where I forget, I'm forgetting the...
Aesthetically preferable actions.
As human beings, why shouldn't we make the most aesthetically preferable actions possible?
Somebody has a comment, a very interesting comment.
They said, why eat cats or dogs?
They require meat to grow cows, convert grass to delicious meat.
It's a different situation.
Did you want to respond to that?
No, I mean, if anything, like from a moral perspective, I would see it as like, you know, I don't view it as necessarily black and white, but I would view it as, you know, less bad to kill, you know, like a wolf or something along those lines than a cow who doesn't mean you any harm.
You know, if you're going to kill a cougar or something, you know, there's the potential for self-defense or If anything, it would be more moral to kill an animal, or less immoral, I should say, to kill an animal that eats meat, as opposed to the harmless cow who's just trying to eat some grass.
Right. So somebody else has argued, positive axiom says, the true argument is about industrialization of meat.
Sustainable farming doesn't do that.
The industrial production of plants is equally bad.
Now, of course, whether plants can feel pain or not, I don't think they can.
I don't know much about it, but If I can, I think I know what the argument he's making, and I've heard this many times, and I have a response to it, which is that if you're growing a cornfield, there's going to be field mice or other living creatures that live in the ground, and as they pull these big giant tractors over the land,
some of those animals are bound to die, and I accept that, and I think it's a valid argument, and my rebuttal to it is that It requires exponentially more of those deaths because in order to feed the cows and the pigs, you need an even larger amount of corn and grass grown to feed those cows and pigs.
So it just becomes exponentially worse.
It's just choosing the lesser evil, if that makes sense.
Yeah, there is no feeding of human beings without the suffering of animals.
Yes. Even if it's all 100%...
Yeah, I know.
Even if it's all 100%...
That you are eating vegetables.
It's still going to be. And the line needs to get drawn somewhere.
I'm against animal testing, but does that mean I'm not going to buy an aspirin if I need it or something?
You can't buy a single pharmaceutical item without it having been legally tested on an animal, which I find, again, morally reprehensible.
But I will likewise take part in a life-saving medication if I need it, even if it's derived from an animal.
It's that necessary argument.
Okay, here's another comment.
If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be vegetarian, but that's not quite right, is it?
I really don't know where all the empathy for animals comes from, but I know that before slaughterhouses existed, people saw animals getting killed.
Not only that, they killed the animals themselves, because meat is good and they needed some nutrients.
Killing animals to eat was normal, so the reason people nowadays can have all this empathy for animals is exactly because slaughterhouses exist.
Block the gore from view, denormalizes it, and allows you to be also sensitive.
It's an interesting point. I mean, it's an aesthetic point, I suppose.
Sorry, go ahead. It is an interesting point.
And, you know, to some degree, I'm sure it's true.
That being said, if you put a bunny in front of a three-year-old, that kid's not going to eat the bunny.
Well, but the kid's not going to eat the cow either.
But if you put a burger in front of a kid, the kid's going to eat it if it's not identified as a bunny, right?
Right, when you remove all the violence behind how it's created.
Well, I don't know.
No, because even if the bunny died of old age, right?
If you tell the kid it's the bunny, they probably won't eat it.
But if they don't know that it's a bunny, they probably would eat it.
So let me just see here.
I just want to make sure we get to all the comments.
I've got a couple more things that I wanted to argue, and I really, really do appreciate this conversation.
It's very helpful. So children of the mentally disabled are to be eaten, right?
So I just want to touch on this because I did a long debate about this in the past, so I'll just talk about it really, really quickly.
Children and the mentally disabled, so if you can't enter into one of my arguments is morality applies to people who can understand morality or it applies to creatures that can understand morality.
In other words, creatures that can communicate, that can process abstractions, that can universalize and, of course, themselves deploy moral arguments to get what they want, right?
So the moment a kid says if they steal some candy, if the moment says I didn't steal the candy, the moment the kid says that lies about it, or the moment that if there's a fight and two brothers point at each other and say he did it, he did it, right?
They're saying, well, if it's self-defense, it's okay.
The initiation of force is bad.
So the moment you deploy moral arguments, you are subjected to moral arguments.
And so the difference is between humans and animals is that children, when they're very young, let's say, you know, 12 months, 16 months, 18 months, they will grow into human beings.
Right? So they are potential human beings.
The mentally disabled, it certainly is possible at some point, sort of Flowers to Algernon, which is a novel I read when I was younger.
This Flowers to Algernon, which is about a guy who gets treatment.
I think this was made into a movie with De Niro and Robin Williams called Awakenings, but it's about a guy who gets the treatment for his mental disability and becomes a super genius and then slides back into his mental disability.
And so children and the mentally disabled are potential.
Human beings. There could be a cure or a fix for mental disabilities and so on.
And so in the same way that somebody who's fully asleep is not able to process abstractions and moral arguments while they're asleep, but they're going to wake up, right?
Which is why you can't whisper.
Like if somebody said, well, yes, I did strangle him, your honor, but in fairness, while he was sleeping, I did kneel beside him and whisper, well, Don't say anything if it's okay for me to strangle you.
You know, he didn't say anything so that was implicit permission, right?
That would never be accepted as an argument because the person is asleep and therefore has no capacity to hear or consent or choose or anything like that.
But they're going to wake up.
Right? And so this is the Terry Schiavo.
I think it was this woman who had massive brain damage.
And the question is, do you keep her on life support?
Do you not keep her on life support?
And I think the eventual case was made that she was never going to possibly recover because her brain had turned into half its regular size.
So there were massive sections of it that shrunk and miss or whatever.
Nobody knows how to regrow any of that stuff.
And even if you did, it wouldn't be the same person.
So we do...
Where people are in the category of human beings, they are in the category of people who...
Of creatures who can abstract and process moral arguments and use moral arguments and so on.
And so we will keep those under the umbrella of human beings' potential, even if they don't have it in the actuality, they have it in their potentiality.
So that's a little different.
There's no way that a dog is going to be able to grow into a creature that can Reason, speak, process abstractions, make moral arguments, use moral arguments in their defense, enter into legal contracts.
That's not going to happen, right? I mean, that's just the way things are.
They're very small brains, of course, relative to human beings, though not necessarily to some human beings.
But anyway, so I think that's how you take care of that particular argument, unless there's something, Thomas, that you wanted to mention in regards to that?
No, no.
Somebody else says, I'm going to put this on the screen simply because I'm figuring out the technology we're in I can.
All right. Somebody says, bum, bum, bum.
They don't say that song, but...
So they say, it's mathematically impossible for the human race to only eat vegetables that would damage all the topsoil.
Thomas, go! Yeah, that's a new argument.
I gotta say, I've never heard that before.
I think it's certainly plausible, but it doesn't follow to me because of the fact that the process of eating meat exponentially increases the amount of soil we need to grow food because growing meat is very inefficient.
It's something like for every calorie you get from meat, 10 calories went into it.
And so you need to grow a lot more food in order to feed the animals.
Like, if you take the animals out of the equation, then you increase the amount of available land for human consumption.
Well, sorry to interrupt, but isn't it the case that the...
The plants that are used to feed livestock, such as cows, depletes the topsoil far less than something like corn or whatever else you would grow, tomatoes.
That very well could be true.
I don't know that.
I'll have to research that further.
That is interesting.
All right. Here's another one.
And listen, we obviously don't know everything, and that's all fine, right?
So here's another one.
Talk about diabetes. Some people can't eat carbs.
Cowards. Just kidding.
No, what's that? Well, I mean, there would be, like, I guess I don't really follow the argument.
Like, I know I mentioned a loaf of bread earlier, but...
Oh, somebody says they can eat carbs, just not simple insulin spiking carbohydrates.
Like, there would very much be carb-free vegan food.
Okay, so they could be diabetic-friendly vegan food, right?
Oh, absolutely. It's never something I've had to worry about.
I'm an overweight vegan.
People are surprised when I say it.
Because I'm not vegan for health reasons, I'm vegan for ethical reasons.
So I'll eat a vegan cheeseburger.
Right, okay. Grass feeds cows.
Corn isn't good for cows.
Filler. Grass pastures don't require killing of rodents.
Harvesting your wheat and soy does.
Oh, that's interesting. So grass pastures, of course, they're cropped by the cows, so you don't need to harvest in a violent way that kills all of the other animals in the field.
Yeah, that is far preferable, but it's also far less economic.
Right. I mean, in terms of, you know, the efficient use of resources being space.
You know, you're not going to grow as many cows.
But, you know, you drive...
I know I mentioned the I-5 earlier with Cowschwitz, but there's also plenty of places on the I-5 where you just see cows, you know, quote-unquote happy cows come from California.
It's a bullshit statement, but there are happy cows here as well before they get killed.
Somebody here says, there's not a source here, so please feel free to put a source in if you have one.
I've heard this, though, again, I've not delved into the details of it.
Sorry, I'll just get my case here.
So they say, studies indicate many times more sentient life is killed by vegetation farming.
I guess if we're counting cows' life—I mean, obviously not per pound, right?
But if we say the field mouse is equivalent to—as one life to the cow, I think they're saying that more sentient life is killed by vegetation farming than meat farming.
Again, I did address this point earlier, but I'm happy to say it again with the idea of requiring exponentially more because you have to grow more food to feed the cows, which results in more sentient life.
No, no, but you don't mow.
Or harvest the field that the cow is grazing from, because that's grass, which is cropped by the cow.
Whereas if it's corn, you've got to go in and mow it, which kills the mammals or other sentient life that's in the vegetation patch.
Right. This would be specifically applied to factory farms and not the quote-unquote happy cow grazing on the land, which does exist.
To be honest with you, I don't know what percentage comes from a factory farm and what percentage comes from the quote-unquote happy farm.
No, no, this is not a question of happy farms or not, as far as I understand it.
And of course, the listener will correct me if I've gone astray on this.
I think the argument goes something like this.
So if you want to kill fewer sentient animals, then because cows...
Yeah.
Yeah. Right, but that is only applicable to the cows on the happy farms.
It's not applicable to the cows on the factory farms who aren't eating grass and are being fed those vegetables.
Okay, you know, sorry, I understand.
Yeah, you were right about that.
Yeah, I mistook that.
So thank you. I appreciate that correction.
All right, so let's see here.
Oh, I'm sure you have, of course, as a vegan yourself.
Have you talked or looked into much of the health issues that vegans are perceived to be suffering from?
Anemia, lack of energy, that kind of stuff?
You know, it was a big concern for me when I first made the transition.
I was taking a multivitamin.
B12 is supposed to be one of the harder things for vegans to get, but you can get it from a vegan source.
And there are probably exceptions.
I forget the name of it, but there's this joint thing that comes from lobster claws.
I don't think there's a vegan source for that.
But there's a vegan source for damn near every nutritionally required element.
Or there are supplements, right?
You're right. And supplements, it's not, you know, I mean, if you live in a northern climate, particularly if you're darker skinned, if you're black or whatever, it's just one of the issues behind COVID, right?
Then you're not going to get as much vitamin D as you need probably from sunlight, particularly in the winter months, so you can take a vitamin D supplement.
I take a vitamin D supplement and I don't feel like, oh my god, I'm not a robot, I'm a cyborg.
It's just something that we do, right?
I mean, we have air conditioning and we have vitamin supplements and so I don't think that's something that's...
Somebody here says, my sister has been a low-carb vegetarian for eight years, and she's a powerhouse athlete.
Yeah, and there certainly are vegan weightlifters, vegan athletes, and so on.
It does require that extra bit of consideration.
Yeah. Because, I mean, I'm with the idea that ancestrally, we're only here because our ancestors ate meat.
Well, certainly that's an argument that is pretty real, which people need to understand that if we had been vegan, we would not have been able to develop our brains and bodies to the degree that we can make a choice.
Living in the woods, therefore we have to live in the woods.
You know, we can make changes.
I don't consider that a very strong argument.
You know, rape was a weapon of war throughout most of human history.
In fact, rape was a pretty busy way of getting things done throughout a lot of human history.
That doesn't mean that we can say, well, that's the same it is now, right?
Exactly. Right, okay.
So that's a good point.
But let's see here.
If animal suffering is a big problem, shouldn't vegans be providing health care and courts to wild animals to prevent all the murder and mutilation?
No. I mean, I very much view that as a non-argument in that it's not my responsibility to save any animal.
It's just, it is my responsibility, I feel, to not increase its harm.
Like, if I saw an animal being eaten by a cougar or something, you know, doesn't necessarily mean I'd go up and take a bite out of it or, I don't know, maybe put it out faster.
Well, yeah. I mean, so, of course, this is an obvious argument, and I'm sure that there's a simple answer to it.
Nothing pops into my head. But, of course, if animals have rights, then animals which consume other animals are murderers, right?
Except where avoidability is impossible, there can be no morality, because animals that have to murder can't avoid it.
Right. Now, is it that they can't avoid it because there is no choice?
Because there are, of course, omnivores, right?
There are carnivores and vegetarians and omnivores.
So where the omnivores could survive by eating something that's not a creature, but then choose to eat a creature, would that be something different?
For somebody or a creature that can actually process that thought, yes.
But I think humans are unique in the ability to process that thought.
Well, and of course, that goes back to the argument as to why we're different from animals, because we have the process.
Like, the animal can't sit there and say, well...
The creature that I'm going to eat is going to suffer, and it's just like, I'm hungry, fill belly, right?
I mean, that's kind of the way. Absolutely.
Right, the way it works. So, because we, this is people's argument, say, well, because we are different, then we have different moral standards from animals.
Okay, let me answer the question.
I should say that's kind of prejudging my answer, like it's going to solve everything.
Let me attempt to answer the question, which you had, which is a great question, which was, how do you deal with People who treat animals badly.
And I'm not talking about the animal cruelty.
So the reason that I would have big issues with animal cruelty is because it's unnecessary.
And it also displays, to me, that would be a great sign.
You know, there's a lot of...
I think three signs of sociopathy or psychopathy in kids.
I'm just going off the top of my head, so don't take this anything I say as gospel in this area.
But one is a bedwetting, way beyond what should be happening.
The second is fascination with fire or arson.
And the third is cruelty to animals.
This is the mark of somebody who is almost certainly through massive child abuse growing into a pretty dangerous specimen to have around as an adult in human society.
So to me, I would really, really want somebody who was cruel to animals to be dealt with in a fairly harsh manner.
That doesn't mean that I would necessarily shoot that person to prevent the cruelty to the animal, but I would definitely want significant investments into figuring out what happened to that person's brain development, whether they show physical markers for empathy or, you know, I just want that person to be really strongly evaluated.
And I think in a free society, there'd be some pretty good mechanisms for that.
So your question is, your earlier question, and you said, oh, I should put this in UPB about how we deal with people.
Let's take the example of somebody who is a verbal abuser.
Somebody who is a verbal abuser.
Now, somebody who beats up his wife, a woman who beats up her husband, that's just the initiation of force, and we've got UPB and all.
Verbal abuse is trickier, right?
Now, there are two categories of verbal abuse.
There's verbal abuse that you can get away from, and there's verbal abuse you can't get away from.
So the verbal abuse you can get away from is you've got a girlfriend who calls you stupid all the time.
Well, you can just leave that girlfriend, right?
And assuming she's not going to pull some psycho stalking bunny boiler routine with you, you get out of the situation, right?
And if she does, then... She is, of course, invading your space and maybe trespassing in your property.
There's other remedies for that kind of stuff that would be UPV compliant.
Now, of course, for children, this is why I focus so much on parenting.
With children, you can't escape the verbal abuse.
Because you've got to go home.
You're kind of the property of your parents.
You're not independent. You don't have your own rights.
You don't have your own income. You don't have your own legal status or capacity to enter into contracts as a child.
So you really, really are kind of trapped in this situation of being on the receiving end of verbal abuse.
And verbal abuse has been shown in many circumstances to be more damaging.
Than physical abuse, probably not more than sexual abuse, which is just about the worst thing.
But yeah, verbal abuse, it kind of sits in your head and it worms its way into your consciousness and it kind of rewrites the definition of who you are.
As Dr. Phil always says, I don't know if you haven't watched him in forever, but he used to say, right on the slate of who you are, right?
So with regards to verbal abusers, can you shoot a parent who's calling his kid stupid?
No. No. Now, it's not physically destructive.
It's not a permanent...
Can you shoot a parent who's about to stab his kid?
Yeah. Yeah, permanent physical scar.
And the kid has no choice about how that affects him, right?
So if you stab someone, they have no choice.
Like, they have a scar, right?
They have no choice about whether it affects them.
They can't rise above the stabbing, right?
But verbal abuse, and I was verbally abused as a child, and you then have at some point, some significant point, even as a child, you have the option to figure out what you're going to make of what people are saying.
That's a really, really important consideration.
Somebody who punches you, you don't have a choice as to whether that has a physical effect on you.
But somebody who calls you names, and you know, as somebody who's been out here on the internet for 15 years, I've been called a name or two.
And the question is, how do you let it affect you?
You have a choice about that and that you don't have with physical intervention.
And I think the thing to do is to strongly disapprove of the parents who are performing that kind of verbal abuse in a free society.
Kids would be taught strong mental countermeasures to this kind of verbal abuse and so on, right?
So the question is, what do we do with people who are farming in a destructive or horrible manner?
And so, well, of course, there's economic boycotts, this, that, and the other, right?
Certainly what we need is fewer human beings as a whole on the planet in the long run.
And one of the ways to do that is through industrialization, the education of women, and so on.
All of this stuff is kind of well-known.
A welfare state, of course, vastly increases the number of people, as does debt, government debt as a whole, and so on.
So there's lots of things we do in a free society that would limit this kind of stuff. - At farm subsidies. - Farm subsidies, yeah.
Farm subsidies are a huge, huge deal.
I mean, school lunches that, you know, you've got to have your meat.
Talk about the – we should – after I finish this, I sort of want to finish on the topic of this unbelievable and ungodly food pyramid that's kind of the inverse of what is actually unhealthy for human beings where the government is telling everyone to eat meat or die in a way.
But – I'll give you an example of how a society should deal with somebody who goes against social values.
And for that example, I will ask you to look directly at the monitor that you are around.
And the answer, it's kind of funny because it's kind of like...
What I talk about in practical anarchy as the way in which society deals with those who deviate from its values, not in a manner that is a violation of UPB or whatever.
Well, ostracism, if you may be aware.
So it's kind of funny, like one of the theories of my book, Practical Anarchy, that I wrote like 13 years ago...
Well, it's kind of come to life in the person of me and de-platforming and so on, right?
So clearly, I have annoyed significant portions of society or at least some portions of society that have control over who gets to stay on platforms and who doesn't.
And I haven't broken any laws or anything like that or advocate violence or anything like that.
So what happens?
Well, what I said would happen is that people would be ostracized from participation in particular areas of society if they go against social values.
And, you know, lo and behold, the ghost of my book, Past, has risen up and struck me down in a way that I predicted would be quite...
A powerful way to attempt to transform people's actions in society where they're not violating UPB or laws, but they are doing things that people dislike.
So ostracism is a pretty... Now we have boycotts and so on, and everyone ostracizes all the time, right?
Because we vastly don't buy goods or services from people as a whole, right?
So... So I would say that the way you deal with aesthetically negative actions is firstly through personal ostracism, and you're already doing that because you don't buy meat, right?
But then there's a way of encouraging more social ostracism, right?
And people obviously who disliked what I did, they went from personal ostracism, like I'm just not going to watch that bald jerk there on the internet who says all these terrible things.
So they went from personal ostracism to organized ostracism, in other words, trying to encourage other people to not watch me, to...
Structural ostracism, in other words, getting me kicked off particular platforms, right?
And so the question is then, if you look at that kind of example of my own theories coming to life in ways, obviously, they're unjust, right?
It's unjust in the way that I have been dealt with, and it's wrong.
But, because I didn't even violate the policies of the organizations that de-platformed me, but If you look at sort of the power of that kind of de-platforming, of that kind of ostracism, it is quite strong.
And it controls a lot of people.
I mean, a lot of people saw the smoking crater where my 15 years of investment had been in social media and were like, ooh, I better not talk about that stuff, right?
And you can see the same thing with the New York Post.
They were locked out for, I think, two weeks from their Twitter account because they posted facts about Hunter Biden and Joe Biden and the laptop from hell and so on.
And they were locked out. And okay, so now they're back in.
But the whole point, of course, is that reporters aren't going to want to report on this stuff because it's not about the New York Post.
It's about other people and whether they'll invest time and effort into investigating the Bidens.
If it means that they get locked out of their social media accounts, well, that's kind of a high price to pay for a lot of people.
Right.
So they'll just avoid.
Right.
And the purpose was not to get me to stop talking about stuff people didn't like.
The purpose was to get other people to stop, to never start talking about things that other people don't like.
Right.
So it doesn't really matter to me.
I'll continue to talk about things that people don't like.
But the purpose, of course, is not primarily to punish me.
The purpose is to scare other people off from talking about things that upset the leftists or whoever, right?
So there's quite a lot of power in this kind of stuff.
And certainly I think the combination of interstateless society, the free society, the anarcho-capitalist society, that is the only UBB-compliant society, is a society without a government, in the same way that a UBB society with slavery is not...
It's not a UPP compliant society to have slavery.
It's not a UPP compliant society to have a government and so on.
So... And the fact that people will do evil in a UBB compliant society doesn't mean that the society is not UBB compliant, right?
I mean, because if somebody goes and murders, there'll be social sanctions and punishments around all of that.
It's not justified in the way that subsidies to meat producers are and government subsidize and pay for school lunches and food stamps and the food pyramid that's drilled into kids' heads, which is, again, I've read pretty strong articles, but it's the inverse of what people need.
So we take away all of the things that subsidize.
We, of course, have a less traumatized, less greedy, less short-sighted population as a whole in a free society.
And where people are acting in ways that are strongly aesthetically negative actions, but don't fall to the level of UPB violations.
We have very strong ostracism mechanisms, which I advocated for and then got inflicted again, I believe, completely unjustly.
But that to me is a very strong and powerful way of dealing with aesthetically negative actions that don't fall to the level of UPB violations.
I think that's very well said.
I see where you're going with that.
And I even agree.
I'm more coming at it from a point not of enforcement, but of an ideal moral perspective.
Like this is the moral ideal.
And even if it's unachievable, like even if the ideal is more than we can reach, I still think that it's worth striving for as just individuals.
I would also say, and I've made this case, but it's been many, many years, and I'll keep this very brief.
I would very strongly say that in order to treat animals well, we first need to treat children well.
I would agree with that completely.
I'm absolutely positive that you do.
And to me, the solution to social issues, there may be some immediate things that can be done that are more vivid, you know, voting or self-defense or whatever.
But the way in which we treat and exploit animals has a lot to do with a lack of empathy.
And a lack of empathy arises in people in general from being brutalized as children and indoctrinated in schools.
And if we start treating children well, children will grow up into human beings and adults, well, adults who treat animals well.
So I just wanted to mention that as well.
Somebody wanted to mention, which I think is important, They said that people got smarter, our ancestors got smarter, not because they ate meat, but because they ate seafood.
They said, I'm trying to find the actual I'm sorry, it went a little ways back.
But the basic argument was because of ancient climate change, they ended up going more to the oceans, to the lakes and so on, and couldn't farm as much.
And so because of the concentration of...
Fatty acids, omega-3s, I think it is, and other nutrients in fish and other seafood, the crustaceans and so on, that that gave us the energy boost to grow larger brains, not so much meat.
Yeah, I've heard similar arguments for bone marrow, and I don't dispute it.
Right. All right.
Any other comments or questions?
Really, really appreciate the conversation.
I make a fatty acid benefit.
There's a video of a deer eating a squirrel.
Interesting. It's a new one to me.
I would certainly suggest not searching through Google.
I want to see a video of a...
No, don't.
DuckDuckGo is probably the way to go.
I would recommend anybody who wants to delve into this subject further to watch the documentary Earthlings.
Called what? Earthwinds?
Earthlings. Earthlings.
Okay, I'm sorry again. My earpiece is kind of AM radio benefit.
But, you know, no radiation. Okay, well, listen, I really, really appreciate everyone's time today.
It was a great pleasure to drop by.
Thank you so much, Thomas, for a great conversation.
Thank you. And really, really appreciate it.
Please give your feedback through us.
You can email me at operationsoffreedomain.com.
Please help out the show, freedomain.com forward slash donate.
Great pleasure to chat with you all.
Have yourselves a great, great weekend.
Good luck to everyone in America on Tuesday.
It's going to be lit, and I would plan to not...
Be outside more than you absolutely have to be, particularly in cities.
So I hope you guys have a great, great weekend.
Stay safe, my friends. Stay healthy.
And we will talk to you soon.
Bye. Well, thank you so much for enjoying this latest Free Domain show on philosophy.
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