Episode 6, Alastair Norcross, On Eating Meat
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 29 ก.ค. 2017
- In this episode, Alex talks to Prof. Alastair Norcross about the ethics of eating meat, and in particular Prof. Norcross' paper 'Puppies, Pigs and People' (faculty.smu.edu/jkazez/animal%....
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This is a gem of a conversation. Congrats to both of you for articulating many of my cloudy thoughts in a sharp manner and providing this great content. Thank you so much.
DrZw0 Glad you liked it. Thanks for watching
Great discussion as always Alex. Thanks so much for sharing.
I used to be a vegan until I started having some physical issues and so I reverted to eating some meat albeit very little (perhaps a fish meal once a week, something with eggs once a week). I think the decision was somewhat down to lazyness as I am not the most pro-active person (something I need to work on).
I hope to, someday soon, go back to being a full-on vegan and discussions like these help to motivate me further to do it sooner rather than later.
Many thanks and keep up your work, you are very much appreciated.
Mike
Excellent, this paper is excellent as well I always bring up the puppy example in discussions. This is definitely one of the best philosophical discussions of animal ethics about on youtube!
This was very helpful. Thank you very much. :)
Alex, I would love to hear you talk about the ethics of the domestication of animals. Or do you know any talks/books about the subject?
Look up the book philosophy comes to dinner. I haven't got it but looking at the contents it deals with all the tricky difficult questions that arise once animals come into the moral arena that are very interesting, including I think domestication.
Edit: I was wrong it doesn't, but I think there is an entry on domestication in Oxford Handbook to Animal Ethics!
Why a vegetarian rather than a vegan? Im not as informed on this topic. Could you elaborate for clarity?
Hi Alex, great talk thank you, do you eat dairy products?
Hi. I do currently eat dairy products, but I think that this is lazy on my part. Really, the moral arguments against eating meat carry over almost entirely to the dairy industry as well. There is suffering involved in the production of milk and eggs. Animals die in the production methods we have for both, so it isn't consistent to be a vegetarian for those reasons but not a vegan. I expect to become vegan at some point fairly soon. I have already pretty much switched to oat milk (which is just the same in taste as normal milk), and I don't eat commercial eggs any more. I plan to get some ex-battery chickens to go in the garden at some point, and then I will eat their eggs because I will know that they are happy and well looked after. I really enjoy cheese, and I will find this hard to give up, but if the 'bacon!' objection is not persuasive, then neither is the 'cheese!' objection.
amen, ive recently gone vegan after some Peter Singer debates and dont miss anything, there is alot of alternatives out there in terms of cheese and milk, the happy chickens is a good idea but too much trouble in up keep for me :P would be interesting to see what you think of vegan activism? considering the benefits a plant based diet would do for the world.
I'd say that the human existence has been net positive. Main reason: We have effectively halved the number of wild animal populations since the 70s by destroying their habitats. Less wildlife = less predation, starvation, injury, disease, parasitism etc. These are intolerable conditions that we would never be willing to endure, were they imposed on us. Nobody wants to be eaten alive.
Moral concern for animals should extend to those living in the wild, and the dogma that wilderness is mostly good for its sentient inhabitants should be challenged.
2:42 citicising the construction of "fancy hypothetical cases" as a method of moral philosophy
13:14 starts the argument with a 'fancy hypothetical' thought experiment.
maybe someone can explain to me, why this two statements from Prof. Norcross doesnt result in a contradiction.
That beeing said, I love this channel and I am a vegetarian myself since my twelth year because of ethical reasons.
He doesn't say that because we have a certain intuition about the puppy case, therefore it is wrong to eat meat. His point is that if you have this reaction to puppies, then you should by analogical reasoning, have the same reaction to factory-farmed products. So he gives a consistency challenge to non-vegans. It's different from the traditional method of cases style arguments in philosophy, which say something like - "since you have intuition X about P, therefore, X"
I've only watched the first half of the video so far, but the argument seems to be more about how animals are treated rather than whether we should be eating meat or not. Not all producers of animal product are factory farms. If a farm cares for their pigs or chickens (for example) and values their quality of life, ensures they have plenty of space (free roaming), are kept healthy and in the end are humanely killed, is this then less of an issue? There are plenty of farms that sell themselves and their products on how their animals are treated.
I myself own 4 chicken. We keep them for their eggs. They have a 500sq meter garden to roam around as they please, they are well fed, we ensure they are healthy, happy and well looked after. We love them like pets. I'm not sure if this type of scenario fits with Alistair's thought experiment as grounds for not keeping them.
On another note - I'm really enjoying your videos Alex!!
His puppy example is meant to be analogous to normal factory farming yes, but keeping animals as you say and then painlessly killing them is for one thing, not the types of meat that most people buy, and second, it is still morally objectionable. Is it morally permissible to painlessly kill humans for food? No- then what are the morally relevant differences between humans and animals that make it wrong for humans and permissible for animals? Intelligence etc might be appealed to, but then the argument from marginal cases: is it morally permissible to painlessly kill cognitively disabled infants for food? Almost everyone thinks this is morally abhorrent, and so it should be proportionally abhorent for animals on the same mental playing field.
Although, to be honest, I think in the philosophical literature the debate about painlessly killing animals is more controversial than about causing them suffering in factory farming. Check out the book: the Ethics of Killing Animals by Visak and Garner. Also, for a related issue check out the replacability argument as well in (is it morally permissible to painlessly kill a happy animal if it is replaced with an animal that will enjoy the same level of welfare who would not otherwise exist?): Practical Ethics by Singer, Morals, Reason, and Animals by Sapontzis, Beyond Prejudice by Pluhar, Killing Happy Animals by Visak, and the above Ethics of Killing Animals by Visak and Garner. Although admittedly this is a problem for utilitarianism as opposed to animal rights per se!
think youre missing the crux of the argument of his paper - about the morality of factory farming specifically, rather than eating meat in general
They get into this counterargument later on in the video
"The first difference that might seem to be relevant is that Fred tortures the
puppies himself, whereas most Americans consume meat that comes from
animals that have been tortured by others. But is this really relevant? What if
Fred had been squeamish and had employed someone else to torture the puppies
and extract the cocoamone? Would we have thought any better of Fred? Of
course not."
This reminds me of the good old "Taxation is Theft" argument. Be a good citizen and pay your voluntary taxes ... or else!
glad to hear that you are vegetarian.
He asks what is the moral difference between the puppy scenario and the meat industry and I would explain it like this.
Let's say we change the analogy so that rather than puppies, we say that Fred has discovered so kind of new animal in the Amazon rain forest. This animal looks like a small blob and is kind of ugly. It doesn't make any sounds or movements as its been tortured but when we scan its brain we can see that its level of suffering is similar to that of a puppy being tortured. I suspect that most people wouldn't be jumping to convict Fred in this new scenario, and certainly they would be a lot less agreeable than in the puppy example.
I think this illustrates that our intuition in these kinds of scenarios is not measuring the level of suffering of the animal but the level of suffering of the human who has to think about and/or see the animal suffering. If this is true then the difference between the puppy scenario and the meat industry is that the thought of puppies being tortured evokes more of a human response because most humans think puppies are cute and many of them have dogs and can easily imagine the torturing vividly which causes those humans to suffer more than in the case of the meat industry where the suffering and death of the animals is far removed and hidden from the consumer.
Just want to add that if you have your tonsils out as an adult - you will not be able to taste sweet stuff - and some lose it for the rest of their life. But - it is a thought experiment and having some relevance to real life does not count...I suppose...
Why do I eat meat? 1) Time. 2) Competitive advantage
Let me explain these.
Some animals have evolved to only eat a particular diet (plant based). They spend many hours consuming a vast amount of matter so they can extract the needed energy from them. I want to live a life so I don't want to spend two thirds of it eating to get the energy to run my body (and most importantly, my brain)
On the second point, we have evolved to eat both plant and meat. Our brain size requires a constant 20 watts of power. I want to have protein packs to give me the capability to operate in this society. Plant protein cannot provide me with the advantage that meat can.
Hi. I don't actually think either of your points is right, but more than that I don't think that they would be morally relevant even if they were.
"Some animals have evolved to only eat a particular diet (plant based). They spend many hours consuming a vast amount of matter so they can extract the needed energy from them." - That might be the case for cows eating raw grass in a field. But that isn't the case for vegetarian humans in our society. I am a vegetarian, and I spend just as much time eating as you do. I eat three meals a day. I didn't swap a diet of eating meat for one of grazing on grass, which would take all day to get enough nutrients. In our society, there is no reason for a vegetarian to spend more time eating to get enough calories to function throughout the day compared to a meat eater. In our society, simply avoiding eating far too much is the real difficulty, rather than not enough. This remains the case when you stop eating meat too.
"I want to have protein packs to give me the capability to operate in this society. Plant protein cannot provide me with the advantage that meat can." - I don't know why you think that a vegetarian diet cannot provide the brain with enough energy, or my body with enough protein. Being a vegetarian didn't prevent me from completing my PhD while working two jobs at the same time. I had plenty of energy. You just need to ensure that you eat things which are full of protein, like nuts, pulses, etc.
Both of your points seem to be based on the presumption that if you gave up meat, you would eat nothing but grass, which is absurd.
But let's say that you were right. All you did was point out your reasons for wanting to eat meat. In order to justify it morally, you would have to explain how these reasons override the suffering of the animals involved. Presumably, slave owners might muster arguments like 'I would give up my slaves, but having slaves means I don't have to spend time and energy doing things that they do for me, and this provides my brain with extra energy and gives me a competitive edge in society'. Sure, having slaves confers these benefits, but we don't say that this justifies keeping slaves as a result.
So, I think both your points are factually incorrect, but even if they were correct they wouldn't be morally relevant. Hope that helps.
Moral relevance is something I steered clear of, due to the extent that you two were anthropomorphizing. How could you use that if the meat was grown in a test tube? If your argument was based around the amount of resources used to produce said meat, that would be far more valid (in my opinion) that to fixate on the "suffering" that you imagine happens.
Regardless, this is the type of conversation one has between a smoker and a non-smoker.
Thank you for the dialog
First of all, and most importantly, puppies are cuter than adult pigs. Secondly, distantly, we have a contract with dogs. That is, our ancestors signed a contract with wolves a long long time ago that our descendants will take care of their descendants. It doesn't matter if dogs are "philosophical zombies" and every adult pig suffers the crucifixion of Christ. What matters is that puppies are cuter, and that we signed a contract with wolves a long time ago.
A little surprised these super relevant details and contractarian arguments weren't mentioned.
I am also convinced that we eat chickens because they're stupid, so we should also be able to eat retards and our political opposition. That just makes sense.
I don't care if all ants suffer the crucifixion of Christ. Why would we sign a contract with them not to step on them, when it is so hard not to step on them, and so convenient to step on them? I will gladly tap dance on an ant hill if you give me a puppy.