Jack Symes

A bunch of it's used for biofuels and stuff, but only 7% of all the soy that we're growing actually is consumed by human beings. So if we look at the vegans' contribution to that, it's marginal even then in comparison to what the factory farming industries they're responsible for. But here's, I think, an interesting point which sort of leaves that all to a side.

Because you hear loads of different arguments like ecological arguments, human nature arguments, all of this stuff. As if it's going to get in often get the Christian or the person who thinks that non-animal rights, such as the Catholic I was mentioned a moment ago, don't matter.

But think of this, like if it was the case that we're forced to do these things and we can't do otherwise to sustain the people we have, we have to kill animals. Let's just give the person the benefit of the doubt and say that's the case. That wouldn't get God off the hook if God's forcing us to do that. Like here's life.

To enjoy it, you need to kill, what is it, like 70 billion land animals and 7 trillion sea animals each year?

It's not. Out of interest, how many did you pick in terms of like how many golden retrievers you were going to chuck out the boat until you chucked the human being out? Depends on the person. I can't say. If it's just a random person, you don't know them, any person walking down the street in Austin today, he's talking like tens, hundreds? No. Thousands? He's talking thousands?

I'd probably just kill him anyway.

Yeah, thinking he could live long. He was worried he was going to die, right? A vegetarian diet to make sure he could. Not just vegetarian, but terrible vegetarian diet. He ate mostly bread and sugar. Yeah, you've got to do it right, but he certainly didn't. I've just finished Ian Kershaw's book on Hitler. It's like over 1,000 pages. It's a real good read, like a 40-hour read.

So if you're interested in like— You've got to be careful leaving those around your house. I know. I bought it my dad for his birthday and he was there in the restaurant showing everyone.

You can't do that.

If you take it to its logical conclusion, then we can't, even on the view which I hold, which is hedonistic utilitarianism, the idea that the morally relevant facts are pain, pleasure, happiness, suffering. Right. If you can't then just let all of the animals free to run around, that's going to, as you say, create like a sort of mayhem.

You have to. That seems I mean, that's in my view, that's OK to give them birth control and the like.

Yeah, you can have population control.

Well, OK, this is good. I think Martha Nussbaum in her new book, Justice for Animals, she argues that these things, as you say, are a problem. You can't avoid suffering in these cases because you need to keep populations in control. And she thinks that we need to embark on a research project which simulates hunting and keeps down populations in like animal sanctuaries, if you like.

And I was thinking recently, like there's a lot of arguments for human reparations, like when a full group is harmed by another group, that we think that they're owed something, whether it's like people who were subject to slavery in North West Africa. We think that those communities have been harmed in the past and that we should right that wrong. I don't know the details.

I don't consider myself like a reparations philosopher. But let's say that's a view that people hold as they do. Well, if you take non-human animals to be like these subjects which you can stop their flourishing, cause them harm, bring them pleasure and happiness, then it seems that they also are part of a group.

And so you might run an argument to say that if all of these creatures were subject to such suffering and torture and death for so long for the benefit of this other group, then that group owes them the research, the time, the money to make their lives as good as possible. Now, it might be, just like in our lives, we can't avoid pain and suffering in the day-to-day of it.

It's not something we can eliminate entirely, but we should be doing everything we can, says the argument, to reduce it as much as possible. If that ends up being like having to add predators to a sort of, you know, into that situation, then so be it. But perhaps there's a, you know, with the right time and money, you can find a way of doing it without as much suffering, so to speak.

Well, there's a question of like what's wrong with death, which is at the heart of this. So it might not just be like the hedonistic properties I've just listed, but it might be that when you stop some conscious creature from fulfilling their ends, from fulfilling their project, you're somehow wronging them.

So like if I was to hypothetically, you know, if we had this random person again that we had on the boat earlier and I put a bullet in the back of their head, this person had no friends, family, no one will remember them. And I can erase the thing I did from my memory.

You might still think what I did was wrong because that person saw themselves as having a future, had projects they were working on, and I stopped their flourishing in some sense.