Jack Symes

Same reason like paintball or like laser tag and war can be fun, right? People enjoy it. People going off to the First World War thought it was a great sport. Maybe it taps even deeper than that because it's the food we're eating in the early days. I think the worry... Okay, let's think about the ethics though, right? So I think it's not comparable to factory farming again.

This is splitting hairs really compared to factory farming.

the ethics of what we're doing good so two things come to mind right the first is it depends on the kind of killing that you're doing when you do the hunting like if i hunt with a spear and you'll know more about this than me a spear is probably not going to knock the animal out like a bullet to the back of the head right a crossbow and a and a bow are going to be somewhere between them right so they're going to be better ways to hunt than not so maybe perhaps i wonder what you think of this

on the whole, when you run the numbers in terms of probability, that hunting with guns is going to be significantly better than hunting with spears or even bows. Would you agree with that?

Are you good? Are you pretty accurate? Yeah, I'm very good. When you hunt, it's like elk. Yeah. When you hunt elk, do you kill the animal without much suffering, would you say?

Okay, so here's where I agree with you, right? Is that when people eat, again, you say don't draw the comparison between factory farming, but I think this is... The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer said that on earth, humans are the devils and animals are the tortured souls. And that rings true for me.

This is the worst thing we could have done in terms of production of our food, in terms of the amount of suffering we're creating. So I think when the person says to you, you're a bad person for hunting, if that person is engaging in buying these products from factory farms, which the overwhelming majority of people are, then they don't have a leg to stand on. What they're doing is way worse.

Yeah.

It's a psychological explanation. It's the same reason why RAF bombers will drop a bomb on a clouded city but not go down there and shoot a mother and a child, right?

Well, it seems like it's an interesting one, right? We just did a big podcast series on the philosophy of war and the history of it and how it's trying to move the person that's killing another person further away from the act. So more killings when you're using guns than when it's hand-to-hand combat.

Even in the Second World War, fieldwork showed that it was about 20 or 30 percent of people were actually firing the weapons.

Yeah, I'd be interested to know how severe their PTSD is in comparison.

Because there's a thought, right, which is we seem to be outraged at the use of drones, but it takes one less person out of the fight. And so it seems if you're doing like a utilitarian calculation that it's going to be better on the whole.

In comparison to not using a drone?

The numbers, though, according to like the UN and stuff, are pretty damn high. Oh, they're horrible.

Well, I think the things that are relevant morally speaking are the same things there.

Yeah. It's a vegan diet. Well, it's like a 98 or 97 percent, especially when traveling and stuff, when you can't seem to find things. I think the perception is, and there's a lot of gotcha stuff, right? In terms of when people say they've got vegetarian or vegan diets, the idea that they're going to be eliminating suffering entirely from their diets, it's impossible.

That's not what anyone thinks is happening. You hear like crop death arguments and stuff like this, right? Which don't tread much water.

Well, the vegan needs to be, or the utilitarian, or all of these brilliant philosophers at the moment talking about this. I don't know any serious philosopher of moral philosophy or ethics that runs a good argument which says that the lives of non-human animals, their pain, pleasure, happiness, suffering, doesn't matter.

So the vegan needs to be concerned about this loss of life as well, or the pain and suffering that goes into it. There are going to be better ways to do it than not. I often get asked about tofu or our soy production. So 77% of global soy production goes towards feeding non-human animals that are fed and we end up killing and eating.