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Rationally speaking, is a presentation of New York City skeptics dedicated to promoting critical thinking, skeptical inquiry and science education. For more information, please visit us at NYC Skeptic's Doug. Welcome to, rationally speaking, the podcast, where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense. I'm your host, Masimo, and with me, as always, is my co-host, Julia Gillard. Julia, what are we going to talk about today? Well, Masimo, today I am delighted to announce that our guest is Professor Peter Singer.

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Peter Singer is the professor of bioethics at Princeton University, as well as a laureate professor at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the University of Melbourne. His work focuses on applications of utilitarian ethics, and in particular, he's famous for his contributions to the animal rights animal welfare movement and most recently, to the effective altruism movement. Peter, welcome.

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Thank you. It's a pleasure to be with you both.

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So, Peter, I have to tell you a story before we get started. So eight years ago, I was in Knoxville, Tennessee, as a as a part of the faculty, the USC, Tennessee. There are in biology, actually, before I turned full time to philosophy and I was running a book club discussion.

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And every month and one of one of those days we discussed one of your books, our We Do Live. And at the end of the discussion, I was driving back home with my wife and we were thinking about your one of your basic points, which was, you know, you don't have to radically alter your life in order to be more ethical. You can do it little by little, you know, as much as you can manage. Otherwise, if you start with the big things, you might get paralyzed.

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I think that that's pretty much what I remember from one of the things that I remember from that book.

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So during the length of the drive back, which was about twenty five minutes, we had decided to sell one of our two cars and move to a smaller house downtown because we forgot that there was really no particular reason to to do the kind of life, to have the kind of life that we were having and was having to have high impact from a sort of an ethical perspective.

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So this is one of the few cases I can actually remember where a book on moral philosophy has had a direct impact on my life, which may be a sad thing about moral philosophy, but I just wanted to mention it because it's a rare opportunity.

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So you actually did it, right? That's right. Woke up the next morning and said that was obviously, you know, we actually did it.

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And the funny thing was that we were ready to take a hit in the house because we bought it. We bought it less than a year before and we were moving in a less desirable area of town and so on and so forth.

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And instead, we actually made money out of it because people are crazy.

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This is terrible, Musoma. This is like those fairy tales that end with the hero who made the sacrifice actually getting rewarded. You have to make the sacrifice to, you know, save the country in the first place. What can I tell you?

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It's a wonderful story both because, as you said, philosophy and I ethical discussion did change your life. And I have to say, I get quite a lot of emails that tell me something similar. That's a very dramatic example. But a lot of emails that tell me that through reading my work or watching me on YouTube or something or other people have changed what they do. And I think that this is very encouraging and should be very encouraging for all philosophers.

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That philosophy does make a difference, that we're not just talking to each other. We are changing the world. And that's a great thing. And I think the second point that you made is also quite often true, that people find that this is satisfying and rewarding thing to do, not always in terms of finding more money than you expected, but just in terms of the way you feel about your life. Yeah, exactly.

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I've often wondered, actually, if the more effective in terms of getting people to make actual changes, to make the self-interested case for for giving away more money, that it actually makes you feel happier. I mean, there's research suggesting as much, isn't there?

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Yes. And certainly research suggesting that that does happen. Quite good research. But, you know, the problem is to get people to believe you. I suppose people often find that afterwards. But are they going to believe you in advance that this will happen? Maybe some of them will, but a lot of people feel, well, this year you're pushing something because you think it would be good if they did it. And you're therefore kind of stretching the argument very concerned.

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Yeah. So I don't pay too much attention to labels, but you are labeled usually as a utilitarian philosopher and specifically as a preference utilitarian.

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Could you tell us briefly what the difference is between a utilitarian, a preference utilitarian? I will certainly be very happy to tell you the difference I need to say, and I'll say more about this in a moment, that actually I'm not so sure anymore that I have a preference utility. OK, we can talk about that.

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But let's let's talk about the the options. Sure. First. So utilitarianism, of course, is the theory that usually traces its roots to Jeremy Bentham in the late 18th century and Bentham and the other 19th century English utilitarians John Stuart Mill and Henry Sedrick were what is usually referred to as hedonistic utilitarians. That means they think that what we ought to maximize is pleasure and the surplus of pleasure over pain. Or sometimes they talk about happiness over misery. So it's it's in terms of this feeling that they think is the good that we ought to maximize.

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And then, of course, they judge all actions as right or wrong in accordance with whether they do or do not maximise that good out of the range of alternatives that you might have had open to you.

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Now, at some point in the late 19th century and early 20th century, economists who had a kind of economics that more or less been part of this tradition and philosophers like Milton Sedrick had written on economics, economists decided that they wanted to be in some way more scientific, more empirical. And they had this problem that you can't measure people's happiness or their how much pleasure they're getting.

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So they shifted to preferences and saying what we want is to satisfy people's preferences as much as we can and minimise the thwarting of frustration of their preferences. And although, of course, you can't exactly observe a preference, what you can observe as people's choices, and that was good enough for economists. So they would say, well, if somebody chooses when an apple and an orange are both both cost 10 cents. If they choose an apple, then they prefer apples to oranges.

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But if they if when the apple costs 20 cents and the orange only cost ten, if, then they choose to oranges rather than one apple, that means that they prefer to oranges, more than one apple and so on. So that was the way they moved. Now philosophers, including myself, thought that this had some advantages over the classical view and suggested in a way, it seemed less paternalistic. It seemed less authoritarian to say that, well, whatever people want, that's what's good for them.

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And so a number of us became preference utilitarians rather than hedonistic, utilitarian.

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And Peter, in what kinds of cases would the two versions of utilitarianism give noticeably different prescriptions?

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Right. Well. There are a few different cases in which they might give different descriptions, one, and I guess the most serious one might be relating to when is it wrong to end someone's life? So for a hedonist, of course, there may be many factors, including the effect on society and on the people you love and so on. But we just focus on on the person who was killed. When is it going as far as the person who is killed is concerned?

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The Hedonists would say, well, when you diminish the amount of pleasure or happiness they will get and if the rest of their life would have contained a positive balance of happiness over misery, then it was wrong to kill them, other things being equal.

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But if if they that the reverse is true, if the rest of their life would have contained more misery than happiness, then killing them would have been justified again.

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Other things being equal and the preference you told him was say, well, wait a minute, why? If they wanted to go on living, even though you told them and maybe they accepted your view that the rest of their life would contain more misery than happiness, but they still said, never mind, I want to go on living. So that's where the preference utilitarianism is on. So much seems like to be on stronger ground in suggesting that you you have a reason against killing somebody who wants to go on living even if their life is going to be miserable on balance.

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And as you said, that does sound less paternalistic, I guess.

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Yeah, but you were saying earlier that you are not so sure about preference utilitarianism anymore. So what's what's next?

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Well, I'd be writing with a co-author from Poland, Cartagena de Lazare Ruddock. I'd been writing a work about based on the 19th century philosopher already mentioned Henry Sedrick. I think just purely as a philosopher was the greatest of the three utilitarians.

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He was not as effective a political reformer as Bentham or M. And he certainly didn't write as fluently as middle class or did. And for that reason, I think he is the least read of these three.

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But as a philosopher, I think he was really the best, the most careful ones who saw the most objections and dealt with them.

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And so we were writing a book about him and bringing his ideas into conversation with contemporary philosophers. And we just finished the book. It's not out yet. It'll only be out next year.

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And to some extent, I suppose I was persuaded by biocentric that you can understand pleasure and happiness broadly. So that is not subject to the rather crude sort of ideas that you're only talking about certain kinds of sensations. But of course, we have the pleasures of intellectual discovery, for example, a very wide range of pleasures.

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And and Sedrick also argues that that when you think about it carefully and you think, well, what is really good in itself, it has to be some state of mind, some state of consciousness that if there was no state of consciousness, well, there would be nothing good in the world. Now, our preference is in some states sense of state of consciousness. But but you can prefer something and it can happen and you may not even know about it.

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And so it doesn't actually change your state of consciousness and. The preference utilitarian, typically, though, there are different varieties of preference utilitarianism, but the typical one says, well, your preference was satisfied. That's that's good for you. And I suppose that same one puzzle to me that, you know, it may not be good for you. So that's that's one of the reasons. There was also an underlying reason that has more to do with the question of whether moral judgments can be objectively true.

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And that's a big one. That is a big one. Yes. And again, Sedrick is an Objectivist. He thinks that there is truth in morality and that some ethical propositions are self-evident, that on reflection, if we think carefully about them, we can find truths that are self-evident. Let me give you an example. He says, the idea that my own good is of no greater significance from the point of view of the universe, he says, than the good of anyone else, so that the same amount of pleasure or happiness for someone else is just as important as the amount of pleasure or happiness for me.

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So specific things that they're objective truths. And recently, the Oxford philosopher Derek Parfit has published a major two volume work called On What Matters, in which he also argues in quite a similar way to Sedrick, in fact, that there are objective truths in the world. Thinking about this did lead me to rethink my views about preference utilitarianism and to think, well, perhaps it is true that that it's states of consciousness or states of mind that are really what is ultimately value in the world are valuable in the world.

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And, of course, sense in a sense. That's right. That this is this is a statement that we can assert to be true, not just a matter of our own tastes or something like that, not just a matter of society's opinion, nor even a construction of our moral intuitions, but that this is something that just is a truth that rational beings can understand and accept.

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This is something this is actually exactly what I wanted to bring up next. This is something that Mascoma and I have disagreed about before. Massimo's disagreed with other philosophers about whether we can say that certain moral views are correct or certain moral theories. And for me at least, the problem has always been bridging. This is AWT gap where you could think of moral claims as being just descriptive facts about what actions increase human flourishing, for example, which are sort of determined by science.

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But then you don't have any force that that argues to people who don't already care about human flourishing as to why they should care and try to maximize human flourishing. Or you could just define moral statements to be just sort of the definition of of. Of what carries force, what you should in some sort of vague sense, find compelling, but but then that doesn't actually contain any any content about what would fit that description. And I've never seen a way to sort of bridge that gap from facts about the world to categorical imperatives.

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Is there is that a thing that you now think can be bridged?

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No, I don't think that you can. Well, let's put it this way. I think it's still true that you cannot deduce a moral judgment from. Facts about the natural world, the world that we we see the material world. So I think that gap between is what remains and is not bridgeable, but.

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I don't think you need to try to cross that gap. I think that what we're talking about when we talk about moral truths, non-natural judgments, that is they are not facts about the natural world. They are still truths. I think if you like about mathematical truths now, I know that there are different theories of what the nature of mathematical truth. But one theory is that these are truths that are not true simply by definition.

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But we are also not truths about the world. That is, we don't we don't discover the two plus two equals four by because in various circumstances in the world we've put two objects together with two objects and then we've counted and then we've got four. It's it's rather an uproar. In fact, the truth of reason that two plus two equals four.

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So it's at least possible that moral truths like that, that truths of reason, they're not to be deduced from any facts about the world, but they are still truths, you know, to change topics and something that however it's well, going to be more controversial than even mathematical.

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Platonism probably one of the things that one of the notable ideas, to quote some reference, is a line about you that you came up with was the drowning child analogy. Would you care to share what that analogy is about?

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Sure. So I often ask audiences to respond to this little story. I say imagine that you're walking across a park and there's a pond in the park. Now, you happen to know that this is quite a shallow pond because on hot summer days, you see kids playing in it and a teenager can stand up in it. It's only waist deep, but you're crossing the park now. It's a rather chilly day and it's not summer. And so there is nobody's splashing around and in a pond.

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Well, wait a minute. There is something splashing it upon. It's not a teenager having fun. You walk a bit closer and you see it's just a toddler, a really small child who seems to have fallen into the pond and obviously is in danger of drowning because though it's shallow, it's too tall for this toddler to stand up. So who's looking after this child? You look around, there must be a parent or a babysitter or somebody. But no, you can't see anyone at all.

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Seems like it's just you there and the child. Your next story as well, this child looks like it's about to drown. I've been rush into the pond and pull the child out so it doesn't drown.

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But just before you can do that, a less noble thought strikes you. I put on my best shoes this morning really expensive pair of shoes that I like very much, and I'll take a while to get them off. And the child might drown if I try to get them off. But if I run into the pond with them on, they'll be ruined and not the kind of shoe that can stand up to muddy water. So it's going to cost me something to save this child.

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It's going to cost me something significant up. You know that I can't afford it. But it's significant, especially if they're Italian shoes.

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Yes, it's very expensive. Yes. Have your favorite brand, whatever they might be. So let me pause at that point and ask your listeners to think for themselves. So suppose that someone did think, I don't want to ruin my shoes. I am not responsible for this child. I've never seen this child before. It's not my fault the child is in the pond. I'm going to forget I ever saw the child and walk on. Now, if somebody said that, would you think that this person had done something wrong?

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I would say so, yes. Good. And that is what almost everybody that I've ever asked. You know, I've asked many audiences now for a show of hands, why don't I just ask my class at Princeton a little while ago. Four hundred people in the in the room and know I well, I didn't I asked as far as I could see everybody raise the hand. I said, is there anybody who thinks it would not be wrong? And nobody raised their hand to that one.

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So overwhelmingly people say, yes, that would be wrong. I then say to them, well, why are you sitting here? There are children in developing countries who are dying from poverty related diseases. According to UNICEF's latest figures, there are six point six million children who die before their fifth birthday every year, and that's about eighteen thousand children per day. So that's why I say you divide up the minutes. We've been talking, children have been dying and you can do something about this.

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It's not as if it's impossible to do something about it. In fact, that six point six million figure is a drop and what it was the year before. And it's been dropping steadily, but not fast enough because of, at least in part because of the efforts of organizations like UNICEF and like Against Malaria Foundation, which is an organization that distributes bed nets in regions that get malaria and various other organizations that do this kind of work. So. Why not take the cost of an expensive pair of shoes and donate it to one of these organizations, it might save a life or depending on how expensive your shoes are, it may not save a life by itself, but put together with other people's donations.

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It may save a life that's good, too, isn't it? Um, so if you think it would be wrong not to help this child, how can we think that it's fine for us to sit here doing nothing to help the poor in other parts of the world and enjoying an affluent lifestyle in which we spend lots of money on things that we don't need, whether it's shoes or concerts or vacations or whatever it might be.

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Yeah, and I know you practice what you say, but but what you just said is one of the reasons why I can use some feedback from from colleagues who have been teaching courses in ethics using your book Practical Ethics.

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When they get to certain chapter like the one you're talking about, for instance, the union, almost universal reaction of the students is that they don't like the conclusions, but they also readily admit that it's really, really difficult to argue with the with the logic and which, of course, makes for a perfect teaching experience because like, OK, well, if you don't like the conclusions, you can you can challenge the premise is you can challenge the structure of the argument, but you can't find fault in either one of those.

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Then what what are you going to do?

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And this is often the first time that that students I'm talking about, you know, sort of introductory courses at a college level actually encounter a moral dilemma that that they if surprising, I guess, none even conceived of up until that moment. And they really upset. They usually don't like it, which, of course, is my opinion is the best thing about a college experience. I mean, if you don't get upset at least once a week, you're wasting your time.

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But definitely you should be challenged. You should be open shot.

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And yes, I mean, many of them will get upset. Some of them actually will say, wow.

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I've thought that for years I didn't realize I was making a philosophical argument and and some of them will act on it, too, and that's also, I think, very encouraging, as we were saying at the beginning of this discussion, that a philosophy challenges people intellectually. But it's not only an intellectual, it may lead some of them in the end to change the way they live. So I also find that argument very intuitively compelling, but what is irritating was that you find it compelling, compelling, irritating.

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But I also feel the I feel intuitively less just naively less obligation to help the child on the other side of the world to sort of a number in my mind, as opposed to a real drowning child in front of me. And I think part of the reason is just naturally evolved like directness parameter in our moral judgment that if someone's right directly in front of us or we would have to directly intervene, then that sort of carries more moral weight combined with maybe the sort of drop in the ocean sense of futility that, you know, I could save this one child in front of me.

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But if I save this one statistical child on the other side of the world, that's one out of millions and millions of children who need saving. And so it just feels like I'm doing less because I'm comparing it to the full number of children between saving and I. I realize that these intuitions sort of evolved and, uh, and yeah, that's why I have them. But it's also true that all my other moral intuitions about caring about other people also evolved.

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And so I don't know if I can really reject the intuitions that caused me to care less about the child on the other side of the world than the child in front of me. If I want to reject that on the grounds that it's it's there for evolutionary reasons, then I would also be rejecting other moral intuitions that are there just because they evolved. So that makes sense.

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It makes sense, but I don't quite agree with it. And in fact, this is something that we argue Katarzyna the Lázaro erotic. And I argue in one of the chapters of the book that I mentioned that we just finished. And that chapter is actually being published already as an article in the journal Ethics. It came out in the last issue of 2012, the December issue. I guess it is. And we start out the way you did that is we think that there's a lot of ethical intuitions that we have that have evolved, including intuitions to help the person near you, for example, rather than to help perhaps more people far away.

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Because I think the way the way the world is, if you live in an affluent country, the amount of money it costs to help somebody near you is enough to help many people far away just because of the huge difference in how much people earn in this country and need in this country to get by on how much they need in other countries. So I think there are a lot of intuitions like that that are evolved and we ought to discount. But unless this connects with things that I said before about the role of reason, I think that there are some judgments that are based more on reason than in emotion and that they are not, therefore subject to this kind of evolutionary debunking or critique that you were suggesting.

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All of our attitudes are and in particular, I mean, I quoted that claim of Sedgwicks that my own good is of no more importance from the point of view of the universe than a similarly good of anyone else. I don't think that that's an evolved intuition or emotion, because if you look at what evolutionary theory should lead us to predict, that's exactly what it ought not to lead us to predict. I mean, it ought to lead us to give preferences to our own interests, because if we don't survive, we'll never pass on our genes.

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And it ought to lead us to give preference to those with whom we share most of a large part of our genes. So our children and siblings, in fact, famously, I think, was JBS Haldane, who who predicted that on an evolutionary grounds we ought to be prepared to lay down our lives for two of our children or four nephews or eight of our first cousins. Obviously, this ratio relates to the fact that we share, you know, on average half of our genes with our children and a quarter with our nephews and and right with our first cousins.

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But you would never get out to the point where you would care equally for everyone. And yet that's what this judgment or axiom is called, it leads us to. So I think that's something that you can defend as being not something that gets debunked because of these evolutionary arguments.

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In fact, you can do a. You can make an analogy in that respect, going back to your previous example of mathematics and mathematical knowledge. I mean, we know, for instance, that we have evolved certain heuristics for thinking probabilistically and that these things tend to be flawed in a number of conditions, situations in modern life. That's why gambling casinos make a lot of money, because we have the wrong intuitions about certain issues and probability theory. But we can correct those intuitions by mathematical training or by thinking about exactly what we're doing and why we're doing it.

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And so that's a similar contrast between what your intuition that is a result of sort of the evolution of your instincts tells you as opposed to what you can you can arrive at by deliberately thinking about the problem and say, well, wait a minute. Thank you. Thank you.

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It's not exactly a very nice parallel. Yeah. Feels different to me, like you can show that our probabilistic reasoning that we do naively is wrong, but the intuitions that we were talking about earlier are about what we care about. And it's sort of harder to show that they're wrong. No, you're right.

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You can show that they're wrong because as Massimo said, because the casinos will make money from you and you follow them and the other ones you can work at. Yes, it's true. So there is no analogue to that.

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But what that shows is that you can't show that the other ones are wrong. It doesn't show that they're not wrong. It just shows they don't have that kind of real world implications that happens in the wrong gambling heuristics. Right.

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I wanted to bring up a topic that sort of broadens the scope of the ethical discussion even further, and that is the issue of speciesism and sort of animal rights in general. You are you're strongly associated with the animal welfare welfare movement, sometimes with the idea of animal rights, although actually as a utilitarian, I'm guessing that the whole idea of rights doesn't actually sit particularly well. But but certainly welfare. Yes.

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So what about these species and thinking what is it and what does it come from and what do we do about it?

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Yes. OK, so. I started thinking about this more than 40 years ago when I was a graduate student at the University of Oxford and I happened to have lunch with somebody who asked for a vegetarian option. And I can tell Oxford colleges in those days there wasn't much in the way of vegetarian options, but you were stuck with a plate of lettuce, basically. So I asked him why I was a vegetarian and he said he didn't really think that it was right to do the things to animals that we did to them in order to turn them into the kind of meat that was on my plate.

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And that led me to start thinking about this issue. And I hadn't really thought there wasn't any real discussion about the moral status of animals going on. It was just widely assumed to be a trivial topic that we ought to be concerned about was the big human issues. You know, this was the time of the Vietnam War and the movement against racism in the United States and all of those sorts of things, including this idea of equality, which seemed very important, moral ideal.

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But I started thinking about that and I started thinking about it this way. So here I am, a strong supporter of the idea of human equality. But why is equality cut out at the border of our species? Why is it that if you're a member of the species homo sapien, then you're equal to all other members of that species? But if you're not a member of that species, you're you know, basically you've got no moral status at all because, of course, not only do we eat lots of animals when we don't need to just to stay alive, but we also do all kinds of experiments on them that we would never do to human beings.

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And, you know, at first, I guess I was really looking for the some answer to this question.

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I would say this is why it's justified to give moral status to humans, but not to animals. But eventually I went through this kind of mental switch where I said, well, maybe it's actually not justified. Maybe it's another of these prejudices. And we're familiar with prejudices like racism and of course, like sexism in the women's movement was also just getting going. And so. Maybe it's just another prejudice that because we have a powerful group like whites and men of the powerful group, we make up this ideology that says that we're entitled to do these things to animals.

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And so that's where the term speciesism came from, to present the idea that just as we think that racism is wrong because it's wrong for one dominant, powerful race to think that other races can't follow us. So it's wrong for one powerful species to think that other species cared for less. And let me just say, when I say cat Phyllis, I mean, even if they suffer the same amount of pain, for instance, that it's not just that well, of course, they are less intelligent than us, so they will not suffer the pain of that.

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We would get, for example, by not getting an education, perhaps, or not understanding the things that we need to to be able to live well in the world. But I mean, even just the similar kinds of pain and physical pains, electric shocks or burns or things like that which were being inflicted on animals in laboratories, on large numbers, didn't really seem to count, didn't really seem to matter. And we were doing things to them that we would never have done to humans, even to humans who perhaps because of, say, some intellectual disability or a similar kind of cognitive level to the animals we were doing it to.

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So along those lines, Peter, I wanted to ask you about the vegetarian versus vegan question. I had correct me if this is wrong, but I had read that you when you're not fully vegan, you're happy to sort of be temporarily vegetarian. And this is roughly the eating policy that I had followed for a while until I sort of sat down and tried to roughly estimate the amount of animal hours, sort of hours of animal life that go into producing various animal products, both meat and vegetarian animal products like eggs and dairy.

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And, you know, setting aside some various important issues like the sentience of the animal or the actual particularities of what their experience on the farm is like. Still, there were certain vegetarian products like eggs that seemed to require many more hours of animal experience to produce them than, say, beef. And I'm wondering, so the takeaway there being that if you want what you care about is reducing the hours of animal suffering, then maybe eating beef is actually better than eating eggs.

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Does that make sense?

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It depends, I think, entirely on where you get your eggs. I mean, I certainly would do not eat eggs from a factory farmed hens, which basically means, you know, battery hens, hens keptin and wire cages and totally miserable existence. I completely agree that from an animal welfare point of view anyway, it would be better to eat beef than it would be to eat those eggs. But on the other hand, if you get eggs from hens that are free ranging, that are able to live a reasonably good life, then the number of hours that it takes the hen to produce an egg, which actually I don't I'm not sure how you doing a calculation, but it's just not that many because hens will lay eggs most days.

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But anyway, you know, those hours are not bad hours. They can have a reasonably good life. They are going to get killed prematurely once their rate of lying drops off to the point where the farmer considers it uneconomical.

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I mean, arguably, that's even a positive thing to. Well, if that of a bad thing.

[00:37:42]

Yeah, I think I think I think with a good free range unit that lives, the lives of hens are actually positive that with dairy, I think there's a you know, again, there are differences in the way in which the cows live, whether they're intensively farmed indoors in a barn, sometimes even tied into a stall, or whether they're able to graze in the pastures. But but there is a serious problem about the dairy cows, which a lot of people don't realize, and that is that you have to make them pregnant roughly every year in order to keep up the milk supply.

[00:38:17]

And then, of course, you have to take the calf away from them so the calf doesn't drink all that milk that you want to sell to humans. And that, I think, is clearly a cruel process. Cows and their calves have a strong bond with each other. The cow calls for a calf quite often for days, weeks, even months after the calf is separated. So I do you know, I try generally to avoid dairy products.

[00:38:45]

But if I'm not buying for myself, if I'm traveling and it's sometimes difficult to get, say, soy milk rather than dairy milk or, you know. It's there there are times, but I'll be a bit flexible about that, but but certainly I agree that I think, you know, when I shop for myself, I try to be vegan with the possible exception of a really genuinely free range eggs if they're available.

[00:39:13]

And I just wanted to make a very quick plug for the animal welfare approved certification system, which is perhaps the most stringent certification system for animal welfare I've ever found. And they do take into account whether calves are allowed to to stay with their mother for the first year before being taken away.

[00:39:31]

But that can only be for for beef cattle. That's not for dairy. I don't think any dairy farmer could leave the calf with the mother for yet. They just wouldn't get the milk.

[00:39:42]

OK, I have a completely different question, and that is what's the matter with the Germans? And let me explain. So you often been controversial all over the world, but it seems like in the late 80s and early 90s, you were particularly controversial in Germany. There was demonstrations against your talks.

[00:39:59]

You were several your events were canceled in what's going on, what was going on at the time. And more generally, you know what?

[00:40:05]

How do you react to this level of, I guess, notoriety for a philosopher, which is pretty unusual?

[00:40:12]

Yeah, well, I think what was the matter with the Germans was the past that they wanted to prove they were completely free of. And in doing that, I think they went actually in the opposite direction so far that they started to almost resemble that past. Let me explain. What I mean, of course, is that they have the past of Nazism. The Nazis had what they called a euthanasia program. It was not a euthanasia program in the sense of helping people who were suffering to die or anything like that.

[00:40:50]

Yeah, that doesn't sound like that.

[00:40:51]

You know, it was a program to get rid of useless mass, as they call them. And so because I support euthanasia in various circumstances, either when people are competent adults or want to die because let's say they're terminally ill and their quality of life has fallen off or in some cases where parents make decisions for their infants. So I think the Germans got into their heads that they had to demonstrate their opposition to Naziism by saying that these views should not be expressed.

[00:41:31]

And the irony of that, of course, is that they were showing their opposition to Nazism by doing one of the things the Nazis did, which was closing at free discussion of ideas. And really that that actually happened not only in lectures and sometimes entire conferences were canceled, but also that on some occasions I was literally screamed down so that I couldn't talk. People came to my lectures with whistles or noise making influence. Not not all of the people, of course.

[00:42:00]

I mean, there might be an audience of three hundred and there might be 20 or 30 of these people who were trying to prevent me speaking. But if I have the right equipment for making noise, it's impossible to be heard above them. And so they did succeed in preventing me speaking on a few occasions. And it was immensely frustrating because I felt that they had misunderstood what I was trying to say. But there were reasons for for the views that I took that if I could only explain them by anyone would be able to see that these were sound reasons.

[00:42:36]

But if you don't get a chance to express that and if all these people are doing a handing out little leaflets with a few quotations taken out of context from my notes, it's very hard to make any headway.

[00:42:50]

Well, we're just about out of time for this section of the podcasts. So I'm going to wrap this up and move on now to the rationally speaking PEX. Welcome back. Every episode, we pick a suggestion for our listeners that has tickled our rational fancy. This time we ask our guest, Peter Singer, for his suggestion Bittar.

[00:43:28]

I'm going to suggest Steven Pinker's book The Better Angels of Our Nature. I think it's a it's a really interesting study. And for people who think that, you know, the world is really bad, it's getting worse and worse, it's getting more and more violent. There was a bomb that went off here. There's this war going on there. It's a it's a really good antidote to that kind of pessimism, because I think Pinker shows fairly clearly that if you look at things over the course of history for any given individual, the chances of dying a violent death at the hands of other human beings are lower now than they have ever been.

[00:44:12]

And they've been getting progressively lower over the centuries and over the millennia. So that, in fact, we are justified in feeling more secure. We justify that feeling that we are making progress towards a more civilized world, a less violent world than than we have ever been in before. Excellent. I would also recommend that book and we will link to it on the rationally speaking podcast page and I don't know, Peter, when is your coedited volume on on what matters scheduled to come out?

[00:44:52]

No, no. The book that I was referring to is co-authored book. It's not edited the one I'm sorry I'd surgery. It's probably only going to be out in in May of next year. So that's still a bit of a bad one. We'll look forward to it.

[00:45:06]

For now, we will. In the meantime, we will link to your recent book, The Life You Can Save, and also to your excellent TED talk on effective altruism.

[00:45:17]

That would be great. So, Peter, thanks so much for joining us on the show. Will put a link to your pick on the podcast site, as well as a link to the life you can save, which is a movement based on your book, your recent book by the same name, as well as to your excellent recent TED talk on effective altruism. Thanks again for joining us. Thank you, Peter.

[00:45:44]

Thank you very much. Good to talk to you. This concludes another episode of rationally speaking. Join us next time for more explorations on the borderlands between reason and nonsense. The rationally speaking podcast is presented by New York City skeptics for program notes, links, and to get involved in an online conversation about this and other episodes, please visit rationally speaking podcast Dog. This podcast is produced by Benny Pollack and recorded in the heart of Greenwich Village, New York.

[00:46:24]

Our theme, Truth by Todd Rundgren, is used by permission. Thank you for listening.