My best interview with a 12-year-old. I talk to Micah Siegel on animal rights, capitalism, and beyond.
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My best interview with a 12-year-old. I talk to Micah Siegel on animal rights, capitalism, and beyond.
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Hi Bryan,
I agree with you an everything, except this. Libertarianism should NOT place higher weight on human well being than on animal rights. At least the basic rights like not be tortured in an animal farm. This is because animals have sentience and they feel the same pain as humans.
Coming to bugs:
- they aren't sentient, they don't feel pain the same way other forms of animal life do.
- even if they feel pain, they don't suffer the same way throughout their lives as cows and chickens do in farms
Animal rights isn't just about killing. Hunting animals is much less cruel than factory farming them. The animal doesn't suffer throughout its lifetime.
Regarding the food argument and how it is important to eat meat. It isn't important. Some of the highest populated human cultures have been in Asia and they are predominantly vegetarian (the Indian subcontinent comes to mind where the food is predominantly vegetarian and India throughout history has been highly populated). Meat, especially red meat, GREATLY increases the risk of cancer and other ailments that it is simply not worth it to eat ANY meat.
A complete nutritious vegan diet is possible AND is efficient for production, especially in a post industrial society.
There's a lot more discussion to be had than in this one comment but I really hope you change your mind on this and agree with your friend Michael Huemer.
Thanks,
IslandObsessed
Great interview! Very impressive kid! I'll note that at 22 minutes Bryan says that he thinks that according to those who study animal welfare, milk producing cows and egg laying chickens are treated as badly as animals that are eaten, with the implication being that there is little advantage to veganism over vegetarianism.
At least per this analysis: https://reducing-suffering.org/how-much-direct-suffering-is-caused-by-various-animal-foods/, he's right about the eggs, but not about the milk.
It estimates 64 units of suffering per kg of eggs, 41 units per kg of chicken, 1.8 units per kg of beef, and 0.11 per kg of milk.
So milk consumption would have a negligable impact on animal welfare compared to animal consumption, particularly chicken consumption.
On the whole, it seems to me that Bryan relies too much on overly simply heuristics, like "we kill lots of bugs, therefore we must fundamentally think their lives lack worth, therefore we must not think that non-human animals, generally, have value." Another seemingly over simple heuristic of his is "new technologies that people fear have all turned out fine, therefore AI will, as well."
As to the first, he seems to assume too strongly that the very strong default is all animals being of nearly identical moral worth, with only a possible exception for chimpanzees.
In the case of AI, he seems to assume too strongly that all new technologies represent an equal threat.
Regarding AI, he would say "well, people had lots of reasons to suggest that previous technologies represented great threats, too." But he isn't addressing whether he himself agrees with those comparissons. That people made ostensibly similar arguments that were bad can perhaps be a reason to doubt a particular arguement, but only if your thought process has to end there. If you can reason yourself about whether AI risk represents the same risk a priori as previously introduced technologies, then settling on the simple heuristic that "it's a technology, and technologies have been fine" seems overly crude.
Of course, the whole point of the heuristics is to avoid excessive granularity. If you get too granular in considering specific uncertain cases, you lose the benefits of clearer knowledge about particular categories. But it seems Bryan's heuristics are sometimes too simplistic.