Debating Peter Singer on Wild Animal Suffering
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 9 มิ.ย. 2024
- Discussing animal suffering with Peter Singer.
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Timestamps
0:00 - Introduction
0:54 - How to influence the world
3:47 - What has changed for farmed animals?
9:08 - Individual vs institutional change
17:51 - The poor meat eater problem
20:12 - Wild animal suffering
51:10 - Negative utilitarianism
54:21 - Afterword - บันเทิง
It's fantastic that you give this subject the urgent attention that it needs. So few do.
The idea that humans could successfully intercede in the various ecology systems successfully is ridiculous. The wild is the wild and we should leave it alone.
Clicked the second I saw the title, congrats on getting Singer on!
Damn, when Singer started comparing the numbers of farmed animals and and land vertebrates saying that he wasn't certain, I was really hoping that you would have the figures out to clarify the situation. I would be interested to see Singer's response.
I think more to the point was his uncertainty about the suffering that wild animals endure. He did, indeed, suggest that we should have a vested interest in helping, but I have the feeling that he is underestimating the average level of suffering that occurs in nature.
Hard to say, right? It all seems to be based on subjective guesses. Jack is pretty quick to accept the assumption that many wild animal's lives are not worth living, but damn it's hard to make that call for *anyone* other than yourself. In humans we see that the worse lives get, the more positive the people experiencing them seem to be! Trying to seek answers to these questions seems to a large extent in vain at this point... rather, we should just say "it could be the case that"... and that is enough to motivate more (empirical) research and great concern for this issue.
On a philosophical level, I completely agree with you on the importance of reducing wild animal suffering. What can I do in practice to optimize my backyard for the welfare of wild birds and other small vertebrates? If you put up a bird feeder in winter, it prevents those birds from going hungry but, in the long run, can encourage over population. I've read about various native plants that you can grow to provide food and habitats for wildlife but they never say anything about the quality of life for those animals.
Birds won't reproduce in the winter, it's too cold for the chicks. Unless you meant that fewer birds would starve, thus more birds would reproduce.
From a purely utilitarian perspective, I understand your point about human caused suffering in animals versus naturally caused suffering. However, I do believe intention (or moral agency) is a very important factor to consider. I also hold the (perhaps slightly controversial) belief that we are not morally obligated to help others, although it is certainly virtuous - but we are morally obligated to not cause intentional and needless harm. (An example of necessary harm would be self-defense.)
Why are we not morally obliged to not cause harm, philosophically speaking? What is it in it for me to not do so? Whatever answer one may come up for this can be extrapolated to argue for why we are morally obliged to help others, I think.
The question is why do you hold those dumbass arbitary views? You might as well care about suffering AND the number of paperclips in the universe. Or suffering AND the sacrifice of virgins to Huizilopochtli. The thing is that any AND here is totally inacceptably for anyone, who only cares about the well being of conscious entities.
i have an exam tomorrow but i think studying can wait, a tier guest :)
Really looking forward to this one!
It seems to me that the ‘solution’ to the issue of helping people out of poverty increasing demand for animal products is to change where those animal products come from. So helping people out of poverty should be partnered with an immense push to get lab grown animal products to market so that when we see the further increase in animal products (well actually it’s already here) it can be catered for by means that don’t exploit animals. Is that not the obvious way of tackling that dilemma?
Woah the man the myth the legend!
Sings: “It ain’t necessarily so...” 🎤
Thanks, great work!! I think that in the number of farmed animals alive at any given time you're not counting shrimps, right?
I understand that their number exceeds by several orders of magnitude the farmed fish, farmed chickens, even farmed insects, I remember seeing a presentation by Daniela Romero Waldhorn on this subject that had a great impact on me.
hey just for clarification, do you mean this one: th-cam.com/video/C1Na4NWAzLM/w-d-xo.html ?
@@DS-uo1zy Yes :)
@@matimvazquez perfect, it's a great talk
@@DS-uo1zy yessssss, yes it is, I answer "yes" to everything, my english is a bit limited. :)))))
Wow can't wait to watch this!
This sis simple, part of a living beings inherent rights from your own perspective are the freedom of life and self.
Part of freedom is inherent risk, when we start trying to control these risk we inherently begin controlling aspects of their life.
Should we really be taking a animals reproductive rights because it a natural carnivore that’s needs to kill to eat?
Should we cull animals that will statistically not make it to adulthood denying them a right to achieve life?
And we aren’t killing or limiting animal populations, how do we provide for these animals without removing inherent suffering?
They only way to do this is to ensure a stable controllable environment which can only be done in captivity.
And what happens when our “prevention of wild animal suffering” ends up destabilizing ecosystems and we are stuck chasing infinitely more suffering than the suffering going on when we weren’t even paying attention?
Much of this argument isn’t well thought out.
I sometimes think about my 'suffering handprint' as well as my 'carbon footprint'.
Good Girl! 👌
Incidentally, Slave, are you VEGAN? 🌱
@@ReverendDr.Thomas Do not address me as Slave.
@@catherinehoy5548, what about "Mrs. LOWER-than-a-slave", Sinful Slave? :D
Incidentally, SILLIEST of My Silly Sinful Slaves, I am patiently awaiting your response to my initial question.
I say this without malice, but to me this conversation sounded just like street activism, rather than an interesting discussion between two thinkers.
very impressive to see you debate Singer on this , excellent content !
Enjoyed the conversation!
Oh, I'm excited for this!!!
This video needs more views, and you deserve more subscribers. Great work as always.
There is a bigger biomass of farm animals than wild animals on the planet, which is why you two had different estimations. But I would be curious if one 100kg animal actually accounts for the same total suffering as 1000 100g animals. What initially appears like a naive comparison on closer inspection seems to become not quite so naive anymore: we could start the comparison with the principle of induction.
If I as a human lacked two limbs, would my total capacity for feeling pain not be reduced by an equal amount? Concretely, any pain/suffering pertaining to such limbs. Left hand hangnail would become an eliminated term when the entire left arm is missing.
Via reductio ad absurdum we get that, yes, a tiny clump of human cells e.g. a fertilized egg is infinitely less able to suffer than a fully grown human, and of course with zero biomass, the suffering potential is nil.
So we are on the right track, conceptually, for the claim that body mass matters as well and not just individual animals.
Next: what is the amount of pain the reduced-limb person incurs by their normal navigation of surroundings? The reduced body size again leads to a naive but satisfying implication: any pain-causing agent that would have impacted with the existing limb but now just contacts empty air, will lead to 0 experienced pain, rather than this being a non-zero value.
Of course, this line of thinking isn't just some purely abstract principle about the relationship between spatial location and mindless, free-floating geometrical shapes as impactors. Rather, the principle also has plenty of real world relevancy and it can account for the complexities of animal behaviour (like being able to detect and seek out things in their environment): e.g. a regular-limbed person (following RP) could "service" much more blood-sucking mosquitos than a reduced-limb one (following ½P = a subject where everything is half, rather than just limbs), with half the amount of mosquitos leading to half the stings, and thus half the pain the person experiences. Time-based reckoning also plays a role: at the moment of violent death, ½P would die ~twice as quickly as RP, leading to less accumulated dying-suffering as a function of time.
The nonequivalence between ½P and RP also applies to threshold dynamics rather than monotone functions:
A lion doesn't bother hunting mice, but he will bother with a bison. This means ½P is, again, to a lion prey half as salient as RP.
In a world where there were only lion predators, even if every unit of pain is equalized to a 1:1 flat-rate between the two, ½P would still suffer only half (or less) the amount RP does, because ½P would be selected for the suffering-agent that much less often to begin with, as it passes the selection threshold at only half (or less) the rate as RP.
Finally, we acknowledge one caveat: inflicted physical harm and experienced physical pain is far from a linear relationship. Such a behavioural architecture (e.g. where a pricked finger hurts and focuses attention to the same degree as adding one additional millimeter to an already giant traumatic laceration) would be useless in nature.
The animal mind models harm:pain in a much more refined manner, with the strongest response someplace around the start, with diminishing returns.
Yet I don't think we have reason to suspect this function isn't still, at the very least, monotonely growing (even if it is not a straight line), so everything above still applies, just with some coefficients tweaked in favor of ½P being more comparable to RP, but without actually affecting the calculus of equivalences between these two.
So what was this lion and mosquito escapade about? To establish that via some objective measures, we can claim that there is a *certain* strict inequality between RP and ½P (standing for any organism with less mass than RP) when it comes to calculating their incurred suffering. Really, what I just did was showing that rejecting the claim of the pro-"bodymass matters" side is far from trivial, whereas it *is* trivial to show that this side has quite some ammo.
This objective reckoning is most potent when we only consider purely physical pain. It is very possible that the fact that sentient beings also suffer mentally, e.g. via fear and terror, either independently of physical pain or as a consequence of it. So it could very well be the case that one ferret suffers all the "mental toll" of one cow, and consequently 1000 ferrets experience 1000 times the amount of mental anguish of one cow, even if those two sides experience the same total physical suffering.
(if you wanna DM me, Twitter is @ekszentrik)
The amount of physical pain (and mental suffering) an animal can experience would have more to do with the architecture of the nervous system than the animal's biomass. A person missing an arm can still feel phantom limb pain. On the other hand, if you gain a lot of weight and your skin stretches, you don't gain new nerve endings. The skin you have becomes less sensitive per square inch because the nerve endings are stretched out.
Though, larger animals do tend to need larger brains to coordinate their bodies. If an elephant has more neurons in the brain region that responds to pain than a shrew has in the corresponding brain region, than maybe the elephant does have more capacity for physical pain.
@@BulbasaurLeavesYou are adventurous. I find it very impressive you managed to read my drivel. I seriously need to hire an editor, or at .least cut my essays down to the essentials.
I agree with the neural architecture point. Yet another reason why my text fails, when I often consider this point as well.
Vertebrates have a special kind of consciousness, so everything else being equal, we should -- of course -- value a mouse higher than an 10x bigger coral or jellyfish.
Within verts, I think the deciding factor is how long the animal has lived (larger liver longer), and also SOMEWHAT size.
Outside verts, we just evaluate on a case by case basis.
I'm neither vegan nor vegetarian, I eat meat but videos on this channel give me so many insights. Thank you!
Did you know that in ancient Bhārata (India), a person who consumed ANY type of animal was known as a “Chandāla” (dog-eater) and was not even included in mainstream society, but was an outcast?🥩
So, do you ADMIT that you are an animal-abusing criminal, Mr. Dog-eater? 😬🙄😬
Insights about what, exactly?
@@mmhmm9271 about why should I stop eating meat
@@morgomi oh right, best wishes making that happen man.
Rather than just using the word "astronomical" to describe the scope of a matter, if you'd want to upscale your ethical positive impact on the world (and I mean the world, not just the surface of earth) by magnitudes of magnitudes, then start advocating and taking action to prevent physical outer space exploration in general and long-term, because forwards-contamination (though also abiogenesis via natural litho-panspermia), a by already existing precedents proven real risk - which can utterly recklessly and unfathomably irresponsibly kick-start entire evolution of life processes on foreign worlds such as the solar system's many ice moons or in nearby star systems with habitable exoplanets, akin to daring to play god can actually cause literally astronomical levels of suffering.
At 20:52 it sounds very much like you're an Antinatalist now. Is that true?
I think Bro is a negative utilitarian, he himself said when debating veganfoot soldier
Transhumanism
Bioengineering entire ecosystems to abolish suffering
Conciousness studies on sentient creatures
Now, minimize suffering as much as possible by maximum research and suitable actions!
Damn wow. I find a lot of his philosophies very backwards and twisted but nonetheless very interested to see this.
love the podcast jack, but where are the updates on the movie you were going to make about slaughterhouse workers? you gathered lots of money from it and im subscribed to the updates but i recieve none.
Great conversation thanks. I've been lucky to talk to Kyle Johannsen and Aditya SK on wild animal suffering @Sentientism if people are interested.
Great and lowly are RELATIVE. 😉
Ah delighted you got to sit down and talk to Peter Singer, interesting conversation guys fair play.🌱🌍🌅
Epic
"I guess" you know your stuff pretty damn well to have The Most Popular Moral Philosopher (which, come to think of it, sounds to me like either a strikingly backhanded compliment or a subtly considerable one) on the back foot throughout this entire conversation.
"I feel like" Singer comes across as oddly wooden and single-minded.
But then, ours is a perspective that requires considerable reevaluation of mental frameworks. That's quite a task to be confronted with, especially if you've dedicated so much action to one facet of the issue.
I'm curious to hear your briefly mentioned skepticism about the argument that reducing people's complicity in personally funding factory farming will effectively hasten the reduction of wild animal suffering, particularly because that's the model I'm basing my life plans on.
My working hypothesis is that the implicit, consequential beliefs that regulate humans' actions are constrained by their habits.
So what's the sticking point for you? Do you think that the focus of a given individual ought better be on wild animal suffering directly in some widely acceptable (and perhaps largely symbolic) issue to push in order to get the ball rolling?
As far as the suffering a wild animal experiences goes, I think an invaluable fact to consider is that animals are gene machines and the interests of the genes and the interests of the aggregate individuals of a species of organism are often misaligned.
I think Singer may have been confused by thinking of the proportion of vertebrate species that are r-selected, as opposed to the proportion of individuals who are r-selected. It's a bit like a weighted average in that even relatively few r-selected species count vastly more in terms of population *precisely because they are r-selected*.
So, uh, that's my two cents.
Keep kickin ass!
You're the shit!
philosophy:
the love of wisdom, normally encapsulated within a formal academic discipline. Wisdom is the soundness of an action or decision with regard to the application of experience, knowledge, insight, and good judgment. Wisdom may also be described as the body of knowledge and principles that develops within a specified society or period. E.g. “The wisdom of the Tibetan lamas.”
Unfortunately, in most cases in which this term is used, particularly outside India, it tacitly or implicitly refers to ideas and ideologies that are quite far-removed from genuine wisdom. For instance, the typical academic philosopher, especially in the Western tradition, is not a lover of actual wisdom, but a believer in, or at least a practitioner of, adharma, which is the ANTITHESIS of genuine wisdom. Many Western academic (so-called) “philosophers” are notorious for using laborious sophistry, abstruse semantics, gobbledygook, and pseudo-intellectual word-play, in an attempt to justify their blatantly-immoral ideologies and practices, and in many cases, fooling the ignorant layman into accepting the most horrendous crimes as not only normal and natural, but holy and righteous!
An ideal philosopher, on the other hand, is one who is sufficiently intelligent to understand that morality is, of necessity, based on the law of non-violence (“ahiṃsā”, in Sanskrit), and sufficiently wise to live his or her life in such a harmless manner. Cf. “dharma”.
One of the greatest misconceptions of modern times is the belief that philosophers (and psychologists, especially) are, effectively, the substitutes for the priesthood of old. It is perhaps understandable that this misconception has taken place, because the typical priest/monk/rabbi/mullah seems to be an uneducated buffoon compared with those highly-educated gentlemen who have attained doctorates in philosophy, psychology and psychiatry. However, as mentioned in more than a few places in this book, it is imperative to understand that only an infinitesimal percentage of all those who claim to be spiritual teachers are ACTUAL “brāhmaṇa” (as defined in Chapter 20). Therefore, the wisest philosophers of the present age are still those exceptionally rare members of the Holy Priesthood!
At the very moment these words of mine are being typed on my laptop computer, there are probably hundreds of essay papers, as well as books and articles, being composed by professional philosophers and theologians, both within and without academia. None of these papers, and almost none of the papers written in the past, will have any noticeable impact on human society, at least not in the realm of morals and ethics, which is obviously the most vital component of civilization. And, as mentioned in a previous paragraph, since such “lovers-of-wisdom” are almost exclusively adharmic (irreligious and corrupt) it is indeed FORTUITOUS that this is the case. The only (so-called) philosophers who seem to have any perceptible influence in the public arena are “pop” or “armchair” philosophers, such as Mrs. Alisa “Alice” O’Connor (known more popularly by her pen name, Ayn Rand), almost definitely due to the fact that they have published well-liked books and/or promulgate their ideas in the mass media, especially on the World Wide Web.
Thank you for your work on making animals' lives better, Jack and Peter!
I agree that rewilding agricultural land will most likely cause more animal suffering.
In the long run I hope that we can design a system, in which most of the solar energy, that is trapped by plants on earth, will be used up in rather happy brains which do not suffer. Alternatively I would advocate for a world/earth with no sentient life.
Unfortunately it seems like it will be very difficult to convince humans to help wild animals as it is already quite difficult to convince people not to purposefully breed animals just to abuse and kill them. But we have to do both.
Thanks again for your work, Jack. Keep pushing hard!
👏👏👏
What a sharp difference between this interview and with arrogant and ignorant Neil De Grass
For the world's most well known living philosopher, I'm hearing a lot of "Appeal to Futility".
I don't think he tracked your arguments fully either.
Great job in the interview. Good amount of pushing without going too far.
He doesn't think that it's practical now. That isn't an appeal to futility
To be fair, the wild animal suffering questions are mostly ones he never properly addressed in his work - and being 76, I don't blame him for not working on it too much now!
Farm Consultant here.
Enjoyed the episode.
Ive long felt your concern for wild animals reflects where farming has its roots. And in some ways I think you are closer to supporting farming than you may think.
I was fascinated with Peters disconnect. And have felt that often vegans are disconnected from what animal liberation would represent.
Happy to join as a guest as a farm expert if you ever want one.
Regards
Deane.
Is he vegan?
Nope
In the introduction to this book and in “The Two Dark Sides of COVID-19,” Singer points to a new reason for avoiding meat: the role eating animals has played, and will play, in pandemics past, present, and future. Written in Singer's pellucid prose, Why Vegan?
depends on how you define vegan as far as ı know he ats oysters and mussels which ı would also say vegan
Singer seems a bit lost when it comes to antinatalism as a solution to wild animal suffering.
Did…did Peter Singer just say it’s not clear whether wild animals suffer that much ?
I think that’s disingenuously taking him out of context. He said things like ‘not sure their suffering is more than factory farmed animals, not sure all invertebrates suffer, not sure their is great suffering for animals with short lived lives which is often assumed’ which aren’t ridiculous points of view, even if I’m more likely to think on the other side of the fence with a lot of these points.
@@TeChNoWC7 He was not generous and considerably simplified, minimized, and underestimated the issues that Hancock brings forth.
His tone is unengaged and it seems like his arguments are inconsistent with the principles and research of effective altruism.
This is fairly standard for an older member of a movement.
@@RandomAmbles I actually totally agree with your assessment, but you strawmanned me.
Parasocial relationships are weird
By far my favorite thing about reading Singer is the clarity of his writing.
Interesting conversation, I've watched a few of your videos, once , maybe speakers corner one , I heard you say to yourself , laughed and said if I go down that route ,I'll start believing in God.to me if you really go deep , beyond philosophy, we find ourselves seeking meta physical explanations.
I often think the word one is abetter word than God/ universe ext.
If our ideal is the one , then its easy to connect with nature / animals/ plants ext.
The famous buddist monk , thich nhat haha, called it iter being. Nature is within us ....
Humans are very powerful , but with power comes responsibility.
So it must be our responsibility to connect with wild animal suffering,
The well know phrase ... from a vision of peace on earth , goes something like this ... when the lion lays down with the lamb , and then child plays over the vipers nest.....all will be peace.. ext ... to me this implies something beyond suffering on earth....
It's a spiritual vision , something, to consider?
This wild animal suffering argument is dumb as hell. By this logic one should kill all predators.
Do you think killing predators reduces suffering on the long run?