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 People, and with me, as always, is my co-host, Julia Gillard. Julia, what's our topic today?

Masimo, this episode, we're going to take a rational look at the case for vegetarianism and veganism. This is a topic that I've written about several times for the rationally speaking blog. And Michael Todora, another contributor, has also written about it. And we've had guest bloggers discuss it, too. And it reliably draws some of the longest and most heated comment threads on the Russian speaking blog. So I think it's high time that we laid out the relevant evidence and arguments.

Sounds good. Why don't we start? Actually, I have a little list of different types of vegetarianism which may be useful for our discussion, also for our listeners. But perhaps we should actually start by by acknowledging, first of all, what our position is, what we are. Oh, well.

And then and then talk about it. Why we are maybe perhaps or what what the problem is maybe.

But I don't mind briefly. Well, so in practice, the way I eat most closely resembles a vegan.

I don't usually call myself a vegan just because I differ from vegans and my reasons for for what it eat or don't eat somewhat.

And in fact, I think I probably don't have a lot in common with most vegans in terms of my my reasons for doing it.

So the is different, differently principled vegan or something like the best. I've I've sort of cycled through a few different terms just because it's always useful to have a shorthand or label.

The closest one that I've found is utilitarian vegan.

So so the shorthand for for what guides my eating choices, aside from pleasure, is that I don't want to add to the suffering of animals unnecessarily.

So I don't want to contribute to the demand and therefore by turn the supply of of crudely produced animal.

I like you through time vegan. That's that's nice.

Well, I guess I would have to label myself or consider myself a moderate omnivore, meaning that I pretty much eat anything, but I do tend to steer more toward the vegetables, more toward lean meat and poultry, for instance, and in fish particularly. And I do pay attention to, you know, if it is an endangered species are not not going to eat it, for instance, if we're talking about fish.

But other than that, I'm pretty much an omnivorous so I end in even my limitations tend to be for health reasons more than for principled reasons, although in general I do agree that that there is an enormous room for improvement in how we treat animals. But as we've seen the rest of these areas, the situation is actually too complicated because it's not just animals, it's the impact on the environment of our habitats and its labor consequences. You know, the people actually work in these industries and so on.

And so but before we go ahead, what am I go through a very little sort of classification of types of vegetarianism, which I found both entertaining in some sense and certainly instructive. So in no particular first of all, I should say that I discovered that although vegetarian means vegetarianism in one way or another, it has been practised since, at the very least the sixth century before current era in both India and in ancient Greece. The modern usage of the term actually dates back only to the mid 40s at least.

The Oxford Dictionary says that the word came in general use after the formation of the vegetarian society at Ramsgate in nineteen forty seven.

All right. Now, the different types of vegetarianism include I can hear you gearing up over there for a long list.

We should have a roll of drum roll, drum roll over vegetarianism, which of course eat eggs but not not dairy products instead of a land of vegetarianism, which include dairy products but not eggs. So the opposite. And then, of course, there's a combination of the two of lacto. Then there is veganism, which includes all animal flesh products, including Milk, incepted, etc. Then there is raw veganism, which deals only with uncooked fruit, nuts, seeds and so on.

Then there is fruit fruitarian miasma which only permits fruits, nuts and seeds and other things that can be taken by the plant from the plant without actually killing the plant.

Hmm. And finally, we have sort of what it's referred to some time as Buddhist vegetarianism, which excludes animal products as well as vegetables in the allium family.

Go figure. That's the that's the onion family. I don't know what Buddhists have against onions, but, hey, here it is.

And then there are these macrobiotic diets that basically are mostly mostly about beans and whole grains. Now, on top of which, of course, there are so-called flexitarian.

The flexitarian are those people that say, for instance, eat fish, but no other type of meat.

So there would be Episcopalian, which is a type of flexitarian and then flexitarian was actually close to what you describe yourself as being that they sort of avoid meat animal products to some degree, but not completely. And they're flexible.

Hence the Fleck's consider myself very flexible.

But I don't know, that's one of the definitions that I that I was able to look up.

And of course, another version of the same thing is a polluter Arianism. Yes. Those are people who include exactly Paultre. OK, that's that's as far as we're going to go forward with this, with the classification.

Now, I have to tell you, I have a lot of respect for, first of all, four choices in general, especially if people not necessarily another Sulayem angelical about it. But I also respected the principle choices of a number of variety of vegetarians. There are some things that I consider, however, I'm afraid entirely arbitrary, and I wonder if we can just get them out of the way. And it's not particularly interesting to discuss.

So, for instance, Fruitarian Isma, I really don't see any either principled or real thing really turns out I is people who do this well, I don't know how many, but I guess and I suppose the reasoning behind that is that they don't want to hurt and harm even living plants.

Correct. OK, let's can, let's just table ok.

We'll table them. We'll table. So I move Buddhist vegetarian because there's nothing about onions that is particularly relevant. Yeah. Take deviled eggs first.

What about ra ra veganism. What will be the difference.

I mean why the principal difference that as far as I've been able to gather is just a health thing, that some people are convinced that eating raw food is better for our health.

I haven't seen any particularly convincing evidence for that because I would argue that up to that hard, but probably not. But, um, well, it depends on how it's done and what kind of food. All right, fine. All of the other kinds, I think, are fair game.

So, uh, so what do you think are some of the most principled reasons then for veganism or others type or vegetarianism?

Well, so I've been making my decision. I focus pretty much primarily on the animal welfare issues, even though I know that there are environmental issues to consider and labor issues to consider. But I felt that just the animal welfare issues alone were sufficient to to justify a move to what I've termed utilitarian veganism. So I guess I should just give a little background, since I know more about this than about the environmental or labor effects.

So in the U.S., about nine billion animals are slaughtered for food every year, and the vast majority of those are in what people colloquially call the factory farming system. And I think most people probably aren't quite aware of the conditions, in fact, factory farms, but most of the animals live their whole lives in very small cages so they can't turn around or move. For SAOs, that means gestation crates. So they're sort of lying on one side their whole life and they can't move around.

For chickens, that means battery cages about the size of half of a piece of paper. For the most part, the animals waste isn't cleaned up after them, so they tend to get diseases of their feet and then they're breathing in ammonia because the air is very, very thick with ammonia from the waste and it burns their eyes and their lungs. And then also many of the animals have their their beaks and their tails cut off to prevent them from biting each other out of stress.

So so all of that to me represents it constitutes what I think is a better reason for being vegan than vegetarian, actually, just because to me, the the suffering that's experienced by animals over the course of their lives in the factory farm system is actually it far outweighs in terms of significance the actual suffering that they experience at the in the few minutes of death.

So I actually don't I don't have a problem with the actual killing of animals, per say, as long as it's done as quickly and painlessly as possible. It's just the extended suffering over the course of their lives. And the factory farm system I have a problem with. I would agree.

I tend to think that the much less moved by the by the idea that, well, we're using our animals for our own purposes. Yes, we are. We've always done that. And I don't actually seen anything particularly. I mean, if you have a pet in some sense, you use an animal for your own purposes.

Yeah, I'm not moved by that argument. I don't know. That's one of the reasons why I hesitate to call myself a vegan, because I think that's an argument many vegans make. And I don't think it has much basis. But I don't think the animal mind, it seems to me to be a clear case of anthropomorphism to me.

Yeah, I agree that that has never moved me. But on the other hand, the argument you're making, which is one about pain and suffering during the lifetime of an animal. Right. That's definitely different. But so from that perspective, then you shouldn't or wouldn't have an objection to toward, you know, free ranging, organically grown, you know, small farm raised animals or something. Absolutely, although I think that most people tend to think that stuff that's labelled free range is is better off than it actually is, that the standards.

The standards aren't quite as good as people assume them to be. But I do actually buy eggs and well, they don't sell them. But I buy eggs and beef from a farm called Greven Angus Acres.

They supply to the if we allow this show to do advertising. Yes.

Where they're so small anyway. But they're the only farm that I found in the New York area that has what's called the animal welfare approved certifications. They have the most stringent standards for treatment of animals. And I read over their list of standards and it seems completely unobjectionable to me.

And I couldn't see any reason why the life of an animal on an Iowa farm would be unpleasant.

Right now, I agree with you that people need to be careful about labels. And of course, that's a that's in general true in the food industry. Now, it's actually very difficult because the US government doesn't necessarily enforce regulations or we don't have regulations are strict enough. It's easier, for instance, to do that sort of thing, to pay attention. And that's kind of the kind of information in Europe, because the European community is much more strict about who is allowed to play what kind of label on food in general.

But at least in principle, however, you would agree that that is in fact either non problematic or far less problematic than than than than it would be for a vegan, for instance. Now, what about fish? So fish?

You know, I feel well for me personally, I feel like the jury is still a little bit out on fish. I feel like I've read contradictory things. I'm I've been avoiding eating them because I have read things that suggest that scientists think that fish can feel pain.

Right.

But I imagine we're talking about fish that lives on ordinary fish kind of life in farmed.

Oh, no, I should distinguish. OK, so wild caught fish. I actually don't have a problem with eating those because for being being utilitarian, the utilitarian part of the utilitarian vegan legal label is, is just about not causing additional strong suffering.

And for a wild fish most of their life is is unknown, unchanged by the human fishermen influence.

It's just the last part, the way that they die that's that's influenced by us. But they're going to die in some way regardless. And the way that fish die in nature is rarely pleasant.

So it doesn't seem clear to me that we're adding really much or any additional suffering to the life of a wild fish by catching it, as opposed to letting it be caught by another fish or die of starvation or whatnot from fish.

Then then we run back into the issue of, well, how is it done? And yeah, and I just don't know.

I mean, I know that the water is sort of very polluted with the fish's waste, and I know it's very crowded. I don't have any sense of how much that contributes to the fish's discomfort.

That's just terminal. I just don't know. What about invertebrates?

So most invertebrates, actually, I should say, because there are exceptions like, you know, octopus and squid, for instance, are very smart kind of invertebrates.

But but things like shrimp, for instance, their their their brains are tiny enough that they probably the issue of pain hardly applies there.

I think that's probably true. I think that's probably true. And I actually have no problem eating something like oysters or mussels, although unfortunately I don't like them.

But I could I would feel okay with eating them if I if I liked them. Right. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

So these and these are all things that I think would distinguish me from most people who call themselves vegans. Yes, definitely.

And I also I should say that even though I'm pretty much 100 percent, even though I pretty much 100 percent stick to this this formula, I don't actually think it should have to be an all or nothing thing.

So, you know, if if someone was, say, a vegan 95 percent of the time or eight percent of the time, but they, I don't know, eat ice cream at parties or they they don't stick to their Vytas.

And when they're, I guess, at someone else's house or something like that, people will see that and say, aha, so you're not really a vegan.

And then they'll they'll sort of write off that person's person as a hypocrite or deem that person's behavior as sort of morally equivalent to their own, even though they're still causing only five percent of the animal suffering as the the omnivore.

So I think I don't know, for some reason, people tend to view this in terms of an all or nothing. I do. You are. You aren't. And so if your goal is to influence other people and convince them that you're sort of serious about this is an ethical issue, then it probably is necessary to be a stickler, even though I don't think logically it should have to be.

Yeah, I agree. I'm not sure that it is necessary. I'm I want to go back to that in a minute. But but what you just said reminded me of an argument by a prominent utilitarian Peter Singer several years ago. I, I read one of singer's books, How Are We to Live? And it made it was one of those few books that really made a major and practical impact on my life. I mean, as a matter. As a matter.

Reading the book, I changed almost overnight, certain things that I was doing at that point, but the reason I was I was able to do it is precisely because the major message of that book was it doesn't have to be all or nothing.

If you do, you know, even 10 percent is better than nothing. 50 percent is five times better than 10 percent. You know, 80 percent. It's even better. But you shouldn't feel that unless you make radical changes and you sort of get into a completely different way of life, then you're not doing anything because not doing something is a matter of degrees. Absolutely.

I'm sorry, but that reminds me of a comment that someone left on the podcast, which is sort of the flip side of this argument as GCM or his or her name is GCM. And GCM said that any demand for agricultural land, including vegans, because we can eating produce and grain, competes with wildlife's demand for that same land. And the wildlife tends to lose out such that we all I'm quoting GCM here so that we all, including vegans, have blood on our hands, which is an interesting argument.

No, I mean, so it is true that to some degree, just living and consuming in this world is going to cause some harm. I just don't think that that's I mean, obviously it's a matter of degree, as we were just saying.

So, you know, if you're if you eat animals, then there's that problem that decimals detailing. But then there's the additional problem of the suffering caused to the animals that you're eating. And of course, it causes a lot more land, agricultural land to grow the grain and the plants to feed the animals like it causes.

But it requires far more calories to produce one animal than it would to, you know, the equivalent to the equal energy in terms of this kind of natural to me.

And I've heard from other people, too, all the time. This argument to me seems like, well, you can't be perfect.

So why try to cheat? No, but Jim does make an interesting argument there, meaning that the calculus is more complicated than people seem to. Even vegetarians themselves sometimes seem to assume that's true. But you're right that there is a difference. First of all, it's a calculation. So then then we have to get into the details of the numbers. And second of all, I think that there's still a moral difference. And, you know, one thing is if you display this place I'm sorry, wildlife, because you're doing your own things.

And another thing is if you actively caged animals and put him under pain and so on and so forth, I mean, it seems to me that the moral dimension is or the ethical implications are significantly different. Nonetheless, the defendant this brings up, however, is that there is, in fact, these environmental component to the reasoning and the environmental component goes to to both the ethics of vegetarianism, the different kinds of vegetarianism, and also the science underlying.

Because one of the things that you do hear often from vegetarians is that they think that pretty straight in a pretty straightforward manner. They have the science on their side, meaning that their diet is more healthy. They suffer less from heart disease and mortality and so on and so forth. And also the environment is much better off with with a vegetarian if that if a vegetarian attitude diet. Word spread. Now, when I say looking into this, some of those claims are in fact true.

They're they're backed up by the science. Some of them are not quite that clear. And once again, our little classification of the different kinds of vegetarianism, for instance, it's helpful. So one of the things that I thought was interesting as a as a matter of of sort of piece of scientific information is that although there are, in fact differences, let me look up these these and the actual data, but there are some differences in the mortality associated with different kinds of diets.

OK, but here's the interesting data. If you're talking about mortality ratios where a lower number indicates fewer deaths. OK, so the lower the number, the lower the nor the number of deaths, then then what you get in terms of numbers are the fish eaters rank at zero point eighty two, vegetarians in point eighty. So a little higher.

Occasional meat eaters are no different from vegetarians, their point eighty four as well. But regular meat eaters.

And here's the surprise. Vegans rank at one. So.

So actually, the mortality rate of vegans is as high as that of regular meat eaters, and it is significantly higher than that of both vegetarians, occasional meat eaters and the cheaters. Now, why this exactly is the case? It's probably complicated.

I mean, people don't know exactly all the, you know, the bad apples. But it's an interesting fact that sort of contradicts the sort of simplistic idea that, well, if you're on a vegetarian diet, you necessarily going to be healthier or living longer?

Well, that depends upon if you could eat French fries all day and be vegan and that you wouldn't be healthy. I mean.

So, yeah, I mean, I assume they probably tried to control for things in that study like amount of exercise and whether people smoked and things like. Because I'm sure there must be. A lot of correlations between the likelihood of being vegan and, you know, prevalence of exercise. Well, that's the other thing. That's correct. I don't know if they can control for everything now, but you can do statistical controlling, of course.

I mean, it's hard to do actual experimental controls for these things.

But I you can statistics some things that have data for you probably can be able to control for all the relevant factors.

Yes. And it turns out that, again, there are some interesting things here that show up. So, for instance, it is certainly the case that even controlling for other things, vegetarians and occasional meat eaters, again, doesn't seem to be much of a difference between those two groups do have a significant significantly lower rate of heart disease and other problems.

But that is the only factor, apparently, that is reliably predicted by a vegetarian or a low meat diet. Everything for everything else, that doesn't seem to be a statistical statistical difference. And of course, the other thing, as you pointed out, is that there are confounding variables that are not necessarily the result of your health, you know, your diet, for instance, but other health habits, for instance. One of the interesting statistics is that vegetarians tend to have a higher I.Q. than meat eaters.

But I'm not going to say that's causal. I mean, example of the diet causing the IQ. Right? I strongly suspect that it's not because people eat plants instead of meat. They become smarter is because a lot of highly, highly educated people who therefore tend to have a higher IQ, because let's not forget that IQ doesn't measure only at the least native intelligence. It also measures a degree of education and understanding of things and so on and so forth.

Well, it's not too difficult to imagine that people that have a higher education, they also tend to be more conscious about what they think more in general about what they're doing. Therefore, you're going to find them more among them on vegetarians.

Very interesting statistic is that at least in the United States, the number of women who is vegetarian is much higher than the number of men, which, of course, goes to show you that women are either more moral or smarter or both than men.

Let me just getting let me tell you the actual statistic. If I can find it, it's I have it right here. There are. In the United States, there are twelve point four million people who call themselves vegetarian's updos, a remarkable 68 percent are female and only 32 percent are male. That's that's a huge difference. Yeah, that's a huge difference. That's that's more than double. So it's just about double.

I had noted a few of the comments from the podcast hisor because so many of them were repetitions of things that I've heard when I've talked to people about vegetarianism and veganism. So I thought they were it would be useful to discuss them because they're so representative. So there is the one that I read from GCM and then there's this one from a commenter named One Day Moore, who says, whether or not I eat meat will not affect the fate of the environment or even the fate of the animals I eat.

Should I choose not to eat a steak, no cow will be spared. They all arrive at my table, killed before I decide to eat them or not.

So, yeah, that's a pretty silly argument. Frankly, I hear this a lot, I guess.

And so, I mean, maybe to you, this is, you know, does not need to be said, but just to sort of say, yeah, I think so.

So I mean, supermarkets and restaurants decide how much to how much meat to buy based on how much meat people demand.

So, you know, if people stopped demanding as much meat or as much animal products, it's not like the supermarkets and restaurants would keep on buying the same amount and therefore that the farmers would keep on producing the same amount regardless of how little people are buying. That would be silly. They, you know, lose money. Right.

So there is I've I've tried to do this analysis and to figure out exactly how smoothly the supply of animal products tracks with the demand of animal products. And so I'm still working on that. But at least roughly speaking, we know that in a competitive market, the supply is going to roughly in the long run, match the demand.

It's not going to consistently extremely outweigh the demand because that would be unprofitable.

So reducing the demand reduces the supply in the next production cycle, right?

I mean, to some extent. So so if someone wanted to be charitable to that argument, one could reconstruct it as as a variation of the the tragedy of the Commons idea that, well, I can't do enough on my own.

You know, my own my own my own contribution doesn't change the system because everybody else keeps keeps doing. Most of the people keep doing the same thing. That's a more charitable deconstruction of the argument. But as you point out, it's based on the same floor logic. The idea is that, in fact, first of all, you can show that consumers do drive the industry. There's plenty of examples in the history of capitalism in the 20th century and early 21st century where, you know, there are boycotts, for instance, that have been organized by consumer groups and they work because the industry doesn't it doesn't actually take that much for whatever the industry is to hit, to get hit.

If a large enough number of people go into a boycott. Of course, a boycott is an organized thing. It's not just an individual decision. So clearly it's bound to have a larger impact than an individual decision. But then again, individual decisions are almost always how things get started. If you have a sufficient number of people and as I said, we have a twelve point four million Americans, vegetarians, well, that's a significant number of consumers.

I assume that's a lot of millions of dollars that don't go into the pockets of the meat industry.

Well, so here I mean, I agree that that, of course, the boycott is going to have more of an effect than any one individual choice.

But I do think that the people may tend to underestimate the capacity of an individual to have an effect so that while there's partly the effect, the sort of persuasive effect that you have on people around you, there's that.

So there's like a multiplier effect to any one person's decision, but I think so, OK, the production decision of a farm is not it's not one to one.

You know, it's demand of chickens reduces by one. It's not like this will reduce, you know, correspondingly by one every time.

There's no way you would have the flexibility in your production to be able to be that elastic.

But so assume production is it's chunky in some way or to some degree. And I'm just going to pick a number. Let's say let's say, you know, they're not going to reduce supply of chickens by one or by two in response to a reduction in demand of one or two. Let's say it would take they have some cut off, like a thousand chickens. If the demand goes down by 1000, then the next production cycle, they will reduce their supply of chickens by a thousand.

So so then over time, on average, supply will attract demand, although it's chunky.

So if I give up a chicken then.

I am going to be I have a one in a thousand chance of being the marginal consumer out of those thousand people who was the tipping point and sort of pushed them over the edge and caused them to reduce their supply of chickens by a thousand. I also have a one in a thousand chance of being that marginal consumer. I also, of course, have a 999 out of a thousand chance of doing nothing but the average effect of my of the chicken I didn't eat so that the expected effect of most of the chicken that I didn't eat is one chicken saved.

Mm hmm. So I do think that you can see the a direct effect of your choice in expectation, if not if not in, you know, the absolute number of chickens.

Right now, I agree. There is there clearly is an effect because, again, we are in a society that is based on demand and supply. So, yes, of course, you're going to have an effect particularly. So, of course, again, if the fact is, is the result of a concerted effort. But even if it is, I mean, new life, what I mean by that same reasoning, then, you know, the industry in general wouldn't be responding to anything.

And so it doesn't matter whether you buy or not buy a particular book, for instance, because the publishers are going to churn out the same number of copies no matter what. That's clearly not the case, obviously, in that case, that the correspondence is much closer to a one to one, although probably not exactly.

Again, probably not about their price as well. I've totally simplified the mechanisms here, but there is also fundamentally, you know, an ethical consideration to this.

I mean, to some extent, if you do think that it is ethically and the ethical decision, the ethical thing to do, the moral thing to do, not doing this, it shouldn't matter really whether you're going to have a global impact or not. It's a matter of your your personal choice, which is why those kind that kind of reasoning sounds to me smells to me a little too much of a convenient excuse of, you know, I really like to eat meat.

And here's here's the way I show that it wouldn't matter anyway if I didn't do it.

It's funny. See, I'm trying to formulate all of this in terms of utilitarianism because I find it such intuitively appealing ethical system. But I, I agree that I think for most vegetarians and vegans, they're either they don't even buy the economic argument that I've made or they haven't thought about it. And to them, it really is just a principle. I find the system reprehensible and I don't want to be a part of it.

But regardless of whether my individual decision is going to have a direct impact. Exactly.

But I agree with you that a lot of the justifications for fruit consuming animal products can sound like rationalizations. I mean, sometimes people really just don't know about the factory farms. And sometimes people say, look, I know about it.

I don't I don't care enough. Like, I really just like eating meat. And I'm it's not worth it to me to make that sacrifice. But then there are the people who actually make arguments against the vegetarian and vegan arguments and some of them, OK, there is one I don't remember the commenter's name now because it is such a bad argument.

He said that which probably means is better than you don't remember these names that are shrouded in anonymity. Let's just go for the argument.

This argument was that how can we be sure that when they bite into a vegetable, they're not causing the vegetable and it's an epistemic accident?

That argument is, how do you know the vegetables also don't, right?

Yes. Well, that really does sound like rationalization. I mean, of course, technically, one could be that the argument is correct. Right. There's no way to know what anybody else feels, for that matter. I mean, I don't I'm assuming that you having thinking, you're thinking and you're having feelings similar to the one I have. But I have no idea. For all I know, you could be at zombi to use the infamous David Chalmers analogy.

So I have no idea why I don't have access to your internal mental states.

But for crying out loud, for all we know from biology, it sounds like you not only need a nervous system in order to feel pain, but in fact you need a fairly complicated nervous system. And so I would definitely include vegetables from that from that area. And as I said earlier, you, in fact, a lot of invertebrates and and I'm not even convinced a lot of fish are capable of of complex, um, you know, feelings of that sort.

I'm sure they do feel pain to some extent, but I'm not sure that it's anything like the kind of pain that, say, a monkey would feel or even any other mammal for that matter.

Do you? Oh, so you're you're noting the importance of some kind of self-awareness or intelligence in addition to just the sort of the nervous system that allows them to feel pain?

Well, it's hard to to complete decouple the two, right? I mean, because intelligence, of course, requires and self awareness do require themselves a complex nervous system. Now, granted, none in the same way. I mean, the pain fibres in in in my mammalian brain, for instance, are not the kind of things that is involved in high level thinking or eye level, you know, the ability to plan things, for instance, and certainly not self awareness.

So they're not they're not that. Not the same thing, and certainly self-awareness and intelligence of a complex, sophisticated type come much later than than the ability to feel pain. So so if anything, you want to be conservative. I mean, I would say that certainly intelligent, self-aware animals do feel pain. And then a lot of others do as well who are not necessarily self-aware or intelligent. So if you want to if you want to use pain as a great tune and of course as you do, then you would have to then then I would say you want to air on the on the side of caution, which means that things like, again, squids and octopus are out even even though they are invertebrates, because they're clearly smart and they clearly are, you know, aware of their surroundings.

They're intelligent. They probably do feel pain in a way that it's it will be uncomfortable for somebody who is preoccupied by these kind of considerations. On the other hand, if you go, as I say, all the way down to other kinds of vertebrates and bunch of crustaceans and so on and so forth, then I will be much less bother. And certainly I will not be bothered at all when it comes to the beginnings of what they does.

What do you think of this argument also came up, if not in this thread, than maybe in the comment thread on that post that I wrote earlier about vegetarianism? And I've certainly heard from other people as well, the argument that even if animals in factory farms do suffer, they wouldn't exist at all if we hadn't raised them, if we hadn't bred them specifically because we wanted to eat them. So they they are existence to us.

And so even if their existences aren't great, it's still better than not existing.

That is true. Of course, there's an analogous argument on the vegetarian side. Right. So all these vegetables that we grow wouldn't be grown in such large numbers if we were not actually using them to to eat.

Now the problem is, OK, true. But what does that what does that do? First of all, that is a different issue from pain. There's an issue of of multiplying a particular genetic line. Right. So you could you could argue that, look, the the chicken variety, for instance, that the varieties that we use for for food are much more successful evolutionarily than other kinds of birds, precisely because we grow them in such large numbers.

Right.

I think this was an argument that we can't be said to actually be harming any individual animal because what are we measuring its welfare relative to it relative to not existing? I mean, but that's what may be unhappy, but that's better than not existing. So they're talking about the welfare of the animals as opposed to sort of an ecological diversity.

But I think that that hinges on on on on the argument, not what you think.

I think it hinges on what you mean by farming because, yeah, I can actually argue that existence is worse than nonexistence if the existence is full of pain. Yeah.

I mean, I so well, I think that's, I think the strongest answer to this argument that that some existence is actually our negative utility, that it's better not to exist.

Although I have met people who deny that I've met people who think that any existence, no matter it's so hard for me to believe people think this, you know, that the clear quite the obvious question to ask those people to see if they actually have thought that through or if they're serious about it, is would you trade your existence with that sort of existence?

Oh, well, they're not saying that all existences are equally good or equally bad, just that everything, no matter how painful, is better than not existing. But I've asked them the thought experiment, would you rather not exist or would you rather exist and just be tortured continuously for eight years?

And they say the latter. I just don't believe them. That's just wrong. I think I think that they don't know what they literally want to know, that they know they're just being stubborn. They're exactly. They just don't want to concede the point. I think that the most most of them, if they're allowed the chance, would commit suicide under those conditions.

Yeah, but I do think that this highlights the difficulty in utilitarianism in general, the difficulty of of comparing to states of non-existence.

So, for example, if you're deciding whether there was a case I remember reading about in which some politician made some argument about how women should wait until they're financially stable and ideally until they have a partner to have a child because a child will be better off. And some guy wrote to the paper angrily saying, well, my mom had me when she was young and financially unstable. And, you know, if it were up to you, she would never have had me and I wouldn't even exist.

And so and he was no affronted at this.

And so maybe his life would have been better if he had, you know, had a more financially stable existence.

But he's still really glad. That existence of the difficulty, of course, is that if his mom had waited, he wouldn't have existed, a different person would have existed. And so the question is, is she right?

Is it worse for her to have a child that's that's worse off than a child she would have if she waited as she causing harm to the world by not having the child whose life is the optimal level of happiness.

The problem with it is. Well, yes, that is a well known problem with China, is that it is the calculus is very difficult and precisely because it hinges on a lot of counterfactuals.

Exactly right.

But in that particular example that you just brought up, it seems to me that the mistake there is to see the thing from the point of view of somebody who already exists. The actual comparison is between two hypothetical people, neither, neither one of whom has been born yet and one of whom has been born under more difficult than taxing conditions, and the other one has been born by the same parents under more benign conditions. I think that under those conditions, which would be what sort of what John Rawls calls the veil of ignorance, that is, if you don't know if you are asking yourself the question, well, would I want to be born under condition or condition?

B, I think that most people would say on the condition B, what what undermines the discussion here is that now instead you're comparing a counterfactual in hypothetical condition to an actual conditions. And of course, if you are actually alive now, of course we're saying no, I like the way it is and I don't want to I wouldn't want to risk nonexisting as a person given given given the choice. But that's the wrong comparison of the right comparison is between two hypotheticals, and in which case I think it's much easier to decide that, to decide that, yes, it will be in fact the rational thing to do to wait for that woman to have a child.

Now, there's another issue I want to bring up about, about the jitteriness and the discussion surrounding it, which is it's really sort of to the environmental impact. But in this case is the human impact. It's a labor issues. All right. All right. So these are the animals that suffer, but that's actually human beings that are actually not particularly happy in that in that situation either. The conditions labor is in in Animal Farm industry are horrible. It's one of the worst industries in the world.

And, you know, the statistics there are pretty clear.

On the other hand, it's not quite that clear that things are much better in the agricultural business because, for instance, the International Labour Organization says that agriculture is one of the three most dangerous jobs in the world. It's really done in horrible conditions through continuous exposure to poisons. And, you know, and it's very hard work. It usually comes with very low wages and very low or no health insurance and so on and so forth. So from that perspective, again, it's another example where it's easy to point to the obvious, which is the meat industry is is really bad industry, not only in terms of the animals themselves, but in terms of the human beings that work in it.

But but we should be comparing making the right comparison, which is if we're talking about big meat production plants, then we should be compared them with big agricultural farms.

While the comparison I suspect I suspect a lot of people have in mind, it's some of the more unfair imbalances between, you know, the large production of animals on the one hand and the small little mom and pop farm that that has little gardens and so nice and organic and all that sort of stuff. That doesn't work. If you want to make that comparison, then you have to compare that with the farms that the animal firms that are in fact also organic and small as small and so on and so forth.

And so if you do the comparison the right way, I'm not so sure that either one either camp comes out as straight as as the winner. They may still be an edge on the on the side of the plant in favour of the plant approach.

But just in terms of labor out. But I'm not sure. And the same goes for diseases. So, you know, we only hear, of course, about the horrible stuff that is associated with with growing animals in terms in terms of of health. But there are similar things as well in terms of of plants. So the other the last point that I wanted to bring up was this idea of the health risks associated with, you know, eating meat, meat versus vegetables.

And I'm talking now not about long term diseases like heart disease, but but in terms of infections where if you call and things like that. So but pathology, the pathology of eating. Now, it's true that if you look at the data, meat eaters are not in a particularly happy situation. There's an estimated one third, one half of all chicken meat market in the United States. And it's continued with salmonella, for instance.

That's that's a large percentage. And in as early as 1995, and this is still true today, essentially 100 percent of the eggs that are tested by the American government, by our audience that came from it, have a cancer virus that is 100 percent. Now, of course, the rate of communication, cancer virus. Yes, there is a there are several cancer viruses.

And one of them, some of these are actually can cross the barrier, the species barrier. Now, the crossing on this barrier is rare, but the fact that you've got 100 percent of the eggs essentially tested that have it, it's pretty scary on the other. Right. Those are things that actually. That's the kind of information that probably would be, you know, tilting, tipping, tipping the point in some cases. But it is also true that a lot of the E.

coli contamination, for instance, that we've seen in recent years don't come only from meat. The obvious, the obvious one being ground beef, but also from vegetables and spinach.

Right. And it's also true that, again, big agriculture operations are have all sorts of contaminations in terms of of bacteria, viruses, that they also have all sorts of poisons that that they're used for the you know, the treatment of the food before it gets it reaches the supermarket or your plate.

So in both cases, there are hazards.

I am beginning to suspect that the real problem is the large scale of the operations, more than necessarily the difference between animals and and plants. It's again, overall, I do think that a plant type choice or at least a mostly plant and not a lot of meat and mostly fish choice is probably all in all the most defensible one in terms of ethics, in terms of labor, in terms of diseases, in terms of health and so on and so forth.

But it is also true that I think that if we're going to have a reasonable discussion or rational discussion about these things, we should compare things appropriately. And that seems that over and over the issue that comes up is that the big numbers are the problem is that when we're talking about hundreds of millions of people on a certain diet and therefore a huge operations worldwide, it doesn't at that point matter that much. If you're talking about raising plants and raising animals, we're still we're still engaging in practices.

There aren't environmental, they're unhealthy and so on and so forth and antilabor.

Yeah, and not just the sheer number of people eating meat and the amount that they're eating, but but also the low prices that we expect to get the meat from.

That's right. So with that nice enumeration of all of the reasons to cut down on your animal product consumption, I think we'll wrap up the section of the Russian speaking podcast and move on to the rationally speaking PEX.

Welcome back. Every episode, Julie and I pick a couple of our favorite books, movies, websites or whatever tickles our irrational fancy, let's start as usual, Julia Spik. Thanks, Masimo.

My pick is an article by two professors at the MIT School of Management. It's called Warning Physics Envy May Be Hazardous to Your Wealth. And the reason I like this article so much, I mean, it's geared towards people with an interest in finance. But the reason that I found it so interesting and so useful is that it has this great taxonomy of the different levels of uncertainty that we face in different fields.

And this is something that I feel like I and most people tend to get confused about a lot.

So just very briefly, and you can see great examples and more explanation in the paper itself, which we're going to look to.

But so the level one would be absolute certainty about what's going to happen next. Level two would be a quantifiable risk, like at a casino or rolling a die.

You know the exact odds of each possible outcome. Level three would be the typical statistics that you use in sort of a well-defined, simple statistical study in which, you know, there's one underlying distribution that you're drawing your data from. And you you may not know exactly the parameters of that distribution, but as you draw more and more data, you approach a complete understanding of what the parameters of the distribution are.

Level four is what they call irreducible uncertainty. And that's when the data that you're drawing may come from multiple different distributions or it may come from a distribution that's changing over time. And so you can never really be sure that you're approaching certainty about about the actual parameters of any distribution that your data is coming from because it changes over time. And so the reason this is related to finance is that the authors point is that finance is an example of a level four uncertainty because the stock market changes every day.

In fact, it changes in response to people's attempts to model it. Right. And there's so many different different factors involved. It's hard to say that there's even one distribution you're you're drawing your data from.

And then and a lot of problems are caused by people's underestimation of how much uncertainty is actually involved and treating the stock market as a level three uncertainty instead of level for be sure to get your uncertainties right, lets you pick Mathinna.

My pick is something called field papers, Doug. It's actually a website that we mentioned in some other context before on the podcast. But it's a it's an operation that got started two years ago. Just recently, they did their second anniversary by David Borger and David Chalmers. Chalmers is the same guy that I often disagree with about zombies and like but this operation is absolutely fantastic. This is essentially a one stop for all things philosophical at a essentially professional level.

They have at the moment, at the last count, they have almost three hundred and seventy thousand articles that have been archived on on these website. You can download the article directly or the link to that article from a nearby library.

It's you can follow your favorite philosophers and be alerted by any time that they do, they post something interesting, something new. There are discussions, boards, of course there are job advertising. There's everything that you need to know if you are a graduate student or a professional in philosophy. And if you are curious about philosophical issues in general, then what you can do is you can select you can sign up on the website, select your areas of interest, say philosophy, your mind or philosophy of science or whatever, and you get alerts about any updates to the website in those particular areas.

And you have access essentially to almost everybody who is a professional philosopher working in that area. So it's a great resource mostly for professionals, as I said, but even for the serious non-professional student of philosophy things.

Masimo. Yeah, I actually love field papers and I've I've used it whenever I'm looking for articles to decide in my post on the rationally speaking blog. And I highly recommend it to. We are all out of time for this episode, rationally speaking. Join us next time for more explorations on the borderlands between reason and nonsense.

Cool. What is that? Oh, it's the schedule of speakers for Nexus. Nexus? Yeah, it's the Northeast Conference for Science and Skepticism.

Oh, are you going. Yeah, right. Tell me what is next.

What's next is a well, it's an educational conference held annually in New York City. Nexxus explores the intersection of science, skepticism, the media and society for the purpose of promoting a more rational world.

How does that spell Nexxus? What does that spell? Nexxus is emesis. It should be near Jesusa. What should it be pronounced yet? Processer. I have no English, no good, but any synthesis, no spell nexxus.

Well, ok. Yeah, but yet just to get a sense of what's wrong with New Jesusa.

Yeah, just Hassa. I have a brother in law, his name and nature.

So you do know. But I could get just a. The rolls of the tongue, your tongue, maybe, but nothing. So who is speaker going to be a nexus, a nexus, whatever, telling me? Well, scheduled to appear are Brooke Alcina Villa, Evan Bernstein, Steve Nivola. How did John Allen, Paul, Julia Gillard, Masimo and Garden. John Rennie, Thomas Gilovich, John Robbins, Jennifer Michael Hecht, Eugenia Scott George from Rebecca Watson, Daniel Karna, Carl Zimmer, Bob Novela and keynote speaker Phil Plate Blowies Death from the Spaceman from the Skies.

How you do that. Do what? Make it so bouncy, bouncy like that. Well, I am a pod. Cast her.

Oh, it's very nice.

Tell me, what does podcasting Nexis search? The Northeast Conference for Science and Skepticism, April 9th and 10th in New York City. Go to Chicago or check out our Facebook page and Twitter feed. 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.

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