Episode #071 - Transcript

Thank you for wanting to know more today than you did yesterday, and I hope you love the show.

Today I want to talk about morality and autonomy. I guess, more specifically, what goes into these judgments that we make about whether a particular action or behavior is right or wrong. I’m not talking about whether you actually follow through and do the right thing. That’s a completely different story. You know, Kant talks about how as humans we find ourselves in a constant struggle between virtue and happiness, and that oftentimes doing what the right thing is in a given situation may seem counterintuitive to what is going to make us happy in a given situation. And to Kant, the true, highest level of existence is not only being a virtuous person but having enough mastery over that virtuous condition where you find happiness there as well. I’m not talking about that. I’m not talking about the execution of these things. I’m talking about that process in your mind, whatever it is, of making a decision about what the right thing to do is in any given situation. What goes into those judgments? What are those made of?

And we all have these, by the way. If you’re confused right now, you make these decisions all the time. You’ve already made thousands of these moral judgments already just today. Probably more if you really broke it down. But some of these decisions are easy for us. You’re driving on the road. You see a red light. Should I run the red light, save 30 seconds off my commute, risk getting T-boned by a firetruck, or should I wait for 30 seconds and play it safe? Seems like a clear decision about what the right thing to do is there, but some of these are a little bit more difficult. Do I have a bowl of oatmeal for breakfast, or do I have blueberry pancakes? Well, it depends on the kind of person that you want to be and the information that you have at your disposal, right? Some of these decisions can be downright agonizing, painful they’re so difficult to make—lifechanging crossroads sorts of decisions. Should I take a job that pays me more so that I can provide for my kids and my family better? Or do I do a job that is fulfilling to me that I enjoy doing?

Now, the thing is, typically when people think about morality, typically when they think about themselves making these moral decisions, they usually only think of these really difficult questions, this final class of question as actually being making moral decisions. But the fact is, every one of these things we just talked about—the red light, the blueberry pancakes, and the final question—these are all moral decisions. A moral code is just a collection of behaviors based on some standard that can be deemed to be right or wrong. So, really, it’s not just the decisions that are hard to make that are moral. Every decision you make is a moral decision. All of them are an exercise in judging what the right thing to do is in a particular context, right?

You deciding not to run that red light, no matter how easy of a decision it was, is still a moral decision in the sense that, for example, you have some standard that you’re appealing to—you value the preservation of your life and safety—and running the red light and gaining 30 seconds out of your commute is not as important to you as the crippling bodily harm or death that may come if you do run the red light. You have your own personal criteria for why that action is good or bad to you. In the case of the oatmeal and the blueberry pancakes, you’re using a similar standard there. You might be, say, 22 years old, have barely read up on nutrition in your life. And you may think in that moment that it is a moral decision to choose the blueberry pancakes there. Your criteria might be, well, look, I’ve heard that fruit is good for you. Blueberry pancakes have fruit in them. Oatmeal doesn’t. Obviously, they’re the more healthy choice here.

What all of these choices have in common is that at the root of them, there is some criteria that we use to determine whether it’s a good decision or a bad decision. And as you just saw in the case of the blueberry pancakes, just because we intuitively feel like something is a good thing to do in a situation, just because of the nature of this life where we are flawed human beings that have a limited set of experiences to pull from, a limited amount of time to read books on nutrition and blueberries, what we find is that, oftentimes, these criteria that we have for claiming that something is morally justifiable are completely out of whack if not entirely false.

People realize this, right? That hypothetical young person that chose the blueberry pancakes will, no doubt, go on in their life, and they’ll read some more stuff on nutrition. They’ll talk to a mentor, a nutritionist, a friend. Whatever they do, point is, when they’re a little bit older, a little bit grayer, a little more experienced, they might just adjust that criteria that they have for what the proper thing to do was in that moment and moving forward. And that’s fine. We are all conglomerations of experiences, right? Nobody’s born Confucius. Nobody’s born Socrates. It stands to reason that as we have more experiences and we gain more knowledge about the world around us and we think about things more, we will adjust some of these criteria that we have about what is right or wrong. Life is not a straight line. It’s a series of zigzags, not unlike a heat-seeking missile finding its target.

Now, that said, the scary thing here—the thing we all have to contend with by virtue of being one of these flawed human beings with a limited set of experiences—is that we may be making immoral decisions or doing things that are not morally justifiable every day of our lives without even realizing it because there’s no immediate price that we pay for doing it. And what I mean by that is that if you made the immoral decision of running the red light, for instance, there is a very real tangible cost to making that decision. Maybe you’ll get away with it one time, five times, ten times, but eventually the criteria for why that was an immoral decision for you, it’s going to rear its ugly head as you’re eating nothing but chocolate milkshakes for the next six to eight weeks. There is an immediate cost that you pay, right?

Well, in the case of the blueberry pancakes, it’s not that obvious. That young person that thinks that fruit is good for you, so, therefore, blueberry pancakes are better than oatmeal, if they weren’t willing to take their criteria to task aggressively—question their assumptions, learn new information about nutrition, learn about oatmeal—they could seemingly—and we see people do this—they could seemingly go on their entire lives eating pancakes for breakfast thinking that they are completely morally justified in doing so. The fuse that you light on that firecracker, the fuse on that decision is much longer than running a red light’s fuse. They may go their whole lives. They may not realize they’ve been making a big mistake until they’re literally downing Bayer aspirin like it’s M&M’s on their way to the hospital having a heart attack, which brings me to the topic of discussion today.

These criteria that we all have, they’re slippery things. They change all the time. And they should change. Begs the question, how much accountability do we have to question the assumptions that we may be making and refine our thinking about why we deem some actions to be okay and some to not be okay? How much accountability? When I was thinking about this episode and how to get people to relate to these criteria, I wanted to give a real-world example. And I wanted it to be something that literally 100% of people listening to this episode would have some criteria that they have to reference. So, I chose what is, no doubt, an extremely controversial issue. It’s not the easiest issue I could have done. But the question here today, the one we’re going to be talking about is, is it morally justifiable to kill animals for food?

We see this in our culture all the time. Go to the supermarket: there’s beef. There’s chicken. There’s duck, lamb, anything you want. Are we patronizing a cause that is inherently immoral? Not talking about factory farming. Even if you went out and hunted, is it morally justifiable to kill animals for food? Now, I want to say something right off the bat. I don’t know what the answer to this question is, alright? Just because I’m giving arguments as a podcaster refuting people’s criteria does not mean that I think I somehow know the answer and that I’m pompously attacking how other people choose to behave. Really, I have no idea if there is an answer here, seriously. What I want to do is illustrate the games that we play in our heads, how easy it is to keep two sets of books when it comes to these moral criteria that we have. And I want to do it in an interesting context, so this conversation is a good one.

Let’s talk about the common arguments that people give when they try to justify why killing animals for food is an okay thing to do. Firstly, maybe a good place to start is to make it clear that we’re not just talking about whether it’s right or wrong to kill animals at all. We’re talking about killing animals to meet our caloric needs. I don’t think there’s many people out there that would make the claim that it’s never the right thing to kill an animal or that there are zero situations where you’re not morally accountable for killing an animal. For example, if somebody’s driving a backhoe on a construction site and they accidentally, unbeknownst to them, run over a rat that was living under the house, not many people are going to say that that person is morally reprehensible or even culpable for that killing. It was an accident.

Euthanasia is another example. If an animal is in abject, extreme suffering. If it’s at the vet, it’s dying, not many people are against the idea of killing that animal out of mercy just so it doesn’t have to suffer anymore. Some people would say that killing an animal in self-defense is okay. Animal is attacking you; if you have the ability to save yourself, most people would say that if it was the only thing that you could do, then it’s fine.

The point of this is that we’re not talking about the killing of animals. It’s the killing of animals in the context of using them as food or other things that are useful to us. Let’s start with a very basic one, and then we’ll work our way up. We’ll sort of crescendo up to the more complex criteria that people have for this stuff.

This is a pretty common one in my experience. Why do you think it’s okay to eat meat? “Because it tastes so darn good. There is nothing in this whole world that’s better than a juicy, flame-broiled double cheeseburger with bacon, served up hot on a poppyseed bun. Woowee! Dang, that’s good. It’s impossible. Nothing that was so ethically wrong could ever be so delicious.” So, again, we’re starting with the simple arguments here. But what this person’s doing here is saying that the criterion for what makes something ethically sound or not is how pleasing it is to my tastebuds, how pleasing it is to my senses makes it morally justifiable.

Well, someone looking at this moral criterion might ask them, “Well, if how pleasing something is to someone’s tastebuds is what makes it morally okay, then, look, we could theoretically extend that to any number of other behaviors that you’d have to endorse at that point too if that’s truly your criterion.” All someone has to say is that, “Look, I legitimately love the taste of five-year-old girls. Based on your criterion, it would be totally morally justifiable for me to kill and eat a five-year-old girl simply because I like the taste of her.” Or there’s other cases we could extend this to. Let’s say I want to kill my neighbor on his front lawn. “You know, I killed my neighbor because nothing is quite like that beautiful sight of blood soaking into the grass. I love it, personally. It’s wonderful. Nothing that was that morally wrong could ever look that beautiful.”

So, you see where they’re going here, right? So, maybe at this point the guy that was using taste as a justification for eating meat, maybe he’d start to rethink his criteria. “No, can’t be taste, I guess, because I certainly don’t believe that it’s morally okay to eat other human beings. And I see where you’re coming from. It must be something else. It has to be.” Another argument he might use, “How about the human jaw and the human teeth? How do you explain that, smart guy, huh? Our teeth obviously were designed or naturally selected to be able to eat meat. We are bipedal creatures that were imbued by the universe with the capability to eat meat. Why do we have that if we’re not supposed to be doing it? That’s got to count for something, right? Why would it be wrong if we are biologically capable of doing it? Such is the order of nature, right? Life eats life, and we were bestowed with the ability to rip flesh from bone.”

So, this is a slightly more advanced argument. It’s morally okay to eat meat because we are biologically capable of doing so. But what a person might argue back to this criterion is that just because we are biologically capable of doing something, just because natural selection or God or whatever gave us the tools to be able to do something, doesn’t instantly make it morally justifiable. I mean, I have the biological capability to beat the bejesus out of some random guy walking down the street. That doesn’t mean it’s morally right for me to do it. I was imbued by nature with a gift, the gift of biologically being capable of defecating on someone when they’re asleep. That doesn’t mean I should be doing it or that it’s not morally reprehensible. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that most people would probably have a very strong aversion to that activity.

So, this person, hearing that argument, looking at their criteria, might adjust it further. “Okay, so, it’s not the taste. It’s not that I biologically can do the thing. It’s the useful nutritional properties of the meat that I love. Meat is an abundant source of protein. From a nutritional standpoint, I need the protein that I get from meat. And that makes eating meat morally justifiable.” Again, another layer of complexity here, right? Someone dissecting this criterion might say that if it truly is just from a nutritional standpoint, like you say, that you decide that something is okay or not, then your argument really leaves no room for someone that wants to eat humans. I mean, based on this criterion, all someone would have to say to justify it is that they want to get their nutritional benefits and protein intake from human flesh. After all, what makes something morally okay to you is just that the meat that we’re eating is conferring nutritional and protein-packed benefits onto me. Human flesh does that too, so I guess it’s okay.

Not to mention the fact that this person might also argue that, yes, you may need protein—not arguing that. But getting it from animals in the 21st century is just not necessary anymore. Fact is, we have other foods that will give you high levels of protein that don’t involve taking the life of another sentient being—beans, nuts, eggs, whole grains, synthesized protein. These are all ways to get that same protein intake without taking the life of something else.

“Alright, alright. So, maybe this conversation’s a little more complex than I let on about. Maybe it’s not the taste or our biology or the nutritional benefits. The real reason it’s okay to eat meat is because we are just higher up on the food chain than all these other animals. Nature, evolution, God, whatever you call the organizing, life-sustaining aspect of nature—whatever it was gave human beings certain advantages, advantages that every other species of animal do not have. We have bigger brains. We can coordinate. We are in a position where we are able to use these weaker creatures for our dining pleasure, to make car seats out of, to make tennis rackets out of, to till our farms. We’re just stronger than these weaker animals. And in nature, I’m sorry, but that’s how it goes. The smaller fish always gets eaten by the bigger fish. Only the strong survive. And we’re the stronger creature. Therefore, it’s okay.”

So, the criterion they’re using here is an oldie but a goodie. It’s the classic might makes right principle that whether something is right or wrong is determined by what the stronger or more powerful thing is. We have abilities they don’t. They are weaker creatures placed beneath us on this natural hierarchy. So, because we’re stronger than them, that makes it okay for us to impose our will. It’s just how nature was set up.

Well, someone looking at this criterion might say that if that is true, think of how horrible the world might look. Think of all the horrible things that your moral criteria justifies if it truly is as simple as “might makes right.” What, just because I’m stronger than an elderly man or a child or a terminally ill person, that thereby gives me cart blanche to kill them, eat them, skin them, and wear them around on my feet every day? Not to mention that implies that anyone that can impose their will on you, like an emperor riding around the city in a chariot, they have the right to just do anything to you, and then deem it to be morally justifiable after the fact simply because they were stronger than you in some way.

Imagine the biggest guy at the gym eating, killing, enslaving people. Oh, oh, but he’s not wrong. He’s the moral authority because he’s the strongest. On a larger scale, should a government be able to do that just because they have the most powerful military in the world? Should they be able to shoot cruise missiles wantonly because you have some black liquid that they want in the ground?

Now, I want to refocus this for a second. What we should be taking from all these arguments is that most of the criteria that we’ve already talked about for what makes eating meat morally justifiable start to run into problems because they also make it morally justifiable for us to do terrible things, terrible things to human beings or children or sick people, which I’m assuming nobody out there is a fan of. I’m hoping. But come on, guys. You know me. You know your boy, Stephen West. Look, I fully realize that these arguments don’t just end once somebody points out these flaws in the criteria. In fact, it’s actually the opposite. It’s usually once you point these things out that the real conversation begins.

And probably the most common—one that most people are thinking about right now listening to this—one of the most common rabbit holes that these arguments go down at this point is when the person says, “I love the taste of meat; therefore, it’s okay to do.” And the other person replies, “Well, what if I love the taste of humans?” The other person says, “No, no, no, no, no, hold on. Humans are different.” They make the claim that it’s not a faulty criterion, that humans by nature are different somehow from the rest of the animals in the animal kingdom. And they use all kinds of different arguments to try to make this claim.

They might say, “Humans have a special status to me above all of the other animals. See, I believe in eating every other animal in the world, but not humans. Not only do we have a much more rich, vibrant experience of the world than a cow or a chicken. We’re all on the same team, right? This is the survival of the species we’re talking about. Team cow and team chicken, they’re losing the football game right now. I can’t do this stuff to people on my team, but I can do it to the opposing team.”

This is a really interesting and tough position to take. I think it’s given me accelerated gray hairs. Luckily, I don’t have them yet. But what these people are arguing with this criterion is that any hierarchy within the human species based on size or ability or anything like that is baseless, and they point to what they think is a more legitimate hierarchy, one that they have identified as obviously created by nature. We as humans have a certain rank assigned by nature. We’re on team human. And to kill any creature of our own rank or hire is wrong. Killing everything else, using it however you want, is completely okay.

Well, aside from the really interesting tangent based on this, you know, that if some—I mean, imagine if an alien species came to planet earth, and they obviously, to us, had a richer, more vibrant experience of the world than we do. And let’s say they wanted to pluck us out one by one and harvest us with a giant claw and use us as food. We might dislike it. We might try to fight against it. But based on the standard that we’ve already propagated, we could never say that they were morally wrong for doing it.

But that’s neither here nor there. The point of this is that the person that’s using this criterion has a pretty giant task ahead of them in justifying why this hierarchy doesn’t extend to human beings as well and that we’re all on one big team that can never kill or use each other at all, regardless of size, ability, or intellect. We’re on team human, and yeah, you can mess with team cow or team chicken. But you never do anything that would kill someone on team human.

Now, the reason this is a hard position to defend is that the onus is on them here. The onus is on the person using this criterion to explain why, although there is clearly a hierarchy that extends across every being in nature to them, why that hierarchy magically ends where the human species begins and ends, as though we’re not all points on an evolutionary continuum that are constantly changing. It begs the question, do these people really believe that we are morally forbidden from killing or eating anyone from our team no matter what the circumstances are? I mean, wouldn’t all these people agree that there are certain circumstances where killing or using other people would be morally acceptable?

For example, if someone’s trying to kill you, is it okay to kill them in self-defense? Is it okay to kill one person to prevent the deaths of millions? Is it okay to kill somebody that’s infected with the T-virus to prevent a zombie apocalypse? Is it okay to pull the plug of life support on someone who’s in horrible pain every day of their life? Well, if you agree with any of these—and there’s tons more—then it seems like we’ve already created a hierarchy that exists within the human species. How can they really say that this hierarchy exists when it comes to the abilities from species to species but somehow magically ends when it comes to the abilities of different humans?

Now, what somebody looking at this criterion might say is that what they’re really doing here is playing a clever argument shell game. What they’re doing is they’re arguing the might makes right argument, but they’re doing it a little more covertly. They’re doing it via a third party. What someone using this criterion would say to you is that, “No, no, no, no, I’m not. It’s not that might makes right. It’s that nature makes right. And it has granted our species, lucky for us, a myriad of abilities that make us stronger and more capable of subjugating other species. Look, man, it’s unfortunate. Look, I don’t want to kill cows and stuff. I’m not sadistic. My hands are tied here. Your problem is with nature, not with me. Nature’s the one that decided this was going to happen.” They’re essentially throwing out all moral responsibility by pretending to know somehow that nature has ordered the world in such a way to make humans superior to other animals. “And look, don’t blame me. I’m just operating within that framework.”

Well, from here, the person arguing against this might ask, “Well, how arrogant is it for you to assume the intentions of nature? How arrogant is it to assume that human suffering is the metric that nature uses to determine how it’s going to order the world and, therefore, is the reason that we have the advantages that we do?” It reminds me of Leibniz’s Theodicy. Leibniz would say, isn’t it a distorted human intuition to try to infer why we have the abilities that we do on behalf of nature or God? What if this nature that ordered the world did so in a way that ensured other things? What if this hierarchy of the abilities of species are in place to ensure the survival of the earth itself? I mean, if that’s the case, the actions of modern humans would be probably one of the furthest things from morally justifiable in that case, right? How can we assume that it’s not that? What if nature ordered the world to ensure a balanced ecosystem? There’s tons of possibilities.

Not to mention the fact that we’re speaking on behalf of nature and this “obvious” framework that it’s set up. But we don’t even know what nature is, really. I mean, are we really in the place to do that honestly? Something like 80% of the observable universe is made up of dark matter that is a substance that we know nothing about except that it exists. Really it’s a complete mystery to us. Can we really safely make value judgments about how important human beings are in the grand scheme of things? Seems dishonest. My point is, there are tons of explanations for why nature would have given us the abilities that we have without necessarily the intention of making the statement that it’s justifiable to cause the suffering of other sentient beings so that we can live more comfortably.

But this is where it gets confusing. Because if you’re this deep down the rabbit hole of this leg of the argument and you’re willing to accept all these things that we’ve accepted—that there’s a species-specific hierarchy that nature maintains with different teams of animals competing against each other, which is a lot to assume—if that’s the case, then how can I safely assume that even killing a lion in self-defense is morally okay? Aren’t I there in the same way making an inference about what nature has deemed to be right or wrong? It’s a good question. I don’t know if there’s a good answer to it either. But lucky for us, all this confusion is predicated by the idea that the person with this faulty criterion said before us—that they think that nature is a superior purveyor of morality than humans are.

There’s tons of other criteria that people use. Some people say, “I don’t make the rules; I don’t break the rules when it comes to eating other animals. Look around you. Stop being so naïve. It is an inexorable fact of the universe that life eats life. Lions eat gazelles. Cats eat mice. How come lions get to do it, but I can’t? To pretend as though there’s some different standard for us is in itself another form of human arrogance. Look what you’re doing.” Well, someone arguing against that might say, “What makes something a moral choice at all is the idea that there was some other thing you could have done besides the thing that you did. We as humans have the ability to reason. We have the ability to weigh the pros and cons of an action, to choose which one we think the best one is, and to act on it. The lion, on the other hand, just sees a gazelle and eats it. It’s operating based on instinct. The lion doesn’t have full autonomy in that case. It doesn’t consider making a different decision than it did. And look, we don’t get mad at the lion because we know it doesn’t have the same ability to that we do. Simply the fact that we have the capability to choose an alternative course of action makes us morally culpable.”

By the way, a pretty interesting extension of this argument, I think, is when the person that is arguing in the favor of eating meat and against the person that’s saying they don’t have a justification for it—is by asking them to explain why it’s okay to eat plants. “Okay, I can’t eat animals? Why can you eat plants? Why is that okay? Plants are alive, right? It seems to me that one of our goals here in this conversation is the preservation of life. Why is it okay to eat plants then?” And they might argue back, “Well, plants aren’t sentient life forms. The true goal here is the preservation of sentient life and the limitation of unnecessary suffering.” To which the other person might argue, “Who are you to construct a hierarchy that sentient life is somehow more valuable than plant or bacterial life? And if the goal of all this is to limit the suffering of sentient beings, what if we kill the animals we eat in a way that ensures they never feel any pain or fear or anything for that matter? Also, how can you possibly say with confidence that you know a plant doesn’t feel anything when it dies?”

Now, these are all really interesting sub-discussions. But let’s not forget about the true purpose of this episode. And that is to take a look at one issue that most people probably don’t put that much thought into why they have the moral criteria that they do, and to see how even on an issue that feels this intuitive, this obvious, there are dozens if not hundreds of different mistakes in thinking that people might assent to. Isn’t it interesting how easy it is to have a faulty criterion for why it’s morally okay to do something if there’s no immediate price that we pay for doing the thing that’s unjustifiable? You can live your entire life doing something morally unjustifiable, and you never pay a price for that transgression. So you never are incentivized to change it. Think about it. Eating meat is not at all like running the red light on your way to work.

Even if we could prove once and for all that eating meat is morally wrong, pretty much everyone who does it today is never going to pay a price for that moral transgression in any way during their lifetimes. Most likely, they will die having eaten meat their entire lives—no problems. Generations will pass. And in this hypothetical world where we collectively arrive at the fact that it was morally wrong, they wouldn’t have to answer for what they did; they’d just be looked at by future generations as people that were from another time, doing something morally reprehensible that we later found was wrong the same way we look at people in the 1700s that owned slaves. Think of the power of these criteria that we use.

I genuinely don’t know what the right answer is on either side of this question or if there even is a right answer. I mean, honestly, when I get too tired of thinking about it, I just pull out my crucifix, and I say, “Look, look, right here! God conferred onto Adam dominion over all the animals of the earth. He said it right there! Checkmate!” That one always works. That said, I wish, I truly wish this episode could be longer. But to be completely honest with you, the pizza guy just got here. And my meat lover’s pizza is getting cold on the counter.

Thank you for listening. I’ll talk to you next time.